Methodology in Politeness Research: Salient Points and Routes through Deep Waters 3031091604, 9783031091605

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Advances 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 Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

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 extensive bibliographic review of politeness or research methods. The reason is that many v

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monographs already cover both areas excellently, though separately. Finally, impoliteness 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 methodology in pragmatics, this book provides an intersection: on the one hand the methodological 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 methodological 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 microdimensions 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

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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 collaborative 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, specifically 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 application 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 strategies: 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 (Questionnaires) 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 experiences of investigation, an integrated methodology may be particularly advisable

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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 politeness. 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, bisociation 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 politeness 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 indeterminacy affect systematicity in an unpredictable way. Recent praxis in the study of politeness shows that the traditional view of what is considered significant, rigorous, transparent 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 in a study. Milan, Italy

Elena Landone

Contents

Part I

Methodological Key Points: Introduction to Part I

1

Where is Politeness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Politeness as a Personal Activity in Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Politeness as a Discursive and Interpersonal Social Practice . . . . 1.3 Politeness as a Cognitive Activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3 4 6 9 11

2

What Do Speech Acts Offer as Discursive Practices? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 The Speech Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Discursive Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17 17 20 23

3

What is the Magnitude of Variation? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Variational Perspective and Comparability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 The Situated Variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The Active Notion of the Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

25 25 27 29 32

4

What Emerges from a Dynamic System? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Values and Morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Face . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35 36 40 44

5

How Complex is the System? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 The Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Space-time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Levels of the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47 47 50 52 54

6

How Deep Are Relations? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Relational Dynamics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 57 59

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6.3 Deep Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

62 65

7

How Relative is Everyday Politeness? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 A Matter of Everyday Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Evaluations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 69 72 75 78

8

How Does the Mind Frame? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 The Organization of the Knowledge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Intentions and Perceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 The Frame Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

81 81 83 85 88

Part II Routes and Tools for Investigation: Introduction to Part II 9

Introspection and Experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 9.1 Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 9.2 Introspection and Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 9.3 Experimentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

10 Observation of Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 Observation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Discourse Analysis, Digital-Mediated Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 Conversational Analysis and the Interactional Approach . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105 105

11 Observation of Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.1 The Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 The Sociolinguistic Factors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.3 The Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

117 117 119 121 123

107 110 113

12 Discourse Completion Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 13 Role Playing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 14 Questionnaires . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 15 Interviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 16 Recording and Transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

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17 Field Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 18 Shadowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 19 Corpus Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 20 Tools for Online Politeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 21 Community Studies and Action Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 22 Scientific Empiricism in Politeness Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22.1 Scientificity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22.2 Empiricism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22.3 Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22.4 Methodological Recapitulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

249 250 254 257 262 269

Part I

Methodological Key Points: Introduction to Part I

Part I deals with concerns and proposals emerging in contemporary politeness research from different theoretical perspectives. As Haugh (2018:158) states, “[a] theory sets the terms for what counts as data, what counts as evidence through analysis of that data, and how we explain this evidence of systemic patterns or tendencies in our data”. Hence in this part, we identify the main research paradigms in the field of politeness studies and select the topics of methodological interest. They help the researcher to connect a certain view of reality with specific research problems in politeness studies. Every chapter is organized into thematic areas, and does not, therefore, follow a chronological order. For example, the popular stages of first, second, and third waves in politeness studies are not expressly mentioned (see Ogiermann & GarcésConejos Blitvich, 2019 for a clear outline). Instead, the contributions to the field are illustrated as a rhizomatic system. The reason is that the different theories have their own characterizations but, at the same time, are not monads. Therefore, the following chapters are a multi-faceted outline of politeness as a complex system. This is something that a researcher needs to be aware of in order to decide how to investigate politeness in relation to her research aims. For this reason, every chapter ends with key questions for the researcher to consider. They focus particularly on those critical issues that do not have a clear solution yet, hence are intended as input for personal reflection. Holistically, in Part I the following general premises seem to emerge transversely from the various chapters:

● Relevance, in humanities research, is more concerned with what is significant (and less with what can be generalized). ● Research in politeness could have a direct impact on our everyday life, which is where politeness is in action. In particular, microlevel studies might identify specific areas of utility.

2

Part I: Methodological Key Points: Introduction to Part I

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

● ●

●

Politeness is a complex system. Politeness is a situated phenomenon. Politeness reveals itself in the individual in relationships. Politeness relies on comparative backgrounds that are the measure of what is appropriate (“normal”) or dissonant. Action takes place within frames of which the lay speaker is usually unaware. The individual can have agency in her own frames. Fears, desires, needs, ideologies, and values are constructs of social cognition that can be related to politeness. Individuals and their community networks are the source of empirical data. Emotions, perceptions, and evaluations may become methodological tools. Body, space, and time are semiotic entities. In communication, there are cues to the psycho-cognitive worlds of the speakers that are observable in discourse, but there are also deeper elements that are unconscious. The variability of empirical data is a reflection of complex systems and should be welcomed with a holistic approach. Methodological integration offers different perspectives and investigates different loci of understandings in which lay communicators and theoretical analysts collaborate. In particular, emic and etic may be two synergistic perspectives. A contrasting methodology is useful to put an object into perspective, it offers comparable points of view even if the methods themselves are not comparable.

In the course of this account, many other issues are touched upon and many others should be dealt with; nevertheless, this list represents the key points in the view of politeness embraced here, which is that of a simple matter of everyday life and a complex matter for investigation.

References Haugh, M. (2018). Afterword: Theorizing (im)politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 153–165. Ogiermann, E., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Im/politeness between the analyst and participant perspectives: An overview of the field. In E. Ogiermann, & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness (pp. 1–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 1

Where is Politeness?

This chapter offers a panorama of politeness as a specialized field within the pragmatic perspective of linguistics. Metaphorically, it is a first approach to deep waters, in order to support the researcher focussing on the interconnected levels where politeness is in action. Interconnection is one of the principles that will help her to acknowledge that the prismatic refractions politeness seems to have at the state of the art imply methodological ductility and creativity. In fact, at the moment, politeness studies are experiencing a theoretical diversification that is difficult to trace back to a comprehensive framework. Although the single studies that follow a theory reach internally valid results, the whole gives the impression of theoretical incoherence (Haugh, 2018). For the researcher in the field of politeness this poses a problem, because she is faced with several valid theories and valid methodologies, but has to make a choice between seemingly irreconcilable options. With this in mind, this chapter reports the main traditional and contemporary theories of politeness, which, in general, is conceived as a socio- and psycho-cognitive universal. Politeness affects communication for relational causes and purposes. We propose three perspectives: individual activity in society (Sect. 1.1), interpersonal social practice (Sect. 1.2), and cognitive activity (Sect. 1.3). They differ in their main focus, which is respectively: the context, the relations and the mind. These three paths are inspired by a personal selection of specialized literature (mainly: Placencia, García, 2007; Culpeper, 2011b; Fernández Amaya et al., 2012; Locher, 2012; AlbaJuez & Mackenzie, 2016; Haugh & Culpeper, 2018; Baider et al., 2020), and they simply represent an organisational principle for introducing a stratified field. Clearcut distinctions are avoided because these perspectives naturally overlap. The concise approach of this section is justified by the fact that the more traditional theories are already well explained in extensive, widely available monographs (such as: Culpeper et al., 2017; Jucker et al., 2018; Culpeper et al., forthcoming), while more recent, lesser studied theories are explored in detail in the following chapters.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_1

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1.1 Politeness as a Personal Activity in Society The first perspective we propose originates in traditional views of politeness, and covers the study of socially adequate behaviours in the context of social activities. The social context takes centre place in this concept: politeness is a system of social norms internalized by the individual through socialization. It is a normative view of social regulation which studies the norms expressed through verbal and non-verbal language. Thus, politeness is conceived of as a form of linguistic behaviour, which is guided by norms adhering to socio-cultural principles (Fraser, 1990a, 1990b; Kasper, 1996, 2009; Leech, 2014). This social normative view has brought with it the concept of strategy. In this view, politeness is a rational exercise of communicative actions aimed at compensating for the imbalances that can emerge between people as members of a social structure. This theory merges the speaker’s goals and means with the cooperative rationality of Grice’s communication theory (1975). As a consequence, if communication is based on normative expectations (such as the Cooperative Principle), then politeness will follow the same rationale in a universal way, that is, it can be described for all languages through the same theoretical model (with possible local parameters). These concepts are the premises for Lakoff (1973), Brown and Levinson in their development of the Goffmanian constructs (1978–1987), Leech (1983, 2014) and Scollon and Scollon (1983, 1995). They configure politeness both as a principle in itself and as a conversational implicature arising from the violation of a principle (Haugh & Watanabe, 2017; Haugh, 2007b) (see Sect. 2.1). The concept of strategy has developed two directions: a strategy aimed at compensating the latent aggressiveness in relationships (typically in Leech, 1983 and Brown & Levinson, 1978–1987) or a strategy aimed at establishing a meeting ground and good relations between speakers, therefore proactive towards solidarity, cooperation, affection (as in Aston, 1988 or Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 1996). Here, the researcher in politeness will find one of those interconnections mentioned in the introduction to this chapter because Arndt and Janney (1985, Janney & Arndt, 1992) open up a path from politeness as a social phenomenon to politeness as an interpersonal phenomenon. As we shall see in the next section, they subsume politeness to the framework of emotive communication (Caffi & Janney, 1994). In general, social normative views have tried to define principles and maxims, and then models, based on the assumption that politeness can be theorized at an abstract level. In other words, politeness is systematic and to a certain extent measurable, which means that can be interpreted by a researcher on the basis of context factors (e.g. in terms of power, familiarity, etc.). As a consequence, politeness is a sort of universal which is conceived of in the same way in different cultures. The differences that are found in different cultures would be due simply to the different importance that is attributed to the linguistic structures and to the socio-cultural norms of use in a context. This theoretical view does not contemplate the idea that cultures conceive of politeness in different ways that are not a matter of variability of the same model,

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but of the subsistence of different conceptions of politeness (Calvo Pérez, 1994; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, 2001; Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Concerning the principles, maxims, and models that the social normative view of politeness has developed, they are characterized by social constructs, such as hierarchical relationships and the need to mark the position of a member of a community by means of language. This raises the dilemma: is politeness a free and creative strategy of the speaker? Or is it a highly conventionalized action that creates fixed associations of forms and functions in a rapidly accessible way? The theorists who favour free strategy argue that speakers evaluate the context in order to reach a certain aim by linguistic means. The level of this intentional control by the speaker is however difficult to define, because the completely free strategy would require enunciation time that the speaker does not usually have in spoken interaction. Therefore, it is plausible that a certain degree of automation of conventionalized forms is a practical necessity (Stubbs, 1987). Escandell-Vidal (1998a: 53) adds: [...] the possibility of a strategic usage of linguistic forms with a social purpose is dependent on the existence of expectations about what can count as an adequate linguistic behaviour in a given situation. What is wrong with strategic approaches to politeness is not that strategic uses do not exist, but rather that all politeness phenomena are treated in terms of strategies: default uses are seen just as particular cases of strategies [...].

