Terkourafi (e.g. 2001) is certainly not the first, or indeed only, scholar to have related politeness to the notion of a (cognitive) “frame” (Watts 2003; Locher 2004; and Locher and Watts 2005 do likewise). However, Terkourafi produces the most elaborate account of the frame-based approach to politeness, anchoring it in pragmatic theory. For this reason.

Terkourafi argues that we should analyze the concrete linguistic realizations (i.e. formulae) and particular contexts of use which co-constitute “frames”. This avoids problematic notions like directness. Moreover, “[i]t is the regular co-occurrence of particular types of context and particular linguistic expressions as the unchallenged realizations of particular acts that create the perception of politeness” (2005a: 248; see also 2005b: 213; our emphasis). It is through this regularity of co-occurrence that we acquire “a knowledge of which expressions to use in which situations” (2002: 197), that is, “experientially acquired structures of anticipated ‘default’ behavior” (ibid.). Note that we are tapping into experiential norms, and also that we are dealing with anticipated politeness. The fact that the expressions are not only regularly associated with a particular context but also go unchallenged is an important point. This feature seems to be similar to Haugh’s point that evidence of politeness can be found in, amongst other things, “the reciprocation of concern evident in the adjacent placement of expressions of concern relevant to the norms in both in that particular interaction” (2007b: 312). That we are dealing with regularities means that we can deploy quantitative as well as qualitative methodologies (a simplistic quantitative methodology, such as counting up a particular form, is not possible, however, as we must count up forms in particular contexts that are unchallenged).

Of course, it is not the case that such conventionalized formulae – the stuff of anticipated politeness – constitute the only way politeness is conveyed and understood. Terkourafi (e.g. 2001, 2005b) develops neo-Gricean pragmatics to account for more implicational/inferential modes. Hitherto, standard, classical Gricean accounts of politeness (e.g. Leech 1983) have made no explicit connection with generalized implicatures, instead discussing politeness in terms of the recovery of the speaker’s intentions in deviating from Gricean cooperativeness on a particular occasion (i.e. in terms of particularized implicatures). In the introduction to their second edition, Brown and Levinson (1987: 6–7) concede that they may have underplayed the role of generalized conversational implicatures. Terkourafi , in contrast, argues that, while politeness can involve full inferencing in a nonce context, what lies at its heart is a generalized implicature, that is, a level of meaning between particularized implicatures and fully conventionalized (non-defeasible) implicatures (cf. Levinson’s utterance-type meaning. More specifically, she argues that generalized implicatures arise from situations where the implicature is weakly context-dependent, requiring a minimal amount of contextual information relating to the social context of use in which the utterance was routinized and thus conventionalized to some degree. Her argument is neatly summarized here (Terkourafi 2005a: 251, original emphasis):

Politeness is achieved on the basis of a generalized implicature when an expression x is uttered in a context with which – based on the addressee’s previous experience of similar contexts – expression x regularly co-occurs. In this case, rather than engaging in full-blown inferencing about the speaker’s intention, the addressee draws on that previous experience (represented holistically as a frame) to derive the proposition that “in offering expression x the speaker is being polite” as a generalized implicature of the speaker’s utterance. On the basis of this generalized implicature, the addressee may then come to hold the further belief that the speaker is polite.

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