© 2022, CAJLPC, Central Asian Studies, All Rights Reserved 66 66 Copyright (c) 2022 Author (s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ CENTRAL ASIAN JOURNAL OF LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE Volume: 03 Issue: 06 Jun 2022 On Linguistic Politeness Theory: Robin Lakoff’s Theory of Politeness, Brown and Levinson’s Theory of Politeness, Geoffrey Leech’s Theory of Politeness Ruziyeva Nilufar Xafizovna An assistant teacher, Bukhara State University nilufarruziyeva7@gmail.com Received 19 th Apr 2022, Accepted 15 th May 2022, Online 8 th Jun 2022 ANNOTATION Linguistic politeness has occupied a central place in the social study of language; even it has been the subject of intensive debate in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. A lot of linguistic scholars have carried out studies on linguistic politeness in a wide range of cultures. As a result, several theories have been proposed on linguistic politeness and have been established as scholarly concept. The major aim of this paper is to review the literature on linguistic politeness as a technical term. It will present some of the most widely used models of linguistic politeness in literature. It also tries to gloss the basic tenets of different theoretical approaches, the distinctive features of one theory versus another. There are some concepts of politeness that will become the subject of discussion of this article. These concepts are proposed by (1) Robin Lakoff, (2) Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson (3) Geoffrey Leech. KEYWORDS: politeness principle, Gricean maxims, Brown Levinson‟s theory of politeness, Lakoff‟s pragmatic competence, a face-threatening act, Leech‟s theory of politeness, a universal Model Person, Leech‟s central model of PP. Introduction We usually know for certain with what we mean when we describe someone‟s behavior as polite. Our usual way of describing it is by giving examples of behavior, which we consider polite. For example, people behave politely when they show respect towards their superiors; they are always helpful; they speak really well or they use polite language etc. In English, polite language may be characterized by the use of indirect speech, the use of respectful forms of address systems like, Sir, Madam, or the use of formulaic utterances like, please, excuse me, sorry, thank you, etc. Robin Lakoff’s Theory of Politeness Robin Lakoff was associated in the late 1960s with the development of a semantic based model of generative grammar commonly refer to as „generative semantics‟ and with the possible integration of speech act theory into generative models of language. The positive impact of Grice‟s cooperative principle has shifted Lakoff‟s