Situated Politeness

Book excerpt: Pragmatic and sociolinguistic analyses of im/politeness have usually been dependent on context and cultural frames of reference. This new study approaches the concept from an original perspective, namely situatedness. Although politeness research often concentrates on examining how speeches or discourses themselves are situated with regards to different places and contexts, the focus on just one situation, and various text types within it, can also be of value. Situated Politeness is concerned with disentangling the factors which govern our behaviour within a given social context as well as across them. A range of expanding disciplines, including corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, are brought to bear on the topic, and this work will be of interest to a diverse global audience.