Politeness and ideology

Abstract

Eeleneveryday usages, which are often far more complex than the ideologies would lead to believe.Such metapragmatic ideologies, in the form of canonical rules of politeness, tend to present a simplified version of reality, in that they highlight specific cultural commonplace values -such as the direct socio-structural indexicality of politeness in the case of Japanese.Watts, Ide & Ehlich (1992: 3) have labeled commonsense ideologies of politeness 'first-order politeness', and contrasted them to 'second-order politeness', which is the second type of ideology to be distinguished here.It comprises scientific ideologies of politeness, and refers to the different ways in which science has tried to make sense of -or capture or explain-politeness phenomena.This ideology thus involves scientific concepts and theoretical constructs, and describes how scientists see politeness.Although scientific ideologies have mostly employed conceptualizations and terminologies that differ vastly from those of commonsense ideologies, Okamoto's paper points out that this dissimilarity may be merely a veil, as scientific views are often implicitly based on commonsense canonical rules and values.The third type of ideology is social ideology, which refers to beliefs having to do with certain aspects of social organization or social structure (e.g. the power relations that prevail in a society), and their associated values.This ideology consists of elements that make up what could be called a 'social worldview' (e.g.notions of right and wrong, of good and bad, of social worth, and so on).Although strictly speaking, social ideologies are not ideologies of politeness, the two are closely connected, in that social worldviews are often used as explanatory factors in scientific accounts of politeness.Again, 'individualistic' Western social ideologies are often contrasted to Eastern 'collectivistic' ideologies, a distinction which is called upon to explain differences in politeness concepts and practices between Eastern and Western cultures.Although the papers in this volume discuss different kinds of ideologies or different interconnections between them, together they clearly demonstrate that all of them are in fact closely interconnected.For starters, Gudrun Held convincingly argues that commonsense ideologies of politeness are connected with social ideologies, by showing how the meaning and function of certain politeness formulae are transformed -by changing their meaning and function-when the underlying social structures change, and with them the accompanying social ideology.More specifically she illustrates how notions like 'democracy' and 'social equality' have influenced the meaning and use of formulae that were historically directly related to the power-structure of society.Rathmayr also raises this issue in examining the effects of the growing westernization of Russian society on politeness usage, as does Terkourafi, in linking differences between Cypriot and Mainland Greek usage of diminutive forms to features of the social organization of the different communities.Watts's paper focuses on the connection entirely, as he examines the political and socio-structural functions of early eighteenth century British politeness.That same connection -between commonsense and social ideologies-is also discussed by Klotz, when he establishes the link between social structure, political correctness, and politeness.But Klotz also establishes the connection between social and scientific ideologies, by showing how scientific conceptualizations of politeness (and even of communication in general) can be related to social organizational features.E.g. current politeness theories mostly favor explanations and models based on (again) 'democratic' principles -or at least principles ideologically connected with the concept of democracy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 61 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.