ABSTRACT
Two words figure greatly in the current metadiscourse: politeness and civility. Politeness has been much discussed recently by linguists and other social scientists (Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983; Brown and Levinson 1987), who generally use the term to cover behaviour that allows participants to avoid hostile confrontation or (in Brown and Levinson’s terminology) ‘face threatening acts’ or FTAs. The word in its scholarly sense thus includes both the popular usage, describing actions more or less synonymous with ‘etiquette’, and behaviour that is seen in its cultural milieu as ‘friendly’ or ‘inclusive’.
