- Email: [email protected]
Understanding Politeness
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 77 (2015) 113--116 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Understanding Politeness Dániel Kádár and Michael Haugh, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, 287 pp., ISBN: 978-1-107-03168-5, £22.95 (paperback) ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ brings together the work of two scholars who have published extensively in the area of politeness and have contributed significantly to recent developments in the field. The book, therefore, focuses on the authors’ areas of expertise, such as Kádár’s research on historical Chinese politeness (Kádár, 2010, 2011, 2012), as well as his growing interest in rituals (Kádár, 2013). It draws extensively on Haugh’s work, who has analysed politeness in relation to intentions and implicatures (e.g. Haugh, 2007a, 2008, 2014), proposed an interactional approach to the study of politeness (Haugh, 2007b, 2009) and also developed further some existing frameworks, such as Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and Eelen’s (2001) conceptualisation of politeness in terms of evaluations (Haugh, 2010, 2013). All these fairly recent publications shape the present book, which thus moves away from the focus on linguistic forms dominating much of previous politeness research and towards a view of politeness as a social practice involving interpersonal evaluations of politeness. Rather than providing a chapter by chapter overview, this review will focus on the challenges analysts adopting such an approach face; namely those of identifying, analysing and defining politeness -- and the extent to which the authors manage to overcome them. The early 2000s saw the publication of several influential monographs taking a discursive approach to the study of politeness (e.g. Eelen, 2001; Mills, 2003; Watts, 2003), but while these publications unanimously state that politeness does not reside in linguistic structures, linguistic structures remain central to the analyses they provide. We are told that politeness is negotiable and that the use of certain conventionally polite linguistic structures (such as please or thank you) may not necessarily be intended or perceived as polite. But when discursive politeness scholars assert that politeness is not ‘‘necessarily ‘a good thing’’’ (Mills, 2003:59) or that it ‘‘may easily be non-altruistic and clearly egocentric’’ (Watts, 2005:69), they seem be saying that politeness (linguistic structures!) is not always polite (good? altruistic?). Politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987) are no longer tenable, so they are replaced with a much broader group of linguistic structures called ‘‘expressions of procedural meaning’’ (Watts, 2003) and we are told that politic behaviour ‘‘consists in ‘paying’ with linguistic resources what is due in a socio-communicative verbal interaction’’ while politeness consists in paying ‘‘more than would normally be required’’ (2003:115) -- a distinction that seems to be solely based on the quantity of linguistic structures employed in a given situation. It seems that with the discursive turn, the notion of politeness became extremely vague while analyses demonstrating participants’ evaluations of politeness remained scarce. ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ offers numerous analyses centring on participants’ evaluations and draws on a multitude of types of data, such as extracts from films and comedy series (by far the most frequent source of data in the book), observational data, recordings of naturally occurring conversations, books, novels, poems, newspapers, cartoons, letters, emails, online discussion boards and readers’ comments. These types of data can be roughly divided into three groups: (1) written sources, such as poems, letters and other documents, which are indispensable for the analysis of politeness in historical contexts and whose analysis necessarily relies on linguistic forms, (2) sources involving meta-participants, such as online discussion forums and online newspapers with readers’ comments, where meta-participants’ provide evaluations of im/politeness (this highly accessible type of data has significantly contributed to the recent shift in politeness research towards evaluations of politeness and extended participation frameworks), and (3) face-to-face conversations, where im/politeness may arise without being evaluated or even oriented to by the participants. The interpretation of this type of data seems least reliable, with the danger of politeness being overlooked or even interpreted into the data by the analyst.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.01.007 0378-2166/
114
Book review
