Anticipated versus Inferred Politeness

A number of researchers have recently argued that politeness is not always inferred in the form of an implicature as claimed by Brown and Levinson (1987), but rather can be anticipated by addressees when it involves expected behaviour. The distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness is thus an important area for further development of politeness theory. In this paper, the way in which the notion of ‘expectations’ is related to politeness is first considered, before outlining the distinction between anticipated and inferred politeness in some detail. It is then argued that discourse politeness theory (Usami, 1998, 2001a, b, 2002) shows greater promise for deepening our understanding of this distinction than the proposals made thus far by relevance theorists. It is concluded that any investigation of the distinction between anticipating and inferring politeness must ultimately be grounded in empirical studies of politeness phenomena. Politeness has been the subject of an enormous amount of research in the past twenty years, but it has also generated considerable controversy. Brown and Levinson's (1987) face-saving view of politeness in particular has stimulated a prolific amount of discussion. Various aspects of Brown and Levinson's theory have received attention, but in recent times their claim that politeness is something that is communicated by means of an implicature has come under scrutiny. Brown and Levinson assume that for politeness to arise in interaction, a 'polite intention' must be attributed to the speaker by the addressee (Brown 1995: 169, 2001: 11623; Brown and Levinson 1987: 95). This attribution by inference to the speaker of an intention to be polite constitutes a (particularised) implicature: "Polite utterances are not necessarily communicating 'real' feelings about another's social persona, but expressing contextually-expected concern for face. This concern is an 'implicature', an inference of polite intentions, not a feature inextricably attached to particular linguistic forms." (Brown 2001: 11623, author's original emphasis)