Thus, the speaker’s creativity has to deal with uses and expectations of adequacy, as well as with cognitive limits. Conceiving of politeness as the use of routine formulas (conventionalized by frequency of use) takes into account the fact that even the choice of the formula requires an evaluation of the context (Culpeper, 2010), at least in certain cultures (Hill et al., 1986). The result is a flexible parameter that each community admits between strong conventionality and non-conventionality: the first is configured as a formulaic pole of politeness (conventional, “traditional”, ritual, protocol); the second as a pole of flexible politeness (rationally calculated, volitional, individually creative). The revision of the well-known maxim-based approach by Leech (2014) is in line with this point of view. The Frame-based Approach by Terkourafi (2005), too, is a pertinent example of this theoretical middle way. According to Terkourafi (2012), the evaluation of politeness cannot emerge from nothing, just as speakers cannot, in any daily interaction, disperse energy in endless guessing at possible interpretations: there must be a basis for normal circumstances that, in a certain community, constitutes a minimal context or frame. That is, the speaker must reduce the horizon of possible contexts to a limited set of contextual parameters. In other words, ordinary speakers have a background for the comparison of their own politeness evaluations, which is a normative question. Thus, a normative approach is based on the categorization of human behaviour into recognizable classes within a community of speakers. What does not diverge from the minimal context will be conventional politeness, that is, a politeness routinely achieved by means of conventionalized expressions. These expressions offer a short-cut with greater perlocutionary guarantees with respect to

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the multitude of alternative possible forms. On the contrary, what diverges from the minimal context will be marked by relevance. It should be emphasized that minimal contexts or frames are individually and experientially based: the relationship between utterance and context becomes conventionalized due to the statistical frequency that it acquires in a person’s experience. It can therefore vary between speakers and over time for the same speaker (Terkourafi & Kádár, 2017). To sum up, there are acts and structures that are conventionalized by frequent use but which lend themselves to special uses in specific circumstances. We close this section on politeness as a personal activity in society by mentioning the construct of face because, in traditional politeness studies, this representation of a speaker’s identity is based on social values and introjected by the subject in her acculturation. Individuals invest a lot in activities that seem to revolve around their own face and that of their interlocutors. Among the symbolic indicators referring to face, those of a linguistic type are very active and have been equated with politeness since Brown and Levinson (1978–1987) popularized the construct of face. Ultimately, the construct of face has dominated politeness studies through research on its configuration in specific cultures (Matsumoto, 1988, 1989; Fraser, 1990b; Mao, 1994; Kasper, 1996, 2009; Bargiela-Chiappini, 2003; Wierzbicka, 2003; Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2004; Acevedo-Halvick, 2006). However, in the latest generation of studies, the equation between facework and politeness has been questioned and the trend is to turn to the more dynamic and less egocentric dimension that face had in its sociological origins in Erving Goffman (Arundale, 2006; Spencer-Oatey, 2007, 2009; BargielaChiappini & Haugh, 2009; Haugh & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2010, Portolés Lázaro, 2011; Sifianou, 2011; Terkourafi, 2012; Haugh, 2013b; O’Driscoll, 2017). Thus, the face construct constitutes a point of intersection with the next perspective on politeness as a discursive and interpersonal social practice. To sum up, politeness research focusing on the social context implies taking into account how the variables of the context affect the individual in communication. Methodologically speaking, this perspective aims at capturing linguistic behaviour quantitatively and/or qualitatively, demonstrating its social recognition, proofing its use for social adequacy (i.e. politeness) with respect to normality (i.e. norms), and possibly subsuming it to a general principle. This view intersects with the following perspectives on two main points: the dynamism of the individual in relations (Sect. 1.2) and our cognitive economy (Sect. 1.3).

1.2 Politeness as a Discursive and Interpersonal Social Practice The second perspective we propose places human relations at its centre. In fact, Eelen (2001) marks an important theoretical and methodological junction in the field, shifting the centre of politeness from norms to speakers and their evaluation: how is it possible for people to find a sufficiently functional mutual understanding

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by mediating the great variety of their psycho-cognitive and cultural universes? This question brings to the attention of the researcher the emic perspective of politeness: in everyday reality the speakers understand each other, although from the external point of view of the researcher it is difficult to explain how this happens. Hence, the researcher should focus on the speakers, and should investigate their point of view. Eelen (2001: iv) states the need to contemplate the individual in the theory of politeness, because “[…] politeness as a form of language is invariably coupled with social relationships and social roles […]”. More in detail, politeness is not a simple manifestation of an individual’s use of language in a social context, but it is a social practice. Eelen substitutes the notion of norm with that of the Bourdieusian habitus to explain how practices and actions are reproduced over time and evolve. Speakers are not seen as passive with respect to static social and cultural systems that determine ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable’ behaviour, as in the social normative perspective (Sect. 1.1). On the contrary, politeness involves the speakers in an ongoing process of interaction (Watts, 2003). Thus, Eelen (2001) marks a passage to discursive studies in politeness, which in general refer to the centrality of the speakers and to the dynamic and emerging formation of meanings. As a consequence, the view turns from predictive or explanatory (macro) models to the description of situated exchanges (on a micro level) (Eelen, 2001; Watts, 2003; Terkourafi, 2005; Arundale, 2006; Locher, 2006, 2008, 2015; Haugh, 2007a, 2011; Inagaki, 2008; Mills, 2011b; Culpeper, 2011b; Kádár & Haugh, 2013). In general, the discursive approach favours qualitative methods, because it: ● uses authentic discourse data (long stretches of interactions, naturally occurring face to face or online); ● focuses on the evaluation process of the speaker (and, in particular, of the hearer); ● considers the lay speakers’ perspective in order to find inner significant categories that could inform theorization (in general, with an emic account of data) (Haugh, 2011). Conceiving politeness as a discursive and interpersonal practice has some consequences for the research design. For example, as social practice, the parameters of time and space become methodologically highly relevant. The current moment of talking is the result of prior and subsequent talking, in a flow of time. Space is not only a diatopic variable (e.g. cultural differences), but mostly a social variable because the relation between individuals and society produces cognition and cultures over time (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). In other words, politeness “[…] is located in evaluations of social actions and meanings by persons that are situated relative to both time and social space” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013:6). It is a social synergy that emerges in historical time and sociocultural space from the active evaluations of the subjects. In general, the analyst should not impose herself on the data but should try to abide by the evaluations and interpretations of the speakers themselves. Haugh (2007a: 313) suggests that “[…] politeness should be studied within a broader theory of interpersonal communication, whether one terms this ‘relational work’ (Locher & Watts, 2005; Watts, 2003; Locher, 2006), ‘face-constitution’ (Arundale, 1999, 2006), ‘rapport management’ (Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2002a, 2005) [..]”. An example is the

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Interactional Approach (Arundale, 2006; Haugh, 2013a, 2015) because it focuses on social practices by which subjective evaluation of politeness arises. It offers a rigorously emic look at the interactions with the fine grain typical of Conversation Analysis in order to reveal the locally inherent dynamics. It also uses the identity traits of the speakers and their relational history to refine the researcher’s insight and capture the interpretations of the speakers themselves. Studies of Relational Work in the field of Interpersonal Pragmatics are another methodological reference within this approach. They study the construction, maintenance and transformation of interpersonal relationships within a social context, and politeness is considered one of the various facets of relational work. With Arndt and Janney (1985, Janney & Arndt, 1992), politeness also becomes an affective and emotive activity, which implies the researcher crossing the frontier of discourse and resorting to disciplines which are not strictly linguistic, such as psychology (Watts, 1989; Locher & Watts, 2005; Arundale, 2006, 2010b; Fant, 2007; Culpeper, 2011b; Mills, 2003, 2011a; O’Driscoll, 2013; Locher, 2012, 2013, 2015; Haugh et al., 2013; Langlotz & Locher, 2017). The specialized vein of Discursive Relational Work develops genre approaches (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010, 2013), studies related to the definition of identity (as in Locher, 2006, 2008; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Bou-Franch, 2019), and the interactional sociolinguistics of Holmes et al. (2011). Methodologically, this openness to other disciplines implies the willingness of the researcher to explore the contributions from unfamiliar methods. In general, this line also displays links with Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), paying attention to the discursive struggle and the exercise of social power through discourse (and therefore also through politeness) (Leezenberg, 2013). For example, in the work of discursive materialism, CDS is integrated with the concept of community of practice (a group mutually engaged in common practice). Politeness is one of those practices that define the identity and negotiate the positions within the community of practice. Therefore, CDS is interested in understanding how the subjective processes of evaluation of what is polite reflect the social struggles. To close this part, it might be useful to mention the underlying postmodernity of this perspective. It deconstructs the idea that theoretical models can be defined because the actual loci of the politeness are people and interpersonal relationships, which can hardly be generalized. To give an example, Watts (2003) proposes the concepts of politic and polite behaviour. The first is the appropriateness that the speaker perceives in an interaction; the second is salient behaviour that goes beyond the perception of expected appropriateness. This difference goes back to the linguistic habitus (Bourdieu, 1991), which is acquired in the experience of social interactions. It is part of the dynamic and variable individual process of construction of social reality. Hence, for the researcher, to study politeness as an argumentative, evaluative and discursive movement in real language is to focus on social practices, not models. They are different orders of magnitude. However, different trends have developed from postmodernism and in part they already surpass it on a theoretical level. For example, Interactional Approach quoted earlier searches for a way to account for theoretical models of the variability of subjective evaluation. In the same trend, Haugh (2018) defends the need to work on metatheorisation in order to analyse the

