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Epilogue

(Im)politeness: Three issues

1. Introduction
That we have a huge literature in the area of cross-cultural politeness can be taken as self-evident. What is
surprising is that cross-cultural here almost always goes hand-in-hand with cross-linguistic, that is to say, the focus is
on members of different cultures speaking different languages. This produces two problems. One is a methodological
nightmare concerning equivalence between linguistic forms in the different languages. The other is that it is all too easy
to give the impression that one language equals one culture, not least of all because the label for the language
becomes a convenient label for the culture (e.g. English and Japanese compliments compared). But of course we all
know that within one language there are many different cultures, however that tricky notion of culture is conceived.
English must be the example par excellence of this point. Its global spread exceeds that of any other language, and
consequently communities of English speakers have come into contact with diverse cultures, been geographically
separated and developed in diverse ways. It does not take an academic to know that, for example, English speakers in
England may share a language with English speakers in North America but have very different cultures. This is the
backdrop that helps throw into relief the warm welcome we should give to this special issue. Of course, it is not the very
first publication to look at politeness or impoliteness intra-language cultural variation, or, more specifically, variation
across English-speaking cultures, but it counts, as far as I know, as the first major publication. This, incidentally,
excludes diachronic intra-language cultural variation across English speakers, for which Culpeper and Kdr (2010)
probably counts as the first. This is not the only reason to welcome this special issue. It is rare for studies to treat both
politeness and impoliteness. We have major works on politeness, including the classics such as Brown and Levinson
(1987) or Leech (1983), and more recent works such as Watts (2003). But although Watts (2003) takes steps to explain
how impoliteness might be accommodated, there is no real treatment of it. Similarly, although there is now a
burgeoning literature on impoliteness (e.g. Bousfield, 2008; Bousfield and Locher, 2008; Culpeper, 2011a), it proceeds
in relative isolation from politeness. In this final paper of this special issue, I will discuss three issues that have been
raised within its papers, namely, (im)politeness and (in)appropriateness, the politeness--impoliteness dichotomy and
methodological approaches.
2. (Im)politeness and (in)appropriateness
The notion of appropriateness or inappropriateness is the key focus of the first paper by Schneider, where it is argued
that this is the more encompassing and suitable notion for studying intra-language variation in politeness or impoliteness.
(In)appropriateness is also discussed in some of the other papers. For example, Goddard's cultural scripts offer a way of
describing differing expectations about what constitutes typical and/or appropriate conversational moves and
conversational tone. Holmes et al. say that impolite verbal behaviour infringes the norms of appropriate behaviour that
prevail in particular context and among particular interlocutors (interestingly, they do not define polite verbal behaviour in
the same terms but as behaviour perceived as having been used in order to maintain harmonious relations and avoid
conflict with others). Of course, as Schneider points out, there have been earlier attempts to promote the notion of (in)
appropriateness. Of these, perhaps the earliest and most forceful is Meier (1995), who argues that (im)politeness could
not only be defined as (in)appropriateness but termed that as well. Since then, the notion of appropriate behaviour has
come to loom large in the relational approach espoused by Richard Watts and Miriam Locher. Relational work is
0378-2166/$ -- see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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considered to cover the entire continuum from polite and appropriate to impolite and inappropriate behaviour (Locher,
2004:51; see also Locher and Watts, 2005:11; Watts, 2003:19; Watts, 2005:xliii).
Schneider investigates the metapragmatic terms impolite, rude, polite, appropriate and inappropriate in large corpora,
and shows that the most frequent by far is appropriate, followed by inappropriate -- a finding that seems to support the
promotion of (in)appropriateness to the status of superordinate concept and term. There are further studies lending
support. Ide et al. (1992) found that for American informants the adjectives respectful, considerate, pleasant, friendly and
appropriate correlated with the concept of polite, whereas the adjectives conceited, offensive and rude correlated with
the concept of impolite. In fact, in my own work (Culpeper, 2011a) on descriptive labels in narratives supplied by
informants describing conversations in which they had felt bad, I found that inappropriate, along with such terms as rude
and patronising, was amongst the most frequent. However, there are also some problems which I will touch on below. I
should state here that none of these require us to abandon the notion of (in)appropriateness, but they do require us to
abandon the idea that it is an easy panacea.
