POLITENESS, RELEVANCE, AND GOAL-CONCILIATION: AN ANALYSIS OF “CAN YOU PASS THE SALT?”

Abstract Based on Rauen’s goal-conciliation theory, Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, we model in this essay the utterance “Can you pass the salt?”-taken as a classic example of a polite request between politeness theorists-assuming the mobilization of a polite or attenuated speech act contributes to the accomplishment of practical goals. Next, we discuss the modeling considering some criticisms produced by second-wave politeness studies and politeness relevance-theoretic studies. We conclude that politeness aspects are part of intentional action plans, affecting the design of the lowest level practical goal superordinating the respective informative and communicative subgoals. We claim the speaker defines-in the scope of that lower-level practical goal-the speech-act, the politeness super-strategy, and the formulation of the polite utterance considering a palette of linguistic possibilities.