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specific contribution of the different theories, especially those that have proliferated since the deconstruction of the postmodern turn (Eelen, 2001; Haugh, 2007a, 2018; Wood, 2015; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Sifianou, 2017; Haugh & Watanabe, 2017; Haugh & Culpeper, 2018). To sum up this section on politeness as a discursive and interpersonal social practice, the researcher has to focus on the speakers in an ongoing process of interaction socially situated. The research objectives will aim more to capture dynamic and emerging formation of meanings rather than to test models. To study the individual act as embedded in a social moral order and as a mediation of social relations, methodologically, implies: using authentic discourse data, to ensure an emic data collection, to focus the speakers’ process of evaluation, to relate evaluation to both time dynamism and social space, and to admit constructs from other disciplines (e.g. identity, community of practice, etc.). From this approach emerge intersections with the need to contemplate variations in theoretical models (Sect. 1.1) and the cognitive role of emotions (Sect. 1.3).

1.3 Politeness as a Cognitive Activity The last perspective we propose complies with a cognitive concept of politeness and, upstream, it has the basic theme of understanding philosophically the intentions in human action. This approach is more centred on psycho-mental mechanisms than on socio-relational issues or on the contribution of the context (as in the views described above). The origin of this perspective is the study of mental processes linked to language, so it subscribes to cognitive-oriented pragmatics that considers linguistic phenomena as a matter of knowledge representation. In linguistics, this theory can be traced back to Generativism, cognitive semantics, and cognitive grammar (that of George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker, among others). In the cognitive view, politeness is understood as a linguistic phenomenon that falls within the normal system of human thought and does not require further specific models. Kasher (1991) hypothesizes a pragmatic competence not linked to specific modules of thought, but to general cognition and responsible for regulating phenomena such as politeness. More specifically, politeness is considered a possible cause of implicitness and this option becomes popular in Grice (1975) and in the Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) to explain inference and reveal how the implicit is managed cognitively. Katsos (2012: 279) points out that “all conversational implicatures are derived by a common set of pragmatic principles, which takes account of cooperativity, epistemic state and relevance to the discourse context among others”. (Kasper, 1990; Palmer, 1996; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2004; García Macías, 2005; Ariel, 2012; Haugh & Jaszczolt, 2012; Katsos, 2012, Wilson & Carston, 2019). Inference is considered as rational behaviour common to all human beings, however the various manifestations of politeness suggest combining this cognitivist line with conventional social parameters. According to Escandell-Vidal (1996, 1998a,

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1998b, 2004, 2009), politeness is a social type of knowledge: “[p]oliteness exploits general processing devices, but also particular pieces of knowledge” (EscandellVidal, 1996: 645). This view is proposed under the name of Sociocognitive approach and is in favour of pragmatics that take into equal account both the social and the individual cognitive dimension of the interpretation process (Kecskes, 2012; Long, 2016; Xie & Yus, 2017). The cognitive view of politeness also includes some concepts related to the understanding of language in general, such as the mental spaces theorized by Gilles Fauconnier or the schemata (derived from the theory of semantic frames by Charles Fillmore) (Palmer, 1996). According to this theory, the individual possesses cognitive schemata on language and its social implications. Schemata are conceptual frameworks that schematize knowledge and concrete contexts of use. Through schemata, recurrent connections are formed in the brain between formulas and contexts and, due to this same recurrence, they become typical. What is typical is the background of what is considered appropriate. Hence, the native speaker has typical conceptual schemes and categories that lead to the evaluation of politeness (Harris Bond et al., 2000; Terkourafi, 2005; Holtgraves, 2005; Haugh, 2012). It is clear that this theory interconnects with the issue of norms and principles (see Sect. 1.1). Terkourafi (2012) bases the concept of norms on the categorization of human behaviour in classes recognizable within a community of speakers. In her model, frames are clearly cognitive, that is “constellations of observable features of the extra-linguistic context extracted from their experience of similar situations and biasing speech-act interpretation toward specific preferred outcomes” (Terkourafi, 2012: 632). In this regard, verbal practice forms a sort of social memory that selfreproduces through cognitive habits (Haugh, 2013b). Another interesting interconnection is with the studies of interpersonal pragmatics (see Sect. 1.2). A first suggestion comes from the cognitive studies of relations, which see relationships as cultural constructs with cognitive representations (Ohashi & Chang, 2017). Palmer (1996: 211), too, stated that a speech act activates a scenario with cognitive and emotional states and a pattern of speaker participation. Such configurations can be conceived in cultural terms. Further input comes from the emerging cognitive role of emotions which, in politeness studies, are related, for example, to the emotional investment of the face. The Appraisal theory argues that cognition frames expectations about appropriate behaviour in a specific situation. Against this background, the cognitive interpretation of an event lead to evaluations, which generate emotional arousal. Emotions are triggered according to the degree of personal involvement, the speaker’s goal satisfaction (or lack of satisfaction), and the personal relevance for the speaker (White, 2011; Langlotz & Locher, 2017; Alba-Juez, 2018). To sum up, cognitive linguistics investigate the human inclination for conceptualization (Palmer, 1996) and this has interesting implications in terms of how we understand non-literal meanings and how politeness is implicated. The researcher adhering to a cognitive conception of politeness focuses on theorising mental processes supported by language data. Methodologically, the context and the social interactions cannot be ignored, because this perspective has strong interconnections with

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the categorization of human behaviour in a community (Sect. 1.1) and to the cognitive representations and evaluation of relationships and emotions (Sect. 1.2). In conclusion, this chapter advocates for an open conception of politeness, contemplating the context, the relations and the mind. These three perspectives yield emerging interconnections entailing methodological challenges because traditional research design (e.g. based on the questionnaire for data collection alone) does not seem to be adequate here. These challenges are discussed in detail in the following chapters.

Key points for the researcher ● According to my worldview, where is politeness? ● Does a single conception of politeness prevail in my preliminary bibliography? ● Do I prefer to refer to a single model of politeness or am I open to a multimodel view? ● Do I feel comfortable with the idea of “inventing” a new method for my investigation? ● Within my research constraints (e.g. time, subjects, etc.), what type of data source can I access? Data on context, mind and/or relationships?

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Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (pp. 41–58). Academic Press. Harris Bond, M., Žegarac V., & Spencer-Oatey. H. (2000). Culture as an explanatory variable: Problems and possibilities. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 47–71). Continuum. Haugh, M. (2007a). The co-constitution of politeness implicature in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(1), 84–110. Haugh, M. (2007b). The discursive challenge to politeness research: An interactional alternative. Journal of Politeness Research, 3(2), 295–317. Haugh, M. (2011). Epilogue: Culture and norms in politeness research. In Z.D. Kádár, & S. Mills (Eds.) Politeness in East Asia (pp. 252–263). Cambridge University Press. Haugh, M. (2012). Conversational interaction. In K. Jaszczolt, & K. Allan (Eds.) The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 253–273). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haugh, M. (2013a). Disentangling face, facework and im/politeness. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 1(1), 46–73. Haugh, M. (2013b). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 52–72. Haugh, M. (2015). Im/politeness implicatures. Mouton De Gruyter. Haugh, M. (2018). Afterword: Theorizing (im)politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 153–165. Haugh, M., & Bargiela-Chiappini, F. (2010). Face in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics., 42, 2073– 2077. Haugh, M., & Jaszczolt, K. (2012). Speaker intentions and intentionality. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 87–112). Cambridge University Press. Haugh, M., & Culpeper, J. (2018). Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. In C. Ilie & N. R. Norrick (Eds.), Pragmatics and its interfaces (pp. 213–239). John Benjamins. Haugh, M., Kádár, D. Z., & Mills, S. (2013). Interpersonal pragmatics: Issues and debates. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 1–11. Haugh, M., & Watanabe, Y. (2017). (Im)politeness theory. In B. Vine (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language in the workplace (pp. 65–76). Routledge. Hill, B., et al. (1986). Universals of linguistic politeness: Quantitative evidence from Japanese and American English. Journal of Pragmatics, 10, 347–371. Holmes, J., Marra, M., & Vines, B. (2011). Leadership, discourse, and ethnicity. Oxford University Press. Holtgraves, T. (2005). Social psychology, cognitive psychology, and linguistic politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 73–93. Inagaki, N. (2008). Linguistic politeness beyond modernity: A critical reconsideration of politeness theory. King’s College London. Janney, R., & Arndt, H. (1992). Intracultural tact versus intercultural tact. In R. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Politeness in language: Studies in its history, theory, and practice (pp. 21–41). Mouton de Gruyter. Jucker, A., Schneider, K. P., & Bublitz, W. (Eds.). (2018). Methods in Pragmatics. Mouton De Gruyter. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press. Kasher, A. (Ed.). (1991). The Chomskyan turn. Basil Blackwell. Kasper, G. (2009). Politeness. In S. D’hondt, J.O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.) The pragmatic of interaction (pp. 157–173). John Benjamins. Kasper, G. (1990). Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 193– 2018. Kasper, G. (1996). Politeness. In J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, & J. Blommaert (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 1–20). John Benjamins. Katsos, N. (2012). Experimental investigations and pragmatic theorising. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 275–290). Cambridge University Press.