Most of the face-to-face conversations analysed in ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ are scripted and taken from films, comedy series and books. Naturally occurring conversations, in contrast, are relatively rare in the book; as they are in politeness research in general (though Haugh actually is one of the few politeness researchers who do work with detailed transcripts of recorded conversations). This is not surprising given the restrictions on availability of naturally occurring data and the wealth of easily available film material. The analysed extracts are very well chosen and the conducted analyses are precise and insightful. They not only focus on participants’ evaluations, but also demonstrate the relevance of a number of concepts neglected in previous politeness research, such as sequentiality and incrementality, to the interpretation of interactions and ways in which im/politeness is co-constructed in them. What is rather striking though is that most of the analysed extracts illustrate instances of impoliteness rather than politeness; with participants offending somebody (pp. 57, 91), criticising (pp. 65, 82) or complaining about (p. 70) somebody’s behaviour, using swearwords (pp. 40, 110), etc. It is the examination of participants’ negative evaluations of somebody’s behaviour that allows the analysts to tap into the expectations of politeness motivating these evaluations. This approach seems to suggest that if we are to analyse politeness without referring to linguistic forms and while relying solely on the perspectives of participants’ in an interaction, we need to do so through identifying acts of impoliteness; which are much more likely to be commented on by participants than politeness. This then allows us to gain access to politeness norms underlying negative evaluations of impoliteness, but it does not necessarily provide us with a framework for analysing (evaluations of) politeness. One example in the book that attempts this is an analysis of a ‘ritual’ performance put on by Kádár to encourage his daughter to go to school. The fact that the daughter asks her father to continue with his performance is interpreted as ‘‘a case of politeness in the sense of involving an evaluation of support for their relationship’’ (p. 226). This interpretation seems to be suggesting that, because the father’s performance leads to positive emotions, it is polite, which in turn suggests a very broad understanding of politeness, where politeness is equated with behaviour that is received favourably. What I find problematic about this analysis is that there seems to be a vast range of alternative interpretations of the child’s positive response: The father is not only supportive and entertaining, but he is postponing her having to enter the school building. So how do we know that it is politeness that arises in this interaction? While in this particular case we have to rely on the analyst’s -- who also happens to be a participant -- interpretation, one of the advantages of having a recording of the interaction under analysis is that it allows researchers to elicit evaluations from informants, who thus become metaparticipants, as demonstrated in one of the studies discussed in the book (pp. 97 & 189; Chang and Haugh, 2011). The study is about an intercultural apology offered to a young Taiwanese woman (Joyce) by an Australian acquaintance of her mother (Wayne), following an incident where Wayne did not turn up to a dinner with Joyce, did not cancel or send his apologies, and did not respond to Joyce’s call made from the restaurant. An apology was sent the following day via a text message and took the form of ‘‘Sorry I forgot I was busy with something.’’ This delayed, impersonal message not disclosing any acceptable reason for not turning up can undoubtedly be evaluated as offensive (so we are analysing impoliteness again); and it is not clear why Joyce decided to put herself through the experience of following it up with a call (other than for the purpose of recording it -- and I keep wondering: Did Wayne know he was being recorded?). Given this rather awkward situation, its underlying purpose of eliciting a fuller apology (or at least an explanation), and the fact that Wayne and Joyce had never met face to face, it is not surprising that the conversation is characterised by a high degree of disalignment between the speakers, pointing to divergent expectations of what constitutes appropriate behaviour. To support the analysis, further data was obtained by playing the conversation to both Taiwanese and Australian subjects who were asked to ‘‘rate the level of im/politeness of the apology in that call on a five-point Likert-type scale, ranging from ‘‘very impolite,’’ ‘‘impolite,’’ ‘‘neither polite nor impolite,’’ ‘‘polite,’’ through to ‘‘very polite’’ (2011: 424) and interviewed to reveal ‘‘the reasons why the respondents evaluated the apology in the way that they did (2011: 425). While this is an interesting and innovative study design, I keep asking myself if the participants had used any of the ‘politeness evaluators’ if they were simply asked to evaluate the apology in their own words. Has not presenting them with a Likert scale biased them towards evaluating the interaction through terms imposed on them by the analyst? In fact, the interviews revealed that while the Australian participants tended towards describing Wayne’s apology as friendly, the Taiwanese respondents indicated that it lacked sincerity. The authors’ main concern in presenting this data is that metalinguistic terms referring to politeness need to be viewed within their semantic fields and that these semantic fields are likely to be different across languages and cultures. The semantic field referring to politeness in English, for instance, is said to contain terms such as courteous, considerate and friendly (as well as polite), while the Spanish one includes terms such as cortesía, simpatía, respeto and educacio´n (p. 190). While this approach is useful in that it demonstrates that politeness is conceptualised differently in different languages, I would go a step further and argue that we need to consider the full range of terms referring to appropriate behaviour -- and the role politeness plays within it.
