The Structure and Use of Politeness Formulas

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine with some care the little snippets of ritual used in everyday encounters between people, expressions like good morning, or thank you, or God bless you said when someone sneezes, or bye-bye said to an infant by a departing guest. All human speech communities have such formulas, although their character and the incidence of their use may vary enormously from one society to another. Strangely enough this universal phenomenon has been very little studied by linguists or anthropologists or other students of human behaviour. These politeness formulas (as I call them) are, in the word of Erving Goffman, ‘among the most conventionalized and perfunctory doings we engage in and traditionally have been treated by students of modem society as part of the dust of social activity, empty and trivial’ (Goffman 1971: 90). Goffman, in his intentionally irritating way, seems to attribute our failure to study these interpersonal rituals to the general decline of religion in modem times. He says, ‘Only our secular view of society prevents us from appreciating the ubiquitousness and strategy of their location, and, in tum, their role in social organization’ (89). Without in any way accepting his explanation for the dearth of systematic study of politeness formulas, I join him in bewailing it, and find in his works some of the most insightful treatments of them.