Politeness Some Universals in Language Usage

Empirical research may have ramifications in multiple directions. Here we bring together those that we foresee and make some assessment of their relative importance.

Let us first summarize what we set out to do in this paper. We wished in the first place to account for the pan-cultural interpretability of politeness phenomena, broadly defined. We argued that this interpretability derives from the universal mutual-knowledge assumptions of interacting individuals: that humans are ‘rational’ and that they have ‘face’. On these lines we constructed an overall theory of politeness, integrating notions of polite friendliness and polite formality in a single scheme. From abstract ends, our two ‘face wants’, repeated application of rational means-ends reasoning will bring us down to the choice of linguistic and kinesic detail, to the minutiae of message construction. Only at the most abstract level, then, do we need to resort to concepts like ‘ethological primitives’, ‘innate dispositions’, and so on — concepts that notoriously block inquiry. Nor, interestingly, do norms play a central role in the analysis.

This is the core of the investigation, which is to be read against a set of sociological goals. The essential idea is this: interactional systematics are based largely on universal principles. But the application of the principles differs systematically across cultures, and within cultures across subcultures, categories and groups. Moreover, categories of egos distribute these universally based strategies across different categories of alters. From an interactional point of view, then, principles like those here described are some of the dimensions, the building blocks, out of which diverse and distinct social relations are constructed.