Conventionalization: A new agenda for im/politeness research

The first linguistic accounts of im/politeness were proposed to explain departures from the shortest, clearest, and most succinct way of speaking. While this early perspective tied politeness to indirectness, empirical studies from different cultures have shown that it is impossible to circumscribe a closed set of expressions whose utterance guarantees a polite effect in any single culture, let alone universally. I survey five types of evidence – from questionnaire and corpus studies, L1 and L2 acquisition studies and impoliteness studies – that lead me to place at the heart of im/politeness not indirectness but conventionalization as a three-way relationship between expressions, contexts and speakers. Unlike previous semantic-based definitions of conventionalization, this habit-based definition allows that any expression can be conventionalized to a speaker, and is inherently evaluative. The proposal presented in summary form here is that conventionalized expressions (whenever available for a situation or to a speaker) are used all else being equal, irrespective of the degree of face-threat. They can be adapted to a wide range of frequently experienced situations with minimal effort and, while they are the most expedient means of achieving im/politeness, departing from conventionalized expression is also possible and may be associated with either increasing politeness or increasing impoliteness.