In:Pragmatics and its Interfaces
Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 294] 2018
► pp. 213–239
Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory
Published online: 7 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.294.10hau
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.294.10hau
Abstract
In this chapter, we first discuss the role that pragmatics has played in the development of (im)politeness theory, and the recent move towards a middle ground that integrates classic and discursive approaches to (im)politeness. We outline the key tenets of integrative pragmatics that afford such a move, before illustrating how these can be implemented through a case study focusing on an incident in Big Brother UK where the (ostensibly) jocular use of a racial slur by a contestant caused offence and the subsequent removal of that contestant from the show. Our analyses draw from multiple methods, including those of interactional pragmatics and corpus pragmatics. In this way, we aim to both highlight the fundamentally pragmatic basis of (im)politeness, as well as the need for a nuanced and complex theorisation that integrates multiple perspectives and methods of analysis.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.The role of pragmatics in politeness theory
- 3.Integrative pragmatics
- 4.Case study: Jocular abuse and offence
- 4.1User and observer perspectives on the use of the n-word
- 4.2Pragmatics, (im)politeness and conventionalization: The case of the n-word
- 5.Concluding remarks
Notes References
References (87)
Allan, Keith. 2015. “When is a Slur not a Slur? The Use of Nigger in ‘Pulp Fiction’.” Language Sciences 52 (1): 187–199.
Arundale, Robert. 2008. “Against (Gricean) Intentions at the Heart of Human Interaction.” Intercultural Pragmatics 5 (2): 229–258.
Bilmes, Jack. 1993. “Ethnomethodology, Culture, and Implicature: Toward an Empirical Pragmatics.” Pragmatics 3 (4): 387–410.
Blitvich, Pilar Garcés-Conejos. 2010. “A Genre Approach to the Study of Im-politeness.” International Review of Pragmatics 2 (1): 46–94.
. 2013. “Introduction: Face, Identity and Politeness. Looking Backward, Moving Forward: From Goffman to Practice Theory.” Journal of Politeness Research 9 (1): 1–33.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1987. “Indirectness and Politeness in Requests: Same or Different ?” Journal of Pragmatics 11: 131–146.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bousfield, Derek, and Alison Johnson. 2007. “When Respect is Impolite: The Pragmatic Uses of Naming Strategies in Confrontational Institutional Talk.” Paper presented at the Third Symposium on Politeness, University of Leeds, 2–4 July 2007.
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011a. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 2011b. “Politeness and Impoliteness.” In Pragmatics of Society, ed. by Karin Aijmer, and Gisle Andersen, 393–438. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
. 2015. “Impoliteness Strategies.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, ed. by Alessandro Capone, and Jacob Mey, 421–445. New York: Springer.
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Michael Haugh. 2014. Pragmatics and the English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Escandell-Vidal, Victoria. 1998. “Politeness: A Relevant Issue for Relevance Theory.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 11: 45–57.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” American Journal of Sociology 61 (5): 420–424.
Gibbs, Raymond Jr. 1999. Intentions in the Experience of Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1956. “Embarassment and Social Organisation.” American Journal of Sociology 62: 264–271.
Grainger, Karen. 2011. “‘First Order’ and ‘Second Order’ Politeness: Institutional and Intercultural Contexts.” In Discursive Approaches to Politeness, ed. by LPRG, 167–188. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
. 2013. “Of Babies and Bath Water: Is there any Place for Austin and Grice in Interpersonal Pragmatics?” Journal of Pragmatics 58: 27–38.
Grice, H. P. 1975. “Logic and Conversation.” In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3. Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry Morgan, 41–58. New York: Academic Press.
. 2007a. “The Co-constitution of Politeness Implicature in Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 39 (1): 84–110.
. 2007b. “The Discursive Challenge to Politeness Theory: An Interactional Alternative.” Journal of Politeness Research 3 (2): 295–317.
. 2008. “The Place of Intention in the Interactional Achievement of Implicature.” In Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer, ed. by Istvan Kecskes, and Jacob Mey, 45–85. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
. 2013. “Im/politeness, Social Practice and the Participation Order.” Journal of Pragmatics 58: 52–72.
. 2016. “‘Just kidding’: Teasing and Claims to Non-serious Intent.” Journal of Pragmatics 95: 120–136.
