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Brown & Levinson opened their 1987 commentary on their theory of politeness by reemphasizing not only that their framework presumed "that Grice's theory of conversational implicature and the framework of maxims that give rise to such implicatures is essentially correct" (p. 3), but also that their theory presupposed "the other great contribution by Grice, namely his account of the nature of communication as a special kind of intention designed to be recognized by the recipient" (p. 7; cf. Levinson 1983: 16-18; 1995: 227-232). Brown & Levinson also closed their 1987 commentary with a projection for future development of their theory: Social interaction is remarkable for its emergent properties which transcend the characteristics of the individuals that jointly produce it; this emergent character is not something for which our current theoretical models are well equipped. Workers in artificial intelligence have already detected a paradigm clash between 'cognitivism' and 'interactionism', and noted the failure of the former paradigm to account for interactional organization (see ... Suchman, [1987]); our own account suffers from the same dose of 'cognitivism'. Work on interaction as a system thus remains a fundamental research priority, and the area from which improved conceptualizations of politeness are most likely to emerge. (1987: 48) One straightforward implication of juxtaposing this opening reemphasis and this closing projection is that an improved conceptualization of politeness will require a theoretical model of interaction other than the Gricean account of communication presupposed in Brown & Levinson's theory. In this paper I identify three broad patterns in the accounts of communication constituted by scholars in talking about language use: accounts in terms of conduits, in terms of code-using, and in terms of interactional achievement. I associate each account with a theoretical model of interaction, identified respectively as the information transmission, the encoding/decoding, and the co-constituting models of communication. Grice accounted for communication in terms of encoding-decoding, and I indicate why such an account is ill equipped for conceptualizing the emergent properties of human interaction, and hence untenable as the basis for an improved conceptualization of politeness. I provide an outline of the co-constituting model as a distinct alternative model that arises from "work on interaction as a system," and that addresses emergence in interaction. The co-constituting model of communication has implications for a number of issues in language pragmatics, but I employ it here as the basis for sketching an alternative conceptualization of politeness consistent with Brown & Levinson's projection.

For a researcher to ground his or her interpretation of a participant’s utterance in terms of face requires that he or she provide empirical evidence both of that participant’s orientation to such an interpreting, and of its consequentiality in interaction. Chapter 9 re-examines the conversations considered in prior chapters to illustrate how a researcher “articulates” the participant’s engaging of various social practices with both connection and separation, as they conjointly co-constitute operative interpretings of face. The evidence provided reveals how and why the skill of “nexting” is central to ethical conduct in everyday interacting. Against that background, examining two further studies provides insights into finding emotions like surprise in relating and face in everyday interacting.

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