An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory

Abstract

Brown & Levinson opened their 1987 commentary on their theory of politeness by reemphasizing not only that their framework presumed "that Grice's theory of conversational implicature and the framework of maxims that give rise to such implicatures is essentially correct" (p.3), but also that their theory presupposed "the other great contribution by Grice, namely his account of the nature of communication as a special kind of intention designed to be recognized by the recipient" (p.7; cf.Levinson 1983: 16-18; 1995: 227-232).Brown & Levinson also closed their 1987 commentary with a projection for future development of their theory: Social interaction is remarkable for its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it; this emergent character is not something for which our current theoretical models are well equipped.Workers in artificial intelligence have already detected a paradigm clash between 'cognitivism' and 'interactionism', and noted the failure of the former paradigm to account for interactional organization (see ... Suchman, [1987]); our own account suffers from the same dose of 'cognitivism'.Work on interaction as a system thus remains a fundamental research priority, and the area from which improved conceptualizations of politeness are most likely to emerge.