Uncorrected proofs -  John Benjamins Publishing Company TSL[v.20020404] Prn:24/03/2005; 13:17 F: PB13903.tex / p.1 (65) Whither politeness Bruce Fraser The paper addresses a number of questions raised by Brown and Levinson model of politeness, questions such as Is politeness communicated? What is the status of a politeness principle? What is the relationship between deference and politeness? Should a theory of politeness be extended to impoliteness? What is the status of politeness strategies? Is the notion of face universal? What is the status of Wx? These raise but a few of the important questions to be asked in pursuit of an understanding of what linguistic politeness is, how it is used, what factors influence a speaker’s choice to be heard as polite and what sort of a model is maximally useful. Optimists take the position that if we continue to work on the problem, we can expect to arrive at a serious theory of politeness, necessarily somewhat different from the existing model. Pessimists, on the other hand, take the position that while we all know polite behavior when we see it, we will never be able to speak definitively about it. I am an optimist. Keywords: Politeness; challenges; status; future . Introduction 1 The initial publication of Politeness: Some Universals of Language Usage (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987) 2 some 25 years ago provided focus to the area of lin- guistic politeness and subsequently gave rise to an extraordinarily large number of articles and several books on politeness. Indeed, a bibliography edited by DuFon et al. which appeared in the Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 21 in 1994 listed more than 900 articles and books, most of them after 1978 (DuFon et al. 1994), and in the past five years the number has increased by several hundred. Yet, as we might expect, all is not settled in the domain of linguistic politeness. Several alternate models have been suggested, and the original model, not al- tered in the second edition (Brown & Levinson 1987), has been challenged on almost every aspect. It is my purpose in this paper to identify some of the