A Critique of Politeness Theories

Abstract

This paper presents a critique of politeness theories. As such, it aims to show the shortcomings and defects of the different theoretical foundations and pragmatic models of politeness. This work is hopefully supposed to be significant for the specialists and analysts in the field of pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and conversational analysis, ethnomethodology and communication studies. On the basis of the results of the criticism, it has been concluded that politeness theories suffer from different shortcomings and problems that lessen their efficiency in the successful analysis of interactive communication. Universalism, for instance, is not well-defined by Brown and Levinsons’ theory. Leech’s model is limited to some speech acts. Besides, his model is not clear whether to cover culture-specific as well as cross-cultural aspects of communication.