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Kecskes, I. (2012). Sociopragmatics and cross-cultural and intercultural studies. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 599–616). Cambridge University Press. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (2004). ¿Es universal la cortesía?. In D. Bravo, & A. Briz Gómez (Eds.) Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 39–53). Ariel. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, C. (1996). La conversation. Seuil. Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness: Or, minding your P’s and Q’s. In C. Corum, C. SmithStark, & A. Weiser (Eds.), Papers from the 9th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 292–305). Linguistic Society. Langlotz, A., & Locher, M. (2017). (Im)politeness and emotion. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D.Z. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 287–322). Palgrave Macmillan. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. Longman. Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press. Leezenberg, M. (2013). Power in speech actions. In M. Sbisà & K. Turner (Eds.), Pragmatics of speech actions (pp. 287–312). De Gruyter Mouton. Locher, M. (2006a). Advice online. Advice-giving in an American Internet health column. John Benjamins. Locher, M. (2006b). Polite behaviour within relational work: The discursive approach to politeness. Multilingua, 25(3), 249–267. Locher, M. (2008). Relational work, politeness, and identity construction. In G. Antos, & E. Ventola (Eds.) Handbook of interpersonal communication (pp. 509-540). Mouton de Gruyter. Locher, M. (2012). Politeness research from past to future with a special focus on the discursive approach. In L. Fernández Amaya (Ed.) New perspectives on (im)politeness and interpersonal communication (pp. 36–60). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Locher, M. (2013). Relational work and interpersonal pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 145– 151. Locher, M. (2015). Interpersonal Pragmatics and its link to (im)politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 5–10. Locher , M., & Watts, R. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 9–33. Long, C. (2016). A social cognitive account of relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 12(1), 1–26. García Macías, H. (2005). Propuesta de un modelo cognitivo para el estudio de la cortesía. In J.M. Medrano (Ed.) Actas del II coloquio internacional del programa EDICE (pp. 343–359). Universidad de Costa Rica: Programa EDICE. Mao, L. R. (1994). Beyond politeness theory: «Face» revisited and renewed. Journal of Pragmatics, 21, 451–486. Matsumoto, Y. (1988). Reexamination of face. Journal of Pragmatics, 12, 403–426. Matsumoto, Y. (1989). Politeness and conversational universals: Observations from Japanese. Multilingua, 8, 207–221. Mills, S. (2003). Gender and politeness. Cambridge UniveristyPress. Mills, S. (2011a). Discursive approaches to politeness and impoliteness. In Linguistic Politeness Research Group (Ed.), Discursive approaches to politeness (pp. 19–56). Mouton de Gruyter. Mills, S. (2011b). Communities of practice and politeness. In B. Davies, M. Haugh, & A. Merrison (Eds.), Situated politeness (pp. 85–94). Continuum. O’Driscoll, J. (2013). The role of language in interpersonal pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 170–181. O’Driscoll, J. (2017). Face and (im)politenss. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 89–118). Palgrave Macmillan. Ohashi, J., & Chang, W.-L. (2017). (Im)politeness and relationality. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 257–285). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Palmer, G. (1996). Toward a theory of cultural linguistics. University of Texas Press. Portolés Lazaro, J. (2011). Cortesía pragmática e historia de las ideas: Face y freedom. Onomázein, 24, 223–244. Placencia, M.E., García, C. (2007). Introduction: Models for the study of (linguistic) (im)politeness. In M.E. Placencia, & C. García (Eds.) Research in politeness in the Spanish-speaking World (pp. 1–17). LEA. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, F. J. (2001). Lingüística cognitiva: semántica, pragmática y construcciones. CLAC Círculo 8. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (1995). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Basil Blackwell. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (1983). Face in interethnic communication. In J. Richards & R. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and communication (pp. 156–188). Longman. Sifianou, M. (2011). On the concept of face and politeness. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & K. Dániel (Eds.), Politeness across cultures (pp. 42–58). Palgrave. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000). Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.) Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 11–46). Continuum Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002). Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(5), 529–545. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2005). (Im)politenss, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their basis and interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 95–120. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007). Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics., 39, 639–656. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2009). Face, identity and interactional goals. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini, & M. Haugh (Eds.) Face, communication and social interaction (pp. 137–154). Equinox. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Basil Blackwell. Stubbs, M. (1987). Análisis del discurso. Análisis sociolingüístico del lenguaje natural. Alianza Editorial. Terkourafi, M., & Kádár, Z.D. (2017). Convention and ritual (im)politenss. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & Z.D. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 171–195). Palgrave Macmillan. Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 237–262. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Politeness and pragmatics. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 617–637). Cambridge University Press. Watts, R. J. (1989). Relevance and relational work: Linguistic politeness as politic behavior. Multilingua, 8(2–3), 131–166. Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge University Press. White, R. R. P. (2011). Appraisal. In J. Zienkowski, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Discursive pragmatics (pp. 14–36). John Benjamins. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics. The semantics of human interaction. Mouton de Gruyter. Wilson, D., & Carston, R. (2019). Pragmatics and the challenge of ‘non-propositional’ effects. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 31–38. Wood, T. (2015). Elements of hermeneutic pragmatics. Peter Lang. Xie, C., & Yus, F. (2017). An Internet dialogue on Internet pragmatics. Foreign Language and Literature Studies, 34(2), 75–92.

Chapter 2

What Do Speech Acts Offer as Discursive Practices?

It follows from the previous chapter that the epistemological evolution of politeness studies in recent decades offers the researcher different theoretical frameworks and methodological perspectives, often derived from cognate disciplines: politeness is not simply linguistics, because of the fact that the use of language centres on people. For this reason, politeness looks at interdisciplinary spaces and integrates methods from sociology, psychology, cognitive sciences, communication sciences, philosophy and anthropology (Held, 1992; Verschueren, 2012; Norrick & Haugh, 2015; Haugh & Culpeper 2018). The multiple understandings of politeness give different insights into it. In order to support the researcher in making methodological choices coherent with her research aims, in this chapter we start to focus on landmarks and possible routes through this interdisciplinary landscape. In the next pages, the overview of the philosophical origins of pragmatics helps identify the issues that this perspective raises in politeness studies. Hence, this is the first of a sequence of chapters presenting theoretical perspectives and extracting insights that can alert the researcher. Sometimes, new paradigms offer an answer to the problems of old paradigms, sometimes the issue remains an open question.

2.1 The Speech Acts The core of the development of pragmatics, as is well known, lies in ordinary language philosophy, which was anticipated in the later Wittgenstein, and developed by Austin, Searle, Strawson and Grice. Ordinary language philosophy leads to the reconsideration of traditional philosophical problems as problems of language. In addition to the oldest antecedents reported by Wierzbicka (2003: 197–198), the focus on ordinary language prepared the ground for the Speech Act Theory and other insights that continue to be fruitful in politeness studies (such as, the notion of appropriateness) (Sbisà, 2011a, 2018). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_2

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Since Austin (1962), the Speech Act Theory has developed in different views, such as Searle’s (1969) and later, neo-Gricean pragmatics and Relevance Theory. Politeness has adopted the construct of the speech act as one of its main reference points. Speech acts catalogue the intentions of the speaker in linguistic forms (called locutive force) combined with functions (denominated illocutive force). They constitute an utterance, which possesses a performative force (i.e. an effect on reality). The speech act has constituted the primordial unit of analysis in pragmatics and coupled with the assumption of linguistic data (rather than context, relationship, etc.) as priority data (Kecskes, 2012). Regarding politeness, in particular, this construct is strictly linked to the fact that when there is no direct linguistic correspondence between locution and illocution we have an indirect act. As we will see further on, an indirect act is a deviation from conversational cooperation and has been theorized as an implicature of politeness. These two themes, speech acts and conversational implicatures, form the strong link between politeness and pragmatic epistemology. They deal with why humans are able to understand each other sufficiently well despite the gap that may exist between what they formally say (locutive force), what they emotively and cognitively intend (illocutive force) and what they achieve in practice (perlocutive force). In other words, the distinction between illocution and perlocution is the fundamental issue in pragmatics as a science (Grice, 1975; Pfister, 2010; Culpeper & Terkourafi 2017; Sbisà, 2018). As Sbisà points out, discourse is not a direct consequence of the semantics of words, because, in-between, there is (2018: 149–150): [...] the power of discourse of shaping and reshaping the relationship between the interlocutors, what they legitimately expect from one another, what they owe to one another, what they are in a position to do to one another or to third parties. And the exercise of this power is located at the level of the illocution, which then appears as intermediate between the uttering of words and the effectiveness of discourse.

Typically, speech acts concern politeness studies at the level of utterance. This is a single linguistic unit easily manageable from a methodological point of view. We can identify the linguistic form of an utterance; we can also analyse sequences of utterances. We can also identify conventional routines of acts. As summarized by Culpeper and Terkourafi (2017: 13): Firstly, the notion of an utterance ‘doing an action’—the precursor to the notion of speech act—offered a contextually sensitive unit of analysis. Secondly, it offered the possibility of shifting the focus from language as a tool for exchanging information about the world to a tool for building and maintaining human relationships (i.e. shift from transactional to interactional). Thirdly, the idea that utterances could vary in terms of how explicitly they performed actions, what later scholars would refer to as (in)directness, was to become an important dimension of politeness theory.

