Table Of ContentAdvances in (Im)politeness Studies
Series Editor: Chaoqun Xie
Elena Landone
Methodology in
Politeness Research
Advances in (Im)politeness Studies
Series Editor
Chaoqun Xie, School of English Studies, Zhejiang International Studies University,
Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
The book series Advances in (Im)politeness Studies advances new perspectives,
challenges and insights on (im)politeness studies and, in so doing, furthers
understanding and interpretation of human worlds (online and offline) and human
beings. (Im)politeness has, over the last several decades, become a multidisciplinary,
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary endeavor. (Im)politeness can be seen
as a complex system, the production, perception, and evaluation of which may
involve various components, linguistic, behavioral, cognitive, social, contextual,
emotional, moral, historical, cultural and ethical. A full understanding of the
(im)politeness system may only be reached by looking into the complex, fluid and
dynamic interaction among those components.
The series invites innovative monographs and edited volumes that contribute to
charting and shaping the discipline with respect to contemporary (im)politeness
practice and research, that experiment with new and creative approaches to
describing and explaining specific (im)politeness phenomena in either face-to-face
communication or mediated interaction, or expound philosophical dimensions and
implications of (im)politeness as a critical and essential lens through which to
examine the full complexities and intricacies of human interpersonal interaction and
human nature. Both experienced researchers and young enterprising scholars are
welcome to submit their book proposals. The volumes in this series appeal to
scholars and students of social interaction in general and pragmatics, sociolinguistics,
philosophy, psychology, language teaching and learning in particular.
Editor-in-Chief Chaoqun Xie, Zhejiang International Studies University, China
Advisory Editorial Board Aaron Ben-Ze’ev, University of Haifa, Israel; Jonathan
Culpeper, Lancaster University, UK; Marta Dynel, University of Lodz, Poland;
Anita Fetzer, University of Augsburg, Germany; Saeko Fukushima, Tsuru
University, Japan; Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, University of North Carolina
at Charlotte, USA; Karen Grainger, Sheffield Hallam University, UK; Michael
Haugh, University of Queensland, Australia; Dániel Z. Kádár, Hungarian Academy
of Sciences, Hungary; Istvan Kecskes, State University of New York at Albany,
USA; Miriam Locher, University of Basel, Switzerland; Robert Louden, University
of Southern Maine, USA; Jacob L. Mey, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark;
Rosina Márquez Reiter, University of Surrey, UK; Valeria Sinkeviciute, University
of Queensland, Australia; Helen Spencer-Oatey, University of Warwick, UK;
Youzhong Sun, Beijing Foreign Studies University, China; Marina Terkourafi, Leiden
University, Netherlands
For inquiries and submission of proposals authors can contact the editor-in-chief,
Chaoqun Xie, via: [email protected]
Elena Landone
Methodology in Politeness
Research
Elena Landone
Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature,
Culture e Mediazioni
Università degli Studi di Milano
Milan, Italy
ISSN 2524-4000 ISSN 2524-4019 (electronic)
Advances in (Im)politeness Studies
ISBN 978-3-031-09160-5 ISBN 978-3-031-09161-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
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Preface
In the complexity of everyday life, speakers interact without much soul-searching and
their communication is of a sufficiently good level; in fact, we do communicate and
rely on it for our social existence. This natural practice, however, appears elusive to the
professional researcher. In particular, the study of politeness highlights how, in spite
of its pervasiveness in all human contexts, politeness resists scientific insight. This
resistance generates intriguing methodological issues for contemporary politeness
research, and this book aims at outlining the landmarks and tentative routes through
these deep waters.
To solve the problem of how politeness research can refine its theories and develop
its tools for studying real life would be a desirable objective, albeit an unrealistic one,
as will become apparent as the book proceeds. Hence, the aim of this monograph is
more modestly to relate the theoretical state of the art in politeness studies with regard
to methodological problems and to the way researchers have tried to overcome them
so far. The synoptic table at the end of the book outlines the results of this attempt.
The following chapters do not, therefore, intend to give epistemological answers,
unravel methodological problems or offer ready-made solutions, which would not
really be feasible in the field of politeness. Conversely, they provide a summary of
the detours of the community of scholars committed to politeness research, hoping
they may foster scientific creativity and find new routes. This aim is pursued in a
spirit of exploration, and for this reason, the book might be of particular interest to
scholars who are about to start their research in the field of politeness and feel the
need for an up-to-date overview of methods and examples in order to get inspiration.
