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Chapter 12
Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness
Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive
Language
Carl Vogel
12.1
Introduction
Some forms of conflict involve participants intending or experiencing psychological
offence, as opposed to more physically impinging threat. Offensiveness may be
modulated by behaviors of politeness and impoliteness. An upsetting message
may be tempered by polite delivery, or a message that is literally positive may
be reversed through impolite conveyance (see D'Errico and Poggi
2014
). Among
the features that comprise delivery are forms of linguistic packaging. The means,
cross-linguistically, of creating emphasis within propositional content of a message,
partly with reference to information states of interlocutors, have been discussed as
“information packaging” (Vallduví and Engdahl
1996
). Herein, attention is drawn
to the fact that attitudinal orientation to both message content and interlocutors is
also potentially packaged linguistically.
Linguistic manifestations of politeness and impoliteness present some puzzles
about human behavior. A number of these puzzles are detailed in the next part of
this paper. However, the main puzzle of linguistic politeness and impoliteness is
an existential one. That these linguistic flourishes exist at all is at odds with other
linguistic behaviors which tend to minimize communicative effort.
Aspects of linguistic politeness and impoliteness are well explained from the
point of view of semantic theory, and may ultimately be integrated into a multi-
dimensional account of meaning in the context of interaction (Bunt et al.
2012
).
Such an approach may, as here, be sympathetic to the idea that perceptions of
(im)politeness may differ among interlocutors in particular situations (Davies et al.
2011
). However, perspectivalism is not obviously more necessary in accounts of
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