politeness in English

English has no second person contrast of any kind, so the grammatical question a politeness system answers cannot be posed in the language. One pronoun addresses a stranger and an intimate, a superior and a child, one person and a crowd. No verb form varies with the standing of the addressee, no noun takes an honorific affix, and no agreement anywhere in the clause registers the relation between the people speaking. This is the most complete absence among the twenty-one records filed here, and it is the sharpest divergence from a language that forces every speaker to choose a form of address in nearly every clause and to keep choosing it consistently through a conversation.

The contrast existed and was lost, which is worth recording because it shows the shape of the hole. Earlier stages of the language kept a familiar singular against a plural that doubled as a respectful singular, the pattern many neighbouring languages still keep. The familiar form dropped out of general use by around the start of the eighteenth century, the respectful form generalised to every addressee, and no replacement contrast arose. What survives is frozen in a few liturgical and archaic registers and is no longer productive.

What the language does instead is not a grammatical system and is not recorded as one. Politeness is carried by choosing a modal, by adding please, by asking a question where a command would do, by hedging, and by address terms such as titles and honorific nouns. Every one of those is optional, gradient, stackable and open ended, and none is required by any grammatical rule. A system of this kind consists in a closed set of forms one of which must be selected; English offers a large open set of strategies none of which must be. The absence recorded here is an assertion about the language and not a gap in the description of it, and no obligatoriness is recorded because a denied dimension has nothing to be obligatory about.