Book review
115
In fact, Haugh himself explains that ‘‘the moral order is what grounds our evaluations of social actions and meanings as ‘good’’ or ‘bad’, ‘normal’ or ‘exceptional’, ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ and so on, and of course, as ‘polite’, ‘impolite’, ‘over-polite’ and so on.’’ (Haugh, 2013:57). Surely, polite is more specific than good or appropriate. And different cultures or social groups may perceive politeness as more or less central to what they regard as appropriate behaviour. As we have been shown -- while for some being friendly and chatty after letting somebody down is appropriate, others may consider sincerity to be the only appropriate form of behaviour likely to elicit forgiveness. Likewise, honest and decent people are not necessarily polite and polite people may well be dishonest and devious. It seems that while ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ does move away from linguistic structures used to express politeness, at the same time it moves towards a different type of linguistic structures, the so-called politeness evaluators, which -similarly to the phrases please and thank you -- are not equally important and do not mean the same to all people. The evaluators used in the book (and in politeness research in general) are English -- and distinctions between terms such as ‘not impolite’ and ‘neither polite nor impolite’ (p. 190) may not transfer into other languages. Ultimately, the fact that nearly all theoretical work on politeness has been conducted by Anglo-Saxon scholars may well reflect the central role politeness plays for speakers of English when evaluating people’s behaviour. Early cross-cultural politeness research seemed to be portraying speakers of some languages as less polite because they used fewer linguistic structures associated with politeness (in English). Studying social actions, rather than linguistic structures, does not fully solve this problem if we restrict our analyses to politeness only as this will not do justice to those speakers who place more emphasis on other virtues or values involved in maintaining relationships and adhering to (and reproducing) the moral order. ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ promises ‘‘an analytical framework by means of which one can successfully situate the analysis of politeness across time and space’’ (p. 1). While I would not necessarily agree that it provides a framework, it does provide the tools to analyse politeness in a variety of contexts and types of data. It is a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of concepts and categories relevant to the study of politeness, and it offers a wealth of very well chosen examples and detailed and insightful analyses. The book is definitely a must-read for any academic working in the area of politeness, though I am not convinced that it is equally suitable for ‘‘undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to make their way into linguistic politeness research’’ (p.9). I picked up a copy of ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ as I was planning a new third-year BA module on politeness but, after reading it, decided against using it as a textbook for the module. I concluded that the book’s focus on recent developments in politeness research and the density of concepts introduced in it, as well as the tendency to make more and more, finer and finer distinctions (such as that between metalinguistic, metadiscursive, metacommunicative, metacognitive awareness) goes beyond my students’ needs. Politeness research conducted before 2000, in contrast, which seems indispensible to understanding the development of the field of politeness research and the concepts that are currently under discussion, is dealt with on 20 pages -- nearly half of which take a critical stance towards this early research. I did, however, refer to the book repeatedly throughout the module and found the examples of data analysis extremely helpful. Not surprisingly, in their module evaluation, the students demanded ‘‘More copies of Understanding Politeness!’’ for the library. References Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, Haugh, Michael, 2011. Evaluations of im/politeness of an intercultural apology. Intercult. Pragmat. 8, 411--442. Eelen, Gino, 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theory. St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talk. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Haugh, Michael, 2007a. The co-constitution of politeness implicature in conversation. J. Pragmat. 39, 84--110. Haugh, Michael, 2007b. The discursive challenge to politeness theory: an interactional alternative. J. Polite. Res. 3, 295--317. Haugh, Michael, 2008. The place of intention in the interactional achievement of implicature. In: Istvan, Kecskes, Jacob, Mey (Eds.), Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 45--48. Haugh, Michael, 2009. Face and interaction. In: Francesca, Bargiela-Chiappini, Michael, Haugh (Eds.), Face, Communication and Social Interaction. Equinox, London, pp. 1--30. Haugh, Michael, 2010. When is an email really offensive? Argumentativity and variability in evaluations of impoliteness. J. Polite. Res. 6, 7--31. Haugh, Michael, 2013. Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. J. Pragmat. 58, 52--72. Haugh, Michael, 2014. (Im)politeness Implicatures. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Kádár, Daniel, 2010. Exploring the historical Chinese denigration/elevation phenomenon. In: Jonathan, Culpeper, Kádár, Daniel (Eds.), Historical (Im)politeness. Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 117--145. Kádár, Daniel, 2011. Historical Chinese Letter Writing. Continuum, London. Kádár, Daniel, 2012. Historical Chinese politeness and rhetoric: a case study of epistolary refusals. J. Polite. Res. 8, 93--110. Kádár, Daniel, 2013. Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Palgrave Macmilan, Basingstoke.
