Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive Language - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 230

Notice that a further contrasting example ( 12.31 ), involving not the language of
reflexive politeness, but politic commentary, is not problematic.

(31)I i am enjoying this fine toast I i 've made.
Thus, self-praise is not predicted to be prohibited on this account, but self-
politeness is.
The puzzles of learning (Sect. 12.2.5 ) and the incompletely Saussurean nature
(Sect. 12.2.4 ) of the language of (im)politeness are both partly explained by the
complexity of the calculus involved in using politeness expressions, relative to other
most aspects of language use. Cooperative use of definite noun phrases presupposes
that the addresser is able to make a reasonable calculation of what entities might be
shared in a common ground understanding of salient possible references. Even in the
use of definite noun phrases, it has been shown that speakers tend to make use of a
notion of common ground that is inclined to their own world view rather than to the
information available to interlocutors (Horton and Keysar 1996 ), demonstrating that
calculations of addressee states are not straightforward. The calculation necessary
in the proposed framework is additional to that required by the easily learned
aspects of language, and partly accounts for the complexity of learning involved
in (im)politeness, sensitive to triggers that are established by convention in the
chain of association and to the relative status of interlocutors. While the calculators
in Hurford's simulations were the worst performers in competition with Saussureans
and imitators in establishing strategies for communicating messages (Hurford
1989 ), it is open that the calculating strategy may be necessary in optimal packaging
of the message.
This discussion has demonstrated some of the successes of the semantic theory
of linguistic (im)politeness described here in explaining several of the puzzles of
(im)politeness that have been noted.

12.5 Final Remarks

Not all of the puzzles of linguistic (im)politeness are addressed in this chapter, and
there is more to say about each of the puzzles within this framework. However,
the semantic theory outlined has been demonstrated to have some traction in
explaining a number of the puzzles. It is demonstrated that some aspects of
politeness are appropriately treated as linguistic and through formal semantics. The
calculation involved in politeness management is too important for it to disregard
views of interlocutors, and therefore a strictly Saussurean strategy for linguistic
packaging may be inappropriate. The fact that politeness expression augmentation
can create disgust at a point of excess, rather than managing disgust positively arises
through conflicting constraints. Asymmetry in the relative availability of reflexive
impoliteness over reflexive politeness is also modeled. The complexity of politeness
also makes it no surprise that linguistic politeness learning is at a different pace to
language learning, generally.