Linguistic politeness: The implicature approach

Abstract

This paper pursues an analysis of politeness as a Gricean implicature. My claim is that this analysis captures both uses of politeness: politeness as the expected thing to do, the rule, as well as unexpected politeness, a voluntary contribution to communication by an individual speaker. Moreover, it covers cases in which politeness is employed as a strategy to achieve smooth interaction and cases in which it is employed in order to convey some message to the addressee. In order to be able to analyse politeness as an implicature, I propose a Maxim of Politeness which supplements Grice's Cooperative Principle. This maxim, like the other four, can be observed or flouted and so give rise to different kinds of implicatures. The addition of the Maxim of Politeness to the CP is necessary in order to account for multiple implicatures generated by the same utterance in the same situation.