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.

Indirectness has traditionally been viewed as commensurate with politeness and attributed to the speaker’s wish to avoid imposition and/or otherwise strategically manipulate the addressee. Despite these theoretical predictions, a number of studies have documented the solidarity-building and identity-constituting functions of indirectness. Bringing these studies together, Terkourafi 2014 proposed an expanded view of the functions of indirect speech, which crucially emphasizes the role of the addressee and the importance of network ties. This article focuses on what happens when such network ties become loosened, as a result of processes of urbanization and globalization. Drawing on examples from African American English and Chinese, it is argued that these processes produce a need for increased explicitness, which drives speakers (and listeners) away from indirectness. This claim is further supported diachronically, by changes in British English politeness that coincide with the rise of the individual Self. These empirical findings have implications for im/politeness theorizing and theory-building more generally, calling attention to how the socio-historical context of our research necessarily influences the theories we end up building.

The article is devoted to speakers’ responses to inappropriate communicative behavior in Russian everyday communication. The analytic part of the article presents a short review of both classical and modern works on (im)politeness theories, which show that communicative strategies in response to the wrong communicative behavior in a particular context have not been investigated and described sufficiently in modern Politeness theories, investigating face-aggravating communication. The aim of this work is to describe a strategy that we define as “pedagogical aggression”, which manifests itself in a variation of impolite answers whose purpose is to “punish” the interlocutor for a communicative error. This strategy is in contrast to what we call “empathy” strategy since - instead of trying to neutralize the interlocutor’s error - “pedagogical aggression” emphasizes it by “teaching” the addressee to be more considerate in adhering to norms. The material for the research was collected in the Russian National Corpus and analysed by drawing on discourse analysis, pragmatics and (im)politeness theories. The study showed that “pedagogical aggression” is realized in three face-aggravating communicative tactics: (1) a pseudo-question (rhetorical question or a question to the assumptions of an interlocutor), 2) mocking citations from interlocutor’s speech, 3) rhymed pseudo-answers. The last tactic was given special attention in the study. We grouped the pseudo-answers in four types corresponding to typical discourse situation. This tactic is based on an unspoken rule, according to which it is permissible to point out in a playful way a communicative error made by the interlocutor. In response to an inappropriate question with this or that interrogative pronoun (where, who, why, etc.), the speaker can allow himself or herself to “punish” the interlocutor with a pseudo-answer, so that he or she will be more careful, more attentive and will not repeat such mistakes. The considered tactic of rhymed pseudo-response is rooted in language with the help of formulaic phrases. The research contributes to (im)politeness theory and the study of communicative interaction.

Interest in non-academic ways of understanding of im/politeness has so far been evident primarily in analyses of the sequential development of real-life interactions. However, understandings of im/politeness can be found in other sources such as related articles in on-line newspapers and their ensuing comments. The main aim of this paper is to contribute to this rather neglected area in im/politeness research, thus placing emphasis on the underexplored societal rather than individual level of im/politeness. The data to be investigated comes from two on-line articles and the comments they received. The articles appeared in a popular Greek free press on-line newspaper, LIFO, in 2014 and 2017 and were written by the same journalist. Both articles and ensuing comments express lay understandings of impoliteness and are discussed in the paper in terms of van Dijk’s (1998, 2006a, b) ideological discourse analysis and ‘ideological square’ that revolves around positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. In exploring understandings of impoliteness in this context, we identified two emerging social identities, those of ‘polite’ and ‘impolite citizen’, dynamically co-constructed as binary opposites by the journalist and posters involved. Despite the fact that on-line newspaper articles and their accompanying comments reflect stereotypical thinking, they also depict pervasive views and are worth exploring because they concern the societal level of im/politeness.

The present paper explores disagreement and impoliteness in a WhatsApp interaction within a Spanish family that took place during the 2018 International Women’s Day. The conversation is linguistically examined using categories of disagreement strategies proposed by previous authors (Pomerantz 1984, Brown and Levinson 1987, Rees-Miller 2000, Locher 2004, Kreutel 2007, Malamed 2010, Shum and Lee 2013). Furthermore, multimodal analysis (Dresner and Herring 2010, 2013, Jewitt 2013, Bourlai and Herring 2014; Herring 2015) is used to consider not only participants’ linguistic strategies for expressing disagreement, but also the function of multimedia elements and emojis (Dresner and Herring 2010, 2013, Yus 2014, 2017, Sampietro 2016a, 2016b, Aull 2019). The analysis is followed by an interview to better understand the participants’ communicative intentions towards disagreements in relation to (im)politeness. A total of 427 instances of disagreement are identified, with the most common strategies being giving opposite opinions and emotional or personal reasons. This is to be expected since the group is divided from the very beginning into detractors and supporters of feminism, and they are also defending their opposite viewpoints by giving examples from their own life experience. Based on the participants’ opinions, the most significant result is the fact that, although disagreement may lead to face-threat, and thus impoliteness in other contexts (Langlotz and Locher 2012, Sifianou 2012, Shum and Lee 2013), in this WhatsApp interaction, the Spanish family members did not consider it to be impolite, and it is even evaluated in positive terms by some of the participants (Angouri and Locher 2012).