Journal of Pragmatics: Pilar Garc Es-Conejos Blitvich, Maria Si Fianou

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Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101

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Journal of Pragmatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Im/politeness and discursive pragmatics


s-Conejos Blitvich a, *, Maria Sifianou b
Pilar Garce
a
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Department of English, 9201 University City Blvd., Charlotte, NC, 28223, USA
b
Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The aim of this paper is to explore how the analysis of im/politeness can be tackled from a
Available online 24 April 2019 discursive pragmatics perspective. Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated
disciplines as they are both concerned with language use. However, they differ mostly in
Keywords: terms of the units of analysis traditionally associated with them: pragmatics is typically
Discursive pragmatics concerned with the utterance whereas discourse analysis with what is beyond the ut-
Im/politeness
terance. Im/politeness research has drawn from both as it was initially based mostly on
Genre/text
pragmatic notions and later, reacting to these and embracing the pragmatic turn, it
Micro-, Meso-, Macro-levels
turned primarily to big D discourse for additional or more useful tools. Thus, researchers
abandoned isolated utterances as their data and gravitated towards longer stretches of
discourse in context. However, context was mostly explored through aspects of the
micro- and macro-levels leaving rather underexplored the meso level. Our contention in
this paper is that for a truly discursive approach to pragmatics in general and to im/
politeness in particular, we need to develop methods and tools that will facilitate the
analysis of politeness phenomena also at the mesolevel and reveal the dynamic inter-
action among these three levels.
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

The goal of this paper is to discuss how the analysis of linguistic im/politeness could be tackled from a discursive prag-
matics perspective. More specifically, we will focus on what discourse-based units of analysis can offer im/politeness
scholarship. Although pragmatics and discourse analysis share a common, functionalist approach to language in use/language
in context (Angermuller et al., 2014), they differ in some key issues, mostly in the relative length of the units of analysis
traditionally associated with the two disciplines. Whereas at least the Anglo-American tradition of pragmatics (see section
2.1) can focus on individual lexemes and utterances, discourse analysis typically looks at longer stretches of spoken or written
text. Traditional, first wave approaches (Grainger, 2011) to politeness were conceived on the bases of utterance-based theories
and models of pragmatics (speech act theory, Grice's (1975) Cooperative Principle) and thus the tools they offered to analysts
were also utterance-based. Although the discursive turn was experienced by the politeness field in the 2000s (Eelen, 2001;
Mills, 2003; Locher and Watts, 2005) constituting the second wave of politeness research, we will argue that one of the
reasons why the resulting approaches did not manage to completely replace earlier models was, among others, the fact that
discursive approaches provided a new perspective but not very different and distinct units of analysis that would allow
analysts to tackle im/politeness more fully at the little d discourse level. Indeed, the current third wave of politeness research

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: pgblitvi@uncc.edu (P.G.-C. Blitvich).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.03.015
0378-2166/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
92 P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101

can be seen “as a middle ground between classic and discursive approaches to politeness” (Haugh and Culpeper, 2018:4). This
does not mean that we do not acknowledge the second wave's shift of focus from the utterance to the interaction or the
multiplicity of analytical units espoused by third wave accounts (frames, Terkourafi, 2001, 2005; CA informed, Haugh, 2007,
2015; emergent strategies, Culpeper, 2016, among others), but, we believe, that moving forward towards a politeness
anchored in models of discourse would imply coming up with tools that facilitate theorizing and analyzing the intercon-
nection not only between the macro and the micro level, but crucially developing the analysis of politeness at the meso level.
In other words, the dichotomous micro (local) e macro (global) interface should be refined with the inclusion of an inter-
mediate meso level, as realized in genre practices (see Figs. 1 and 2).
Below, in subsections 2.1 and 2.2, we position our paper by discussing our understanding of such multirefential terms as
discourse and pragmatics. Regarding the former, we argue that a proper discourse model into which politeness can be
anchored needs to account for the three tiers of sociological enquiry (macro/meso/micro levels of analysis) whereas regarding
the latter we expound on the differences between the narrow and perspectivist approaches to the field (Verschueren, 1999)
and how those integrate with discourse analysis. In section 3, we tackle our understanding of politeness. Despite being the
target of academic enquiry for over four decades, scholars are still not in agreement regarding what constitutes politeness (or
impoliteness for that matter). In this section, we offer our views on politeness mostly regarding the main units of analysis
scholars have used to tackle politeness phenomena (activity types and communities of practice). We problematize these units
regarding their ability to account for the three levels of sociological enquiry (macro/meso/micro) and argue that they cannot
properly account for a politeness anchored in a model of discourse. In section 4, we introduce Fairclough's discourse model
and genre as a meso level discourse unit, tied to the macro and micro levels of discourse, and argue that im/politeness
phenomena need to be tackled within genres by taking into consideration the dialectic relationship among discourse/genres/
styles and texts. We explore this proposal further, in section 5, by illustrating it with one case study. We provide some
concluding remarks in section 6.

