What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

Twentieth-century critics have opposed the supposed objectivity of the essay to the letter and diary as private, self-expressive, and autobiographical genres. But this was a modern development. From Michel de Montaigne to the early nineteenth century, the essay, the letter, and the diary were more alike and far more closely aligned than they later became, particularly with regard to representations of the self and notions of publicity. For instance, they were all considered forms of address, and means of presenting one’s intellectual physiognomy to others that were likely to be read aloud, shared, and discussed. This chapter therefore explores now-forgotten family resemblances among these genres both in form and function and concludes by showing where they were fused or embedded in one another.

This chapter traces the development of the essay in the context of a world of early eighteenth-century sociability constituted by coffee shops, periodicals, and a variety of informal clubs and societies. Never simply a reflection of a prior social reality, the periodical essay developed as part of a self-consciously created mythos of ‘polite literature’ designed to regulate manners in the inchoate and often contentious social world from which it represented itself as emerging. In the skilful hands of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, among others, the polite essay shaped values of agreeableness, conversability, and formal equality that helped define a remarkably durable idea of polite literary culture still in play – if increasingly represented as passing away – for essayists like William Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt writing a century later.

Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

Chapter 2 positions ritual in the field of pragmatics. The chapter first provides an overview of previous pragmatic research on ritual and discusses why Goffman’s term ‘interaction ritual’ is particularly useful to describe what ritual is from the pragmatician’s point of view. The chapter then considers why ritual offers a powerful perspective through which one can approach and interpret language use across different linguacultures and context types. It is also shown that an analytic model based on ritual provides a different and often more accurate view of many instances of conventionalised language use than the oft-used politeness paradigm. Finally, the chapter defines the key pragmatic features of ritual as elements of a pragmatic approach to ritual and language. Interpreting ritual through this cluster of pragmatic features allows the researcher to venture beyond any single working definition.

This chapter examines how lexicographers symbolically policed the borders of English not only by distancing same-sex practices from English society but by disbarring words for those practices from the English language. Though terms for women who had sex with women existed in other Early Modern English text types (and in the bilingual dictionaries that influenced early monolingual lexicographers), they were barely acknowledged in hard-word and general dictionaries. Sexuality between men, though initially well-represented, was also excised by many general lexicographers in the wake of Samuel Johnson, reflecting a growing concern that dictionaries should record only ‘proper’ English. Acts that were inadmissible in polite lexicography would partially re-emerge in dictionaries of criminal cant, which encoded an earthy alternative vocabulary for the men associated with London’s molly houses during the eighteenth century. However, even cant dictionaries would edge carefully around the existence of intimacy between women. And as dictionaries of the underworld gave way to those of fashionable slang in the nineteenth century, unnatural sex of any sort was once again thrust beyond the pale.

This chapter shows how the two most influential periodicals of Queen Annes reign, The Tatler and The Spectator, reacted to the perceived threat posed by the sometimes chaotic representation of contemporary battles in the newspapers, by offering readers fictionalised and idealised alternatives. This strategy was compatible with the attempts of their authors (mostly Richard Steele and Joseph Addison) to encourage politeness. War is seen to encourage disinterested sociability while the career of soldiering is seen to promote good manners. In the face of growing criticism of the bellicose aspect of European cultural heritage, the periodicals attempt to distinguish morally useful representations of violence from aristocratic codes of honour and from sensational barbarism.

This opening chapter first discusses the important position politeness research holds in pragmatics. Four areas of research are selected for the purpose: speech acts, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and interaction on the Internet, with the overarching aim to show that politeness offers insights for how meaning is made and transmitted in each of these areas. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the discussion on the important role Chinese politeness plays in politeness research in general. Since the notion of Chinese face is a pillar of Brown and Levinson’s notion of face, an in-depth understanding of Chinese face and, subsequently, Chinese politeness, stands to benefit the understanding of Brown and Levinson’s thinking in their theory. In addition, research on Chinese face has been drawing an increasing amount of attention from scholars of politeness in recent decades, accumulating a literature the size of which few other languages can parallel and offering insights to the understanding of politeness that are unique and significant, a thorough exploration of Chinese politeness can inform the field about politeness theorizing.

In this book, Rong Chen provides a thorough discussion of Chinese politeness and argues for universality in politeness theorizing. Based on in-depth analyses, the author dichotomizes Chinese face into Face1 and Face2 – the former referring to the person and the latter to the persona of the speaker – and proposes a model of Chinese politeness (MCP), with the notion of harmony at the center. Chinese politeness thusly conceived – the author argues – should be seen as a cultural-specification of a universal theory of politeness dubbed Brown and Levinson Extended (B&L-E), a model that anchors with Brown and Levinson’s theory but with the incorporation of the notions of self-politeness and impoliteness. The author then applies MCP and B&L-E to the analyses of Chinese politeness, both diachronically and synchronically, and to comparisons of politeness between Chinese and other languages. The results demonstrate that B&L-E is capable of accounting for variation as well as consistency across time and space, differences as well as similarity between linguacultures, and fluidity as well as stability in meaning making in authentic interaction. The monograph hence presents a rare challenge to politeness research and pragmatics, which have emphasized particularism at the expense of universalism.

