While the first-wave politeness research considers politeness a universal human characteristic to reduce friction and to soften face threats in interaction, more recent works, in contrast, call our attention to the social and evaluative nature of (im)politeness and its underpinning moral order, defined by Kádár and Haugh (2013: 6) as “a set of expectancies through which social actions and meanings are recognisable as such, and consequently are inevitably open to moral evaluation”. Understanding (im)politeness in this way opens up the possibility to explore (im)politeness as an intersection of pragmatics and other socio-culturally oriented disciplines, such as sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Along this line, this study investigates how evaluation of (im)politeness is intertwined with language ideologies, defined by Silverstein (1979:183) as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use”. Specifically, this study investigates an incident occurring in Taiwan in which an American-born Taiwanese, J., insulted a local bus driver in English when the driver appeared to have limited English proficiency. The confrontation was video-recorded by a passenger on the bus, and the incident soon hit the news and aroused heated discussions and sentiments, to the extent that J. finally apologized to the bus driver publically after a few days. Data used in this study include 489 Youtube responses to the original video clip and to the related news. These responses often involve evaluations about socially (in)appropriate conduct and are often intertwined with ideologies concerning the use of Mandarin Chinese and English in the local and translocal contexts, on the one hand, and nationality and identity, on the other. Recurrent themes concerning the mutual constitution of the moral order underpinning politeness and language ideologies are identified, including “you shouldn’t speak English when you can speak Chinese”, “you shouldn’t speak English to someone who doesn’t speak English”, “you are in Taiwan, speak Chinese”, “when you speak Chinese/English, speak standard Chinese/English”, etc. The analysis reveals complex interactions between evaluations concerning (im)politeness, language ideologies, and netizens’ (dis)alignments with a variety of identities involved. We conclude that an adequate theorization of (im)politeness needs to go beyond the confines of pragmatics and takes into consideration how politeness is socially situated, discursively constructed, and ideologically constituted.

References

Kádár, Dániel Z. & Haugh, Michael. (2013). Understanding Politeness. Cambridge University Press.

Silverstein, Michael. (1979). Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In P. Clyne, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer (eds.), The Elements (pp. 193–248). Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.