What is another term for digital politeness?

Face—a person’s public self-image—has been a key topic in politeness research since Brown and Levinson’s () seminal work. Brown and Levinson borrowed face, and the concept of politeness as an interpretation of face-work, from Erving Goffman’s (, p. 12) work, in which the concept of “facework” refers to “the actions taken by a person to make whatever he is doing consistent with face.” In Goffman’s theory, face-work thus includes a wide variety of practices, including among others, corrective face-work and avoidance face-work. Universalist theories of politeness gave pre-eminence to these (corrective and avoidance) forms of face-work, but in doing so excluded many other aspects of face-work originally noted by Goffman. In addition, the concepts of addressing others’ face needs and protecting one’s own face have been approached primarily through the concept of rationality that is assumed as part of the modus operandi of the CP, even though Goffman himself emphasizes that face-work has a strong emotive element. It is worth noting that emotions are also rational, as social psychologists such as Haidt () argue, but their rationality differs from the calculated nature of ‘rationality’ in Brown and Levinson’s () sense.

After the emergence of the second wave of politeness research, various scholars questioned the straightforward connection between face and politeness. More specifically, while perhaps no researcher has denied that face and politeness are strongly interrelated phenomena, it has been broadly agreed that the operation of face and face-work cannot simply be drawn under the politeness umbrella, as groundbreaking research by Bargiela-Chiappini () has illustrated. In fact, it is even possible to conduct face research without venturing into the realm of politeness, as a recent edited collection by Bargiela-Chiappini and Haugh () has shown in an insightful way. The following example, cited from Kádár and Haugh (, pp. 51, 52) illustrates the reason why researchers argue that face and politeness should be treated as different, albeit interrelated, phenomena:

• Well, can I please wear something else?

• As long as I don’t have to pay for it.

• Just find something to wear and I’ll take a look at it, okay?

• I don’t have anything special.

• When I was a kid we didn’t need any special clothes. Just having clothes was special.

• The only way I was going to get my mom to spend money on me was if not doing it would embarrass her.

• Mom, I’m the only black kid in the whole school. They already think I’m a crack baby. Wearing this sweater they’ll probably think we’re on welfare.

• Who said we were on welfare? Be home from school on time tomorrow.

• I thought you said we didn’t have the money?

• Oh, I’ll get it. Not havin’ people think we on welfare.

This interaction is cited from the American comedy series Everybody Hates Chris. Here, Chris is trying to convince his parents, Rochelle and Julius, to buy some new clothes for him to wear to the school picture day. After pleading to wear something other than what his mother has picked out, his father indicates that he is not allowed to buy anything new. His mother suggests that he find something else (i.e., that he already owns or can borrow from his brother). It is at this point that the narrator (the grown-up version of Chris) comes up with a strategy, namely, alluding to the potential embarrassment, or threat to his family’s and thus his mother’s face, if people were to think they are too poor to buy new clothes. Rochelle reacts strongly to this potential face threat, and decides they will buy new clothes for Chris in spite of protests from Julius. However, despite the obvious salience of face in this interaction, it is quite clear that evaluations of politeness (or impoliteness) are not at issue here. Rochelle does not decide to get new clothes for Chris because it would be polite to do so, but because she wants to avoid having others think badly of their family. In other words, she wants to protect their face.

It is pertinent to note that academic interest in the concept of face has generated some noteworthy research on equivalents of the English ‘face’ across modern languages and cultures, such as Thai (Ukosakul, ), and Chinese and Japanese (Haugh & Hinze, ), and also in historical cultures (Ruhi & Kádár, ). Such metalexical research helps scholars to tease out culture-specific understandings of this notion. Such explorations have revealed that cultures and times have varying conceptions of face, and these differences also influence the ways in which politeness behavior—which has a strong intersection with face, in particular in popular culture—is conceptualized across language and cultures. In addition, face continues to be in the center of cutting-edge research on the interactional formation of interpersonal relationships (see Arundale, ; Spencer-Oatey, ). Recent research has also explored face beyond its understanding on the individual level (see e.g., Kádár, ).

2.2. Valency and the Moral Order

The rationale for politeness to operate is the existence of valence, which the interactants use as a benchmark for their production and evaluation of politeness. As Haugh argues,

[e]valuations in interpersonal settings […] involve the casting of persons and relationships into particular valenced (i.e., positive-neutral-negative) categories according to some kind of perceived normative scale or frame.

The notion of valenced categories, which plays a key in the politeness theory of Kádár and Haugh (), reveals that (im)politeness as a situated interactional phenomenon cannot exist in a vacuum; its operation presupposes the existence of some common ground between the interactants as regards the value of interactional messages. On the operational level, the enactment of a valenced category showcases the interactants’ polite intentions situated in a particular context. To illustrate the way in which valency operates, let us refer to an interaction, which has been analysed in Kádár ():

A couple is arguing in the park. Bystanders overhear the argument but seem conflicted over intervention. An elderly female bystander decides to intervene.