We now review some specific theoretical developments of speech acts in the field of politeness studies, namely, indirectness, and the process of conventionalization. These themes pose various methodological questions, hence, further on, we will comment on speech acts understood in a more dynamic way, that is as dialogic synergies embedded in discourse. The latter conception is an answer to the limit of

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the speech act conceived as a single unit of analysis with an intrinsic polite semantic, but at the same time, implies new methodological issues in research. As introduced above, the indirectness of a speech act has been considered a good reason for deviation from Grice’s Maxims: the gap between locution and illocution breaks the rational efficiency of cooperative communication and can be attributed to an intention of politeness (Grice himself hypothesized this possibility). Somehow, a competition is generated between Cooperative Maxims and politeness, especially when the aim of the conversational cooperation is not the transmission of information (transactional) but the relationship between the speakers (interactional) (Ventola, 1979; Kasper, 1990). When the cooperative principle is not complied with, the speaker recovers the implicit meaning of the deviant speech act with the support of the context. This is called a conversational implicature and the speaker reconstructs the polite intention by inference. The traditional view also deduced a sort of quantification: more indirectness corresponds to more politeness. In the case of politeness, the implicature cannot only be attributed to a particularized implicature, that is linked to the reading and evaluation of the context in question. It is also a generalized implicature, which means that in the conventional uses of language it is established as being polite. This latter characteristic refers to a more recent hypothesis, based on the routine strategies of the speakers observed by Gumperz. It is connected to the concept of frame—already introduced in Sect. 1.1—, which is intended as a sequence of acts that are recurrent and that, as a consequence of this frequency, are conventionalized according to a principle of economy: speakers can process the automated sequences more quickly and with less effort (Watts, 2003; Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017). This development of generalized and particularized implicatures shows that indirect acts can produce a variable amount of effort and a variable amount contextual politeness effects (Haugh, 2007b). In fact, there are generalized frames of politeness that are used unconsciously and go unnoticed (technically, they are termed unmarked or political). There is, as well, a non-framed politeness that instead requires access to the specific intentions of the speaker in a specific context for a particularized reconstruction of the polite intention (this is termed marked or polite) (Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017). The generalized facet of the implicature admits that an utterance (or a routine of utterances) can have a polite default interpretation (Müller, 2006; Kádár & Haugh, 2013). This interpretation needs to rely on a process of conventionalization. At the origin of the studies of speech acts, it was somehow assumed that there was a systematic connection between speakers’ intentions and speech acts, i.e. that politeness was inherent in certain linguistic forms. Leech (1983, 2014), for example, identifies a conventional link between a speech act and its impositivity. This made it possible, in his model, to “quantify” politeness as a predictable relationship between the energy that the communicative goal requires (verbal cost) and the results (benefit/offense) for the speaker and the interlocutor. This position comes from the observation of formulaic recurrences in conversational situations, which are regularly implied in politeness. Conversation analysis documents such recurrent linguistic structures (e. g. adjacency pairs and preferred

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and dispreferred pairs) so that it is plausible to admit regular linguistic paradigms that interpret the “laws” of politeness. The frame-based view of Terkourafi (2005, 2012), for example, adopts a quantitative methodology to identify regularity of cooccurrence between linguistic expressions and context traits (such as social status for example). The novelty is that this view uses the rejoinders of the speakers themselves to have an emic basis for the classification of acts as polite. Therefore, it maintains the speech act analysis paradigm but with an emic perspective to capture polite habits and their frames. In this perspective, politeness is a matter of frequency in certain contextual frames.

2.2 Discursive Practices Stubbs (1987) defines the study of language in its context of social interaction as a sort of socio-psychological quagmire because linguistics must operate with multiple levels (code, situation, contents, action, subconscious, etc.) to search for a possible underlying order. The speech act theory, in general, had the disadvantage of being unprepared for the heterogeneity of actual communication in real life, as Wood (2015: 11) notes: “[…] the claim that actual acts are accomplished ‘once and only once’ marks a decisive difference with the study of acts that are precisely not actual; the latter are acts which have been abstracted from actual communication and objectified in the relevant cultural science. They are types of acts”. Contrasting what happens in the natural use of language with the concepts that scholars attempt to draw from it follows the general linguistic turn of the twentieth century. The attention to linguistic data (such as grammatical structures) branches out into the discourse studies and, as far as politeness is concerned, this in turn leads from speech acts to discursive practices (see Sect. 1.2). Methodologically influenced by Discourse Analysis and Conversational Analysis, the single speech act as a unit of analysis has been integrated into communicative interaction; as a consequence, discourse has become the unit of analysis (Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Terkourafi, 2015; Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017; Jucker et al., 2018). The example of facework research (see Sect. 1.1) is paradigmatic: many of the studies were based on speech acts that benefit the recipient (i.e. polite acts, like greetings, thanks, compliments, etc.), neutral acts (like informing, announcing) and face-threatening acts (like an order or a request). The discursive approach, however, points out that speech acts in real use are subject to indeterminable complexity a priori, because the meaning emerges in the discursive construction of turn on turn and following dynamic evaluation by the speakers. In other words, the meaning has turned out to be meaning in interaction, hence speech acts are not simply actions, but acts in interaction (Haugh 2013a, 2015). In this passage a new philosophical perspective is grafted on to the subject: Foucault suggested the pertinence of power relations in the field of politeness, stimulating studies on how discursive practices relate to social practice (Martín Rojo & Gabilondo Pujol, 2011). Foucault theorizes discourse as a practice, i.e. a “body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the

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time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area, the conditions of operation of the enunciative function” (Foucault, 1969/1972: 117 cited in Martín Rojo & Gabilondo Pujol, 2011: 91). In politeness, the power variable is one of the axes of Brown and Levinson’s theory, however, today the focus is less anthropological and more political. As a consequence of this discursive perspective, the idea that linguistic forms can directly codify illocutive forces seems an inflexible view of linguistic use, due to considerations of speaker agency and to the social dimension of language. As anthropology notes, the idea that linguistic forms can directly codify illocutive forces is not feasible because illocutive forces are charged in the context by the speakers’ agency. Duranti (2007) defines agency as the property of those entities that have a certain degree of control over their actions and whose actions have an effect on other entities (and sometimes on themselves). In particular, agency is a sort of semantic universal connected to the question: what is the origin of the power of words? The agency of participants engaged in a social interaction is an interesting point that Mitchell and Haugh (2015) elaborate with respect to impoliteness, but it is also highly pertinent to politeness. The presupposition of agency is what determines how the participants can be held to be committed to or accountable for their actions and meaning, inside a framework of moral order that informs the set of evaluations they make: “[t]he accountability of social action—and thus evaluations of impoliteness these social actions can occasion—is mediated in part through the presumed agency of those participants” (Mitchell & Haugh 2015: 210). In other words, perceptions of social norms and perceptions of the interlocutor’s intentions are to be framed in a role of presumed agency. Additionally, following a discursive paradigm, the thesis that illocutive forces can be codified directly in linguistic forms is not acceptable for a second reason. The idea that words have a power of their own ignores the social dimension of language (Duranti, 2007). For example, a speech act can be threatening in one situation and not in another, or in one culture and not in another. This makes it clear that a linguistic action cannot be studied in a way that is alien to its context. Therefore, the hypothesis of the conventionalization of politeness in certain linguistic forms is contrasted with the idea that communication does not follow mechanical combinations of forms and functions (or, at least, not always), but flexible strategies involving the (at least potential) multifunctionality of all speech acts (Fraser, 1990b; Kasper, 1996, 2009; Verschueren, 2002; Koike et al., 2001; Culpeper, 2010). The need to relativize the speech act situationally and culturally grows, thus, surpassing the speech act as a decontextualized entity, as it was at the philosophical beginnings of the theory (Stubbs, 1987; Wood, 2015). In a discoursive approach, each act is conceived as a bundle of illocutive components (intentions, values, beliefs, feelings, etc.). Moreover, as noted by Sbisà (2011a), in the philosophy of language there is still an interest in the role of context (contextualism) in discourse as practice. For example, as a philosopher in formal semantics, Stalnaker (1999) theorizes that speakers have a shared cognitive world (common ground) without which there is no access to the meaning of their interaction. Stalnaker emphasizes the dynamism

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of the speech acts, because pragmatic presuppositions do not reside in the semantics of words, but in the speakers. They make pragmatic choices based on their presuppositions and carry out processes of accommodation within the dynamics of the discourse. The scientific question remains of how the analyst can access these presuppositions and the aim remains to understand how exactly the speakers make inferences (Kecskes, 2012, 2014; Wood, 2015). As is evident, the philosophical perspective is still very fertile for studies of politeness, especially in hybridization with cognitive linguistics (e.g., frame concept), and with sociology (e.g. social practice, power, Bourdieusian habitus). From a methodological point of view, the philosophical approach still offers useful data because its linguistic inspirations can be adequate for quantitative analysis. The quantitative data is significant in offering insights on the relationship between frequency of use and degree of conventionalization. For example, in recent developments in corpus pragmatics, the speech act can be a very important tagging unit for function-to-form corpora research. This is determining new theoretical developments with respect to the categorization of acts themselves and their reconfiguring as a sort of diffuse category (with different degrees of prototypes) (Hernández Sacristán, 1997). In conclusion, this chapter has focusessed on speech acts as a salient point in politeness studies developed at the philosophic core of pragmatics. The concept of speech act has experienced a theoretical evolution. As a linguistic entity, the speech act has brought to the attention of the researcher of politeness the methodological problem of quantifying indirectness and conventionalization. As a discursive practice, it involves the issue of understanding the choices that a speaker makes from a range of options in order to produce a speech act, following her perceptions and evaluations of politeness.