2. Definitions and positions

Before we can expand on our views on the need to develop the analysis of the meso level (see section 3) in politeness
research and how that would fit within a discursive pragmatics, some definitions and positions are in order due to the multi
refentiality of the terms involved.
Discourse analysis/studies and pragmatics are firmly established fields of study whose definitions are still difficult to put
forth (Bublitz and Norrick, 2011). Despite significant overlap among them, however, they have been mostly branded as
different disciplines. Although, in the past, there have been voices (see Blum-Kulka and Hamo, 2011) arguing for the need of a
discourse pragmatics, it has not been until recently that a more manifest interest has emerged in bringing together the two
fields of enquiry. The attempts to carry out this initiative include the introduction of the interdisciplinary field of discourse
pragmatics (Blum-Kulka and Hamo, 2011; Schneider and Barron, 2014) or discursive pragmatics (Kasper, 2006; Zienkowski
et al., 2011). According to Barron and Schneider (2014:2), the pragmatics of discourse and the pragmatics of utterances are
complementary. Whereas the latter focuses on the study of speech acts, the former investigates how speech acts combine into
speech sequences or speech events. Thus, the authors claim, the realm of discourse pragmatics is its focus on interactional
issues.
The problem in meshing two disciplines which are so broad is narrowing down what one means when referring to them
and also finding where the differences and the possibilities for synergy between the two lie. For example, Ostman € and
Virtanen (2011:282) conclude that “[d]iscourse and pragmatics have the same fields of interest, but different aspects in
focus. Thus, discourse will typically require larger stretches of text or conversation, whereas for pragmatics this is not
necessarily the case”. Indeed, the relative length and complexity of the units of analysis seems to be at the heart of the
difference between the two fields. The focus of discourse analysis has been taken to be that beyond the utterance (but see Bax,
2011 and Widdowson, 1995 for a different view regarding words and short expressions constituting discourse) whereas
pragmatics, at least from a narrow view (see section 2.1), can focus on smaller units such as pragmatic markers or single
utterances.
Although the difference between the two fields regarding, for example, units of analysis seems to be quite crucial,
especially as regards im/politeness, there are other fundamental intra-disciplinary differences that need to be taken into
consideration before tackling cross-disciplinary divergences.

2.1. Understandings of pragmatics

Regarding pragmatics, Angermuller et al. (2014:18) claim that, in general terms, pragmatic theories should be seen not as
an alternative but as an outright refutation of structuralist orientations. Traditionally, the field has been divided into two main
frameworks: the early Anglo-Saxon framework of pragmatic linguistic study put forth mostly by philosophers of language
who were interested in utterance rather than sentence meaning and the Continental European framework that has expanded
the original framework and mostly sees pragmatics as “a general functional perspective on (any aspect of) language, i.e. as an
approach to language which takes into account the full complexity of its cognitive, social, and cultural functioning”
(Verschueren, 1999:16). These two frameworks have also been called the narrow and the broad views of pragmatics (Bublitz
P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101 93

and Norrick, 2011:3; Culpeper and Haugh, 2014:5), respectively. Further, the Anglo-American perspective is primarily con-
cerned with pragmalinguistics (the study of the linguistic resources available within a language to convey pragmatic
meaning) whereas the Continental perspective involves both pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (the study of the ways in
which pragmatic meanings reflect specific “local” conditions on language use) (see Leech, 1983; Marmaridou, 2011; Thomas,
1983).1 As Culpeper and Haugh (2014:7) argue, im/politeness has a foothold in both the narrow and broad view of pragmatics:
early politeness can be situated within the narrow view, whereas recent approaches devote more attention to social function
and context, thus showing more overlap with the broad view. Furthermore, it could be claimed that im/politeness phe-
nomena have been the focus of both pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, especially at the inter-cultural and interlanguage
levels. Although that means using larger units of analysis, we will argue these do not fit necessarily well within a discourse-
based framework.

