Abstract
This article attempts to show how British Members of Parliament (MPs) employ politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1978, 1987) as a device to make their discourse abide by the rules of Erskine May's Treatise on the law, privileges, proceedings and usage of Parliament. Question Time is a highly aggressive genre, and Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) are intrinsic to its essence, but MPs are constrained by the need to produce ‘parliamentary language’. Politeness strategies become the linguistic device that helps the system work. When an MP flouts the rules, s/he is often obliged to reformulate the FTA, with face redress. Brown and Levinson's ‘balance principle’ still holds, although with different postulates: there is consensus to threaten each other's Public Face (Gruber, 1993), but respecting Erskine May's rules. Politeness strategies serve to comply with a sort of ‘institutionalized hypocrisy’.
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