Key points for the researcher ● Am I more interested in the gap between locutive and illocutive force, or in what speakers achieve in practice (perlocutive level)? ● How can I demonstrate a dialogic synergy in discourse? ● What is my position on generalized frames of politeness and a non-framed politeness? ● How can I quantify politeness? ● How can I investigate the perceived agency of speakers? ● How can I prove that the perceived agency of the speaker determines her perceptions of social norms and of the interlocutor’s intentions? ● Are speech acts really comparable among cultures if I conceive of them as practices?

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References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press. Culpeper, J. (2010). Conventionalized impoliteness formulae. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3232– 3245. Culpeper, J., & Terkourafi, M. (2017). Pragmatic approaches (Im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 11–39). Palgrave Macmillan. Duranti, A. (2007). Etnopragmatica. La forza del parlare. Carocci. Fraser, B. (1990b). The concept of politeness. Paper presented at the 1985 NWAVF Meeting, Georgetown University. Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics (pp. 41–58). Academic Press. Haugh, M. (2007). The co-constitution of politeness implicature in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(1), 84–110. Haugh, M. (2013). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 52–72. Haugh, M. (2015). Im/politeness implicatures. Mouton De Gruyter. Haugh, M., & Culpeper, J. (2018). Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory. In C. Ilie & N. R. Norrick (Eds.), Pragmatics and its interfaces (pp. 213–239). John Benjamins. Held, G. (1992). Politeness in linguistic research. In R. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.) Politeness in language (pp. 131–154). Mouton de Gruyter. Hernández Sacristán, C., et al. (1997). Actos de habla desde una perspectiva contrastiva: Apuntes metodológicos. In A. Briz (Ed.), Pragmática y gramática del español hablado (pp. 317–327). Universidad de Valencia/Libros Pórticos. Jucker, A., Schneider, K. P., & Bublitz, W. (Eds.). (2018). Methods in Pragmatics. Mouton De Gruyter. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press. Kasper, G. (2009). Politeness. In S. D’hondt, J.O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.) The pragmatic of interaction (pp. 157–173). John Benjamins. Kasper, G. (1990). Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 193– 2018. Kasper, G. (1996). Politeness. In J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, & J. Blommaert (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 1–20). John Benjamins. Kecskes, I. (2012). Sociopragmatics and cross-cultural and intercultural studies. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 599–616). Cambridge University Press. Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural pragmatics. Oxford University Press. Koike, D.A., Vann, R., & Busquets, J. (2001). Spanish no, sí: Reactive moves to perceived facethreatening acts. Journal of Pragmatics. Part 1 33(5), 701–723, Part II 33(6), 879–899. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. Longman. Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press. Martín Rojo, L., & Gabilondo Pujol, A. (2011). Michel Foucault. In M. Sbisà, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Philosophical perspective for pragmatics (pp. 85–103). John Benjamins. Mitchell, N., & Haugh, M. (2015). Agency, accountability and evaluations of impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 207–238. Müller, A. (2006). La cortesía conversacional: Análisis secuenciales. In M. Schrader-Kniffi (Ed.), La cortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 156–182). Iberoamericana. Norrick, N., & Haugh, M. (2015). Interdisciplinary perspectives on pragmatics: A festschrift for Jonathan Culpeper. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 1–4. Pfister, J. (2010). Is there a need for a maxim of politeness? Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1266–1282.

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Sbisà, M. (2011). Analytical philosophy—ordinary language philosophy. In M. Sbisà, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Philosophical perspective for pragmatics (pp. 11–25). John Benjamins. Sbisà, M. (2018). Philosophical pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 133–153). Mouton De Gruyter. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press. Stalnaker, R. (1999). Context and content: Essays on intentionality in speech and thought. Oxford University Press. Stubbs, M. (1987). Análisis del discurso. Análisis sociolingüístico del lenguaje natural. Alianza Editorial. Terkourafi, M. (Ed.). (2015). Interdisciplinary perspectives on im/politeness. John Benjamins. Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 237–262. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Politeness and pragmatics. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 617–637). Cambridge University Press. Ventola, E. (1979). The structure of casual conversation in English. Journal of Pragmatics, 3, 267–298. Verschueren, J. (2002). Para entender la pragmática. Gredos. Verschueren, J. (2012). Ideology in language use: Pragmatic guidelines for empirical research. Cambridge University Press. Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics. The semantics of human interaction. Mouton de Gruyter. Wood, T. (2015). Elements of hermeneutic pragmatics. Peter Lang.

Chapter 3

What is the Magnitude of Variation?

This chapter continues to pursue the objective of exposing the insights that emerge from specific theoretical perspectives. The route that the section takes comes from the tradition of the variational studies, which have their origin in the cross-cultural and intercultural politeness studies, as well as in the sociocultural investigation. These theoretical paths, however, have had to face the fact that variation concerns aspects of systems, and not single axes of change (e.g., diatopic variation). They cast light on the issues of comparability of politeness and the epistemological redefinition of the construct of culture. The methodological consequences for the researcher imply the need to evaluate different magnitude of variation for her investigation, from a macro cultural level to a micro individual level, passing through an intermediate level of “small cultures”.

3.1 The Variational Perspective and Comparability Variation can be expressed as social (gender, age, ethnicity, social class, economics, education, etc.), spatial (regions, areas, countries, etc.) and time-related (historical changes). Just to mention a few examples in politeness studies, the best developed areas so far are: speech acts across languages and cultures, interaction between native and non-native speakers, cultural values of face in different cultures, cultural frames and rituals in comparison, intracultural variations, interactional sociolinguistics, etc. (Scollon & Scollon, 1983, 1995; Blum-Kulka et al., 1989; Palmer, 1996; Barron & Schneider, 2009; Culpeper, 2011a, 2015; Kádár & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2011; Holmes et al., 2011; Schneider & Placencia, 2017; Terkourafi & Kádár, 2017). Since the first studies in the 1980s, the variational perspective has been developing on the basis of a comparative approach. It addresses the fields of cross-cultural politeness, that is the interaction between individuals belonging to different societies/communities, including the themes of cultural breakdowns, relational incidents, and speech-acts in different cultures. It also addresses the intercultural politeness, that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_3

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is communication between native and non-native speakers of a language, communication in a lingua franca, multilingual discourse, and pragmatic in multilingual subjects (Kecskes, 2012). The data that this approach prefers are mainly ethnographic and sociolinguistic, and partly cognitive (e.g., ontologies and representations of knowledge). With respect to politeness, the starting point is constituted by speech acts (e.g., requests, apologies, compliments, greetings, etc.). Data on speech acts are obtained independently from different cultural groups and then compared to look for both regularity and variation (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Observing the geographical variations of a language, scholars try to map patterns of speech acts to compare them across languages. The purpose of comparison is to search for equivalence, i.e. data comparable with respect to function (e.g. the observed behaviour), with respect to conceptual equivalence (e.g. the construct of face) and to linguistic equivalence (e.g. the semantic correspondence of terms). Valid comparison requires a good amount of data to allow for a certain degree of generalisabilty, but capturing authentic language is not possible in the time reasonably needed to obtain a quantity of data considered sufficient for its generalisation. Consequently, this approach requires the use of elicitation methods (such as DCTs, role playing or questionnaires), because they offer standardized data and homogeneous categories. Obviously, the data elicited return a non-natural language and fail to record several conversational and interpersonal phenomena of interest for studying politeness (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Comparability entails several problems, methodologically speaking. First, it is difficult in our field to have sufficiently stable categories for making comparisons because politeness is sensitive to “virtually infinite adaptability in the meaningful functioning of language” (Verschueren, 1996: 590). In other words, politeness adapts dynamically in the ongoing interaction, which implies more fuzzy phenomena than clear categories. The second point is that the elements of politeness undergo a process of subjective evaluation. The speakers make moral judgements that only an emic perspective can validly report. If the supposed categories of politeness under comparison are subject to subjective evaluation, the outsider’s interpretation (i.e. the researcher’s) always involves risks of speculation, e.g. going beyond the data. In short, the researcher can try to establish categories for comparison, but without an emic validation, they are theoretical constructs. One example is historical politeness studies. They face the problem that politeness is “localized” and try to reconstruct the context in order to re-contextualize and interpret it. But often this is a speculative move, and sometimes, it is quite impossible (Jucker & Kopaczyk, 2017; Traugott, 2019). A second point under discussion in a variational approach is the fact that politeness has been considered a culturally dependent phenomenon, because the underlying norms and values vary from culture to culture. Politeness was therefore conceived of as a cultural product, and culture was seen as a pre-existing unit, which the speaker inherited (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Moreover, the variation was mostly understood as being between “national” cultures, and neglected both intracultural variation (at the level of social class, gender, age, etc.) and diachronic variation. In general, the

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equation «one region/nation = one language = one culture = one politeness» was a default assumption (Besnier, 1995; Schneider & Placencia, 2017). In general, these critical points are rejected as being culturally static and overly homogeneous (Holliday, 2016). The deconstruction of the national cultural construct brings the idea that cultures are a “more or less organized disorder” (Besnier, 1995: 564). To give an example of the consequences, Schneider and Placencia (2017) stratify regional variation in national, subnational, local, and sublocal variation. Furthermore, supranational regions can also be identified, for example a community that shares values and politeness across political or geographical boundaries, despite speaking the same language or not. In simple words, sharing the politeness system does not imply sharing the language and sharing a language does not imply sharing the politeness system. This fine-grained variation has not yet been investigated in depth by politeness studies (Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009). To conclude, it useful to mention that the concept of culture remains at the same time one of the most frequently mentioned in politeness studies but also one of the most confused in pragmatic literature (Eelen, 2001; Verschueren, 2002). Haugh and Kádár (2017) summarise current trends in the conception of what culture is: ● A cognitive approach: Culture is a form of knowledge, therefore the scholar aims to describe it in more or less dynamic/static and local/general terms. ● An interactional approach: Culture is practices and the scholars analyse intercultural encounters in and out of restricted communities. ● A critical approach: Culture is an ideological resource for perpetuating power, so scholars analyse intercultural encounters as a site of struggle. It is clear that politeness can no longer relate to cultures stricto sensu, in fact, as Eelen (2001: 166) observes “[…] although culture may be useful as an abstract descriptive notion […] it is not per se also able to function as a concrete explanatory notion […]”. Many politeness studies in fact offer categorisations of cultures according to the prevailing “type” of politeness (e.g. affiliative, deferential, etc.). The broad definition of culture that they adopt assumes that cultural imprinting is an inherent property of the individual and is shared with the social group. In the following sections, this point is further discussed. To sum up, the variational perspective deals with the critical issue of comparability of politeness and with the epistemological redefinition of the construct of culture. The emerging point of interest in this approach is that a contrastive methodology can capture assonance or dissonance between entities, even if not really comparable. Ultimately, observing elements in contrast is useful to shed light on their respective characteristics.