2.2. Understandings of discourse

As can be gleaned from this brief description, pragmatics means different things to different scholars. The same, even to a
higher degree, can be argued about discourse. Out of the many definitions of discourse (see Cameron, 2001; Fetzer, 2014;
Jaworski and Coupland, 1999; Schiffrin, 1994; Tannen et al., 2015, among many others) certain commonalities can be
extracted: discourse is “(1) anything beyond the sentence, (2) language use, and (3) a broader range of social practice that
includes non-linguistic and non-specific instances of language” (Tannen et al., 2015:1). Angermuller et al. (2014:2), more
specifically, distinguish between micro-sociological discourse analysts who consider “discourse as process or practice of
contextualizing texts, language in use, the situated production of speech acts or turn-taking practice” and “macrosociological
discourse theorists interested in power, for whom ‘discourse’ refers to an ensemble of verbal and non-verbal practices of large
social communities”. This distinction was also captured by Gee's (2005:7) little d and big D discourses:
When ‘little d’ discourse (language in use) is melded integrally with nonlanguage ‘stuff’ to enact specific identities and
activities, then I say ‘big D’ discourses are involved. We are all members of many, a great many, different Discourses,
Discourses which often influence each other in positive and negative ways, and which sometimes breed with each
other to create new hybrids.
What seems to be missing in Gee's account of discourse is more clarification of how his two-tier discourse model
correlates with the tripartite distinction among macro/meso/micro levels of analysis. The term ‘levels of analysis’ is
used in the social sciences to point to the location, size or scale of the research target. Traditionally, three (inter-
connected) levels of enquiry have been identified and applied: macro, meso, and micro. Since these three levels have
been used extensively in many disciplines (from sociology and sociolinguistics to economics and architecture, among
others) what they exactly refer to is, in a way, specific to each field. In sociolinguistics/discourse analysis, macro
refers to belief systems, ideologies, social structure, institutions; Meso units of communication are employed by
groups and communities of practice, such as specific types of discourse or genres; whereas micro refers to specific,
local interactions among participants with special attention to the syntactic, interactional, phonological or lexical
resources deployed. For example, Coupland (2001) highlights the different levels at which identity work takes place:
macro-level (socio-cultural framing); meso-level (genre framing); and micro-level (interpersonal framing). For other
relevant examples, see Terkourafi (2005); Shahbazi and Rezaee (2017) and Snell (2018).
Going back to Gee's account, the micro (little d) and macro levels (big D) are accounted for, but it seems that the meso level
is conflated with the macro level under big D discourse (see Gee, 2015). In other words, this “nonlanguage ‘stuff’” is too broad
as it includes, among others, everything from social practices, ideologies and specific genres to interlocutors' relational
histories. Thus, a clearer distinction between the macro- and meso-levels is necessary which sees the meso-level or “genre as
a bridging notion between micro and macro (Fetzer, 2007:21). This is a problem not only with Gee's model, but also with
many other discourse models, according to Fairclough (2003).
However, meso level analyses are significant in that they reveal connections between the micro and macro levels. It is thus
very important to take the meso level into consideration. As Sealey (2007) argues, claims that can be made on the bases of
analyses of micro-interactional data may differ from those made on the bases of broader social theories, since the properties
and powers of mechanisms working at these two levels are quite different from each other. Therefore, linking such claims
together should not be an obvious or automatic process. Indeed, the relationship between the macro/micro level remains one
of the main problems confronting sociology. The fact is that although macro-level structures (such as gender or different types
of ideologies) constrain and are reproduced/challenged in daily interactions, they are filtered through localized practices and
are experienced in many, unpredictable ways (Little et al., 2013).

1
Besides these two major camps, different scholars have classified the vast field of pragmatics in diverse ways. Mey (1993), for example, divides it into
micro- and macro-pragmatics and includes conversation in macro-pragmatics. For their part, Verschueren (1999) and Levinson (1983) list conversation as
one of the common topics in pragmatics. Further, for Verschueren, macro-pragmatics needs to involve itself with the variation and change of languages,
codes and styles, some of the phenomena that Mey addresses under societal pragmatics.
94 P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101

