Of babies and bath water: Is there any place for Austin and Grice in interpersonal pragmatics?

Introduction: Strategic uses of politeness formulae. Analytical approaches and theoretical accounts

“…That this route has ultimately proved less than fruitful was, however, highlighted by Christie (2015: 263) in an epilogue to the tenth anniversary edition of the Journal of Politeness Research where she wondered whether there has been 'an over-emphasis on what is dynamic and local about the process of meaning-making rather than on what is social and shared about the process'. This is a view which was shared by Grainger (2013) who suggested that the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater in the discursive politeness approach and that traditional pragmatic theory (in the Gricean and Austinian moulds) still had its place in understanding interpersonal pragmatics.…”

Digital Business Discourse

“…In order to explore how contextualization cues "nudge the inferential process" (Levinson, 2003) and influence meaning-making, previous scholarship has taken a discursive, interactional approach aiming to shed light on the discursive creation and negotiation of micro-level meanings (Schiffrin, 1996, p. 315). Drawing on this method, analysts investigate the interaction itself and arrive at an interpretation by demonstrating how participants respond to each other's utterances -that is, by using the reactions that an utterance evokes as evidence of whether interpretive conventions were shared (Grainger, 2013;Gumperz, 1981, quoted in Schiffrin, 1996. This immersive textual analysis allows researchers to identify the cues that might have a role in the contextualization of the messages as well as their effects on the interpretative process.…”

Indexical and Sequential Properties of Criticisms in Initial Interactions: Implications for Examining (Im) Politeness across Cultures

“…Levinson's (1978, 1987) politeness theory has long been a popular vehicle for these kinds of cross-cultural (im)politeness studies, in large part because that is what Brown and Levinson's theory was designed to do. While the discursive turn in (im)politeness research has subsequently challenged the validity of Brown and Levinson's approach (Eelen 2011;Mills 2003), such critical work has not provided a clear alternative way forward for studying (im)politeness across languages and cultures (Grainger 2013;Sifianou & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2017). This has led to a return to a neo-Brown and Levinsonian stance, in which the same theoretical tools (positive and negative face, face-threatening acts and so on) are deployed with discourse data, as opposed to the utterance-based analyses found in Brown and Levinson's original work 1 .…”