Politeness Some Universals in Language Usage

The bulk of the material in this volume first appeared in a collection in the series Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, volume 8. Its reissue will now make it available to a much wider audience. In the years since it first appeared it has come to be accepted as the classic treatment on politeness in communication. As an integrative treatment of phenomena previously dealt with in a variety of disciplines it is now widely cited by linguists, psychologists and students of social interaction. A major reason for this interest is that politeness, as the authors define it, is basic to the production of social order, and a precondition of human cooperation, so that any theory which provides an understanding of this phenomenon at the same time goes to the foundations of human social life.

In addition to their status as universal principles of human interaction, politeness phenomena by their very nature are reflected in language. Societies everywhere, no matter what their degree of isolation or their socioeconomic complexity, show these same principles at work; yet what counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual to individual. If we can find some underlying grammatical and social regularities which account both for this type of variation and for the recurrent patterns, we will have taken a major step in demonstrating and not just claiming the basically social nature of human language.