Politeness: The Practical Turn

Little progress has been made in modern politeness studies despite mountains of publications that have been bombarding the politeness market over the past three or so decades, rendering the latter in much a mess. Thus, many fundamental questions in close relation to politeness, ontological, epistemological and methodological, remain to be satisfactorily answered. This is, to a large extent, because of the pervasive influences if not fettering of Brown and Levinson's politeness model, which has been turned out to be theoretically reductionistic, logically unsupportable and empirically dubious. In other words, what underlies the seemingly thriving profusion of politeness studies is a great deal of confusion.It is argued in this dissertation that (i) politeness is more than a matter of face; (ii) politeness does not necessarily entail sincerity, and sincere politeness and insincere politeness should be distinguished; (iii) the social-norm view of politeness, taking little account of such characteristics of politeness as contextualization, locality and adaptability, reflects a static social reality and is no more than an external embodiment of homogeneous culture, social determinism and universalism; (iv) there is no need to develop two different frameworks to account for politeness and impoliteness respectively; any framework that can be used to examine politeness phenomena should also aim for dealing with impoliteness phenomena; (v) polite language is not necessarily equated with politeness, and impolite language is not necessarily equated with impoliteness; and (vi) though there is some need to differentiate politeness₁ from politeness₂, Watts' (2003) work is problematic.This dissertation, drawing upon interactional linguistics and the theory of practice and the notions of habitus, field and capital in particular, argues thatlanguage emerges in and through interaction and that politeness, like language, is a social practice. Most importantly, it is argued that (im)politeness is inherently a matter of moral judgment and assessment largely based on habitus, that we should shift the analytical focus from the speaker to the hearer because it is the latter that assesses and evaluates the politeness or impoliteness of discourse and that, politeness is ultimately in close relation to power and guanxi (social connections) that are shown to be two kinds of essential symbolic capital for a better and deeper understanding of politeness in China.To conclude, the study of politeness is an area of great significance because it may, in the final analysis, help us human beings better understand the world we are living in and the reality we are confronted with, better understand how we social members re(construct), realize and represent our social and personal identity. It can be said, in the final analysis, that the issue of politeness is one of philosophy, one of human life philosophy. This, if any, should be one of the ultimate goals of politeness studies.