Historical politeness

Dániel Z. Kádár
Table of contents

The present paper introduces a recent and rapidly developing field within politeness research, and pragmatics: historical politeness (and impoliteness) research. The diachronic study of politeness is an area which, by its nature, does not necessarily attract researchers and students involved in synchronic pragmatics. My aim is to show that historical politeness is not only a thought-provoking area, but research on certain of its key topics can broaden our understanding of the operation of politeness, as well as the interpersonal aspects of language usage in a broader sense – i.e. “the relational, attitudinal/emotive, and evaluative aspects of embodied language use” (see Haugh et al. 2013, forthcoming). With this objective behind, in this article I focus on the major key concepts of historical politeness research from a somewhat ‘non-historical’ angle and occasionally I illustrate these concepts by using modern data.

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