Abstract
The “politeness principle” was coined even before Stephen Curtis Levinson established pragmatics as a linguistic academic field in the early 1980s. However, other relevant works concerning pragmatics were published as early as the 1930s, for example, by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), Charles William Morris (1901-1979) and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1915-1975). On the other hand, there is a common knowledge that Brown & Levinson (1978; 1987) originated the idea of the politeness principle because of the importance of their linguistic politeness studies. Though the 1973 paper by Robin Tolmach Lakoff, “The logic of politeness: Or, minding your p’s and q’s,” can be considered the “birth certificate” of the politeness principle as a linguistic domain, it is often ignored even in specialized papers or books. Based on a 1967 work by Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988) on the rules of conversation, an as yet unpublished manuscript, Lakoff (1973) summed up the politeness expressions into three rules. Nevertheless, the grammarians and linguists of Asian languages were always particularly interested in describing their relevant expressions and address forms. In 1944, Hsien Chin Hu (Columbia University, New York City) published a pioneering paper concerning “The Chinese Concepts of ‘Face’,” anticipating by 11 years the theory of face in Erving Goffman’s paper “On Face-Work; An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction”. 17th-century European grammarians and lexicographers of the Japanese and Vietnamese languages had also aimed to describe the linguistic social relationships’ regulations. In this paper, we study the approaches which three early European grammarians and lexicographers developed to account for the politeness principle in Japanese and Vietnamese in the 17th century, namely João Rodrigues ‘Tçuzu’, S. J. (1562-1633), Diego Collado, O.P. (late 16th century-1638) and Alexandre de Rhodes, S. J. (1593-1660), and their contribution to present-day linguistics.