In my most recent major work (Culpeper, 2011b), I examined the metapragmatic language of politeness in the twobillion word Oxford English Corpus (see: http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/aboutcorpus). Using the sophisticated
program Sketch Engine (see: http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/), I retrieved a list of near-synonyms for the word polite in the
British English subsection of the corpus (approximately half of one billion words). These near-synonyms are not subject to
the whims and biases of editors, but are retrieved on the basis of sharing the same grammatical and lexical relations as the
target word, i.e. polite. The top 10 rank-ordered items are: courteous, respectful, friendly, pleasant, thoughtful, cheerful,
calm, gracious, charming and quiet. What is striking is that appropriate is nowhere to be seen on the entire list. Similarly,
inappropriate does not appear as a near-synonym of impolite, though it does appear as a relatively weak (rank position 30)
near-synonym of rude. All this is not to suggest that neither appropriate nor inappropriate have a relationship with either
polite or impolite, but it does suggest that the relationship is very weak, especially in the case of appropriate. Of course, I
have been discussing near-synonyms of just one metapragmatic term. I performed a similar search on all ten items listed
above; none of them have appropriate as a near-synonym.
I also considered the converse: the near-synonyms of appropriate and inappropriate. The top 10 rank ordered items for
appropriate are: proper, specific, relevant, various, additional, necessary, particular, same, certain and basic. Items such
as specific, various, additional, particular, same and certain help clarify the set of things in focus (a particular subset, a
diffuse set, an extra set, etc.). Appropriate does this too, as it concerns a particular subset. What defines that particular
subset seems to also colour the items proper and relevant, which have a sense of correct or optimal. Consider these
corpus examples:
From this information, appropriate action can be determined
Following this, proper corrective actions have to be taken
Doctors need to actually look for the relevant treatments that will benefit their patients
you can convey hope by encouraging her to a seek appropriate treatment
The sense of correct or optimal does connect with politeness, the former more with politeness1 approaches
orienting more towards social norms, morality, etc., and the latter more with politeness2 approaches orienting more
towards the pragmatics of achieving one's goals. However, it is also clear that appropriateness is a much broader notion
than one that accommodates solely politeness-related or relational-related concepts. Specifically, it can be applied to a
broader range of domains. For example, medical treatments are appropriate, that is, optimal, in the context of medical
judgements of efficacy. In contrast, polite and its near-synonyms most often describes communicative behaviour, and just
occasionally the kind of person who gives rise to the communicative behaviour.
I have already briefly indicated that inappropriate may have a slightly stronger link with impolite than appropriate does
with polite. The top 10 rank ordered items for inappropriate are: unfair, misleading, unnecessary, unacceptable,
inaccurate, inadequate, irresponsible, improper, offensive and incorrect. Here, we find a richer set of links to the kind of
phenomena discussed in the impoliteness literature, as can be seen in words such as unfair, unacceptable, improper,
offensive and incorrect. The stronger link between impoliteness and inappropriateness is perhaps not surprising. All
genuine impoliteness (i.e. not cases such as banter) is inappropriate, and conspicuously so. Part of its salience, its
power to shock, flows from its ruptures with what is considered appropriate. In contrast, genuine politeness (i.e. not
cases such as sarcasm) (including what Watts, 2003 calls politic behaviour) is often the stuff of mundane normality, of
general appropriateness. It has particular need to be distinguished by something else. In fact, Watts and Locher do
distinguish politeness in their work by something else, and that is positive emotion. Politic or politeness behaviour are
both characterised by positive emotion. The idea that politeness relates to emotion has been put even more forcibly in
earlier work. Arndt and Janney (1987), influenced by work on emotions and attitudes in social psychology, argue that
people, as opposed to social situations and their norms of appropriacy, are the locus of politeness, and we should

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focus on cross-modal emotive behaviour as a means by which politeness is negotiated (1987:377). They consider
appropriacy-based approaches to politeness too vague as an approach to politeness (1987:376).
