Politeness Metapragmatics: Inductive Research, Multimodality and Critical Theory (Advances in (Im)politeness Studies)

By: Lucien Brown and Soung-U Kim

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Synopsis: This volume demonstrates how inductive research into speakers’ metapragmatic knowledge offers a path for researching what politeness means for language users and how this reshapes politeness theory. Through bottom-up analysis of interview data collected from Korean speakers from two generations, the authors map out a participant-oriented perspective on politeness and use these findings to build new theoretical models. The results shows that politeness is a multimodal practice tied up with maintaining emotional attunement and engaging in acts of upkeeping or contesting social conventions. The book features a thorough overview of extant research in the field, three in-depth data analysis chapters and a detailed discussion of the results. By focusing on the culture-specific and empirically grounded ways that language users understand politeness, the book contributes to current trends in im/politeness research, notably “third wave” approaches that view politeness as a culturally embedded social action. Moreover, the book lays the groundwork for researching metapragmatics via interview data that can be applied to other languages and aspects of pragmatics. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of politeness research, pragmatics, linguistics and cultural studies.