Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive Language - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 219

12.2.4 Saussureanism

Saussurean communicators use language with the same meaning-form mapping for
interpretation as for production, and it seems that natural language in general is
used in this bi-directional way. This is not a necessary truth about language, but one
that could have evolved differently. With evolutionary models, it has been shown
that Saussureans “win” over imitators and calculators under relevant initial-state
assumptions (Hurford 1989 ). Nonetheless, people are not manifestly Saussurean
with respect to offence and offensive language. A behavior may offend the speaker
when produced by others, but the speaker may not intend nor notice offence felt
by others when the speaker produces the same behavior. 7

Thus, it seems that the

language of (im)politeness is not completely Saussurean.

12.2.5 Learning

The poverty of the stimulus argument for the innateness of aspects of natural
language syntax is based on observations surrounding language learning, which
occurs quickly during development and in the absence of explicit language teaching
and despite a relative dearth of negative examples. 8 In contrast, the language
of politeness appears to be explicitly taught (Greif and Gleason 1980 ; Gleason
et al. 1984 ) and slowly learned. Given the arguments made above attempting to
explain the existence of the language of (im)politeness through a need for disgust
management in social settings, coupled with one-shot learning from any immediate
encounter with a disgust trigger, one might expect the opposite, that linguistic
(im)politeness would be learned quite quickly. However, the disgust response
generalizes rapidly from the trigger to associates of the trigger, and it is in this period
of association that “accidental” triggers emerge. Thus, the systematic behaviors

7 SeeBabrius'“TheTwoWallets”:
Prometheus was a god, but of the first dynasty. He it was, they say, that fashioned man from
earth, to be the master of the beasts. On man he hung, the story goes, two wallets filled with
the faults of human kind; the one in front contained the faults of other men, the one behind
the bearer's own, and this was the larger wallet. That's why it seems to me, men see the
failings of each other very clearly, while unaware of those which are their own.
(Fable 66, 1-8, p82. Babrius and Phaedrus: Fables, trans. Ben Edwin Perry) 1965 Loeb Classical
Library: Harvard University Press.
8 It is bolstered by results from formal language theory which show that in the absence of negative
examples, an infinite context-free languages cannot be learned “in the limit” (Gold 1967 ), thus
lending support to the notion that some of the structures within language be innate rather than
learned.