Anthropological Foundations of the Language Resources to Recognize Personhood

Abstract

Based on the notion of politeness as revisited by Edda Weigand, this essay studies the demands to which the person’s image or face must respond in order to make true what is said about the interaction between people. The humanist nature of this revisitation reveals the complexity of such a self-image, thus opening up a rich anthropological horizon. With the intermediation of fundamental rhetoric, we read politeness theory through the lens of the resources of care philosophy: primarily the human meaning of what Brown and Levinson call ‘heedfulness’, which they place at the center of their study.