Journal of Historical Pragmatics - Volume 12, Issue 1-2, 2011

This paper investigates the use of the word ‘face’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Turkish and Chinese so as to trace the meaning of the concept in the two languages and cultures. The study describes the occurrence of the lexeme in five semantic/pragmatic domains in novels dating from the turn of the twentieth century, a period that corresponds to an acceleration in modernisation movements. Two conclusions are drawn from the comparison of face in Turkish and Chinese, and noteworthy similarities and differences are shown. The interpersonal and the emotional domains cover a wide usage area but form mirror images of each other in terms of the frequency of the tokens. Yet, the Chinese novels reveal more metapragmatic discourse on talk. This is interpreted as face forming a profound emic notion in Chinese culture, which encompasses both relational management and the social worth of the person, while the Turkish novels suggest that it is an “idiom” primarily employed for describing relational management style.

In this paper we argue that the kind of individualistic ethos Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness model is accused of — and in particular its notion of (non-imposition) negative face — is not simply a reflection of British culture, but a reflection of British culture at a specific point in time. That point is the nineteenth century. Before then, the notion of an individual self separate from society and with its own hidden desires was not fully established. We argue that sociocultural developments, such as secularisation, the rise of Protestantism, social and geographical mobility, and the rise of individualism, created conditions in which the self became part of a new ideology where it was viewed as a property of the individual, and was associated with positive values such as self-help, self-control and self-respect. We also trace the history of conventional indirect requests, specifically can/could you X structures, the most frequent request structures used in British English today and, moreover, emblematic of British negative politeness. We show how such ability-oriented structures developed in the nineteenth century, and propose a tentative explanation as to why ability in particular was their focus.

This article focuses on face-threatening attacks on the Madison Administration during the War of 1812. The discussion is framed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, with the language of the Amendment protecting freedom of speech, and also by the Sedition Act of 1798, which, if it had been made permanent, would have seriously curtailed freedom of speech. The War of 1812 was intensely unpopular among members of the Federalist Party, and their newspapers did not shy away from criticising it. This article investigates writings published in the Boston Gazette and the Connecticut Mirror during the war. It is shown that the criticism took different forms, ranging from accusing President Madison of “untruths” to painting a picture of what was claimed to be the unmitigated hopelessness of his position, both nationally and internationally, and that the criticism also included harsh personal attacks on his character and motives. It is suggested that some of the attacks may be characterised as exhibiting aggravated impoliteness. The article also considers President Madison’s attitude in the face of the attacks.

The central argument of this paper is that “politeness”, when looked at not as a theoretical term but as a lexeme in the English language, has a relatively unstable set of cognitive concepts for which it prompts when used. The first-order notion of “politeness” developed by Watts, Ide and Ehlich (1992a), Watts (2003, 2005) and Locher (2004) entails the need for a very different form of theorisation from the rationalist/objectivist approach presented in Brown and Levinson ([1978] 1987). The only way to develop such a new “theory” of first-order “politeness” is to take positively and negatively evaluated linguistic expressions referring to the general area of “politeness” (polite, polished, refined, well-mannered, standoffish, etc.) to prompt for the socio-cognitive construction of a range of meanings that do not always correspond to one another or even overlap, i.e. to develop a socio-cognitive constructionist approach to emergent social practice. In terms of looking at “politeness” from a historical point of view, it is obviously difficult if not impossible to reconstruct the forms of emergent social practice, but English writings during the early eighteenth century are replete with references to terms such as polite, polished, affected, politeness, etc. The close study of how such terms are used reveals that what was understood by them was very different from what politeness researchers of today understand by “politeness”, and such differences can only be accounted for by positing a relativist model that can account for variability and change.

Forms and conceptions of politeness vary noticeably from one society to another, and also, within a given society, from one age to another. However, it can be assumed that the treatment of politeness phenomena in terms of “facework” as advocated by Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) might help us to shed some light on both cultural variations and diachronic variations in politeness behaviour. This assumption is tested by considering the question of “good manners” in the French classic age as they are recorded in some prescriptive and literary writings. The study reveals that the profound logic that politeness obeys is the same in all eras. I take a special interest in the “double binds” we are confronted with in the exercise of politeness, looking at, for example, compliments as a ritual activity.

This paper considers notions of “wit” in early modern England. It deploys quantitative methodologies to trace the term’s general discursive importance over time; it also looks at the use and conceptualisation of the term by canonical writers — Robert Greene and William Shakespeare in the 1590s, Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s, and the “libertines” of the Restoration era. The paper argues that whereas cultural and social historians have tended to regard impoliteness in the period as either the deliberate inversion or cultural absence of “civil” norms — “anti-civility”, in the words of Anna Bryson — wit provided a range of conventions and conversational repertoires outwith the normal bounds of civility. More to the point, in the hands of Thomas Hobbes wit demarcated a historicised theory of social practice.

Studies in the history of politeness in English have generally relied on the notions of positive and negative face. While earlier work argued that a general trend from positive politeness to negative politeness can be observed, more recent work has shown that in Old English and in Middle English face concerns were not as important as in Modern English and that, in certain contexts, there are also opposing tendencies from negative to positive politeness. In this paper, I focus in more detail on the notions of positive and negative face and follow up earlier suggestions that for negative face a clear distinction must be made between deference politeness and non-imposition politeness. On this basis, I assess the usefulness of the notions of positive and negative face for the development of politeness in the history of English.

The history of impoliteness — of which insults are a part — and violence are intertwined. In medieval Germanic cultural history, this link manifests itself in historical-pragmatic contexts such as sennur, whettings, and flyting-to-fighting scenarios, which are surveyed in this paper. The ethological origins of such interactions are called into question with reference to the Freudian death drive. Based on the connection between insults and violence, a novel definition of Old English lytegian in the Battle of Maldon is offered, namely ‘jeer, insult’, with comparative support from Icelandic.

ic wille ic wolde ic wolde þæt þu me sædest ic wille ic wolde Dictionary of Old English Corpus humilitasThus, this paper, on the one hand, confirms the picture of Anglo-Saxon England as a world “beyond politeness” (Kohnen 2008a); on the other hand, it also adds important aspects that may improve our perception of the complexities of Anglo-Saxon social interaction.

This paper is intended as an overall template of the evolution of (im)politeness. It elucidates how (linguistic) rapport management originated and developed over time, and tries to come to grips with (some of) the sociocultural factors behind such changes. Taking its point of departure in human prehistory (Section 1), the paper argues that, contrary to received wisdom, politeness and impoliteness are not two sides of the same coin (Section 2), and it discusses the dissimilar evolutionary antecedents of politeness and impoliteness (Sections 3 and 4). The paper then maps out three broad-scale diachronic trends regarding the conveyance of interpersonal distance, ipso facto the marking out of socio-proxemic interactional space; namely, (a) from performative to verbal, (b) from self-display to other-concern and (c) from collectivity-oriented to individual-oriented (Section 5).