Clearing the mist: The border between linguistic politeness and social etiquette

Even some of the biggest names in pragmatics and politeness oftentimes confuse social etiquette with linguistic politeness. I was recently invited to examine a PhD thesis at a famous university in New Zealand, and it came to me as a shock to realize that neither the PhD candidate nor her thesis supervisors had noticed the difference between these two concepts. Since a clear understanding of rudimentary concepts is fundamental to any research in any field of science, and pragmatics and politeness are not exceptions, this paper aims at putting linguistic politeness in its right frame. I will first review the historical development of modern pragmatics from an Archimedean point; then, I will set politeness theory in its right place inside pragmatics. Finally, I will draw a line between social etiquette and linguistic politeness and argue that junior (and some senior) researchers working on politeness need to be very careful not to confuse the two, or their claims are doomed to be invalid