Haugh, Michael, and Derek Bousfield. 2012. “Mock Impoliteness, Jocular Mockery and Jocular Abuse in Australian and British English.” Journal of Pragmatics 44 (9): 1099–1114.
Haugh, Michael, and Dániel Z. Kádár. 2017. “Intercultural (Im)politeness.” In Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, ed. by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh, and Dániel Z. Kádár, 601–632. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hay, Jennifer. 1994. “Jocular Abuse Patterns in Mixed-group Interaction.” Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics 6: 26–55.
Holmes, Janet, and Meredith Marra. 2002. “Over the Edge? Subversive Humor between Colleagues and Friends.” Humor 15(1): 65–87.
Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine. 2011. Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Holmes, Janet, Meredith Marra, and Bernadette Vine. 2012.“ Politeness and Impoliteness in Ethnic Varieties of New Zealand English ” Journal of Pragmatics44 (9): 1063–1076.
Holmes, Janet, and Stephanie Schnurr. 2005. “Politeness, Humour and Gender in the Workplace: Negotiating Norms and Identifying Contestation.” Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 121–149.
Jary, Mark 1998 “Relevance Theory and the Communication of Politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 30 (1): 1–19.
Jefferson, Gail. 1979. “Technique for Inviting Laughter and its Subsequent Acceptance-Declination.” In Everyday Language. Studies in Ethnomethodology, ed. by George Psathas, 79–95. New York: Irvington.
. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” In Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, ed. by Gene Lerner, 13–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kádár, Dániel Z., and Michael Haugh. 2013. Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kilgarriff, Adam, Pavel Rychly, Pavel Smrz, and David Tugwell. 2004. “The Sketch Engine.” In Proceedings of the EURALEX Conference, 105–116. Lorient, France.
Lakoff, Robin. 1973. “The Logic of Politeness; or Minding your P’s and Q’s.”Chicago Linguistics Society 9: 292–305.
Lerner, Gene. 2013. “On the Place of Hesitating in Delicate Formulations: A Turn-Constructional Infrastructure for Collaborative Indiscretion.” In Conversational Repair and Human Understanding, ed. by Makoto Hayashi, Geoffrey Raymond, and Jack Sidnell, 95–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1995 “Interactional Biases in Human Thinking.” In Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence, ed. by Esther N. Goody, 221–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalised Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press.
Locher, Miriam A. 2006. “Polite Behaviour within Relational Work. The Discursive Approach to Politeness” Multilingua25 (3): 249–267.
2012. “Politeness Research from Past to Future, with a Special Focus on the Discursive Approach.” In New Perspectives on (Im)Politeness and Interpersonal Communication, ed. byLucía Fenandez-Amaya, Maria de la O. Hernandez-Lopez, Reyes Gomez Moron, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Manuel Mejias Borrero, and Marianna Relinque Barranca, 1–22. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
2015“Interpersonal Pragmatics and its Link to (Im)politeness Research” Journal of Pragmatics86: 5–10.
Locher, Miriam A., and Derek Bousfield. 2008. “Introduction: Impoliteness and Power in Language.” In Impoliteness in Language, ed. by Derek Bousfield, and Miriam Locher, 1–13. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Locher, Miriam, and Richard Watts. 2005. “Politeness Theory and Relational Work.” Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 9–34.
Nwoye, Onuigbo. 1992. “Linguistic Politeness and Socio-cultural Variations of the Notion of Face.” Journal of Pragmatics 18 (4): 309–328.
Ogiermann, Eva. 2009. On Apologising in Negative and Positive Politeness Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Pomerantz, Anita. 1984. “Pursuing a Response.” In Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. by J. Maxwell Atkinson, and John Heritage, 152–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robinson, Jeffrey D. 2004. “The Sequential Organisation of Explicit Apologies in Naturally Occurring English.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37 (3): 291–330.
Schneider, Klaus P. 2017. “Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Variation.” In Doing Intercultural Pragmatics: Cognitive, Linguisticand Sociopragmatic Perspectives on Language Use, ed. by Rachel Giora, and Michael Haugh, 315–333. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
. 1975. “Indirect Speech Acts.” In Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3. Speech Acts, ed. by Peter Cole, and Jerry Morgan, 59–82. New York: Academic Press.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen. 2005. “(Im)Politeness, Face and Perceptions of Rapport: Unpackaging their Bases and Interrelationships.” Journal of Politeness Research 1 (1): 95–120.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition:2nd ed. Oxford, U.K. and Cambridge, U.S.A. Blackwell.