Before we leave the topic of (in)appropriateness, I will raise one further issue. If politeness is simply a matter of
appropriateness and impoliteness a matter of inappropriateness, that would then imply that we cannot make judgements
about the (im)politeness of linguistic forms outside their usage in a particular context, for the reason that appropriateness
involves being appropriate relative to a particular context. However, this is obviously not the case: people can (and do)
make judgements about the politeness of particular linguistic forms outside any particular context. This issue relates to
debates about whether (im)politeness is inherent in linguistic forms (see Culpeper, 2010, for a discussion). This issue was
first aired at in any length by Craig et al. (1986), after they had observed some difficulties informants had in assessing the
politeness of requested strategies. They conclude (1986:464) that facework strategies and social judgement of
politeness and facework appropriateness are distinct constructs, though add that it is reasonable to expect a
relationship between the two. Indeed, the nature of that relationship is the crux of the matter. In my view, politeness and
impoliteness formulae can be viewed as parts of cognitive schematic networks relevant to their respective politeness and
impoliteness attitude schemata, networks which include specific emotions and metalanguage. This is in line with the
position articulated by Holtgraves (2005:89): people possess a schematic knowledge regarding language and its social
implications, knowledge that exists independent of any occasion of use. Note the specific wording here: the claim is that it
is independent of any occasion of use and not that it is independent of context. I would argue that the typical links
between certain formulae and certain contexts have become part of the schema (see Terkourafi, e.g. 2002, 2003 and
2005, for an elegant elaboration of how this might work in more pragmatic terms). In other words, politeness and
impoliteness expressions become semantically tagged for context; we associate them with certain types of context. If this
is the case, one could argue that there is here something of a reprieve for the notion of appropriateness. It is not that it is
not involved in more conventionalised expressions of politeness or impoliteness, but simply that it is involved in a more
restricted way.
3. A politeness--impoliteness dichotomy?
As Haugh and Schneider point out in their editorial (this issue), focusing on im/politeness in a wide range of settings
across different varieties of English allows us to see beyond the traditional politeness-impoliteness dichotomy. Let us
step back and consider the relationship between politeness and impoliteness.
Should a model of politeness account for impoliteness using the same concepts, or is a completely different model
required? Relational frameworks (e.g. Locher and Watts, 2005; Spencer-Oatey, 2008) constitute such an alternative.
They are not models of politeness themselves; they are models of interpersonal relations which may accommodate at
least some aspects of politeness, impoliteness, and so on. Still, intuitively, it seems obvious that impoliteness
phenomena are intimately connected with politeness. One way in which the effects of impoliteness vary is according to
the degree of politeness expected. Politeness behaviour is influenced by a principle of reciprocity. A polite approach to
somebody sets up expectations of a polite response, so that an impolite response seems much worse in that context than
in the context of an impolite approach (see Culpeper, 2011a:203--207). Moreover, the fact that sarcasm often involves
conventionalised politeness expressions and banter conventionalised impoliteness expressions is further evidence of
this relationship. For example, thank you (with exaggerated prosody) uttered by somebody to whom a great disfavour
has been done, reminds hearers of the distance between favours that normally receive polite thanks and the disfavour in
this instance.
There are, however, also some important differences between politeness and impoliteness. Within a relational
approach, impoliteness can be associated with a negative evaluation as opposed to a positive evaluation, which can be
aligned with politeness. However, the categories positive and negative are very broad. When we look at the specifics, the
polite/impolite opposition runs into some difficulties. I conducted a study of 100 impoliteness events reported by (Northern)
English undergraduates. 133 of the total of 200 descriptive labels that informants supplied for those events fell into 6
groups (in order of predominance): patronising, inconsiderate, rude, aggressive, inappropriate and hurtful (see Culpeper,
2011a). Whilst some of these terms have obvious counterparts in politeness theory (e.g. consideration is mentioned as a
key notion by Watts, 2003:14), not all these do. A case in point is patronising, by far the most frequent label. Presumably, it
involves an abuse of power, a lack of deference, but neither power nor deference are well described in the classic
politeness theories.