The Coda returns to the example with which the book begins: the story about the gentleman caller and the naked lady in the bathroom told by the character Fabienne in Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968). The aim of the Coda is to revisit key aspects of the theory and history of tact developed in the course of the book, and to draw its findings to a close.

Existing theories of human interaction tend to focus on tact as a marker of social distinction (Sartre, Bourdieu), and a tool for the cementation of bourgeois power (Foucault). The introduction sets the arena for a new account of tact that not only considers tact’s discriminating effects but also, and primarily, gives room to its equalizing dynamic and democratic potential. Using a story from Truffaut’s film Stolen Kisses (1968) about a gentleman and a naked lady in a bathroom as an example to unpack some of the key aspects of tact, I engage in critical dialogue with a wide range of scholars from different disciplines (including Wollheim, Kohut, Coplan, Luhmann, Derrida, Goffman, Žižek, Sartre, and Sennett). The aim is to address the following questions: What is tact? What is the relation between empathy, widely associated with proximity, and tact as a generator of distance? How can we distinguish tact from politeness and what are the implications of this distinction? How does social tact, as the spontaneous and individual art of mitigating social encounter, relate to hermeneutical tact as a particular mode of reading faces, images, texts?

The Conclusion to Part III follows William Hickey during his visit to Jamaica in 1775. His activities confirm the arrival of the consumer revolution on the island. This made Jamaica, in Trevor Burnard’s terms, “the jewel in the British imperial crown,” and introduced an array of consumer goods and cultural amenities such as cafes and theaters. This is the world in which Jamaicans had as much access to published materials as they desired whether through purchase from local merchants or metropolitan booksellers, orders through factors in England, or borrowing from friends. Analyses of Robert Long’s and Thomas Thistlewood’s notes focused on the themes of slavery, race, and religion, revealing a dynamic reading process in which they were anything but passive receptacles for Enlightenment ideas. Indeed, even when they read the same work, they came to very different conclusions about it. While the conclusions they drew cannot be generalized to all Jamaicans, they demonstrate the potential variety of viewpoints on issues importance to all of them. Like colonial and metropolitan readers, through reading they determined what “Enlightenment” meant to them and took possession of it.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for enacting social relations – mood. A basic distinction is drawn between the systems of formal mood and addressee deference on the one hand and the systems of informal mood, stance and politeness on the other. Subsequently the systems of polarity, modality, participant deference, highlight, comment and expletion are outlined. For each system the relevant choices for meaning are consolidated in system networks and their realisation in structure at clause, group/phrase and word ranks is specified.

This stage of the journey moves to ‘things speakers do with language’ in communication, covering a broad area from the literal-non-literal distinction and approaches to metaphor, through speech acts, ending with the ‘crossroads’ with ethical and social debates, such as those to do with negotiation and joint construction of meaning, questions of accountability and commitment (also in the case of lying and misleading), as well as politeness and appropriateness, including the use of taboo and offensive language. It offers a glimpse of how these topics benefit from an interdisciplinary manner of research and pauses with ample ‘food for thought’ questions on the way.

In this chapter we turn our attention to the role that pragmatics plays in the study of social interaction. When we communicate, we do not simply exchange information. We also manage relationships. As speakers, we can choose to be more or less direct, more or less formal, and more or less attentive to our hearers. The decisions that speakers make are often motivated by concern for how their hearers will react to the utterance, and by the effect that this might then have on the relationship. Perhaps the most influential work in this area of pragmatics is Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness. The first half of this chapter provides an overview of their framework and the politeness strategies that they propose. In the second half of the chapter, we discuss some recent developments that have arisen in response to Brown and Levinson’s work. These include analyses of impoliteness, consideration of how cultural variation might be incorporated into the pragmatics of interaction, and a shift to focus less on politeness and more on a broader notion of the relational work that speakers perform.

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social, interactional, and normative dimensions of language use, while intercultural pragmatics examines how language is used in social interactions between people who have different first languages and are usually considered to represent different cultures. While there are some points of overlap between them, the main aim of intercultural pragmatics is to analyze and theorize how language is used when participants have limited common ground and do not necessarily adhere to L1 preferred ways of speaking. It is thus argued in intercultural pragmatics not only that intercultural encounters are deserving of theorization in their own right, but that theorization in intercultural pragmatics can usefully inform pragmatics more broadly. The aim of this chapter is to consider how research in intercultural pragmatics can inform work in sociopragmatics, and vice versa. Following discussion of the main theoretical foundations of sociopragmatics, a case study examining the openings of first conversations in intercultural settings is used as a springboard to consider the place of sociopragmatics vis-à-vis intercultural pragmatics, and what insights each can bring to the other. The conclusion is that sociopragmatics would benefit from building more explicitly on the important empirical and theoretical insights offered by intercultural pragmatics.