Introducing English Linguistics

bravest
young Americans wasted. 
(February 11, 2007)
While Obama adheres to the Generosity Maxim by describing the soldiers
as “the bravest young Americans,” he simultaneously violates it by describ-
ing their efforts as “wasted.”
Leech (1983) proposes other maxims of politeness, but his approach rais-
es an important issue, summarized below in one of Brown and Levinson’s
(1987: 4) criticisms of Leech’s maxims of politeness:
if we are permitted to invent a maxim for every regularity in language
use, not only will we have an infinite number of maxims, but pragmatic
theory will be too unconstrained to permit recognition of any counter-
examples.
In other words, if one encounters examples that do not fit into existent
maxims, one simply invents a new maxim. As noted in an earlier section,
a similar criticism was leveled against Grice’s four maxims of the cooper-
ative principle.
The discussion so far in this chapter has focused on a series of pragmatic
principles – speech acts, the cooperative principle, and politeness – and
how these principles determine how people speak in various communica-
tive contexts. Language use of this nature is characterized by James Milroy
and Lesley Milroy (1997: 50) as “contextual style ... the speaker’s relationship
to the resources of language and of the situational context in which the
speaker finds himself at different times.” Other variation, however, is
more inherent to speakers themselves. For instance, while the form Could
you please pass the salt is more polite than Pass the salt, it is also the case that
studies have shown that females tend to use polite linguistic forms more
frequently than males. Gender is thus one of a number of