There are yet other cases where there do not appear to be easy diametric opposites between impoliteness and
politeness. Anger is one of the most frequent emotional reactions associated with impoliteness, particularly when a social
norm or right is perceived to have been infringed (Culpeper, 2011a). But anger lacks a similarly specific emotional
opposite associated with politeness. As Blitvich (2010:69) points out, with reference to Kienpointner (2008:41), we tend
to associate impoliteness, but not necessarily politeness, with true emotions. Furthermore, taboo lexical items appear
relatively frequently in impolite language. Lexical euphemisms, however, whilst they can be associated with politeness,

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play a minor role.1 And finally, one way in which there is an obvious difference between politeness and impoliteness is that
they have their own sets of conventionalised formulae.
4. (Im)politeness: methodological issues
In this section, I will focus on two issues: (1) the object of analysis and, more specifically, the variety of English
language and its associated culture; and (2) the source of evidence used.
With the exception of the paper by Hambling-Jones and Merrison, all of the papers talk about particular varieties of
English language and their associated cultures. As I have already pointed out, different languages conspicuously do not
map onto monolithic cultures. But of course the same is true of different dialects within a language; they too have
associated cultures. In North America, for example, a speaker from New England will contrast with the speaker from
Texas in both dialect and culture. This produces an obvious problem for studying variation amongst Englishes. If we
review the speakers or informants used for data in the papers of this issue, we see that Schneider's English speakers are
from Yorkshire, Merrison et al.s are from northern England, and Haugh and Bousfield's are from Northwest England
(mostly working class). In regional terms, then, these are highly restricted (and remember that the bulk of the British
English speaking population lives in the south-east of England). Furthermore, Holmes et al. and Merrison et al. look at data
within particular institutional contexts, the workplace and universities respectively. Again, a highly restricted context. Yet
the temptation is to make rather broader generalisations, as Schneider does when he writes: These observations
suggest that native speakers of English from England, Ireland and the United States of America have diverging views of
what is expected and considered appropriate in small party talk between strangers. But Schneider acknowledges the
problem here: It cannot be assumed, however that all speakers from England, Ireland or the United States behave in the
same way. On the contrary, there is reason to believe that notions of appropriateness also vary across social groups and
communities in the same nation state.
There clearly is a practical reason for proceeding in this more restrictive way. To study a decent range of intra-English
cultures would require huge resources. So, to what extent is it valid to proceed without that range? One way forward, as
taken by, for example, Merrison et al, is to compare one specific cultural context within one variety of English with the same
(or as similar as possible) cultural context of another, and then identify similarities and differences which might be due to
differences at a higher level of cultural generalisation. Another way forward is to make tentative, cautious generalisations
about the more general cultural picture. People do not live on a narrow cultural island, but share cultural experiences with
adjacent cultures or at least have knowledge of them. A farmer in the North of England is, one might suppose, likely to
have more cultural similarities with someone living in London than a farmer living in the South China. Holmes et al.s model
of social constraints on interactional behaviour represents a useful way of thinking about cultural norms and different
levels of generality. Like a stack of Russian dolls, interactional norms sit within community of practice norms, which sits
within organisational (institutional) norms, and in turn societal norms (beyond which minority group norms spill).
The papers of this special issue use a great range of data sources. At the most naturalistic end of the range, we have
the data recordings used in the paper by Hambling-Jones and Merrison and the student e-mail data used in Merrison et al.
