Davies, Bethan L.: Situated Politeness

Pragmatic and sociolinguistic analyses of im/politeness have usually been dependent on context and cultural frames of reference. This new study approaches the concept from an original perspective, namely situatedness. Although politeness research often concentrates on examining how speeches or discourses themselves are situated with regards to different places and contexts, the focus on just one situation, and various text types within it, can also be of value. Situated Politeness is concerned with disentangling the factors which govern our behaviour within a given social context as well as across them. A range of expanding disciplines, including corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, and conversation analysis, are brought to bear on the topic, and this work will be of interest to a diverse global audience.The idea is, as the editors point out, to disentangle the relationship between pragmatic meaning, social meaning and identity. They do not achieve a final solution (which may be impossible) nor do they steer clear of the complexities of this matter. On the contrary, by drawing on empirical research, the authors present different fine-grained theoretical tools and approaches that, undoubtedly, constitute an advance in this discipline... Very interesting and critically enlightening reading for a specialist who wants to be at the cutting edge of this discipline...Reading Situated Politeness allows for improvement in our comprehension of...complicated concepts. Combining this advancement with the variety of approaches covered in the volume make it an important step forward for the field of socio-pragmatics.