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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1421

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Handicap Principle? Your Mother's Handicapped! Towards a Rebuttal of the Game-Theoretic Treatment of Politeness in Van Rooy's (2003)

Authors: Quinley, Jason Cecil
Submitted by: Quinley, Jason Cecil (University of Tuebingen, Germany)

Any conversation on the principles separating pragmatic reasoning from semantics is that pragmatic implicatures require a level of rationality and strategic interaction beyond the denotational meaning of an utterance. Game-theoretic approaches like Jaeger (2007), Franke (2009), and Van Rooij (2004) have given traditional Gricean theories of implicatures a more rigorous mathematical grounding in strategic reasoning and rationality. Nowhere is the use of strategy in pragmatics more evident than in politeness.

Van Rooy(2003) treats politeness as an artifact of the Zahavi’s Handicap Principle(1975), which says that costly signaling over time in mating populations with diverging interests indicates honest communication. E.g. the peacock’s showy tail is an example of a costly signal that indicates a male more likely to be fit, as any of his potential big-tailed forebears who were not fit would have been eliminated from the population. In parallel, females who mated with these showy, fit males were more likely to have healthy young and pass on their own genes.

Three questions arise: 1) Is politeness costly in the same way that a flashy tail is? 2) Do populations of those requesting favors and those granting favors have parallel profiles to males and females and 3) Can the Handicap Principle be used for impoliteness as well?

Van Rooy(2003) argues that polite utterances typically are longer than their unmarked counterparts, and that this is the source of their costs to the speaker. However, even considering status as a commodity at risk, polite speech can elevate the status of the speaker depending on those surrounding him and typically doesn’t require an investment of the type required to grow and carry a larger tail.

On a superficial glance, those granting favors are trading in a limited commodity, much like females who can only mate with one male at a time. Further, those asking for help are more at liberty to solicit multiple parties. This analysis, however, imposes a static asymmetry on the population in question. It may be the case that today’s beggar is tomorrow’s benefactor. A partial resolution, pointed out in Pinker, Nowak, and Lee (2008), is that there are three basic relationship paradigms (dominance, reciprocity, and communality), each profiled with a corresponding two-player game in the economic literature. These different relationship types mandate different types of politeness strategies, something more apparent in languages with T-V forms of address like German or French.

Addressing others within a communality framework sheds light on the last question. Aren’t speech acts like “Hey dickbag!” and “Y’anna giddon outta hiya?” more inherently costly towards a hearer’s respective positive or negative face (Brown and Levinson, 1978) than so-called polite utterances. These arise precisely because social groups, especially those perceiving themselves as marginalized, have an interest in preventing interlopers or defectors. This provides for the costs of membership, much like the Handicap Principle, in being a member of the group and is also linked to language’s role in facilitating eusociality (Wilson, 2011).