Boyfriend: Stop crying. Shut up!

Elderly female: Hey buddy! Cool it!

Boyfriend: Ma’am, can you just let us do my own thing? It’s my girlfriend. Can you just leave us alone?

Elderly female: No. That’s not how you treat someone. How about I call the cops?

This interaction occurs in the reality show Primetime: What Would You Do? The scene features public abuse, which triggers intervention from an elderly woman who draws the attention of the wrongdoer with “Hey buddy! Cool it!”, the inclusion of “buddy” with an accentuated and ironic prosody is clearly conflictive in that it conveys the opposite of its literal meaning: the person addressed is not a friend of the intervener. While “buddy” is not necessarily used to belittle, it is pragmatically appropriate to signal disagreement or opposition, and this meaning is even stronger in this interaction due to the emotive context and also to the age gap between the wrongdoer and the intervening person. In order for the elderly woman’s evaluative utterance “That’s not how you treat someone” to take place, she needs to have a valenced category of the fair treatment of others; reference to this category implies that a) the wrongdoer is behaving in an unacceptable (and, as such, impolite) way, and b) the intervening person has the right to intervene, and so her interruption is not impolite. Observers of this interaction may understand clearly why the woman makes this evaluative utterance—which illustrates that valence tends to entail a common ground either between the participants of an interaction, or a participant and an observer of an interaction, or both.

Valenced categories are not only shared by certain individuals: their operation assumes that they reflect the interactants’ undelaying perceptions of what counts as (in)appropriate in an event in a communal sense. Such perceptions can be defined through the concept of the “moral order.” The moral order is often approached in the field by following Garfinkel’s () study of routinized activities (see an overview in Kádár & Haugh, ). That is, the moral order tends to be interpreted as a set of conventions in the form of valenced categories that become visible if and when they are violated. For example, if someone’s greeting is not responded to, this person is likely to notice this lack and voice it in terms that reflect his understanding of the other’s behavior as inappropriate. Along with this definition of moral order, recent research by Kádár and Marquez Reiter () and by Kádár () use the moral order in Douglas’ (; see this concept also in Douglas, , , ) and Whutnow’s () social anthropological and sociological sense, as a collective term for the normative flow of events and perceived social good, which are often animated and maintained by communal actions (see rituals in Section 3.5). As Douglas (, p. 299) argues, “people all over the world contrive to incorporate nature into the moral order”; in terms of interaction this implies that any individual is surrounded by a cluster of perceived of moral orders, and uses or evaluates language according to the moral order that a given context or interpersonal relationship triggers. These moral orders count as normative from the perspective of the language user, and they are moral in the most common sense of the word: if someone violates the moral order, this violation triggers the feeling that something is inappropriate, and this sense of inappropriateness tends to be voiced in some form on the evaluative level. For example, in the interaction studied above, the intervening person’s valenced category reflects the belief that the on-going event would be perceived as immoral by the broader society (which provides the right for this person to intervene), and as such the act of intervention is needed in order to restore the normative flow of things. Importantly, politeness often co-occurs with moralizing comments even in non-conflict scenarios, as moral orders underlie norms of politeness (Terkourafi, ); that is, the moral order tends to be referenced even in cases when it is not breached.

Note that moral orders reflect situated (inter)personal values, and the studying of this notion helps researchers to examine culture-specific politeness values. For example, as Kádár and Marquez-Reiter () argue, the moral order in the interaction above reflects the Judeo-Christian importance of being a good Samaritan and treating others fairly.

2.3. Politeness as a Social Action and Practice

Politeness is a social action (Goodwin, ), which embodies a social group’s practice. The operation of politeness involves evaluations prompted by social actions and meanings that are recognizable to participants (Haugh, ). Being associated with a certain practice does not imply that a certain social action is predestined to be interpreted in a certain way. Rather, it suggests that the act’s contextually situated evaluation may be influenced by the recipient’s perception of the social practice that the given action embodies, and the relationship between this social practice and the perceived moral order.

Approaching politeness as a social action helps analysts to go beyond the boundaries of language, which is key when it comes to politeness, as politeness phenomena often come into existence in interaction through a combination of linguistic, paralinguistic and nonlinguistic behavior (Arndt & Janney, ). The need to avoid limiting politeness to the boundaries of language has been emphasized since the 1980s; for instance, Ambady, Koo, Lee, and Rosenthal () illustrates this point by the following narrative example:

Consider the following scenario (familiar to some): Mary, a graduate student getting ready to face a dismal job market, receives a letter informing her that a paper coauthored with her advisor, a fellow graduate student, and a senior undergraduate has just been accepted by a prestigious journal with very few revisions. Mary rushes to share the good news with her coauthors.

