Corpus linguistic methods provide new avenues for (im)politeness scholarship to reflexively evaluate its understanding of communication and language use on the theoretical contributions of corpus linguistics to the linguistic sciences. In this sense, this volume is a unique contribution to (im)politeness scholarship. It showcases studies in the field which employ specialized and general corpora, with methodologies that range from the speech act to the discourse-analytic and conversation-analytic traditions. The book brings into closer contact scholarship that has hitherto remained in relatively different streams of the scientific investigation of (im)politeness.
A unifying theme of the chapters here is that (im)politeness phenomena are situated within the institutional and genre-specific expectations of participants in an interaction. Each of the chapters identifies the situatedness of (im)politeness from varying perspectives. The chapters in the volume are sequenced from specialized to general corpora, and simultaneously move from conversation – and discourse – analytic perspectives to contributions that address issues surrounding the identification and extraction of (im)politeness in general corpora. In collating the chapters of the volume, care was taken to focus attention on languages that have been studied extensively in (im)politeness scholarship (varieties of English – British English and Englishes in Hong Kong – and Greek), and languages that are only recently gaining more visibility in the field (Slovenian and Turkish).