3.2 The Situated Variation As mentioned in the previous section, cultures are not monoliths. More precisely they are not the monolith sometimes theorized by researchers on the basis of their cultural

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point of view. This is evident in Western-centric theories of politeness, which reflect an individualistic vision not recognised by other cultures (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). For this reason, Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2017) theorize social levels, namely a macro and micro level. At the social macro level, there are super ordinate factors that produce macroscopic variations in language use. Sociolinguistics studies these magnitudes of variation as attributes of the speaker, for example the language spoken or the gender. Nevertheless, these factors are not linear attributes, they are in fact more complex sociocultural traits of the speaker. This perspective involves a strong emic instance: data should refer to how the subject displays, perceives and evaluates in interaction (Sifianou & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2017). The consequence is, for example, that the regional affiliation of the subject is a cultural construct and does not only reflect geographical pertinence. Indeed, the speaker of a language does not necessarily identify with the place where she lives or was born. To give another example, gender is no longer understood as an inherent characteristic derived to some extent from biological gender. Gender is socially embedded and is constituted as gender identity through discursive practices. Repetition of discursive practices forms the prototype that leads men and women to align (or not) to expectations of polite feminine or masculine behaviour. So it is the reproduction of the discourse that sets different parameters for gender variations of politeness. Therefore, the traditional hypothesis that women are more polite is reviewed as an ideology produced at the discursive level and this opens these studies up to application in the political field as well (Chalupnik et al., 2017). As Kádár and Haugh (2013: 233) observe: “[…] we co-construct understandings of politeness as representative of cultural identities through discourse and interaction itself. In other words, the relationship between politeness and culture is constituted through discourse”. In the Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2017) model, the macro-social factors interact with the micro-social factors. The latter add a specific situational variation to the macro-varieties. For example, values can produce individual variation of macro factors: to return to the previous example, a speaker can identify or not with the place where she was born on the basis of her values. It is therefore understood that individuals do not inherit cultural constraints at a generalized level and are not therefore passive results of them. The culture of a subject is not an inherent force, but can be subject to context and negotiation. Therefore, culture is a resource that individuals use at a microcultural level of action to better express their identity (age, gender, etc.). For example, speakers who have cultural differences regulate their interaction both on the basis of the values they share and through a process of recognition and repair of their differences. In other words, speakers are not passive cultural actors, but they are able to act on their cultural traits and flexibly accommodate them. In politeness studies, this implies exploring the situated variation, and not the mere variation. It implies taking into account the intersection between macro dimensions and localized practices. As Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2017: 590) observe: “Societies are neither populated by uniform individuals who merely conform to social practices of a unified culture but neither are they by individuals who behave in endlessly different ways and constantly change social reality because

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if the latter were the case, communication would be impossible”. Methodologically, to explore the situated variation, ethnomethodological and conversational analysis methods have become more frequent, and they are complemented by ethnographic information about the context and the history of the relationship between speakers (as in the Interactional approach). The trend described so far in this chapter represents a shift in magnitude of variation. The culture and its macro-level influxes have been considered the cause of politeness behaviours in initial cross-cultural and intercultural studies. This conception of culture assumes an idea of homogeneity and it has been successful precisely because it reflects average data (Eelen, 2001). Lately, cultures are being seen as the background for the choices and evaluations of the individual. In this view, the researcher can no longer focus on cultures, but on micro-level situated variations. However, this localized perspective does not preclude the fact that trends can be observed. Current studies of politeness across cultures try to work on social units of transit to the wider society, that is networks of relationships that have specific value combinations. They move from culture as groups of homogeneous and identifiable traits, to smaller convergences of common traits. They identify smaller units of analysis that configure a “small culture”, such as communities of practice and relational networks (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Such small units define and converge on their own conventions of politeness. A community of practice is a group engaged in a joint activity or task of any nature (sports, professional, virtual community, etc.). Compared to the concept of culture, it is a fine-grained unit, a package of salient variables. Being systematically shared, those variables identify the community and hence can be good references for analysis. The limit is that a community is a closed unit: the analysis can only draw conclusions only regarding the internal politeness dynamic of the community investigated, and not others. Instead, a relational network is a network of social links that outline a recognizable group. Compared to the community of practice, it is a more transversal unit and for this reason it allows the analysis of multiple intersections of networks (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). It is evident that these shades of magnitude involve the discussion of the individual, as we will see in the next section. Eelen (2001: 129) points out that “[t]he ontology of the society-individual connection needs to be laid out in detail. Without it we are left with a gap between the abstract level of the collective where the norms and rules reside, and the level of concrete individual behaviour which is explained by those norms and rules”.

3.3 The Active Notion of the Individual Kecskes observes that in politeness studies: “The emphasis on the decisive role of context, socio-cultural factors, and cooperation is overwhelming, while the role of the individual’s prior experience, existing private knowledge, and egocentrism is almost completely ignored […]” (2012: 51). In this field the individual dimension

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is still to be explored, both with respect to the psychological dimension, and with respect to the more neurological locus of the interpretative process. As hinted at above, the individual is not necessarily understood as a rationally strategic entity who acts through language, but as a being embedded in society and its moral order. Namely, politeness involves the subjective judgement of others’ behaviour in relation to what is socially conventionalised. Arundale (2010b) discusses the link between the individual level and the social level, which are seen as distinct but fully interdependent phenomena. This nexus can be conceptualized in a weak form or in a strong form. The weak conception aggregates independent individuals; the strong one focuses on synergistic integration, not simply summative phenomena. This implies that interpersonal communication can be studied with different focuses: (1) individual traits, (2) individual in a situation, (3) dynamic systems, and (4) dynamic systems with dialectic tensions. The first two are weak approaches, and use decoding/encoding models of human communication, adding up the behaviours of an independent sender and receiver. The researcher is as an external observer. The last two are a strong form, use methods where the states, meanings, cognitions and actions of speakers are interdependent in interaction. The researcher examines evidence taking the position of the insiders, that is, those involved in the interaction. In general, as Eelen argues (2001: 213), an adequate psychological model is missing in theories of politeness: “[…] the psychological profile of individuals implicit in current politeness theorizing is one of social conformists whose cognitive structures and mechanism drive them to execute the culture they are part of and over which they are powerless”. This implies implicit and consensual convergence with the system, i.e. the priority of the social over the individual. Culture is seen as dominating the individual, who adheres through socialisation (gratification and deprivation processes) to social roles that she passively interprets and to social expectations that generate patterns of evaluation (norms and scripts). In this view, the individual is seen only as a social token (and not a psychological individual) who follows the norms of her place in society. The individual is not conceived of as a dynamic, unique, and original entity with personal opinions; in short, she is not a creative subject in polite communication. This microlevel of variation is methodologically meaningful because the individual is the real empirical data of the research in politeness, the individual is the tangible subject. The above-mentioned constructs of culture or society are abstract entities, they are theorisations whose empirical foundation remains the individual. It is the individual evaluations and the individual behaviours within a society that are concrete. Even within the same group interpretations of politeness may vary significantly and this is an instance of complexity that questions the traditional assumption that members of the same culture will interpret a statement in the same way. Eelen (2001) adds that the theories of politeness have not accounted for this variability, yet; in fact, they have denied the idiosyncrasy, the individual peculiarity and the individual in favour of the common, the community, the group, and the social. But the individual is not completely culturally determined; on the contrary, she is a unique

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variant of shared culture. In quantitative terms: she has internalised some but not all parts of the cultural heritage. Ultimately, the route illustrated in this chapter leads to an issue of concern for the analyst of politeness: what makes the difference between an intercultural encounter and a simply interpersonal encounter? That is, what guarantees the intercultural element? It seems impossible to discern whether the prevailing variables have a sociocultural or a psychological/idiosyncratic nature. As already stated, on the one hand, each individual in the social encounter tends towards shared principles that make communication possible beyond subjective idiosyncrasies; on the other hand, such convergence is very variable (Ciliberti, 1993; Eelen, 2001; Haugh & Kádár, 2017). Haugh and Kádár (2017) propose different methodological approaches that ensure the analysis is intercultural. Notably, by “intercultural” they mean the encounter between two people, on the basis of the fact that they will embody variation within a general culture. In other words, each encounter is always intercultural and unique but refers contingently to a community or network. Haugh and Kádár (2017) propose: ● to understand if for the participants themselves cultural group membership is relevant in the course of a specific interaction. That could be via naturally occurring references or via post-interview elicited data ● to triangulate interactional analysis with ethnographic data on the context ● to elicit evaluation from observers who identify themselves, culturally speaking, with the participants of the interaction under study. The observer should be a lay observer and not the academic researcher to avoid influencing interpretation. To conclude, this chapter explored different magnitudes of variation, and their methodological implications in politeness research. The macro level involves the dynamic redefinition of the construct of culture and the function of comparing cultures. The micro level focuses on the individuals and their situated practices, and rejects systems that attempt to abstract and generalize the high empirical variability of politeness. An intermediate level admits that the high variability of politeness emerging in interactions can be traced back to small units of analysis, that is to say small cultures. In the next chapter, the consequences of this state of the art are discussed in detail.

