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

Illustrates the latest trends in politeness research from a multilingual and multicultural perspective, through the application of diverse methodologies.

Eva Ogiermann (Edited by), Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Edited by)

9781107198050, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2019

346 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2 cm, 0.67 kg

'… From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness is a completely coherent volume that provides new insights into SA realization and the metapragmatics of face-threat and (im)politeness. Adopting a cross-cultural and cross-varietal perspective, it will appeal to politeness scholars, of course, but also to researchers interested in empirical and corpus-based pragmatics and willing to privilege data triangulation in their investigations.' Nicolas Ruytenbeek, LINGUIST List

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.

Im/politeness between the analyst and participant perspectives – an overview of the field Eva Ogiermann and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich
Part I. Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Speech Acts: 1. Offers in Greek revisited Spyridoula Bella
2. Politeness, praising and identity construction in a Greek food blog Angeliki Tzanne
3. Online compliments of Iranian Facebook users Zohreh R. Eslami, Nasser Jabbari and Li-Jen Kuo
4. Qué Perfección: complimenting behaviour among Ecuadorian teenage girls on Instagram María Elena Placencia
5. Not all positive: on the landscape of thanking items in Cypriot Greek Spyros Armostis and Marina Terkourafi
6. Researching im/politeness in face-to-face interactions: on disagreements in Polish homes Eva Ogiermann
Part II. Concepts and Cultural Norms Underlying Politeness: 7. Notions of politeness in Britain and America Jonathan Culpeper, Jim O'Driscoll and Claire Hardaker
8. The metapragmatics of consideration in (Australian and New Zealand) English Michael Haugh
9. A metapragmatic aspect of politeness: with a special emphasis on attentiveness in Japanese Saeko Fukushima
10. Discussions on Swiss and German politeness in online sources Miriam A. Locher and Martin Luginbühl
11. Globalisation and politeness – a Chinese perspective Daniel Kádár and Yongping Ran
12. Emic conceptualizations of face (Imagen) in Peninsular Spanish Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Patricia Bou-Franch
Epilogue: personal encounters with politeness research Peter Trudgill.

Subject Areas: Sociolinguistics [CFB]