Introduction

Summary

My main aim in this book is to develop a more community-based, discourse-level model of both gender and linguistic politeness and the relation between them. This is in marked contrast to an almost exclusive focus on the individual in most analyses of politeness. At the same time as describing what gender and linguistic politeness are and how they function, my aim is also to question the stability and solidity of these entities. Instead, I see them as processes or acts of evaluation which people perform in conversation. This process model does not mean that I see gender and politeness as ephemeral or without material effects, but rather indicates that I want to move research away from the notion that politeness or gender consist of a range of stable, predictable attributes. At the same time as radically questioning the nature of gender and politeness, I shall also examine the role of stereotype in the process of assessing people's linguistic performance, both stereotypes of gender and of politeness. My principal question underlying this study is: how can we develop a complex, pragmatic model of interaction which can account for the way that gender, in its interactions with other variables like race, class, age, sexual orientation, contextual elements, and so on, inflects the production and interpretation of linguistic politeness and impoliteness? Crucial to this project is a wider critique of many of the linguistic models available at present.