3. Understandings of im/politeness

In the four decades that politeness has constituted a focal point of pragmatic research, many advances have been made
in its understanding. However, to this day, there does not exist consensus among scholars regarding what exactly con-
stitutes im/politeness. For example, in the book published by the Linguistic Politeness Research Group (2011), seven
different definitions of politeness are discussed.2 More recently, Haugh and Culpeper (2018:214) claim that it would seem
that “for every new study of (im)politeness there is a new definition of (im)politeness”. More specifically, Haugh (2019:
201) argues:
A key ongoing debate amongst politeness researchers that remains yet to be resolved is how we should go about
defining politeness. It is now well accepted that we may define politeness from either the perspective of the scientific
analyst or that of the ordinary, lay speaker of a language. It is also increasingly clear that what counts as polite is not
something about which ordinary speakers necessarily agree; and as, it turns out, nor do researchers either. Politeness
is a fundamentally discursive concept, that is, one which does not have an objective existence outside of the dis-
courses in which it is oriented to or talked about by users and observers of (different varieties of) a language (Eelen,
2001; Mills, 2003). For that reason, its very nature may be disputed by users and observers for material, real world
reasons.
Given the complexities discussed above, we believe that it is beyond the remit of this paper to engage in detailed dis-
cussions in this respect. Very briefly, we take politeness to be realized mostly in discourse. Along with many discourse
theorists (Fairclough, 2003; Gee, 2005), we believe that identity is at the core of discourse and tied inextricably to face (see
Goffman's (1967/1955) initial conceptualization of face as tied to a line). Therefore, we take politeness to encompass those
aspects of language (and other semiotic modes) that are geared towards the verification of the identity participants aim to co-
construct while engaged in social practice and/or the positive attributes associated with that particular identity, i.e. face.
Impoliteness, for its part, may ensue when the identity participants are trying to co-construct and/or the positive attributes
associated with it are not verified (for a more detailed discussion see Garce s-Conejos Blitvich, 2009, 2010, 2013; Garce s-
Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou and Garce s-Conejos Blitvich, 2017). We would further situate our views on politeness within the
third wave (Culpeper, 2011; Grainger, 2011; K ad
ar and Haugh, 2013; Haugh and Culpeper, 2018) of the development of the
field inasmuch as we believe that the study of politeness needs to be undertaken from both an etic and emic perspective in
which participants' and analysts' views are integrated. For this integration to be fruitful, however, we will contend that, since
im/politeness is fundamentally a discursive phenomenon, it needs to be firmly anchored in a theory of discourse and tackled
with the proper units of analysis.
In this respect, and returning to our discussion, it could be argued that traditional first wave approaches (Brown and
Levinson, 1987) focused mostly on aspects of the micro-level and referred to how certain features of the macro level of
social structure (power and social distance, for example) weighted on realizations of politeness at the micro-level. Within
this universalistic, etic perspective, cultures are assumed to be homogeneous and agreed on what politeness is (see, e.g.,
Sifianou and Garce s-Conejos Blitvich, 2017). Such views were challenged leading to discursive, second wave approaches
(Eelen, 2001; Locher and Watts, 2005; Mills, 2003), which focused on politeness as an emic term and on participants'
assessments of im/politeness in interaction (rather than the analyst's) and looked, among other things, at what “discourses
inform what speakers think is possible to say, how they view their relationships with others and with their communities,
and how power impacts these relations” (Van der Bom and Mills, 2015:180). Therefore, we also find a focus on the macro/
micro levels of discourse here; the influence of theorists such as Foucault or Bourdieu on the discursive approach pinpoints
the emphasis and relevance of big D discourse. An important difference between the first and second waves is that
discursive approaches argue for politeness to be studied in longer stretches of discourse, rather than focusing at the
utterance-level, and see im/politeness as a feature of context and interpretation rather than an intrinsic property of certain
linguistic forms (e.g., Terkourafi, 2005). These point to the contested nature of im/politeness even within the same group
and lead to its being conceptualized as situated evaluation relating to specific exchanges and thus to an emphasis on emic
understandings.
As pointed out above regarding models of discourse, we see from this brief review that im/politeness, too, has
been developed mostly at the micro and macro levels, coinciding roughly with little d and big D discourses, but little
emphasis has been put on the meso level with the exception of one unit of analysis, activity types (Culpeper, 2011;
Culpeper et al., 2008; Levinson, 1979), that has been resorted to in order to analyze recurrent patterns in language
use. In addition, communities of practice and the norms associated with them were often referred to in the second
wave of politeness research as guidelines for members' judgements regarding what constitutes politeness (see
Locher, 2012; Mills, 2003), thus being viewed as a kind of meso-level. In the third wave of politeness research, which
integrated both etic and emic perspectives, i.e. analysts'/participants' assessments, other units of analysis were
brought into the fray: among others, CA inspired units along with traditional pragmalinguistic units are at the core of
Haugh's (2007, 2015) interactional approach; and frames are the units used in the frame-based framework
(Terkourafi, 2001, 2005) on the basis of which regularities of co-occurrence and extralinguistic contexts of use seek

2
Discussions on defining politeness can also be found in Fukushima (2000), Mills (2017), Sifianou (1992) and Watts (2003) among others.
P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101 95

to be established. Thus, frames could tentatively be seen as meso level units as they mediate between macro level
factors and micro level interactions. However, crucially, frames are not discursive units (in the sense of discourse
espoused here), as they were adapted from notions in AI, psychology, and linguistics (see Terkourafi, 2005:247). In
our discussion below, we will focus on activity types and communities of practice; what these units have in common
is their having been frequently used in im/politeness research.

