Linguistic Politeness

This article gives an outline of the relationships between politeness and intercultural communication. It starts with a first, rather intuitive definition of politeness. It then describes the role of contrastive and intercultural approaches in politeness theory. The fourth chapter is dedicated to research in intercultural communication. This part gives some answer to the question for the role and importance of politeness within this field. This leads to the description of a kind of common ground between the theory of intercultural communication and the theory of politeness, or at least some questions that link the two disciplines, and to an idea of how the two scientific fields can benefit from each other. Obviously, the possibility to benefit depends very much on the concept of politeness applied. This is the subject of the fourth chapter, which gives a brief overview about discussions in the field of pragmatic and sociolinguistic theories of politeness and asks which elements of the discussions can be usefully applied for modelling intercultural competence