Leech Politeness Analysis

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 an absolute scale having positive and negative poles, thus attributing to some illocutions a characteristic of inherent politeness and to others a

In a similar way to the maxims of the CP, the maxims of the PP are not rules set in stone: they are observed by the speakers only “up to a certain point” (Leech 1983: 133) and, as already stated, they only serve as guidelines in order to understand how politeness is generally supposed to function in conversation. Moreover, they do not seem to be equally important, as a matter of fact Leech explains that the Tact Maxim seems to play a more important role in conversation than the Generosity Maxim does and the same holds for the Approbation Maxim with regard to the Modesty Maxim (Leech 1983), which leads to observe that politeness is focused more strongly on “other” than on