Introduction

Abstract

Why do historical (im)politeness research?Historical (im)politeness research was formally 'established' as a field in 2010 when Kádár and Culpeper published a collection of studies with the title Historical (Im)Politeness. In the introduction of this collection, they argue that while topics related to historical (im)politeness have been present in pragmatics since its formation, it is a timely step to focus historical (im)politeness research as an independent area of inquiry. 1 Yet, in spite of this spearheading attempt (and subsequent ones like Bax and Kádár 2011) to elevate historical (im)politeness research to a place it deserves, so far the field has remained relatively low-key in the booming field of politeness studies: if one looks into the number of publications on historical (im)politeness, 2 it may rightly appear as far less popular than synchronic politeness studies. The emphasis here is on the word 'far less': while history by its very nature may not be as popular as modernity when it comes to the analysis of a theme like (im)politeness, it has significance to the study of a variety of synchronic themes. This raises a question that we intend to investigate in this paper: are there ways through which we could increase the visibility of historical (im)politeness research?Researchers involved in historical (im)politeness generally agree that historical data can rightly be studied for its own sake (see Section 3.1 in Kádár 2017). A wide variety of areas in the field represent this autotelic approach, spanning research on terms of address (e.g. Taavitsainen and Jucker 2001), through explorations of historical ideologies on interpersonal politeness (e.g. Klein 1994), to the study of insults in Old English (e.g. Pakis 2011). While this historical focus is arguably the most representative line of research in the field, it is relevant primarily to those who work either on historical pragmatics or related fields, such as sociohistorical linguistics (e.g. Nevelainen 2003) or historical sociolinguistics (e.g. Bergs 2005). A number of scholars working on both synchronic and diachronic politeness (e.g. Kádár and Culpeper 2010;Jucker 2011;Bax and Kádár 2011;Kádár and Haugh 2013) have pointed out that historical (im)politeness may as well have a key applicability beyond this scope: it can both operate as a testing ground for modern (im)politeness frameworks and bring innovative analytic concepts into synchronic research (see Section 2). As Bax and Kádár argue, perhaps no politeness theory can be complete without 'the establishment of diachronic trends in (im)politeness, including cross-cultural historical developments in (im)polite language behaviour and its evolutionary antecedents'.