Critical Analysis Of Geoffrey Leech's Principle Of Politeness

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Politeness is a hard concept to define, but in the opinion of many scholars such as Leech (1983), Brown and Levinson (1987) and Terkourafi (2004) constitutes one of the most important aspects of human interpersonal communication. In order to at least generally explain how politeness works and how it is achieved in interaction, Geoffrey Leech, in 1983, proposed his Principle of Politeness (PP from now on). Leech takes as his point of departure Grice’s Cooperative Principle and its maxims, and considers them useful when it comes to figuring out the difference between the sense and the force of an utterance, but ineffectual at the level of understanding why people employ politeness when communicating . In general, Leech claims, people tend to make confusion between what he calls “relative politeness” and “absolute politeness”. Moreover, he observes, politeness is culturally bounded as every culture possesses its own concept and degrees of politeness in language use. Leech, however, decides to consider politeness not as inherently connected with these concepts, but rather as…show more content…
Furthermore, the scholar also expresses the belief that politeness might be considered the

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