Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive Language - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 228

from a point of view which combines semantics and pragmatics, the result can be
a satisfactory explanation ::: ” (p. 7). As pragmatics is about the contextualized use
of language, holding, as this semantic theory does, the denotation of (im)politeness
expressions to be sets of events (constrained as appropriate to the relevant perception
of offence and disgust according to the agents involved) individuates the same locus
of reasoning as is employed in pragmatic inferences about language use in context.
The framework posits structure on events additional to the usual descriptive
content. These constraints relate, as indicated, to the relative offence-polarity with
which various dialog participants and potentially third parties are viewed, and the
relative use and cost of events for the agents. One consequence of this treatment is
that equivalence classes of (im)politeness exist as individuated by those constraints:
all of the expressions that yield the same values are effectively synonymous
(Sect. 12.2.6 ) to the extent that they support the same inferences regarding the
speaker's estimation of the agents involved in the triggering event. As mentioned
above, lexical semantics may supply means of differentiating expressions of
(im)politeness, but relative to the inferences directly connected to (im)politeness
alone, synonymy obtains. 22 The current treatment of polarity does not provide a
direct model of a cyclical politeness spectrum (Sect. 12.2.3 ).
Semanticists since Reichenbach are accustomed to thinking about distinctions
among utterance time, event time, and reference time. It is also necessary to take into
account the utterer's stance on events, the use and cost, for themselves and others.
Interpretation of communicative actions as polite or impolite constrain the possible
stance values. Therefore, the possibility for politeness to be excessive (Sect. 12.2.2 )
is explained by the determination of inconsistent information between stance values
known (or presumed by reasonable default) to be in place and those derived from
utterance interpretation. During pragmatic evaluation, the self-contradiction implied
by an obsequious utterance fails to earn esteem, just as with other unreliable or
manifestly deceptive behaviors.
Using the defaults of interpretation expressed so far, a reflexive thought such
as ( 12.12 ) (see Sect. 12.2.9 ) encodes a self-appraisal along the lines of ( 12.29 ). 23
This is at odds with the defeasible provisions of both of the default interpretation
principles ( 12.16 ) and ( 12.17 ). The example involves self-reference at two points in
time: the event of burning of the toast and the utterance event. There is also implicit
reference to the event preceding the burning of the toast. It is coherent for the
speaker to adopt the perspective of superiority of the pre-toast-burning-self over the
post-toast-burning-self, thus leading to the expectation of impoliteness. Moreover,
if principle ( 12.24 . a ) has force, impoliteness is independently expected for this
example. Thus, reflexive impoliteness expressions like ( 12.12 ) are sensible.
22 An anonymous reviewer disagrees with some of this, but that is possibly with respect to a version
of the theory in which it is claimed that the relevant expressions are fully intersubstitutable and
undifferentiable on lexical-semantic grounds. This str on ger view is not argued here.
23 The intended interpretation of the co-indexing (e.g., i ) is of structure sharing, including between
the resolution of the disjunction in the first person value with the second person value.