116
Book review
Mills, Sara, 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, Richard J., 2003. Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, Richard J., 2005. Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behavior: reconsidering claims for universality. In: Watts, Richard J., Ide, Sachiko, Ehlich, Konrad (Eds.), Politeness in Language. Studies in History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 43--71. Eva Ogiermann is Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at King’s College London. Her work in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics investigates culture-specific perceptions and conceptualisations of politeness in English, German, Polish and Russian. More recently, she has been analysing video-recordings of conversations in English, Polish and English/Polish families. Her publications include a monograph on apologising (Benjamins, 2009) and articles in Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Politeness Research, Multilingua, and Research on Language and Social Interaction.
Eva Ogiermann Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication, King’s College London, Franklin-Wilkins Building, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected]
ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 77 (2015) 113--116 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Understanding Politeness Dániel Kádár and Michael Haugh, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, 287 pp., ISBN: 978-1-107-03168-5, £22.95 (paperback) ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ brings together the work of two scholars who have published extensively in the area of politeness and have contributed significantly to recent developments in the field. The book, therefore, focuses on the authors’ areas of expertise, such as Kádár’s research on historical Chinese politeness (Kádár, 2010, 2011, 2012), as well as his growing interest in rituals (Kádár, 2013). It draws extensively on Haugh’s work, who has analysed politeness in relation to intentions and implicatures (e.g. Haugh, 2007a, 2008, 2014), proposed an interactional approach to the study of politeness (Haugh, 2007b, 2009) and also developed further some existing frameworks, such as Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and Eelen’s (2001) conceptualisation of politeness in terms of evaluations (Haugh, 2010, 2013). All these fairly recent publications shape the present book, which thus moves away from the focus on linguistic forms dominating much of previous politeness research and towards a view of politeness as a social practice involving interpersonal evaluations of politeness. Rather than providing a chapter by chapter overview, this review will focus on the challenges analysts adopting such an approach face; namely those of identifying, analysing and defining politeness -- and the extent to which the authors manage to overcome them. The early 2000s saw the publication of several influential monographs taking a discursive approach to the study of politeness (e.g. Eelen, 2001; Mills, 2003; Watts, 2003), but while these publications unanimously state that politeness does not reside in linguistic structures, linguistic structures remain central to the analyses they provide. We are told that politeness is negotiable and that the use of certain conventionally polite linguistic structures (such as please or thank you) may not necessarily be intended or perceived as polite. But when discursive politeness scholars assert that politeness is not ‘‘necessarily ‘a good thing’’’ (Mills, 2003:59) or that it ‘‘may easily be non-altruistic and clearly egocentric’’ (Watts, 2005:69), they seem be saying that politeness (linguistic structures!) is not always polite (good? altruistic?). Politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987) are no longer tenable, so they are replaced with a much broader group of linguistic structures called ‘‘expressions of procedural meaning’’ (Watts, 2003) and we are told that politic behaviour ‘‘consists in ‘paying’ with linguistic resources what is due in a socio-communicative verbal interaction’’ while politeness consists in paying ‘‘more than would normally be required’’ (2003:115) -- a distinction that seems to be solely based on the quantity of linguistic structures employed in a given situation. It seems that with the discursive turn, the notion of politeness became extremely vague while analyses demonstrating participants’ evaluations of politeness remained scarce. ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ offers numerous analyses centring on participants’ evaluations and draws on a multitude of types of data, such as extracts from films and comedy series (by far the most frequent source of data in the book), observational data, recordings of naturally occurring conversations, books, novels, poems, newspapers, cartoons, letters, emails, online discussion boards and readers’ comments. These types of data can be roughly divided into three groups: (1) written sources, such as poems, letters and other documents, which are indispensable for the analysis of politeness in historical contexts and whose analysis necessarily relies on linguistic forms, (2) sources involving meta-participants, such as online discussion forums and online newspapers with readers’ comments, where meta-participants’ provide evaluations of im/politeness (this highly accessible type of data has significantly contributed to the recent shift in politeness research towards evaluations of politeness and extended participation frameworks), and (3) face-to-face conversations, where im/politeness may arise without being evaluated or even oriented to by the participants. The interpretation of this type of data seems least reliable, with the danger of politeness being overlooked or even interpreted into the data by the analyst.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.01.007 0378-2166/
114
Book review
Most of the face-to-face conversations analysed in ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ are scripted and taken from films, comedy series and books. Naturally occurring conversations, in contrast, are relatively rare in the book; as they are in politeness research in general (though Haugh actually is one of the few politeness researchers who do work with detailed transcripts of recorded conversations). This is not surprising given the restrictions on availability of naturally occurring data and the wealth of easily available film material. The analysed extracts are very well chosen and the conducted analyses are precise and insightful. They not only focus on participants’ evaluations, but also demonstrate the relevance of a number of concepts neglected in previous politeness research, such as sequentiality and incrementality, to the interpretation of interactions and ways in which im/politeness is co-constructed in them. What is rather striking though is that most of the analysed extracts illustrate instances of impoliteness rather than politeness; with participants offending somebody (pp. 57, 91), criticising (pp. 65, 82) or complaining about (p. 70) somebody’s behaviour, using swearwords (pp. 40, 110), etc. It is the examination of participants’ negative evaluations of somebody’s behaviour that allows the analysts to tap into the expectations of politeness motivating these evaluations. This approach seems to suggest that if we are to analyse politeness without referring to linguistic forms and while relying solely on the perspectives of participants’ in an interaction, we need to do so through identifying acts of impoliteness; which are much more likely to be commented on by participants than politeness. This then allows us to gain access to politeness norms underlying negative evaluations of impoliteness, but it does not necessarily provide us with a framework for analysing (evaluations of) politeness. One example in the book that attempts this is an analysis of a ‘ritual’ performance put on by Kádár to encourage his daughter to go to school. The fact that the daughter asks her father to continue with his performance is interpreted as ‘‘a case of politeness in the sense of involving an evaluation of support for their relationship’’ (p. 226). This interpretation seems to be suggesting that, because the father’s performance leads to positive emotions, it is polite, which in turn suggests a very broad understanding of politeness, where politeness is equated with behaviour that is received favourably. What I find problematic about this analysis is that there seems to be a vast range of alternative interpretations of the child’s positive response: The father is not only supportive and entertaining, but he is postponing her having to enter the school building. So how do we know that it is politeness that arises in this interaction? While in this particular case we have to rely on the analyst’s -- who also happens to be a participant -- interpretation, one of the advantages of having a recording of the interaction under analysis is that it allows researchers to elicit evaluations from informants, who thus become metaparticipants, as demonstrated in one of the studies discussed in the book (pp. 97 & 189; Chang and Haugh, 2011). The study is about an intercultural apology offered to a young Taiwanese woman (Joyce) by an Australian acquaintance of her mother (Wayne), following an incident where Wayne did not turn up to a dinner with Joyce, did not cancel or send his apologies, and did not respond to Joyce’s call made from the restaurant. An apology was sent the following day via a text message and took the form of ‘‘Sorry I forgot I was busy with something.’’ This delayed, impersonal message not disclosing any acceptable reason for not turning up can undoubtedly be evaluated as offensive (so we are analysing impoliteness again); and it is not clear why Joyce decided to put herself through the experience of following it up with a call (other than for the purpose of recording it -- and I keep wondering: Did Wayne know he was being recorded?). Given this rather awkward situation, its underlying purpose of eliciting a fuller apology (or at least an explanation), and the fact that Wayne and Joyce had never met face to face, it is not surprising that the conversation is characterised by a high degree of disalignment between the speakers, pointing to divergent expectations of what constitutes appropriate behaviour. To support the analysis, further data was obtained by playing the conversation to both Taiwanese and Australian subjects who were asked to ‘‘rate the level of im/politeness of the apology in that call on a five-point Likert-type scale, ranging from ‘‘very impolite,’’ ‘‘impolite,’’ ‘‘neither polite nor impolite,’’ ‘‘polite,’’ through to ‘‘very polite’’ (2011: 424) and interviewed to reveal ‘‘the reasons why the respondents evaluated the apology in the way that they did (2011: 425). While this is an interesting and innovative study design, I keep asking myself if the participants had used any of the ‘politeness evaluators’ if they were simply asked to evaluate the apology in their own words. Has not presenting them with a Likert scale biased them towards evaluating the interaction through terms imposed on them by the analyst? In fact, the interviews revealed that while the Australian participants tended towards describing Wayne’s apology as friendly, the Taiwanese respondents indicated that it lacked sincerity. The authors’ main concern in presenting this data is that metalinguistic terms referring to politeness need to be viewed within their semantic fields and that these semantic fields are likely to be different across languages and cultures. The semantic field referring to politeness in English, for instance, is said to contain terms such as courteous, considerate and friendly (as well as polite), while the Spanish one includes terms such as cortesía, simpatía, respeto and educacio´n (p. 190). While this approach is useful in that it demonstrates that politeness is conceptualised differently in different languages, I would go a step further and argue that we need to consider the full range of terms referring to appropriate behaviour -- and the role politeness plays within it.
Book review
115
In fact, Haugh himself explains that ‘‘the moral order is what grounds our evaluations of social actions and meanings as ‘good’’ or ‘bad’, ‘normal’ or ‘exceptional’, ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ and so on, and of course, as ‘polite’, ‘impolite’, ‘over-polite’ and so on.’’ (Haugh, 2013:57). Surely, polite is more specific than good or appropriate. And different cultures or social groups may perceive politeness as more or less central to what they regard as appropriate behaviour. As we have been shown -- while for some being friendly and chatty after letting somebody down is appropriate, others may consider sincerity to be the only appropriate form of behaviour likely to elicit forgiveness. Likewise, honest and decent people are not necessarily polite and polite people may well be dishonest and devious. It seems that while ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ does move away from linguistic structures used to express politeness, at the same time it moves towards a different type of linguistic structures, the so-called politeness evaluators, which -similarly to the phrases please and thank you -- are not equally important and do not mean the same to all people. The evaluators used in the book (and in politeness research in general) are English -- and distinctions between terms such as ‘not impolite’ and ‘neither polite nor impolite’ (p. 190) may not transfer into other languages. Ultimately, the fact that nearly all theoretical work on politeness has been conducted by Anglo-Saxon scholars may well reflect the central role politeness plays for speakers of English when evaluating people’s behaviour. Early cross-cultural politeness research seemed to be portraying speakers of some languages as less polite because they used fewer linguistic structures associated with politeness (in English). Studying social actions, rather than linguistic structures, does not fully solve this problem if we restrict our analyses to politeness only as this will not do justice to those speakers who place more emphasis on other virtues or values involved in maintaining relationships and adhering to (and reproducing) the moral order. ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ promises ‘‘an analytical framework by means of which one can successfully situate the analysis of politeness across time and space’’ (p. 1). While I would not necessarily agree that it provides a framework, it does provide the tools to analyse politeness in a variety of contexts and types of data. It is a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of concepts and categories relevant to the study of politeness, and it offers a wealth of very well chosen examples and detailed and insightful analyses. The book is definitely a must-read for any academic working in the area of politeness, though I am not convinced that it is equally suitable for ‘‘undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to make their way into linguistic politeness research’’ (p.9). I picked up a copy of ‘‘Understanding Politeness’’ as I was planning a new third-year BA module on politeness but, after reading it, decided against using it as a textbook for the module. I concluded that the book’s focus on recent developments in politeness research and the density of concepts introduced in it, as well as the tendency to make more and more, finer and finer distinctions (such as that between metalinguistic, metadiscursive, metacommunicative, metacognitive awareness) goes beyond my students’ needs. Politeness research conducted before 2000, in contrast, which seems indispensible to understanding the development of the field of politeness research and the concepts that are currently under discussion, is dealt with on 20 pages -- nearly half of which take a critical stance towards this early research. I did, however, refer to the book repeatedly throughout the module and found the examples of data analysis extremely helpful. Not surprisingly, in their module evaluation, the students demanded ‘‘More copies of Understanding Politeness!’’ for the library. References Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C., 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Chang, Wei-Lin Melody, Haugh, Michael, 2011. Evaluations of im/politeness of an intercultural apology. Intercult. Pragmat. 8, 411--442. Eelen, Gino, 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theory. St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talk. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Haugh, Michael, 2007a. The co-constitution of politeness implicature in conversation. J. Pragmat. 39, 84--110. Haugh, Michael, 2007b. The discursive challenge to politeness theory: an interactional alternative. J. Polite. Res. 3, 295--317. Haugh, Michael, 2008. The place of intention in the interactional achievement of implicature. In: Istvan, Kecskes, Jacob, Mey (Eds.), Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 45--48. Haugh, Michael, 2009. Face and interaction. In: Francesca, Bargiela-Chiappini, Michael, Haugh (Eds.), Face, Communication and Social Interaction. Equinox, London, pp. 1--30. Haugh, Michael, 2010. When is an email really offensive? Argumentativity and variability in evaluations of impoliteness. J. Polite. Res. 6, 7--31. Haugh, Michael, 2013. Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. J. Pragmat. 58, 52--72. Haugh, Michael, 2014. (Im)politeness Implicatures. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. Kádár, Daniel, 2010. Exploring the historical Chinese denigration/elevation phenomenon. In: Jonathan, Culpeper, Kádár, Daniel (Eds.), Historical (Im)politeness. Peter Lang, Oxford, pp. 117--145. Kádár, Daniel, 2011. Historical Chinese Letter Writing. Continuum, London. Kádár, Daniel, 2012. Historical Chinese politeness and rhetoric: a case study of epistolary refusals. J. Polite. Res. 8, 93--110. Kádár, Daniel, 2013. Relational Rituals and Communication: Ritual Interaction in Groups. Palgrave Macmilan, Basingstoke.
116
Book review
Mills, Sara, 2003. Gender and Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, Richard J., 2003. Politeness. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Watts, Richard J., 2005. Linguistic politeness and politic verbal behavior: reconsidering claims for universality. In: Watts, Richard J., Ide, Sachiko, Ehlich, Konrad (Eds.), Politeness in Language. Studies in History, Theory and Practice. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 43--71. Eva Ogiermann is Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at King’s College London. Her work in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics investigates culture-specific perceptions and conceptualisations of politeness in English, German, Polish and Russian. More recently, she has been analysing video-recordings of conversations in English, Polish and English/Polish families. Her publications include a monograph on apologising (Benjamins, 2009) and articles in Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Politeness Research, Multilingua, and Research on Language and Social Interaction.
Eva Ogiermann Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication, King’s College London, Franklin-Wilkins Building, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NH, United Kingdom E-mail address: [email protected]