Terkourafi, Marina. 2001. “Politeness in Cypriot Greek: A Frame-based Approach.” PhD diss. University of Cambridge.
. 2005a. “Beyond the Micro-level in Politeness Research.” Journal of Politeness Research 1 (2): 237–262.
. 2005b. “Pragmatic Correlates of Frequency of Use: The Case for a Notion of ‘Minimal Context’.” In Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the 21st Century, Sophia Marmaridou, Kiki Nikiforidou, and Eleni Antonopoulou. 209–233. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
van der Bom, Isabelle, and Sara Mills. 2015. “A Discursive Approach to the Analysis of Politeness Data.” Journal of Politeness Research 11 (2): 179–206.
Drew, Paul. 2018. “The Interface between Pragmatics and Conversation Analysis.” In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, ed.by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 59–83. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:
Fetzer, Anita. 2018. “Discourse Pragmatics: Communicative Action Meets Discourse Analysis.” In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, ed.by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 33–57. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:
Holmes, Janet. 2018. "Sociolinguistics vs pragmatics: Where does the boundary lie?” In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, ed.by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 11–32. doi:
House, Juliane. 2018. “Translation studies and pragmatics”. In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, ed.by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 143–161. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:
Ilie, Cornelia. 2018. “Pragmatics vs Rhetoric: Political Discourse at the Pragmatics-Rhetoric Interface.” In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, ed.by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 85–119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:
Norrick, Neal R. 2018. “Narrative Studies versus Pragmatics (of Narrative).” In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, ed.by Cornelia Ilie and Neal R. Norrick, 122–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi:
Cited by (40)
Cited by 40 other publications
Baxter-Webb, Ibi
Haugh, Michael & Rosina Márquez Reiter
Hu, Yue & Daniel Van Olmen
Márquez Reiter, Rosina & Mandie Iveson
Németh, Luca Anna
Sotoca Fernández, David
2025. “If this be Irish gratitude, I could wish myself a Frenchman”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Sotoca-Fernández, David
Fukushima, Saeko
Pizziconi, Barbara
Sifianou, Maria
Albuquerque, Rodrigo & Tauane Matos
Despot, Kristina Š., Ana Ostroški Anić & Tony Veale
Grainger, Karen
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara, Anna Bączkowska, Chaya Liebeskind, Giedre Valunaite Oleskeviciene & Slavko Žitnik
Santamaría-García, Carmen
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs
2023. On the rise of a marker of disaffiliation from Others’ discourse. In Reconnecting Form and Meaning [Studies in Language Companion Series, 230], ► pp. 99 ff.
Vaughan, Elaine
Vismans, Roel
2023. Address and politeness. In It’s different with you [Topics in Address Research, 5], ► pp. 397 ff.
Andersson, Marta
2022. ‘So many “virologists” in this thread!’. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 32:4 ► pp. 489 ff.
Andersson, Marta
Haugh, Michael
Landone, Elena
Landone, Elena
Spokoiny, Ohala & Zohar Livnat
2022. Dialogic language and meta-language in a conflictual discourse. Pragmatics and Society 13:5 ► pp. 837 ff.
Tong, Ying & Chaoqun Xie
Yang, Na
Baider, Fabienne & Georgeta Cislaru
Bączkowska, Anna
Reiter, Rosina Márquez
Archer, Dawn, Karen Grainger & Piotr Jagodziński
2020. Introduction. In Politeness in Professional Contexts [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 311], ► pp. 1 ff.
Baider, Fabienne H., Georgeta Cislaru & Chantal Claudel
Vekarić, Gordana & Ivana Trbojević-Milošević
Zhang, Grace & Ming-Yu Tseng
2020. Attitudes towards elastic language in Australian online healthcare information. Internet Pragmatics 3:1 ► pp. 34 ff.
Tobback, Els
Tobback, Els
Norrick, Neal R.
2018. Narrative studies versus pragmatics (of narrative). In Pragmatics and its Interfaces [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 294], ► pp. 121 ff.
Yus, Francisco
2018. The interface between pragmatics and internet-mediated communication. In Pragmatics and its Interfaces [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 294], ► pp. 267 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
