Politeness: Always Implicated?.

Abstract

Based on the relevance-theoretic distinction between explicit and implicit communication, and the notion of explicature of an utterance and its different types (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber, 1993, 2002), this paper argues that (im)politeness may also be communicated explicitly, and not only implicitly as has been normally claimed in the extant literature. The fact that certain linguistic expressions and paralinguistic features have a procedural meaning that does not affect the truth-conditional content of the utterance where they occur but leads the hearer to obtain a propositional-attitude description can be exploited by the speaker in order to communicate her (im)polite attitude explicitly, as part of the explicit content of that utterance. The hearer will in turn rely on such expressions and features so as to recover a description of the speaker’s attitude and, hence, information about (im)politeness.