Abstract
From its very title, The Pragmatics of Politeness reflects the author’s position that politeness belongs to the domain of pragmatics. More specifically, Leech maintains that politeness can be studied in both pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics: ‘one oriented to linguistic realizations of politeness, and the other oriented to the social or cultural determinants of politeness’ (p. 13). In this text, Leech adopts the former approach, focusing mainly on how language – English in particular – is used for politeness.
This book is composed of 11 chapters arranged in three parts. Part I lays the foundations for the understanding of politeness. Chapter 1 describes eight characteristics of politeness, rightly showing that politeness is a matter of degree, that politeness is not obligatory, that politeness is situational and reciprocally asymmetrical, and that politeness ‘involves the passing of some kind of transaction of value between the speaker and the other party’ (p. 8). We would like to point out that politeness is also closely related to emotion, in that the production and perception of politeness is a matter of social cognition and concerns interactants’ mental and emotional states and rationality. Leech makes a distinction between addressee politeness and third-person politeness, rightly pointing out that the target of politeness is not necessarily the speaker or the addressee but may be someone else present or absent in interaction.
Chapter 2 reviews both classic and more recent viewpoints on politeness, pointing out that these various models share some important common ground. Chapter 3 combines Searle’s speech act theory with Grice’s Cooperative Principle and theory of implicature, in an attempt to provide a pragmatic foundation of a theory of politeness and neg-politeness in particular. Leech highlights the crucial role the notion of ‘default’ plays in working out the polite meaning of indirect speech acts, which is always arguably the result of implicature. In Chapter 4, Leech presents an updated version of his politeness model, where the General Strategy of Politeness (GSP) and its component maxims are elaborated with recourse to detailed examples from various languages, including Chinese (though pīnyīn transcriptions are sometimes misspelled) and Japanese besides English. In so doing, Leech aims to propose a model or theory of politeness that can be employed to account for geographically- and culturally-divergent realisations. For Leech, ‘politeness in a pragmatic sense is a matter of conveying meanings in accord with the GSP’ (p. 90) and should not concern psychological motivations; however, as we see it, a relatively comprehensive, if not all-inclusive, theory of politeness can ill afford to neglect or downplay psychological connotations hidden behind linguistic politeness phenomena. After all, even Leech himself acknowledges that politeness has ‘a psychological function’ (p. 111) and that in pragmatics there is also a need for psychological explanations.
In Part II, ‘Politeness and impoliteness in the use of English’, Leech draws upon corpus data and presents detailed case studies of different speech events to examine the validity of the GSP. The speech events covered include apologies (Chapter 5), requests (Chapter 6), offers, compliments, thanks, advice, agreement, disagreement, congratulations and commiserations (Chapter 7). Chapter 8, which concludes the part, dwells upon four major themes of ‘opposites’ of politeness: nonpoliteness, impoliteness, conversational irony or sarcasm and banter. To account for impoliteness, Leech reverses the GSP and presents the General Strategy of Impoliteness (GSI) and its accompanying categories of constraint violation. Leech attaches importance to the value of ‘value’ in his explanation. Impoliteness, for instance, means giving value to oneself and taking value from the other person. Such a value-oriented approach appears conducive to bringing out easier and simpler politeness or impoliteness interpretations, though the specific contents of ‘value’ need more detailed and meticulous scrutiny.
Part III, titled ‘Further perspectives’, contains three chapters. Chapter 9 compares different methods of data collection in pragmatics research, including rating/multiple choice/interview tasks, discourse completion tests, role play and observation of authentic discourse. It is worth noting that, whether data are elicited or observational, purely natural data are next to impossible, since even seemingly naturally occurring data may turn out to be a result of manipulation. Chapter 10 focuses on interlanguage pragmatics and politeness across languages and cultures, while Chapter 11 covers historical politeness in the English language. The book ends with an appendix providing a brief sketch of the precursors of modern politeness studies and of what he calls Searlo-Gricean pragmatics.
Following Leech’s pragmalinguistic approach can yield a close-up view of how politeness is produced or conveyed through the use of language. This very advantage can also be a disadvantage, though. Largely concentrating upon pragmalinguistic aspects of politeness ‘does not give the whole picture’ (p. xii) in the sense that politeness can be a very complicated phenomenon intricately related to society, culture, cognition and even emotion. It is actually something of a pity to read that the book ‘swims somewhat against the tide of recent research on politeness’ (p. xi). For Leech, ‘focusing on an extended piece of dialogue can lead to a lot of contextual niceties that need explanation but are not generalizable’ (p. xii). This seems to lead to the question of what kind of generalization is in fact needed in politeness or pragmatics research. Given that Leech largely deals with pragmalinguistic facets of politeness, to what extent is his conclusion generalizable? Since language use is fundamentally multimodal, it can be argued that a multimodal analysis may shed some fresh light on politeness studies.
Overall, this book should be most welcome for those looking for a model of politeness that is theoretically lucid and empirically sound. This important book, profound and provocative, contributes to increasing the intellectual reach of politeness and human life in general, and is certainly, like his earlier work, a must-read for politeness research.