Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive Language - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 217

immediate and future avoidance, 3 and since people generally dread ostracism, it is
in the interest of social agents to avoid triggering disgust. Politeness mechanisms
are therefore adaptive mechanisms that mitigate disgust. Impoliteness is explained
as well by the experience of (generalized) disgust triggered by the target of
impoliteness and the desire the impolite speaker has for this view of the target
to be shared by witnesses. 4 The persistent effort involved in the language of
(im)politeness makes sense in light of the profound power of the disgust response.
The paper proceeds by describing some of the other puzzles of linguistic
(im)politeness (Sect. 12.2 ). In Sect. 12.3 a formal semantic theory of (im)politeness
is detailed, and Sect. 12.4 addresses the puzzles within this framework. The
semantics makes use of events as ontological primitives, but assumes that these can
be examined at varying levels of granularity. That is, the semantics does not require
an extensive ontological inventory, but rather specifies constraints that must hold on
events that figure into acts of (im)politeness, linguistic or otherwise.

12.2 Puzzles of (Im)politeness

(Im)politeness behaviors in general present some puzzles: as indicated above, the
biggest puzzle is that linguistic politeness is so persistently ornate. An explanation
has already been provided for this, and the framework for semantic analysis of
(im)politeness that arises from formalizing aspects of offence management can
also elucidate other curiosities surrounding (im)politeness. The issues described in
this section are possibly surprising in contrast to other aspects of language or first
glances at how the semantics of politeness might function.

12.2.1 Linguistic or Extra-Linguistic

One puzzle is whether (im)politeness is a feature of language at all, or rather
only a feature of behavior more generally. To focus on linguistic (im)politeness
is to attend to dimensions of offence mitigation and accentuation that are achieved
through language, apart from dimensions of offence management that are conducted
via other channels of communication. Some have essentially argued that there is
no place for a linguistic theory of (im)politeness, since perceptions of such are
subjectively reached and given the claim that linguistic forms do not have politeness

3 The effects of proximity have been argued to discriminate disgust and fear (Kolnai 1929a ):
separation by a small distance and secure barriers mitigates fear, but with the same intervening
distance and iron bars, disgust is not diminished.
4 Impoliteness contains the risk for the speaker that the act will be viewed by witnesses without
sympathy for the speaker's view but in favor of the perspective of the impoliteness target.