Consider another alternative: Mary reads that the article has been rejected. She knows that the paper will need major revisions if it is to be accepted in any journal. She has the unpleasant task of conveying the news to her coauthors. How will Mary convey the good and bad news? And how will she convey the news differently to her advisor, to her peer, and to the undergraduate?

[…]

She might say, “Well, guess what? The editors said ‘no’—looks like it’s back to square one!” with a confident vocal tone, directly gaze at the listener, shrug her shoulders, and smile, or she could say the same thing with a downcast gaze, a hesitant tone of voice, and no smile. Even though the linguistic content is the same, the two scenarios will be interpreted quite differently.

As this example shows, language is just one, albeit important, element of politeness behavior.

2.4. Interactional Co-Construction

Although politeness is a social action that embodies social practices, hence animating the perceived moral order(s) of the interactants, this does not mean that the production and evaluation of politeness always follow regular and predictable patterns—interactants may agree or disagree about what counts as polite, and interpersonal politeness may come into existence in the form of interactional negotiations, as a co-constructed outcome of an interaction. The study of co-construction has gained momentum in the second wave of politeness research, as a criticism of the universalistic frameworks that operate with straightforward and invented utterances (e.g., Mills, ). Yet, it is pertinent to note that the concept of co-construction is present in third wave frameworks that do not limit their focus to the micro-level of interpersonal behavior. On the one hand, experts of interactional style, perhaps most notably the works of Cook (, ) have pointed out that switches between interactional styles, which are associated with different types of politeness behavior, tend to follow the dynamics of interactions. For example, in a Japanese academic consultation, lecturers and students may continuously make switches between formal (honorific) and informal styles, in order to index distance and sympathy at the same time; according to Cook, this kind of behavior is the norm rather than the exception; that is, the interactional co-construction of politeness is not necessarily an idiosyncratic form of behavior. On the other hand, third wave theories, such as Kádár’s () recent framework, argue that co-construction can be observed even in recurrent and seemingly straightforward practices associated with politeness—it is a phenomenon that should be incorporated into theories that aim to capture politeness on both the macro and the micro levels. Politeness, as it unfolds in interaction, tends to operate with the interactional features of incrementality and sequentiality. Incrementality refers to the way in which speakers’ adjust or modify their talk in light of how the progressive uttering of units of talk is received by other participants. In other words, the fact that social actions and meanings are produced incrementally in interaction means they are inevitably subject to ongoing evaluation as they are produced, and so can be adjusted accordingly in real time. Sequentiality, on the other hand, refers to the way in which current turns or utterances are always understood relative to prior and subsequent talk, particularly talk that is contiguous (i.e., immediately prior to or subsequent to the current utterance). This means that next turns are a critical resource for participants in reaching understandings of the evaluations of others, including inferences of one’s interactant’s understandings of one’s own evaluations (see also Kádár and Haugh, ). Another aspect of sequentiality is that certain recurrent form of interaction are expected to follow strict sequential characteristics, and deviations from these characteristics tend to be sanctioned by default. This does not imply that incrementality does not operate in such interactions, but rather that it is more constrained than in punctuated and relatively free-flowing interactions (see Kádár, ).

Note that the first, second, and third waves do not necessarily follow a temporal order. Ideas of the second wave have been present within the first wave of politeness research, and the same applies to the third wave.

2.5. Understandings of Politeness

A key criticism that second wave politeness research has made about the first wave is that researchers impose their own understandings of politeness onto the data studied. As Eelen () has pointed out, politeness can be divided into first-order and second-order types, the first including the language users’ understandings of politeness, with the latter covering theoretical/the theoretician’s understandings of it. This essential distinction—which recurs in various forms in various politeness theories, such as Watts (), Locher (), and Locher and Watts (), just to mention a few representative examples—is key to disentangling the interactants’ evaluative moments from the theoretician’s own evaluations. This distinction becomes particularly important if researchers focus on longer chunks of interaction. In the second-order conceptualization of politeness, researchers have used various technical terms, such as politic behaviour (Watts, ) and rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, ) to distinguish their own academic definitions and understandings from that of popular ones.

This bipartite approach has been further elaborated by Kádár and Haugh (), who propose a more complex approach to various understandings of politeness. As they argue, from a user perspective, there are four inter-related perspectives from which the nature of politeness, as an assumed part of our social reality, can be understood:

The notion of ‘meta-participant’ includes participants who do not actively engage in an interaction, but who may contribute to evaluations of (im)politeness behavior. The concept of ‘emic’ refers to insider understandings, while ‘etic’ refers to outsider understandings of (im)politeness.

From an observer perspective, there are four inter-related ways by which we can account for how we evaluate something to be polite, not polite, impolite, and so on in the first place.

Thus, there are four important loci, not just two as commonly thought, that constitute the first-second-order distinction, namely, participation (participant/meta-participant) and expectancies (emic/etic), which are first-order loci of understanding, and observation (analyst/lay observer) and conceptualization (theoretical/folk theoretic), which are second-order loci of understanding.

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