3.1. Activity types

Inspired by Wittgenstein's language games, Levinson (1979:368) proposed the notion of ‘activity type’ (similar to speech
event and episode, as postulated by Hymes, 1974; Gumperz, 1972) which refers to:
any culturally recognized activity, whether or not that activity is co-extensive with a period of speech or indeed
whether any talk takes place in it at all … a fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted,
bounded events with constraints on participants, setting, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contri-
butions. Paradigm examples would be teaching, a job interview, a jural interrogation, a football game, a task in a
workshop, a dinner party and so on (emphasis in the original).
According to Levinson (1979), activity types (henceforth ATs) are organized around a specific goal and differ in terms of
how ritualistic and scripted they are, the level of in/formality they require, how much pre-planning and social distance is
expected, etc. Crucially for our discussion here, activity types will also differ in terms of how relevant language is in their
performance, with some containing very little or no language at all (e.g., a game of football). Levinson's most important claim,
it could be argued, was that the structural properties of activity types set up expectations and thus constrain contributions
(speech acts) and, significantly, the inferences that can be drawn on the bases of those. Some im/politeness scholars have
resorted to the constraints of activity types to account for what constitutes im/politeness in a certain context. For example,
Culpeper (2011:218) suggested that impoliteness “can be approached holistically through schema theory, and in particular
activity types”. Others, Gu (2010), for instance, have gone further and argued that ATs should be the primary object and unit of
investigation in pragmatics.
Despite activity types being an influential notion, because of the way they are conceived and formulated, we will argue
that they cannot be claimed to be “a central notion of discourse theory … a meso level concept in providing a link between the
micro- and macro-levels of sociological description” (Linell and Thunqvist, 2003:431).
Importantly, ATs are not necessarily language based, which is a problem when thinking of making them a central notion of
a discourse theory.3 This does not mean that we assume that a discourse theory should be restricted to verbal action; what we
argue is that language should be a central notion. Furthermore, ATs are not necessarily connected to the macro-level, but
primarily to the micro-level,4 as they were mostly conceived as constraints on contributions and the possible inferences on
those. As such, at least in the way they were conceived and have mostly been applied, there is little room for negotiation and
discursive struggle (so important to contemporary approaches to im/politeness). The relationship between the meso level
and the micro level is thus unidirectional, as changes in the micro-level cannot impact the meso-level (or the macro level, as it
was never brought into the description of ATs). In addition, as units of analysis, ATs are abstract formulations, in the sense that
“job interviews”, “jural interrogations” are abstractions that are realized in myriads of different ways locally; therefore, we
would need more concrete units of analysis to refer to the instantiation of ATs (as we will see below, genres are also abstract in
nature, but they are instantiated in texts which constitute the proper object of analysis). Further, we would need concep-
tualizations of meso-level units that would accommodate the fluidity and hybridity5 of this level of sociological enquiry.

3.2. Communities of practice

Communities of practice (CoP) and the norms associated with them have been often invoked by second wave politeness
researchers as the mediating unit between the macro level, big D discourses, and the micro-level, little d discourses. Par-
ticipants' local evaluations of im/politeness could be traced back to the norms of the community of practice. Conceived as
the basis for a theory of learning, the notion of ‘community of practice’ was developed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and
Wenger (2000) and brought into sociolinguistics by Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992). According to Eckert (2006:683): “A
community of practice is a collection of people who engage on an ongoing basis in some common endeavor: a bowling team,

3
This has been acknowledged by prior research. For example, Sarangi (2000) resorted to the notion of discourse type to complement that of activity type.
For the author, activity type is a means of characterizing settings whereas discourse type is a means of characterizing language. Sarangi argues that the
synergy between the two results in various forms of interactional hybridity. In our view, genre is a more elegant notion in this respect as it encompasses
both the setting and the discourse type.
4
For example, in his excellent study of exploitative shows, Culpeper (2005) uses the notion of AT to analyze the Weakest Link. Whereas there is a
comparison between this AT and other similar ones (non-exploitative shows) which leads the author to conclude that exploitative shows have evolved
through the subversion of the politeness norms of the standard shows, there is no mention of what changes in the ideologies of the entertainment industry
have led to impoliteness being a pervasive feature in exploitative shows/reality TV that we observe at the meso/micro levels or how the major success of
this show impacted others and led other hosts to adopt impoliteness as an integral index of their identity.
5
For a relevant discussion, see Sarangi (2000) and Linell and Thunqvist (2003).
96 P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101

