This chapter focuses on the use of clichés for negotiating interpersonal relationships in organisational spoken discourse. The chapter conceptualises clichés as im/politeness strategies in the expression and management of evaluative meanings regarding an interactant either directly or indirectly. The study of clichés as interpersonal devices as explored in this chapter encompasses a multidimensional investigation co-deploying two complementary approaches: a systemic functional approach, utilising the appraisal framework, and socio-pragmatic approaches, namely im/politeness and face theory. These are applied to spoken data collected in an organisational setting. The findings demonstrate that, given their reliance on socially shared knowledge as carried by their formulaic nature, clichés allow the conveyance of evaluation of people or situations whilst also enhancing or mitigating the impact of such evaluation on facework.

The chapter uses the dialogues of Roman comedy (Plautus, Terence) to examine the correlation between the characters’ perception of im/politeness and the practice of interrupting. By adopting the methods of Conversation Analysis, the study sets out criteria to distinguish interruptions from other non-hostile or non-salient types of interventions in a dramatic text without explicit stage directions. According to the main argument, proper interruptions – just like impolite behaviour – are constructed interactionally and their identification depends on how the affected party reacts to someone invading their speaking turn. The analysis of face work in various types of turn-taking incidents, either collaborative or disruptive and antagonistic, helps to justify why given talk is not handled as an interruption. After comparing some qualitative and quantitative data, the chapter shows that there are many examples of face-threatening and hostile interventions in the comedy corpus that cannot be analysed as interruptions but rather should be associated with the type of interaction (e.g. conflictual talk) or the speaker’s dominant position within.

This chapter examines Varro’s depictions of teasing and banter in his dialogue De Re Rustica, with particular reference to issues of im/politeness. In many cases, this banter involves some kind of provocation of the addressee, and so risks being construed as impolite. In most instances, however, the witty phrasing conveys a playful intent, which ensures that the remark does not cause offence. The end result is usually heightened rapport among the participants. In several cases Varro’s teasing involves ‘collaborative’ banter, in which both participants contribute to the construction of a playful conceit. In other instances, however, the teasing quips are one-sided, with no response reported. In such cases the emphasis seems to be on the display of quick-witted inventiveness for its own sake. This energetic interaction differs from the highly conventionalized language of social negotiation typically used by the Roman elite. Indeed, it is significant that Cicero’s real-life epistolary relationship with Varro was marked by a degree of formality that eschewed the use of banter. In this respect, the right to tease was one extended only to a privileged sub-set of personal acquaintances

This chapter has two core aims: first, it argues that a ‘discursive’ approach to im/politeness, which foregrounds interactants’ own (emic) evaluations of the (in)appropriateness of language as they arise in discourse, is needed to properly capture the nuances of social interaction in Greek and Roman literature. Second, it seeks to demonstrate the utility of Conversation Analysis in approaching this emic perspective. The chapter sets out from various passages in Greek tragedy in which speakers explicitly comment on the inappropriateness of their interlocutors’ language (metapragmatic comments), and shows that such comments regularly coincide with disruptions of regular conversational sequencing. The chapter then offers an extensive analysis of the herald scene in Euripides’ Supplices, a passage rich in metapragmatic commentary. Theseus’ principal concern in that scene, it is argued, is the correct procedural conduct of inter-polis diplomacy, rather than any putative personal face wants. Accordingly, expressions traditionally interpreted as politeness formulae should in this scene be seen as procedural rather than face-oriented devices.

Metapragmatic comments, that is, comments that reflect the understandings of speakers or lay observers regarding the ways and aims for which the language is used, are one of the main means of access to native ideas on im/politeness in corpus languages. This chapter analyses the metapragmatic comments on im/politeness that can be identified in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, as a mean to understand the Roman conceptions of im/politeness (that is, the emic perspective of this phenomenon), and the social and moral order underlying those conceptions. This approach facilitates a more detailed and integrated analysis of the speaker’s intentions and/or the interpretation of a particular utterance as polite (or impolite or overpolite) by the addressee, whether or not there are linguistic markers to indicate this intention.