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date: 11 December 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This article selectively reviews the literature on politeness across different disciplines—linguistics, anthropology, communications, conversation analysis, social psychology, and sociology—and critically assesses how both theoretical approaches to politeness and research on linguistic politeness phenomena have evolved over the past forty years. Major new developments include a shift from predominantly linguistic approaches to those examining politeness and impoliteness as processes that are embedded and negotiated in interactional and cultural contexts, as well as a greater focus on how both politeness and interactional confrontation and conflict fit into our developing understanding of human cooperation and universal aspects of human social interaction.

Keywords: language use, politeness, impoliteness, politeness theory, discourse, conversation, conversation analysis, conflict, face, pragmatics

Penelope Brown

Penelope Brown is a Senior Researcher Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She has worked for many years in a Tzeltal Maya community in southern Mexico, on research that broadly addresses relationships between language, culture and cognition and ranges across spatial language and cognition, conversational structure and inference, the systematics of social interaction and child language socialization. She is (with Stephen Levinson) the author of Politeness: some universals in language usage, and editor (with Melissa Bowerman) of Crosslinguistic perspectives on argumentsStructure: implications for language acquisition. She is currently writing two books based on her research in Mexico, one on Tzeltal conversation, the other on spatial language and cognition.

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