This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of
politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena
in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use
taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on
his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a
pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that
politeness is communicative altruism. Leech's 1983 book, Principles of
Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between
pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness;
this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in
recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the
prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms 'polite' or
'impolite' to linguistic phenomena.Leech covers all major speech
acts that are either positively or negatively associated with
politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers,
criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and
disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related
phenomena of irony ("mock politeness") and banter ("mock
impoliteness"), and with the role of politeness in the learning of
English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look
at more than a thousand years of history of
politeness in the English language.Readership: Graduate
students and researchers in linguistics (especially sociolinguistics)
as well those in sociology, social psychology, and anthropology.