a book club, a friendship group, a crack house, a nuclear family, a church congregation”. Communities of practice are
characterized by three dimensions: 1) mutual engagement; 2) joint enterprise; 3) a shared repertoire (Wenger,
1998:72e73). Their value for sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, according to Eckert (2006), lies in identifying a
social group not on the bases of abstract categories (class, genre, geographical location, etc.) or co-presence, but on shared
practice. Engaging in regular joint activity “a community of practice develops ways of doing things, views, values, power
relations, ways of talking” (Eckert, 2006:683). Some have questioned the suitability of CoP as a viable unit of analysis for
discourse. For example, Koester (2010:9) argues that the role of discourse in communities of practice is not very clearly
defined as they include “‘routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gesture, symbols, genres, actions or concepts’
(Wenger, 1998:83). There are linguistic as well as non-linguistic elements here and it is not clear what role each of these
elements plays in the practice of the community”. Because of the difficulty of operationalizing CoP within discourse analysis,
Koester's recommendation is to shift the focus from practice to discourse as proposed by Swales (1990) with his notion of
discourse communities that place the emphasis, not on the community, but on how it uses discourse, i.e., the utilization of
one or various genres. Whereas some have argued that both concepts are equally useful (Pogner, 2005), others claim that
both communities of practice and discourse communities are still anchored in “a structuralist-folk linguistic-folk
sociological-nationalist ideology” (Prior, 2003:19). Indeed, Prior (2003:12) argues that communities of practice and
discourse communities have not really broken up with previous conceptions of speech communities they were developed to
replace: “If initial community theories tended to imagine homogeneous discourses in homogeneous spaces, accounts of
communities in the last decade have moved to acknowledge more heterogeneous, though still discrete discursive spaces,
allowing for various conflicts, divisions of labor, and interactions with other discourses, but typically still involving ho-
mogeneous discourses (perhaps smaller and less stable than in earlier representations)”. The fact that it is often difficult to
demarcate what constitutes a CoP e which has become even more difficult in the digital age (see Tagg, 2015; Zappavigna,
2011) e together with the functionality of discourse not being clearly delineated therein pose problems to their usefulness
as units of analysis. Further, a community of practice (say a church) may engage in more than one genre practice (attending
service, organizing fund-raisers, getting together for fish-fries), and as we will argue below it is the social norms associated
with that specific genre, rather than the community's norms that guide expectations of im/politeness and the evaluations
associated with those.

4. Genre as a basic component of a three-level analysis

In view of the above, it would seem that in order to tackle the study of im/politeness within a discursive pragmatics we
need to ground its study in a model of discourse that includes the three levels of sociological analysis, accounts for the in-
terconnections among them, and offers scholars well developed units of analysis. In our view, that is the model proposed by
Fairclough (2003). The starting point, as it were, of Fairclough's model is a rebuke of Bourdieu's views. For Fairclough, a key
omission of Bourdieu's model is the lack of attention to the meso-level. As an example, when discussing political discourse,
Fairclough argues that politicians never articulate political discourse in its pure form: political discourse is always situated,
always shaped by genres (presidential speeches, press conferences, debates, and so on). In contrast, genre (meso-level)
notions play a fundamental role in Fairclough's account of language social practices, i.e. orders of discourse. Orders of
discourse are defined as “the social organization and control of linguistic variation” (2003:24). The way discourse figures in a
social practice is threefold: discourses (ways of representing), genres (ways of acting) and styles (ways of being). Genres are
different ways of inter (acting) discoursally.


Fig. 1. Discourse in social practice.

The term discourse is here used in two ways: (i) as an abstract noun referring to language and other kinds of semiosis as
elements of social life, (ii) as a count noun referring to particular ways of representing a part of the world e e.g., the discourse
of the right wing in the US. Styles refer to the role of language, along with non-verbal communication, in creating particular
P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101 97

social or individual identities. Fairclough sees the three elements of meaning as dialectically related, each of them inter-
nalizing the others. In Fairclough's (2003:29) words: “particular representations (discourses) may be enacted in particular
ways of Acting and Relating (genres) and inculcated in particular ways of Identifying (Styles)”.
The model thus includes the three levels of sociological description (discourse/macro, genre/meso, style/
micro). Furthermore, it sees them as dialectically related in the sense that not only the macro/meso levels have an impact
on the micro-level, but that changes in the micro-level can alter genres and ultimately discourses. For example, US
President Trump's individual style of relating with the press and other politicians (through various genres) has been
argued to have changed traditional representations of political discourse.6 Indeed, the anonymous author of this New
York Times op-ed claims that as a nation, America has sunk as low as Trump by allowing public discourse to be stripped of
civility.

4.1. Genre and text

A key element of this model was further developed by Fairclough (2004:381e382) i.e. texts, “[g]enres, discourses and
styles are realized in features of textual meaning”. Genres situate big D discourses, but they are still abstractions (we have a
socially acquired sense and expectations of what a business meeting or a service encounter are). However, genres themselves
are instantiated in texts: the socially situated, individually/collectively negotiated instantiations of genres. As Fairclough
(2004:229) argues “Texts are the situational interactional accomplishments of social agents whose agency is, however,
enabled and constrained by social structures and social practices”. For example, ideologies, such as how classes should be
taught, are part of our representation of Education discourse. For its part, education discourse is situated in different genres,
such as teaching a class. The way a professor teaches an actual class will be instantiated in a text that will reflect the discourse
and the genre but will uniquely be shaped by the professor's and the students' styles and their agencies. Thus, although text
(as in text linguistics) was initially an attempt to extend grammatical principles beyond the sentence, nowadays it is “widely
defined as an empirical communicative event given through human communication rather than specified by a formal theory”
(de Beaugrande, 2011:290). Thus, it can be argued that the focus of analysis of a discursive pragmatics and the study of im/
politeness anchored therein is the text.


