Introduction to Politeness and Impoliteness Research in Global Contexts

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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.

About the authors

Miriam A Locher

University of Basel

Email: Miriam.locher@unibas.ch
Professor of the Linguistics of English at the University of Basel Nadelberg 6, 4051 Basel, Switzerland

Tatiana V Larina

RUDN University (Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia)

Email: larina-tv@rudn.ru
Full Professor at RUDN University, the Editor-in-Chief of the Russian Journal of Linguistics 6 Miklukho-Maklaya str., 117198 Moscow, Russian Federation

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