Grounding politeness

Abstract

Traditional theories of politeness, like Brown and Levinson’s (1987 [1978]) and Leech’s (1983), claim a universal status which can be questioned on the basis of the evidence provided by studies on the politeness mechanisms of the most diverse cultures. In the present paper, we attempt to prove that one of the reasons which prevents those theories from reaching the desired pancultural validity is no other than their use of conceptual metaphors (i.e. a culture-specific construct) in their explanation of politeness. In addition, we would like to establish a firmer ground for a crossculturally valid theory of politeness by considering the workings of some universal cognitive tools (i.e. image-schemas) in the conceptualization of this subject matter.