In particular, it might be useful for those contexts where research might contribute
to community development, because an applied approach to politeness has great
potential for promoting a healthy social life.
It is only honest to admit that some of the readers’ expectations may not be
satisfied. The themes are not developed as in a manual, nor are they chronological,
so a historical overview on politeness is not present and no didactic explanations
are offered for the constructs and concepts that are the basis of this field. Our goal
implies a selective approach, so the reader will find neither a complete and exten-
sive bibliographic review of politeness or research methods. The reason is that many
v
vi Preface
monographs already cover both areas excellently, though separately. Finally, impo-
liteness is rarely mentioned in the book. In reality, it is not an exclusion, but a silent
presence. All the topics that will be raised for politeness can be raised for impoliteness
as well, but as the majority of examples reported in Part II have politeness as a focus,
the term politeness is more representative of the book than the term (im)politeness.
Compared to a monographic overview of politeness and/or to a manual of method-
ology in pragmatics, this book provides an intersection: on the one hand the method-
ological side of politeness research is selected, on the other the methodological
challenges specific to politeness are focused upon. In fact, politeness tends to
share the common methodological concerns of general pragmatics and, at the same
time, to raise specific critical issues. Our approach includes various perspectives
on politeness, the most productive methodologies, and some ideas for the politeness
research agenda. The book also reviews representative examples of studies in various
languages and cultures within a recent time span.
The volume consists of two parts. Part I identifies key points in contemporary
politeness research; Part II focuses on the routes that the researcher can follow to
continue the methodological exploration the field of politeness still requires. The
conclusion will present some methodological trends, as well as some notes on what
is considered significant, rigorous, transparent and empirical in the study of the
complex system of politeness. The schematic summary in the last few pages is a
quick reference tool to support reflection on integrated research design.
The overall panorama that emerges from this book is that politeness is a relational
activity and a social practice, it is situated in a context, by which it is co-constructed
and from which it emerges. It is subject to individual perception and to evaluation
and is related to the speakers’ perspectives, cognitive schemes, moral constructs,
and psychological depths. Compared to the beginnings of the study of politeness, the
methodological challenges are different, in that they must now capture the discursive
dynamism and relationships stratified in different levels of variation of a complex
system.
The following brief overview of the single chapters may be helpful to illustrate
the transversal aspect of the topics in this book.
Part I is dedicated to the main research paradigms in the field of politeness studies
and connected topics of methodological interest; they are elaborated taking into
account scholars whose work we have found fruitful on our personal path, so that
the study does not, therefore, claim to be exhaustive. Or better, exhaustiveness is not
a priority. Chapter 1 advocates an open conception of politeness, contemplating the
context, the relations and the mind as interconnected perspectives that entail method-
ological challenges for traditional research designs. Chapter 2 focuses on speech acts
and their theoretical evolution toward discursive practices that involve the research
problem of understanding the speakers’ perceptions and evaluations of politeness.
Chapter 3 explores different magnitudes of variation: the macro-and the microdimen-
sions of the variations in politeness pose challenges in terms of the relevance and the
generalization of politeness studies. Many constructs need to be redefined (e.g., the
concept of culture), and intermediate units of analysis are required. These emerging
dynamic, multilayered relationships between the individual and society are also the
Preface vii
topic of Chap. 4, which presents a more detailed discussion of pivotal concepts for
politeness (such as values, moral order, face and identity) in the light of the collabora-
tive construction of the speakers. This perspective opens the way to an understanding
of politeness as an adaptive system emerging from below in a self-regulating and
unpredictable process of interactions between speakers. Chapter 5 is devoted to some
methodological implications of complexity concerning variables in research, specif-
ically space and time in politeness research. The methodological lesson deriving
from a complexity paradigm suggests identifying the connections between the levels
of the system and reporting both its stability and variations: Chaps. 6–8 explore
the consequences of this. Chapter 6 discusses the dynamic conception of rapport
management to point out its deeper levels and its emotional dimension. Chapter 7
underlines the need to account for the speakers’ subjective evaluation and the high
variability that such evaluations presuppose. It challenges the researcher to embrace
integrated methodologies revealing various points of view, with particular attention
to the speakers’ perspective. Finally, Chap. 8 shows that cognitive frameworks have
specific pertinence in explaining how speakers interpret politeness. They provide
conventionalised, communicative, action-reaction schemes that are the background
to evaluations, but also take into account the agency of the speakers to bypass them.
