To speak diplomatically

The basic meaning of the phrase speak/say something diplomatically is intuitively understood by all of us. Those intuitions are rendered in dictionaries by saying something (1) politely, and (2) evasively. The article is an attempt to answer the question what are the underlying language mechanisms that allow us to evaluate an utterance as diplomatic. Those mechanisms are on the one hand positive and negative politeness strategies as postulated by Brown & Levinson, and on the other hand, specific language games based on the Gricean Cooperative Principle. Additionally, some other marginal mechanisms involved in diplomatic speech are also analysed