Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness Within a Formal Semantics of Offensive Language - Conflict and Multimodal Communication: Social Research and Machine Intelligence - page 231

Theories of (im)politeness have tended to focus on pragmatic theory. 25 The
literature on politeness and impoliteness properly accords a major role for context
in the evaluation of the experience of (im)politeness (Allan and Burridge 2006 ).
However, appeal to the norms of language use within communities of practice to
determine what counts as polite or impolite implicitly relies on the possibility of
straightforward semantic interpretation to decode content and levels of politeness
(e.g., Schnurr et al. 2008 ). Following Goffman's analysis of human interactions in
terms of “face” (Goffman 1956 , 1967 ), much work has been guided by a view of
politeness as “facework” (Brown and Levinson 1987 ). An alternative view (Locher
and Watts 2008 ; Bousfield and Locher 2008 ; Culpeper 2008 ) gives priority to
relation management more than to agents in themselves, and in this conception,
(im)politeness is seen as “relational work.” In exceedingly coarse-grained terms
associated with networks of communicating agents, the “facework” approaches may
be seen as giving primary attention to the nodes (the agents), and the “relational
work” approaches may be seen as attending primarily to the links (relations
between agents), while the analysis presented here addresses (im)politeness as the
management of a fog of offence that might otherwise engulf the whole network of
agents and their relations.
The view pursued here is thus not at odds with those prior conceptions, but rather
contains a distinct focus. The overarching effort is an attempt to contribute both to
explanation of the perception of acts as polite or impolite and to the specification
of the ontology required by a formal truth-conditional semantics for linguistic
(im)politeness. It is argued that speakers use polite forms in order to avoid invoking
disgust and impolite forms when they do not mind disgusting others. 26 Specifying
denotations of expressions of (im)politeness as sets of events provides a semantic
ontology also presupposed by pragmatic analysis of the phenomena. It is claimed
that this approach clarifies some of the puzzles of (im)politeness, but others remain
for future analysis.
Acknowledgements This research is supported by Science Foundation Ireland (Grant
12/CE/I2267) as part of the Centre for Global Intelligent Content ( www.cngl.ie ) at Trinity College
Dublin. I thank Irene Sheedy for helpful discussions on the topic of (im)politeness. I am grateful
to an anonymous reviewer for very constructive criticisms of an earlier draft of this chapter.
25 Of course, some others also emphasize that forms of language associated with (im)politeness
expressions are open to semantic interpretation (Culpeper 2011 ).
26 Recall footnote 4 . It is held in this chapter that impoliteness forms are expected when the speaker
feels greater levels of offence from others than self-offensiveness. Accordingly, if a speaker is
disgusted, then one expects impoliteness. However, this is always at the risk of in turn disgusting
not just the target of any such impoliteness, but also any witnesses to the communication. Thus,
ultimately, impolite forms are used when the triggers of disgust for the speaker are so great that the
risks of being deemed disgusting by others are outweighed.