A benchmark for politeness

©2014 Keith AllanThis paper was presented at the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 2013, at the University of Melbourne. All papers in the volume have been double blind peer-reviewed. Volume edited by Lauren Gawne and Jill Vaughan.ISBN: 978-0-9941507-0-7(Im)politeness is never a depersonalized, decontextualized absolute but always a perception or judgment of appropriate behaviour on a given occasion – what one expects oneself and others to do in a particular social interaction. Nonetheless it is normal for most tabooed words and phrases to be castigated in dictionaries as ‘coarse’, ‘obscene’, ‘insulting’, ‘vulgar’, ‘profane’, ‘taboo’, ‘impolite’ and ‘offensive’, i.e. dysphemistic. The benchmark for such judgements, and more generally for (im)politeness within Anglo communities, is what Allan & Burridge (1991) called the middle class politeness criterion (MCPC). Following a discussion of (im)politeness theories and hypotheses about face management, (cultural) scripts and habitus, the MCPC is closely examined, explained, and tested in the course of examining some texts. The essay concludes with proposals to resolve the apparent limitations of the MCPC.1/10/201344th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 201