From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness : Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives

An up-to-date survey of im/politeness research from both a multilingual and a multicultural perspective, in which a diverse range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies are applied to the study of politeness. Aimed at scholars and students in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, interactional linguistics and linguistic anthropology, among others.

Taking an up-to-date and truly global approach, this volume presents a wide range of phenomena in politeness research, and discusses key developments in the field. Covering eight major world languages as well as several language varieties, a team of leading scholars provide a multilingual and multicultural perspective on various speech acts and emic conceptualisations of politeness, and a diachronic view of the field. Most significantly, the volume focuses on the latest trends in the field, such as metapragmatic approaches to im/politeness, politeness and globalization, politeness in computer mediated communication, and politeness and prosody, spanning a wide range of methodologies and types of data, including naturally occurring conversations, role plays, email messages, social media, online discussion forums, ethnographic interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, experiments and language corpora.