Introduction to Politeness and Impoliteness Research in Global Contexts

Abstract

Im/politeness research has been a solid and growing research field in sociolinguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis during the last four decades. The scientific interest in this topic is not accidental and may be explained by the general pragmatic turn of modern interdisciplinary linguistic studies which are not focused on language as an abstract system, but on its functioning in various contexts and types of interaction. Knowledge of the strategies and politeness mechanisms used in various social and cultural contexts promotes mutual understanding in communication. In this introduction to the special issue on im/politeness in global contexts we will briefly position the topic of im/politeness research, and highlight advancements in im/politeness theory, method and data. We then turn to a brief synopsis of each individual paper and highlight the theoretical and methodological contributions and innovations proposed by our authors. We end with a discussion of the results and a brief outlook on future research.

Cultural Values and Norms of Communication: A View From the Middle East

“…In numerous studies, it has been disclosed that politeness is a concept, constructed on the base of culture [Watts 2003, p. 70, Haugh & Chang, 2019, Locher & Larina, 2019, Tzanne & Sifianou, 2019. In contrary to universal nature of politeness, there are different understandings and norms of politeness among cultures.…”

Politeness Strategies in Response to Request in British and Persian Family Discourse

“…It also involves the appropriate linguistic selection according to a specific and fixed social as well as situational context (Noviani, 2014). One of the main problems of communication is caused by the fact that understanding of politeness as well as norms of politeness vary across cultures (see Blum-Kulka 1989&1992, Hickey & Stewart 2005, Larina 2008& 2015, Locher & Larina 2019, Mugford 2020, Pizziconi 2003, Sifianou 1992, Tzanne & Sifianou 2019, Watts 2003 among many others).…”

Norm And Uzus In The Theory Of Media Discourse

“…Any discourse, including a media discourse, is situationally determined by a combination of not only social and pragmatic, but also cultural factors, so the task of the article is to analyze the cultural component in terms of politeness theory (Locher & Larina, 2019;Stepykin, 2014).…”