Volume 11, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Tenth Anniversary Issue

This issue marks the 10 th year anniversary of the Journal of Politeness Research: Language, behaviour, culture . Ten years ago, founding Editor-in-Chief Christine Christie established the journal as an “international and multidisciplinary forum for research into linguistic and non-linguistic politeness phenomena” (Christie 2005: 1). Under her editorial guidance, the journal published a great number of papers which embodied this founding principle. In 2010, Derek Bousfield and Karen Grainger took over the editorship and in 2013 Karen Grainger became the sole Editor-in-Chief, and the Journal of Politeness Research has grown and matured further under the stewardship of Bousfield and Grainger. Today, with the invaluable contributions of authors and reviewers, and the continuous support of the journal’s readership, editorial team and advisory board, the journal remains a flagship for and a pioneer of research into all kinds of politeness phenomena. To celebrate this 10 th year anniversary, it is worth reviewing in detail what has been achieved so far, and to take a look at promising future developments of politeness research.

This paper aims to provide an exemplification of the way that the discursive approach can work in relation to the analysis of data. As such, it argues for the validity of the discursive approach to politeness. Because the discursive approach has been seen as difficult to employ in the analysis of data, in recent years, there has been a proliferation of research returning to Brown and Levinson’s approach. Although discursive approaches to politeness have functioned successfully as a critique of Brown and Levinson’s work, they are not seen as a means of analyzing politeness and impoliteness in their own right. By tracing the development of the discursive approach to politeness, and by addressing the critiques that there have been, we argue that although the critical role of the discursive approach is paramount to the development of the field, discursive approaches are more than just a critique, and should be seen as constituting an approach to the analysis of politeness as well. As a case in point, we illustrate what a discursive approach consists of through analyzing an intercultural interaction between a group of close friends of Dutch and Italian origin.

It is now well recognized that the recipients’ evaluations need to be given serious consideration when theorizing impoliteness. Yet despite the importance placed on evaluations by recipients, the role of the recipient in interaction has been reduced through theorizing within the field to the ascribing of (perceived) intentions or interpreting of (perceived) social norms and expectations. We suggest, in this paper, that this under-theorizes the role of the recipient vis-à-vis evaluations of impoliteness. Building on an account of (im)politeness as social practice (Haugh 2013b, 2015; Kádár and Haugh 2013), we argue that evaluations of impoliteness inevitably involve those recipients construing the speaker’s action as a particular kind of social action, and holding them accountable for that particular kind of social action with respect to particular dimension(s) of the moral order (Haugh 2013a, 2015). The accountability of social action is underpinned, in part, by the presumed agency of participants. Agency involves the socially mediated capacity to act that is afforded through 1. knowing one has the ability to act, 2. knowing that these actions may affect others (and self), and 3. knowing that one will thus be held accountable for those actions (Ahearn 2001; Duranti 2004; Mitchell forthcoming). We argue that a focus on agency in theorizing impoliteness allows for the ways in which recipients do not just simply invoke social norms or (in some cases at least) perceived speaker intentions in evaluating talk or conduct as impolite, but may also exercise their own agency in construing the speaker’s actions as a particular kind of action, and thus as offensive or not. It is concluded that the agency exercised by recipients with respect to the degree to which they hold speakers accountable for impolite or offensive stances needs to be examined more carefully in theorizing about (im)politeness more generally.

In this study we offer a socio-pragmatic examination of instances of what is generally known in social psychology as “bystander intervention,” i.e., the social action by which a bystander steps in and attempts to prevent a wrongdoer from abusing a victim. We explore the relationship between (im)politeness and participants’ perceptions and understandings of moral principles as evidenced by their metacommunicative voicing. Our analysis concentrates on cases of bystander intervention in the US by analyzing data drawn from a reality show. Bystander intervention is a noteworthy phenomenon to examine for, at least, two reasons. First, it is a type of aggressive social action as it poses an uninvited and open challenge to the wrongdoer in public. Second, bystander intervention challenges conventional behavioural norms. It aims to reinstate what the intervener regards as morally appropriate behaviour. This study aims to contribute to current research on (im)politeness by offering a yet unexplored dimension: that of the interface between metapragmatics, (im)politeness and (im)morality in the interactional arena of bystander intervention.

While politeness has been researched mainly from the perspectives of face and identity, this conceptual paper explores another understanding of politeness through the consideration of attentiveness, namely, a demonstrator’s pre-emptive responses to a recipient’s verbal or non-verbal cues or situations surrounding a recipient and a demonstrator, which takes the form of offering. In this paper, it is suggested that politeness can be construed in relation to the heart; and that behavioral (non-linguistic) politeness, an understudied area in the field, should be taken into account in politeness research. With the development of interpersonal pragmatics, there has been a growing need to investigate interpersonal relationships, and great importance is placed on evaluation in the discursive approach. As attentiveness is an interpersonal notion, which involves evaluation, the consideration of attentiveness meets these demands. In the present paper, the concept of attentiveness is clarified and it is shown how attentiveness works by presenting the process of demonstration and evaluation of attentiveness.

Understood as an umbrella term covering different phenomena (e.g., banter, teasing, jocular insults, etc.), mock impoliteness has long attracted the attention of scholars. However, most of this research has concentrated on English while other languages have been neglected. In addition, previous research has mostly analyzed face-to-face interaction, generally ignoring computer-mediated communication. This paper aims to redress this imbalance by analyzing a particular case of mock impoliteness – i.e., jocular mockery – in two Facebook communities (Spanish and English). More specifically, and following Haugh’s (2010) and Haugh and Bousfield’s (2012) three inter-related dimensions, this paper intends to answer three questions: (i) what triggers jocular mockery in each corpus? (ii) How is it “framed”? And (iii) how do interlocutors respond to it? To this end, two balanced datasets were gathered: one in (British) English and one in (Peninsular) Spanish, consisting of 6,215 and 6,193 words respectively. Results show that jocular mockery is pervasive in both datasets and both British and Spanish users resort to it when confronted with bragging. Likewise, both groups borrow framing strategies from face-to-face communication but also employ other means afforded by Facebook itself. They also opt for accepting it good- naturedly as a way to boost group rapport.

This article attempts to give a state-of-the-art picture of impoliteness studies and to indicate a few prospective research directions to enrich them. It critically surveys a number of theoretical and methodological problems (impoliteness vs. rudeness; intention; sanctioned face-threat; and impoliteness strategies), as well as the paramount topics of investigation (such as disagreement; arguments; insults, taboo words; or sarcasm), and discourse domains in which impoliteness can be found. Importantly, this paper brings to focus a selection of notions central to impoliteness, albeit not yet widely recognized in the scholarship on impoliteness. These include: slurs; pejoratives; and a number of phenomena promoted by computer mediated communication (e.g., flaming or trolling).