Fig. 2. Discourse in social practice.

Fairclough's tripartite model and his focus on genres/texts provides im/politeness scholars with very useful tools of
analysis. Genres, the mesolevel units situate discourse, guide expectations regarding social appropriateness and morality.
However, due to the dialectical nature of the relationship between the three levels, these expectations, norms and values can
be subject to discursive struggle at the micro-level of style and ultimately change the genre expectations and affect discourse
ideologies. Furthermore, genres have been extensively studied, both as socio-cognitive units and at the level of structure, i.e.
how certain linguistic and rhetorical devices come together in stable but fluid ways (as genre practices, like the societies they
mediate are in constant change).
For example, within linguistics, linguistic anthropology and practice theory, genres have been of significant import.
Hymes (1974) urged anthropologists to take genre into consideration as one of the main components of communication.
Systemic functional linguistics, too, has placed genres centerstage as “the system of staged goal-oriented social process
through which social subjects in a given culture live their lives” (Martin, 2002:56). English for Specific Purposes revolves
around notions of genre and its practitioners, Swales (1990, among others) has provided very detailed descriptions of the
units that constitute the building blocks of genres/texts (i.e., moves and rhetorical strategies) and has developed notions

6
See among many others, a recent op-ed in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-
resistance.html.
98 P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101

such as discourse communities (see above) in which members come together around their use of one or more genres.
Crucially, and looking for ways in which to conceptualize social practice, a mesopolitical level that allows us to combine
Foucault and Goffman, a way to relate text and society, Pennycook (2010:142) argued that Fairclough's model, with his
focus on the meso-level along with the macro/micro levels, helps us achieve an understanding of language “that not only
looks at society or institutions, that not only includes an understanding of the interactions of the everyday, but that also
seeks an understanding of how such interactions are institutionally framed and such institutions are interactionally
realized”.
Pragmatics, discourse studies, and im/politeness studies are interdisciplinary disciplines (Culpeper and Terkourafi, 2017).
However, and despite Leech's (1983) depiction of pragmatics as essentially rhetorical in nature, there has not been much
significant cross-pollination between the field of rhetorical studies and pragmatics. It could be argued that in the same way
that pragmatics/discourse analysis/politeness can gain useful insights about the macrolevel from sociology, and handy tools
and methods from anthropology such as ethnography to apply to the analysis of the microlevel, rhetorical genre theory can
provide key insights regarding the meso-level. The core conceptions regarding genre held by rhetorical genre theory were
inspired by Miller's (1984) seminal paper in which she conceptualized genres as social actions. Bazerman (1997:19), a key
contributor to this line of looking at genres, summarizes the approach well:
Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for social action. They are envi-
ronments for learning. They are locations within which meaning is constructed. Genres shape the thoughts we form
and the communications by which we interact. Genres are the familiar places we go to create intelligible communi-
cative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar.
Genres/texts as situated and instantiated forms of macro level discourses need to be central to a discursive pragmatics and
to politeness research therein (see Garce s-Conejos Blitvich, 2010, 2013 for a genre-based model to the analysis of im/
politeness phenomena).

5. Case study

An interesting example of how these macro/meso/micro levels interact and impact im/politeness realizations can be found
at the mesolevel in one particular genre, the announcements heard in the Athens Metro stations (Sifianou, 2010). Given that
in the era of globalisation, English has emerged as an indisputable global lingua franca, modern cities may feel they need to
provide visitors with relevant information in both English and the local language. Thus, the announcements played to
travelers waiting at the Athens Metro stations are delivered in both Greek and English.
A linguistic microanalysis suggests that the genre of announcements has undergone considerable change in this context.
Despite the expected/typical/genre-specific need for brevity, given temporal and acoustic constraints, these new an-
nouncements (both in Greek and in English) are verbose, probably because verbosity and elaboration are assumed to convey
the required formality and politeness. Formal language is probably deemed necessary because of the public nature of the
event: whereas the features of negative politeness (e.g., the passive voice) reflect the Anglo-Saxon influence, those of positive
politeness (e.g., accounts) reflect the Greek socio-cultural milieu. This interplay of features aims at constructing the institution
not only as polite but also as reliable and caring, having a voice of its own. In short, an institution that can be trusted by
passengers. For instance, note the verbosity of the following announcement:

(1) May I have your attention, please? We remind you that after validating your ticket when entering a station, you are kindly
requested to keep it, until exiting the Metro System. Thank you.

