This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is communicative altruism. Leech's 1983 book, Principles of Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness; this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms 'polite' or 'impolite' to linguistic phenomena. Leech covers all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony ("mock politeness") and banter ("mock impoliteness"), and with the role of politeness in the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look at more than a thousand years of history of politeness in the English language.

This book studies the principles for constructing polite speeches, based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures.

While research into intercultural teaching has grown exponentially during the past two decades, the research has primarily resorted to the use of quantitative data collection instruments and the interpretation of scores calculated through them. As such, studies in the field can seem somewhat decontextualized, ignoring in some cases setting-specific parameters. Therefore, further study is needed to bring together theory, research, and practice demonstrating how this teaching is reflected in research design and how it is undertaken in different settings. Intercultural Foreign Language Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Contexts is an essential reference source that provides a series of rich insights into the way intercultural education is practiced in numerous international contexts and showcases practical examples of teaching situations and classroom activities that demonstrate its impact within the classroom. Featuring research on topics such as higher education, multilingualism, and professionalism, this book is ideally designed for educators, researchers, administrators, professionals, academicians, and students seeking pedagogical guidance on intercultural teaching.

Politeness as practised across 22 European societies, firmly set within critical debates developed since the 1980s, is here presented in ways related to concrete situations in which language-users interact with one another to achieve their goals. Areas covered include types of politeness, forms of address, negotiation and small-talk in various contexts.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,7, Saarland University, language: English, abstract: The following term paper deals with Leech’s Politeness Principle and the Maxims of Politeness, especially with its appliance on children’s books. I think it is a quite interesting theme to analyse children’s books according to politeness. At a first step I would like to show the coherence between the Politeness Principle and Gricean’s Cooperative Principle, and to show problems with the CP. Next I want to give a short overview about positive and negative politeness and about the Politeness Principle itself. After that I would like to point out the six main maxims: Tact Maxim, Generosity Maxim, Approbation Maxim, Modesty Maxim, Agreement Maxim, and Sympathy Maxim. Further I also want to give a short overview about the Miscellaneous Principles: Consideration, Irony and Banter. After explaining the maxims I would like to find examples, where these maxims are broken. The resource for these examples is Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In a last step I want to give a short summary about how analysing the book functioned and whether Leech’s Maxims can be adapt to children’s books.