In both cases, the Observer's paradox is sidestepped by the fact that permission to use the data is obtained after the
production of the data. This raises some interesting and controversial ethical issues, which are discussed in HamblingJones and Merrison. On the one hand, recording somebody without their knowledge is morally contentious (though not
illegal in the UK); on the other hand, post hoc permission requests have the advantage that the informant will know
precisely for what permission is being requested. At the least naturalistic end, we have (written) discourse production/
completion tasks such as those deployed by Schneider, amongst other methods, who argues that such a tool reveals
what language users consider as appropriate in a given social situation. Of course, there is still a danger, as pointed out
by Merrison et al., that such a tool risks homogenising the data rather than allowing the heterogeneity of language to
emerge because it promotes stereotypical responses. In addition, a number of papers (Schneider, Goddard, Waters) use
corpora, both spoken and written, and also the web as a corpus. One could simply search for specific conventionalised
(im)politeness features in the corpora. However, the focus in all the corpus-related papers and parts of papers in this issue
is on investigating the metapragmatics of politeness and impoliteness. Waters is the prime example of this. She focuses
on the cultural semantics of rude, investigating the formula It's rude to VP, a structure that is also discussed in Culpeper
(2011a:84--88), and the fixed collocation rude word through Google searches restricted to Australia.
The importance of metapragmatic comments as a way of affording insight into (im)politeness is also evident in
Goddard's deployment of blogs reflecting on (im)politeness-related behaviours, and in fact in Holmes et al.s selections of
examples of workplace recordings, which often contain metapragmatic comments on the talk that has just taken place.

1
Leech (2009) argued that taboo language is one of the two impoliteness areas which politeness theory, specifically his own, cannot
adequately account for. The other concerns the negative acts threats and curses.

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The use of such metapragmatic data helps tap into first-order understandings of (im)politeness. But it is not only a matter
of tapping into something; the argument is that those metapragmatic comments are the touchstones by which we
understand language:
How people represent language and communication processes is, at one level, important data for understanding
how social groups value and orient to language and communication (varieties, processes, effects). This approach
includes the study of folk beliefs about language, language attitudes and language awareness, and these
overlapping perspectives have established histories within sociolinguistics. Metalinguistic representations may
enter public consciousness and come to constitute structured understandings, perhaps even common sense
understandings -- of how language works, what it is usually like, what certain ways of speaking connote and imply,
what they ought to be like. Jaworski et al. (2004:3)
5. Conclusion
Some researchers, as Schneider in this issue, have claimed that we should adopt appropriateness as our
superordinate concept for politeness and impoliteness phenomena, and appropriate/inappropriate as our terms. The term
appropriate is used much more frequently than other (im)politeness-related terms such as rude, polite or impolite, and so it
may seem to be a term that better fits the analysis and description of (im)politeness-related phenomena. I also suggested
that as far as conventionalised (im)politeness formulae are concerned some notion of (in)appropriateness could be built
into them. However, I showed, at least as far as British English data in the Oxford English Corpus are concerned, that the
term appropriate does not have an evident relationship with the other terms used for politeness, and the term inappropriate
has at most a weak link with impoliteness-related terms. The notion of appropriateness is indeed more encompassing, but
that is precisely its weakness: it encompasses more besides and fails on its own to give enough shape to politenessrelated notions. One way of throwing (im)politeness more into relief is to bring in the notion of emotion.
As far as the politeness--impoliteness dichotomy is concerned, the upshot is that what we can say for sure is that
politeness and impoliteness are not at opposite ends of a simple unitary scale. They do have important contrastive links,
but each also involves aspects that are not obviously reflected in the other. Moreover, both can contribute to phenomena
that may ultimately lie outside both of them, a case in point being Haugh and Bousfield's non-impoliteness (their redefinition of mock impoliteness). As Haugh and Schneider suggest, exploring how politeness and impoliteness vary
across different situations and cultures is an obvious way in which one can probe relationships between them.
All methodological approaches are flawed in some way. However, on a more optimistic note, they are flawed in
different ways. Both Goddard and more particularly Schneider use multiple data sources. This is a solution to the particular
methodological flaws and limitations of any one method. Schneider, who devotes more space than any other paper to
methodological issues, convincingly articulates the merits. Using multiple methodologies allows one to triangulate -- we
can focus on the same object of analysis from different points of view and thereby confirm or otherwise what we see with
one methodology (see also Kasper, 2008).
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Jonathan Culpeper*
Department of Linguistics and English Language,
County South, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, United Kingdom
*Tel.: +44 1524 592443
E-mail address: j.culpeper@lancaster.ac.uk