Overview

This volume demonstrates how inductive research into speakers' metapragmatic knowledge offers a path for researching what politeness means for language users and how this reshapes politeness theory. Through bottom-up analysis of interview data collected from Korean speakers from two generations, the authors map out a participant-oriented perspective on politeness and use these findings to build new theoretical models. The results shows that politeness is a multimodal practice tied up with maintaining emotional attunement and engaging in acts of upkeeping or contesting social conventions.

Contents

The book features a thorough overview of extant research in the field, three in-depth data analysis chapters and a detailed discussion of the results. By focusing on the culture-specific and empirically grounded ways that language users understand politeness, the book contributes to current trends in im/politeness research, notably “third wave” approaches that view politeness as a culturally embedded social action.

Significance

Moreover, the book lays the groundwork for researching metapragmatics via interview data that can be applied to other languages and aspects of pragmatics. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of politeness research, pragmatics, linguistics and cultural studies.