Evolutionary Stability of Linguistic Politeness and the Politeness Equilibrium Principle

Abstract

Unlike many facets of language – phonology, syntax, semantics or even prag- matics – linguistic politeness (LP) has attracted little attention of evolutionarily minded researchers. We think that this lack of interest – apart from a few isolated attempts (van Rooy, 2003; ̇ Zywiczy ́ nski, 2012; Wacewicz et al., 2015; Pleyer & Pleyer, 2016) is not dictated by a peripheral status of LP for the description of language, and especially for language evolution. LP is a universal characteristic of languages (cf. Brown & Levinson, 1987) but its specific markers are subject to considerable cultural variation, a combination of features that makes it an interest- ing target for evolutionary modeling. Next, LP is first and foremost a set of inter- actional strategies, and hence naturally lends itself to rendering in game-theoretic terms (cf. Quinley, 2011). In this paper, we take a game-theoretic approach and make a case that LP can be subsumed under a more general explanatory principle: disalignment of interests. This is formally expressed as the Politeness Equilibrium Principle (PEP), whereby the more disalignment there is between the interests of Speaker and Hearer, the more LP Speaker needs to use to offset the imbalance. Furthermore, we present a game-theoretic model to show that the use of LP pre- dicated on the PEP forms an evolutionary stable system.