Abstract
The present volume assembles a number of inspiring contributions to a research field that is still very young but expanding fast, that of historical (im)politeness. Coming from different methodological approaches, all contributions the volume under review are united in the view that (im)politeness is a relational phenomenon. The volume contains 11 chapters, including an introduction by the editors, as well as an index of subjects and notes on the contributors.
The introductory chapter by the volume editors puts in perspective the difficulties and benefits of a historical view of linguistic (im)politeness, underscoring the importance of cultural coherence, and offers essential guidance for the reader wishing to get the full benefit from this book. In addition, it provides the usual summary of the volume’s papers and a brief overview of the field.
The chapter by Şükriye Ruhi and Dániel Z. Kádár examines the lexeme ‘face’ in Turkish and Chinese novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Central to their analysis is the discursive perspective, due to the dialogic nature of the novels under examination. Based not on an a priori definition of face, they investigate its meaning in five semantic and pragmatic domains: situational, interpersonal, personal, emotive and metapragmatic. The authors go beyond differences between the two cultures regarding ‘face’ to highlight the fact that this notion is not an exclusive ‘property’ of the Chinese, but rather a universally important emic concept.
The contribution of Jonathan Culpeper and Jane Demmen investigates the use of can/could in conventional indirect requests in different genres, during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Taking the perspective of Brown and Levinson (1978/1987) as their point of departure, they consider the cultural, social and ideological history of self in England before the 19th century, detecting the start of the rise of ‘ability-oriented requests’ in the 19th century. Their chapter offers valuable consideration of the factors that have historically influenced the rise of the individual self and its connection to politeness, such as religion, industrialization, romanticism and political and economic liberalism. There are, however, reasons to question the taken-for-granted individualism of the underlying model. As Sifianou (2011: 44) argues, the dimension of interdependence of social beings is not absent from their conceptualization of the notion of face.
Juhani Rundako analyses the attacks on the Madison Administration in the writings of the Boston Gazette and Connecticut Mirror during the war of 1812. Madison’s attitude towards the attacks is also briefly considered. After outlining the struggle for freedom of speech on political discourse before the war, Rundako adopts a theme-based approach. His analysis draws upon the division between ‘ordinary’ (i.e. unmarked) and ‘aggravated’ impoliteness (i.e. intentional rudeness), roughly connecting the former type with off-record verbal attacks on the public character of Madison and the latter with on-record attacks on his private character.
Richard Watts provides a complex and unique socio-cognitive approach to historical politeness based on an examination of terms like politeness, polished, politus, etc., in early 18th-century sources. He argues that the notion of politic behaviour is a necessary analytic tool not only for modern, but also for historical data. By acknowledging the variable conceptualizations of the lexeme polite among individuals, he demonstrates that the aspects that affected the ‘knowledge frame constituting politeness’ (p. 128) in the 18th century were very different from those in the modern era.
Catherine Kerbrat-Orechionni argues that a revision of Brown and Levinson’s model, such as that presented in her 1997 reformulation, can provide a satisfactory basis for a diachronic view of politeness phenomena in terms of face-saving. She delineates the abstract categories that such a proposal comprises and introduces the notion of ‘polirudeness’. Drawing mostly on Molière’s work, she argues that despite social variations, face-want is universally shared.
Phil Withington investigates the content of the notion ‘wit’ in early modern England with special reference to both canonical and ‘libertine’ writers of that era. His illuminating contribution sheds light on the valuable palette of definitions of ‘wit’, from ‘good fancy’ and ‘discretion’ to sociability through the will to power, and gives prominence to the conceptualization of wit as an early modern theory of practice.
Andreas H. Jucker studies the notions of positive and negative face in order to determine the trend towards them from Old to Modern English. By reinterpreting previous findings, he suggests that these notions are not useful as descriptive categories for the study of Old and Middle English. As far as late Middle and Modern English is concerned, the author identifies the transition from deference politeness to negative politeness through positive politeness. Nevertheless, his argument that the use of pre-requests contributes to the view that present-day English is a negative politeness culture is a slippery one, if we consider that a pre-request can equally count as a strategy for the protection of the speaker’s positive face since it circumvents rejection.
Valentine Pakis illustrates the connection between verbal insults and violence in medieval Germanic history. He detects the transition from actual violence to ritualized linguistic violence by studying three different dialogic genres – flyting-to-fighting, whettings and sennur – and highlights the significance of verbal and physical violence as honour challenges. Furthermore, he provides a different definition of the Old English hapax lytegian as ‘tease, mock’ instead of a meaning like ‘use cunning’.
Thomas Kohnen demonstrates the relationship of the directive forms ic wille and ic wolde to (im)politeness in Old English. By adopting a sentence-based approach, he identifies four categories of directive constructions and emphasizes the fact that Anglo-Saxon England seems to use the above forms in terms of practicality and not (im)politeness, as primary evidence demonstrates.
Marcel Bax explores the ways in which interpersonal distance was communicated from prehistory to modern times, paying attention to three broad developments: from iconic aggression to verbal, from self to other and from collective to individual. Considering impoliteness as a natural thing, he argues that impoliteness is not the opposite of politeness.
All in all, this collection broadens our understanding of the relationship between (im)-politeness and culture. Despite being mostly limited to the analysis of English-language data, this volume provides readers with a range of methodological approaches to the examination of diverse data sources (letters, poems, fiction, courtroom trial proceedings, etc.), covering the entire spectrum from utterance-based analyses to discourse-length ones. As such, it constitutes a valuable contribution to the growing field of historical (im)politeness.