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

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.

Eva Ogiermann is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics at King's College London. Her research interests focus on pragmatics, politeness and social interaction and revolve around the question of culture-specificity of language use. She is associate editor of the Journal of Pragmatics.
Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is interested in aggression and conflict, im/politeness models, genre theory, identity construction, and traditional and social media. She is co-editor in chief of the Journal of Language of Aggression and Conflict.