Implications of Politeness and Culture

Communication plays a crucial role in human life, and politeness is an important part of speech communication. Therefore, politeness has received much scholarly attention, and many theories of politeness have been developed. Among them, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory stands out and has been widely cited because of its formularization of the relationship between social factors (distance, power, and task imposition) and politeness weightiness perception, and its potentially universal applicability. In fact, Brown and Levinson were the first to attempt to describe a politeness theory in mathematical form. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.