Abstract
The past four decades have seen an increasing interest in linguistic (im)politeness, together with a move from the pursuit of politeness universals to a more locally and dynamically defined understanding of (im)politeness. This timely Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the proliferation of models, approaches and applications in the field. Its four parts and 30 chapters introduce the theoretical foundations of (im)politeness research, trace its development trajectories and suggest future directions. The various chapters are well organised and follow a standard structure: introduction, key concepts and theories, critical overview, case study and future directions.
Part I, ‘Foundations’, consists of seven chapters introducing important concepts, theories and perspectives involved in (im)politeness research in order to equip readers with sufficient fundamental knowledge. Chapter 2 introduces classic pragmatic theories and key concepts such as face-threatening acts, (in)directness, implicature and so on, which have laid the foundation for pragmatic approaches to (im)politeness research. Chapter 3 discusses (im)politeness from a socio-cultural perspective, highlighting the roles played by norms, ideologies and values in the evaluation process of (im)politeness. Chapters 4–6 examine the relationships between (im)politeness and ideology, face and power, respectively. The latter three factors exert an influence over both speakers’ (im)politeness strategies and hearers’ evaluations of (im)politeness in communication. Chapter 7 analyses (im)politeness through the lens of indexicality theory, arguing that interactants use various linguistic resources to index their identities, stances, social roles and so on and therefore appear polite or impolite. Chapter 8 distinguishes between ritual and convention according to their relationship with (im)politeness: ritual is constrained by context and has no direct relationship with (im)politeness, while convention is a schematic and normative practice, suggesting that when interactants act in conventional ways their behaviour tends to be positively evaluated.
Part II, ‘Developments’, contains eight chapters that discuss the most recent developments in the field. These include a broadening range of topics such as impoliteness, relationality, emotion and mixed messages, as well as research methods newly employed in (im)politeness research, such as multimodal analysis and corpus linguistics. Chapter 9 describes three waves of the development of impoliteness research: from earlier studies focused on impoliteness strategies and models, followed by a ‘discursive turn’ that focuses on the dynamics of impoliteness, to an interpersonal pragmatics perspective that emphasises the role of interpersonal relationships in the interpretation and effects of impoliteness. Chapters 10–12 investigate how (im)politeness and identity, relationality and emotions, respectively, are related. These chapters correspondingly focus on the processes of how speakers use (im)politeness to construct identities, create relationships and signal emotions. The indexical nature of the (im)politeness involved in these processes is surveyed as well. Chapter 13 explores mixed messages, which may generate either polite or impolite interpersonal effects given a specific context. Chapter 14 conducts a multimodal analysis of (im)politeness by discussing the role of prosody and gesture in the evaluation process. Chapters 15–16 introduce (im)politeness research methodologies, among which experimental research has become more popular at the expense of intuition-based approaches.
Part III, ‘(Im)politeness and variation’, comprises seven chapters that examine diachronic as well as synchronic variation. Chapter 17 introduces historical (im)politeness, an area in which researchers usually focus on how to delineate or interpret (im)politeness about a particular source (e.g. Shakespeare’s plays) or particular genres in certain periods. Chapters 18–19 discuss the relationships between language socialisation and (im)politeness and investigate teaching methods and pedagogical models involved in (im)politeness socialisation. Chapters 20–23 examine synchronic variation in (im)politeness, focusing particularly on the influence of gender, region and culture on the representation and evaluation of (im)politeness.
Part IV, ‘(Im)politeness in specific contexts’, consists of seven chapters that deal with various specific contexts ranging from workplace to digital communication. It argues that research should be situated within a local context to uncover varying aspects of (im)politeness and to discursively address the dynamic progression of (im)polite exchanges. Chapter 24 examines (im)politeness in workplaces where (im)politeness norms vary within specific socio-cultural, institutional and organisational contexts. Chapters 25–26 investigate (im)politeness in service encounters and health settings, where the focus moves to the interactional construction of whole encounters and interactants’ normative expectations of services. Chapters 27–28 explore the complexity of (im)politeness in legal settings and political exchanges, both involving a series of facework strategies covering everything from face enhancement to face aggravation. Chapter 29 presents three themes of (im)politeness research in fictional texts: (im)politeness strategies, (im)politeness and foregrounding and (im)politeness for characterisation and plot development. Chapter 30 discusses (im)politeness in digital communication, arguing that the unique features of various media platforms can have an enormous impact on (im)politeness strategies and effects.
A distinctive organising theme throughout the volume is the common concern with interpersonal interaction, focusing on ‘how language interacts with contexts in the mediation of attitudes, identities and emotions’ (p. 7). The interdisciplinary approach adopted – drawing from communication studies, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and historical linguistics – adds depth and breadth to our understanding of (im)politeness; for example, the chapter on (im)politeness and identity by Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou brings in sociology and identity theory for a richer understanding of the socio-pragmatic features of (im)politeness phenomena involved in individual and social identity construction.
From a methodological point of view, the volume showcases the growing importance of multimodal and corpus approaches. While traditionally (im)politeness studies have focused primarily on verbal data, multimodal aspects such as prosody, gesture and facial expression have increasingly come under scrutiny. A multimodal approach enables us to see how various non-verbal aspects work to create interpersonal meaning, though this should be complemented with a closer look at the interaction of such factors with more complex ones, such as social distance, culture, gender and so on, to understand their cultural variation. Corpus methods, for their part, provide empirical support for many of the theoretical developments in the field of (im)politeness, such as proposed (im)politeness formulae or the meanings of (im)polite metalinguistic expressions.
As the editors acknowledge, the volume’s coverage is not entirely balanced: some topics, such as emotion or ideology, are discussed much more extensively than others, like the relationships between (im)politeness and language aggression and conflict, which might have benefited from a more comprehensive treatment. Nevertheless, it serves as an excellent resource for undergraduate and graduate students interested in learning more about linguistic (im)politeness, for general linguistic researchers exploring new territory and for experienced (im)politeness researchers looking to further extend their research scope.