Part II deals with the review of a variety of data collection methods and their appli-
cation in politeness studies. Various data collection techniques and approaches—
from traditional to emerging ones—are described, and the researcher will try out
various tools for making choices according to her research goals. Each chapter offers
examples of selected, recent studies intended to be representative of methodologies
that have been consolidated in practice, as well as those that are currently being
assessed by the scientific community. The aim is to give the researcher concrete
examples of practice through the experience of those who have implemented them:
For many researchers, they might be well-known tools, but they are still able to
generate ideas for critical discussion.
Chapters 9–11 introduce Part II with an overview of three data collection strate-
gies: introspective intuition, experimentation and observation (of language and of
language users). These chapters present a few general considerations to highlight
the fact that, in politeness research, the way data is collected affects the data itself
to a great extent, because politeness is inherently context-sensitive. Since the data
that introspective intuition, experimentation and observation retrieve are varied, they
resort to the multiple tools described in Chaps. 12–21. These show in detail how
different ways of obtaining data affect the kind of analysis that can be conducted in
politeness. Chapters 12 (Discourse Completion Test), 13 (Role Playing), 14 (Ques-
tionnaires) and 15 (Interviews) illustrate tools used to elicit data, usually in controlled
settings. Chapters 16–18, instead, are devoted to Recording and Transcription, Field
Notes, and Shadowing, which are tools for natural data collection. Finally, Chap. 19
on Corpus Analysis, Chap. 20 on Tools for Online Politeness, and Chap. 21 on
Community Studies and Action Research deal with more transversal tools concerning
specific contexts or specific processes. As will be evident in many reported expe-
riences of investigation, an integrated methodology may be particularly advisable
viii Preface
in politeness studies in order to gather different types of data, put the analysis into
multiple perspectives and underpin the complexity of the politeness scenario.
Chapters 18 and 21 are probably the most unusual in a monograph on polite-
ness. Chapter 18 presents shadowing, a dynamic field technique which has had little
application in politeness research so far, despite having great potential, as argued
through the presentation of a specific method based on sensitive incidents, bisocia-
tion effect, emotional signals and the reconstruction of the implicits of communicative
frames. Chapter 21 focuses on communities of practice as places where politeness
is co-constructed locally, hence they are candidates for being manageable units of
analysis. The aim of this chapter is also to describe the Action Research approach,
which has rarely been applied in politeness studies. It will be argued that it is, instead,
a promising technique both in terms of results and of the methodological tools that
the community perspective requires. In a deeper sense, it supports the social return
of the results of scientific research.
Chapter 22 closes the book by recapitulating the methodological agenda for polite-
ness research, through a final discussion on scientificity and empiricism related to
complex systems like politeness, both in everyday life and in researchers’ minds.
Although scientificity provides a solid basis to refer to, contemporary approaches in
politeness research show that when facing complex systems, fluidity and indetermi-
nacy affect systematicity in an unpredictable way. Recent praxis in the study of polite-
ness shows that the traditional view of what is considered significant, rigorous, trans-
parent and empirical is coming under pressure due to the complexity of the human
being. Such pressure requires new types of data, creativity in mixing methods, more
perspectives of analysis and flexibility in accepting different criteria of scientificity
inastudy.
Milan, Italy Elena Landone
Contents
Part I Methodological Key Points: Introduction to Part I
1 Where is Politeness? ........................................... 3
1.1 Politeness as a Personal Activity in Society .................. 4
1.2 Politeness as a Discursive and Interpersonal Social Practice .... 6
1.3 Politeness as a Cognitive Activity ........................... 9
References .................................................... 11
2 What Do Speech Acts Offer as Discursive Practices? ............. 17
2.1 The Speech Acts ......................................... 17
2.2 Discursive Practices ...................................... 20
References .................................................... 23
3 What is the Magnitude of Variation? ............................ 25
3.1 The Variational Perspective and Comparability ............... 25
3.2 The Situated Variation .................................... 27
3.3 The Active Notion of the Individual ......................... 29
References .................................................... 32
4 What Emerges from a Dynamic System? ........................ 35
4.1 Values and Morality ...................................... 36
4.2 Face .................................................... 40
References .................................................... 44
5 How Complex is the System? ................................... 47
5.1 The Variables ............................................ 47
5.2 Space-time .............................................. 50
5.3 Levels of the System ...................................... 52
References .................................................... 54
6 How Deep Are Relations? ...................................... 57
6.1 Relational Dynamics ...................................... 57
6.2 Emotions ............................................... 59
ix
