Ideologies of politeness

Abstract

This special issue contains 9 papers which deal with ideological aspects of politeness.Most of them (8) were first presented within the panel "Ideologies of Politeness" at the 6th International Pragmatics Conference (Reims, 19-24 July 1998) and were later thoroughly revised.At the panel, Gino Eelen acted as a general discussant who gave critical comments on the other papers.His contribution to this special issue is a revised version of these comments.After the conference, Richard Watts was so kind to agree to act as a critical reader who gave suggestions and critical comments on most of the papers of the panel.More than this, he also helped to improve the English of some papers and contributed a paper of his own.For all this highly valuable and generous support I would like to thank him very much.I would also like to thank the editors for accepting this collection of papers for publication in "Pragmatics", thus making it accessible for a wide international readership.That ideologies of politeness are indeed an extremely interesting subject for linguistic research is amply demonstrated by the fact that only a few months after the panel was held at the IPrA Conference an international conference dealt exclusively with this important issue.It took place at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (5-6 November 1998) under the title "Politesse et idéologie" ("Politeness and ideology").As there are so many different uses and definitions of both 'ideology' and 'politeness', it might be useful to introduce a preliminary demarkation of these concepts in order to avoid possible misunderstandings.'Ideology' here and in most contributions to this special issue is used as a cover term for differing sets of ideas, beliefs, values and goals which together provide a more or less coherent global perspective of the social and political world which is shared within a given group (but cf.Billig 1982: 3ff. on internal inconsistencies of ideologies).These ideas and categories can be part of the world view of lay people, but can also be used to elaborate more systematic and coherent scientific theories about the social world.Defined in this way, 'ideology' does not necessarily have negative connotations as in the Marxist tradition, where ideologies were characterized as "false consciousness".Rather, they could be characterized in a more neutral way as "the basis of the social representations shared by the members of a group" (van Dijk 1998: 8; cf. also Harris 1970 and Woolard 1992: 237ff., who discuss a wide range of definitions of 'ideology').Seen from this perspective, ideologies are simply indispensable for integrating different beliefs, norms, values into a global perspective of a group in a society or culture.This does not mean, however, that ideologies (or at least some parts of them) are not open to criticism and discussion (for approaches which criticize ideology in

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