Brown Penelope, Levinson Stephen C. Politeness: Some universals in language usage

Cambridge University Press, 1988. — xiv, 345 pages. — (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics). — ISBN: 0-521-30862-3, ISBN: 0-521-31355-4.Societies everywhere, no matter what their degree of isolation or their socioeconomic complexity, show these same principles at work; yet what counts as polite may differ from group to group, from situation to situation, or from individual to individual. If we can find some underlying grammatical and social regularities which account both for this type of variation and for the recurrent patterns, we will have taken a major step in demonstrating and not just claiming the basically social nature of human language. One of the reasons for the attention that this work has created, is the fact that an abstract theoretical framework has been proposed which does indeed account for the bulk of the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural data, and which also yields predictions which can be (and in some cases have been) tested through independent experiments.Apart from its general import, the book makes a number of important theoretical and methodological points relevant to current interests in both linguistics and sociolinguistics. Politeness principles are reflected in linguistic universals which are in many ways equivalent to those discovered by grammarians. However, the methods by which these universals are derived constitute a significant departure from current practice. Grammarians rely on informants’ responses to systematic elicitation procedures to deduce abstract rules which are then related to hypotheses about the human mind. Brown and Levinson’s work, in contrast takes its source data primarily from situated conversational exchanges, and generalizations are made with reference to empirically testable universals of discourse and interaction. By so doing, while using new kinds of data, they are also able to draw on and integrate a long tradition of research in social anthropology, conversational discourse analysis, and in syntax and linguistic pragmatics.