The Language of Politeness. Theoretical Considerations and Practical Implications

This chapter analyses linguistic politeness as a set of strategies, norms, and verbal conventions adopted by a community to mitigate conflict and promote harmony in communicative interaction. The language of politeness is a socio-pragmatic phenomenon involving parameters such as social distance between interlocutors, power and/or solidarity relationships, degree of familiarity, affective participation, and involvement. Choices in language vary depending on the context, style, register, channel, and medium of communication. Linguistic politeness encompasses a whole range of enunciative nuances, which are partly dependent on subjective evaluations and partly on socially shared norms in a given discursive context. Expressions denoting respectful and sensitive behaviour, empathetic feelings, and nobility of spirit such as grace, kindness, gentleness, affability, amiability, good manners, cordiality, or politeness are partial synonyms of a broad concept of courtesy that manifests in an extremely vast and heterogeneous set of discursive forms.