Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive Language - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 216

(im)politeness than of propositional content, for which it is also necessary (Healey
and Vogel 1994 ). This chapter details an attempt to use a semantic analysis of
linguistic (im)politeness to explain some of the puzzles of (im)politeness. A number
are resolved by noting the semantic function of politeness in signaling attitudinal
orientation.
The semantic theory of impoliteness described in the third part of this paper is
intended to partially specify what is meant by expressions regarded as polite or
impolite. A truth-conditional approach to semantics articulates the constraints that
the world has to satisfy in order for relevant expressions to be correctly interpreted
as true or false, polite or impolite. Because of the situated element of (im)politeness,
articulating the constraints on the world which have to be in place in order for an
utterance of a sentence to be evaluated as, for example, true and impolite also
provides a reasonable characterization of what makes non-linguistic behaviors in
the same situations also be deemed impolite, and therefore a semantic theory of
the sort described here provides an effective interface to pragmatic theory, as well.
Addressing some of the puzzles of politeness and impoliteness through the semantic
theory provides an evaluation of the theory.
The semantic theory invoked here is informed by the view that politeness and
impoliteness behaviors are manifestations of offence management, offence rooted
in disgust (Vogel 2014a , b ). 1 This etiological account of politeness and impoliteness
has the advantage of offering an explanation for the existential puzzle of linguistic
(im)politeness: the energy required for these locutions is significant, and unlike
other forms of complexity in language, for example, referential descriptions, which
become less involved and more phonologically reduced with each reference in
conversation, the language of (im)politeness does not appear to undergo reduction
on the same scale. The explanation, which anchors (im)politeness in disgust
management, holds that it is the desire not to be seen as disgusting which prompts
politeness and the perception of disgust which draws out impoliteness. This theory
is feasible because of the nature of the human disgust response: disgust triggers are
generally felt as irreversibly polluting 2 ; the response, which has physical oral-facial
realizations connected to expulsion reflexes, includes subsequent avoidance even
after a single exposure; the disgust response generalizes from primary sources to
associates in relatively unfettered contagion; associates may be conceptual as well as
tangible. Because the disgust response, once triggered by an encounter, leads to
1 This is an evolutionary account that anchors politeness in selective processes associated with
disgust. Alternative accounts, from the perspective of socio-cultural development, also exist (Bax
2012 ).
2 Attempts to reverse pollution often involve symbolic treatments that are more vigorous than any
physical cleansing that would be strictly necessary.