(Un)expected behavior: Some general issues and a papal example

•Un/expectedness is the potential encompassing category with respect to im/politeness and in/appropriateness.•The choice of un/expectedness would bring two advantages.•First, the concept would not be value-laden, unlike im/politeness and in/appropriateness.•Second, it would be selected on empirical and phenomenological, rather than logical and semantic grounds.

The definitional debate as to which concept – politeness or appropriateness – it to be chosen as the superordinate one is far from over in politeness studies. In this paper I will raise the question of whether unexpectedness could be a candidate as the encompassing category. I will also tackle two related issues: that of unexpected behavior as a marked choice in a given context, and that of the relevance of the emotive aspects of interaction to the construction of the context. To this end, I will advance the hypothesis that the following notions can together help understand interaction functioning: (a) the interplay/co-variance among different interactional parameters (Caffi, 2001 and Caffi, 2007), (b) the divergence of different kinds of expectations from anticipatory schemata (Caffi and Janney, 1994), and (c) the notion of interactional temperature (an extension of Watzlawick et al.’s, 1967 thermostat metaphor). After some preliminary remarks meant to illustrate the above-mentioned points, I will discuss an example of unexpected behavior, Pope Francis's first greeting after his election.