Which is quite unnecessary as the above announcement could simply be:

(2) Please validate your ticket when you enter the station and keep it until you leave the Metro System.

In addition, this transformed genre includes three distinct moves (opening, main body, closing), a feature of various other
genres such as service encounters (see, e.g., Antonopoulou, 2001) but not of traditional metro announcements.
Note that in example (1), we have the long-winded, rather redundant introductory formula (May I have your attention,
please) through which the speaker/announcer personally (note the I instead of we) and politely (please) requests the pas-
sengers’ attention. Like all announcements, this one also includes a closing token of gratitude (Thank you) with which pas-
sengers are thanked for their assumed attention, and/or perhaps in anticipation of their compliance with the content of the
announcement.
More specifically, it could be argued that, in relation to politeness, it seems that there are two forces at play. On the one
hand, there is the widely prevalent stereotypical perception in Greece of the English being a polite nation and, on the other,
the equally stereotypical view of the Greeks being impolite. These two macro level language ideologies have led to manifest
changes at the meso level, i.e. the genre of announcements; as a result, announcements are now expected be polite in a
P.G.-C. Blitvich, M. Sifianou / Journal of Pragmatics 145 (2019) 91e101 99

deferential way; that is, negatively polite. This is not surprising since, in Western cultures, it is negative politeness that springs
to mind when one thinks of politeness (Brown and Levinson, 1987:130).
Given that the Athens underground is relatively new (it started functioning in 2003)7 and that both the Greek and English
versions of these announcements were apparently written concurrently, it seems that the macro level global ideologies
related to globalization meshed with local language ideologies and attitudes thus transforming the specific genre of un-
derground announcements both structurally (making it more complex) and from the point of view of the type of politeness
manifestations associated with it.

6. Concluding remarks

In this paper, we have argued that the study of im/politeness within a discursive pragmatics needs to be grounded in a
sound understanding of the three levels of sociological enquiry and thus in discourse models that take this tripartite
distinction into consideration. We do agree with Gu (2010) that pragmatics needs to be articulated around a trichotomy. We
have defended, however, that genres/texts, rather than ATs, should be used as the units of the mesolevel as they constitute
solid discursive units which connect dynamically the macro and micro levels.
Regarding the field of im/politeness, we feel that this trichotomy will allow for more balanced approaches, as the field has
tended to gravitate to the two ends, focusing heavily either on the micro or the macro levels. Early, first wave politeness
research, sharing a Gricean and speech act perspective, focused on utterance-level analyses. Although second wave ap-
proaches strongly challenged this focus, they did not offer distinct units of analysis concentrating instead on the theoretical
shortcomings of the earlier approaches, despite their explicit denunciation of the possibility of constructing overarching
theories. On the one hand, they emphasized the significance of empirical, lay data but on the other, they offered relatively
little in terms of tools to tackle little d discourse level analyses. Third wave approaches have attempted to integrate first and
second wave approaches (Culpeper and Haugh, 2014); however, despite the proliferation of research, we believe that more
research effort is needed towards theorizing and analyzing the meso level which will facilitate the understanding of the
interconnections of the three levels as these are not independent from each other in our daily interactions. Indeed, as we
discussed above following Sealey (2007), claims made on the bases of analyses of micro-interactional data may differ from
those made on the bases of broader social theories, due to the inherent differences in the mechanisms working at these two
levels. As a result, linking such claims together should not be obvious or automatic. We need to take into account that macro-
level structures (such as gender or different types of ideologies) constrain and are reproduced/challenged in daily in-
teractions, they are filtered through localized practices and are thus experienced in unpredictable ways (Little et al., 2013). The
meso level of localized practices should, therefore, not be obviated. Further, developing the meso level in im/politeness will
entail using already available and established tools, which will result in more fine-grained analyses. We believe it is time to
see the whole discursive picture and avoid producing just “minute descriptions of individual encounters” (Terkourafi,
2005:245).

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s-Conejos Blitvich is Professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is interested in
Pilar Garce
aggression and conflict, im/politeness models, genre theory, identity construction, and traditional and social media on which she has published and lectured
extensively. She sits on the board of various international journals and is co-editor in chief of the Journal of Language of Aggression and Conflict (John
Benjamins).

Maria Sifianou is Professor Emerita, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her publications include Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece
(OUP), Discourse Analysis (Hillside Press) and a number of articles in edited books and international journals. She has co-edited Linguistic Politeness across
Boundaries (Benjanins) among others. She is on the editorial board of a number of journals and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Language Aggression and
Conflict (Benjamins). Her main research interests include im/politeness phenomena and discourse analysis.

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