Key points for the researcher ● Do I consider values an individual or a cultural construct? ● How can I explain why communities that share the same language and the same “national” culture can nevertheless have different evaluations of politeness? ● Would my data analysis benefit from some sort of comparison? ● How useful is the construct of culture if I accept that an individual incorporates many different cultures?

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● Where does the originality of the individual with respect to her culture come from? ● To what extent can a fine-grained investigation get? How meaningful is individual behaviour for my investigation?

References Arundale, R. (2010). Relating. In M. Locher & S. Graham (Eds.), Interpersonal pragmatics (pp. 137–165). Mouton de Gruyter. Barron, A., & Schneider, K. P. (2009). Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics, 6(4), 425–442. Besnier, N. (1995). The appeal and pitfalls of cross-disciplinary dialogues. In J. Russell et al. (Eds.), Everyday conceptions of emotion (pp. 559–570). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chalupnik, M., Christie, C., & Mullany, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and gender. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 517–538). Palgrave Macmillan. Ciliberti, A. (1993). The personal and the cultural in interactive styles. Journal of Pragmatics, 20(1), 1–25. Culpeper, J. (2011). Impoliteness: Using language to cause offence. Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, J. (2015). Impoliteness strategies. In A. Capone & J. Mey (Eds.), Interdisciplinary studies in pragmatics, culture and society (pp. 421–445). Springer. Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. St. Jerome Publishing. Haugh, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Intercultural (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 601–632). Palgrave Macmillan. Holliday, A. (2016). Studying culture. In Z. Hua (Ed.), Research methods in intercultural communication (pp. 23–36). Wiley Blackwell. Holmes, J., Marra, M., & Vines, B. (2011). Leadership, discourse, and ethnicity. Oxford University Press. Jucker, A., & Kopaczyk, J. (2017). Historical (im)politenss. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 433–459). Palgrave Macmillan. Kádár, D., & Bargiela-Chiappini, F. (2011). Introduction: Politeness research in and across cultures. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), Politeness across cultures (pp. 1–17). Palgrave Macmillan. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Kecskes, I. (2012). Sociopragmatics and cross-cultural and intercultural studies. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 599–616). Cambridge University Press. Palmer, G. (1996). Toward a theory of cultural linguistics. University of Texas Press. Schneider, P. K., & Placencia, M. E. (2017). (Im)politeness and regional variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 539–570). Palgrave Macmillan. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (1983). Face in interethnic communication. In J. Richards, & R. Schmidt (Eds.) Language and communication (pp. 156–188). Longman.

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Scollon, R., Scollon, S. (1995). Intercultural communication: A discourse approach. Basil Blackwell. Shoshana, B.K., House, J., Kasper, G. (1989). Investigating cross-cultural pragmatics: An introductory overview. In B.K. Shoshana, J. House, & G. Kasper (Eds.) Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies (pp. 1–34). Ablex. Sifianou, M., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2017). (Im)politeness and cultural variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 571–599). Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Franklin, P. (2009). Intercultural interaction. A multidisciplinary approach to intercultural communication. Palgrave Macmillan. Terkourafi, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Convention and ritual (im)politenss. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D.Z. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 171–1995). Palgrave Macmillan. Traugott, E. (2019). Whither historical pragmatics? A cognitively-oriented perspective. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 25–30. Verschueren, J. (1996). Contrastive ideology research. Aspects of a pragmatic methodology. In K. Jaszczolt, & K. Turner (Eds.) Contrastive semantics and pragmatics. Volume II. Discourse Strategies (pp. 589–603). Pergamon Press. Verschueren, J. (2002). Para entender la pragmática. Gredos.

Chapter 4

What Emerges from a Dynamic System?

Politeness research is interested in the gap between the individual and the social dimension (e.g. culture) because the concrete data of speakers in interaction show such a variation that the influence of social and cultural models is called into question. For the researcher, this poses the question of how a community can become recognisable as such and how this impacts on politeness practices. Culture, “[…] is commonly used to refer to any set of persons who can be classed or categorised as having some kind of association through shared beliefs, values and practices […]” (Haugh & Kádár, 2017: 604). But, in the recent conceptions of cultures that we outlined in the previous chapter, individuals are fluidly agglutinated by in-group similarities and out-group diversity, which are transversal to traditional generalizations of culture (e.g. national culture). This supposes a systemic view of politeness and suggests the advantages of studying multiple dimensions of variation. Hence, this chapter is dedicated to the individual as a social being and to how she reveals herself in the relationship. The aim is to discuss a few constructs that have methodological consequences in studying speakers as agents in interaction in a situated community, namely: values and morality, and face and identity. They bring to the fore issues that the theory of complexity has already highlighted in many fields, e. i. relations, emergence, adaptation, self-regulation, and unpredictability. This book is not the place for an extensive discussion on the topic, and it is sufficient to say, in general terms, that the complex vision of systems bears a strong similarity with linguistics, because it implies seeing a language not as a set of rules, but as an adaptive system emerging from below in a self-regulating and unpredictable process of interactions between speakers. The system self-regulates and modifies itself to cope with new circumstances, which in turn change. The relations within the system are constantly changing and the different parts take on different roles and relevance: systems are therefore open and non-linear. They spontaneously create a complex order that, in the process of change, nevertheless remains identifiable. As we anticipated in the previous chapter, this point is pertinent to the recent state

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of the art of politeness studies. In fact, this view has revealed the limits of statistical generalisations when they have to deal with emerging and unpredictable multilevel relationships between the individual and society (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008).

4.1 Values and Morality A community can become recognisable because people draw together fluidly and recognize distinctive features in this attraction. In politeness studies, the construct of value has been investigated as one of the possible agglutinators, and consequently as a background element that has impact in politeness evaluation. Opening this tradition of studies, Wierzbicka (2003: 61) notes, “[w]hat is at issue is not just different ways of expressing politeness, but different cultural values. As I see it, the crucial fact is that different pragmatic norms reflect different hierarchies of values characteristic of different cultures”. In a sense, Wierzbicka (2003: 61) introduces the concept of value as a way to start unpacking the monolithic view of cultures: […] it is increasingly accepted that those diversities in ways of speaking and interacting are not superficial at all and that they can be accounted for, above all, in terms of different cultural attitudes and values; and the «cultural relativity in the field of interaction» is increasingly seen as a reality and an important subject for investigation.

Since then, sociological macro-studies have identified national cultural values and the idea of “national” values authorized the theory that societies could be categorized according to politeness preferences, e.g. positive/negative politeness cultures. However, two objections arise. First, the position of a culture on a value axis is to be understood as relative to another culture of comparison: sociological studies are not able to report absolute positions (such as “a culture x is of positive politeness”), but only relative positions (that is, “a culture x is more of positive politeness than culture y”). Second, value axes intersect and produce clusters of values, creating unique configurations in every culture. Hence, it is imprudent to attribute politeness and its intercultural variation to a single value. In politeness research, there is still a general, keen interest in identifying values and somehow correlating them with linguistic structures (Harris Bond et al., 2000). Nevertheless, an ecological fallacy is evident: language and culture have no direct relationship. We cannot say that cultural values influence language; we can say that culture influences a person (her values), who is the speaker of the language. In general, this fallacy has raised several methodological reflections. The first problematic point is to understand the relationship between the values of a culture and the daily practice of the individual. As already mentioned, the individual has been theorised as a being that internalises values and beliefs, a being that is completely culturally determined. In this view, values have been conceived as imprinters in politeness (as power and distance). Consequently, cultural studies have attempted to establish cultural models based on values, which were considered

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suffcientely stable. Many of the traditional studies aggregated individual data to offer data on groups or nations (Smith & Schwartz, 1997; Taras & Steel, 2009; Fischer & Poortinga, 2012). It follows that the concept of culture derived from an a posteriori generalisation. Methodologically, this point invokes two levels of value analysis: individual or aggregate. The individual level considers values as principles that guide a person’s life and as somehow deriving from the biological nature of humans to live and adapt to social contexts (Smith & Schwartz, 1997; Schwartz, 2011). The aggregate level attempts to identify a limited number of values as parameters for a group, thus enabling us to compare groups, institutions, nations, etc. The relationship between these two levels is problematic. On the one hand, it is a mistake to use group level data to explain the behaviour of an individual (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005; Schwartz, 2005). As Eelen (2001) underlines, generalization cannot be a predictive cause of individual behaviour: as mentioned above, it is questionable to affirm that someone displays certain politeness activities because of her culture. On the other hand, there are points of contact between the two levels that denote a certain isomorphism between individuals and the structures they are part of. This partial coincidence can justify the view of an individual who fuses with her culture (Taras & Steel, 2009; Fischer & Poortinga, 2012). In this sense, for example, Fant (2016) admits the use of value-based cultural models. There are also some critical issues related to assumptions recurrent in crosscultural studies. First of all, there is the assumption that cultures correspond to values, but in fact cultures have other attributes (e.g. norms), besides value dimensions. Secondly, there are values that are not affected by a specific cultural background: in previous works, Taras and Steel (2009) verify that out of 27 cultural values, the majority are considered by cross-cultural management scholars to be only marginally affected by culture. The 27 cultural values investigated are: achievement, ambiguity avoidance, assertiveness, ritual suicide, believing in evil/good and changeable/unchangeable basic human nature, conformity, conservatism, determinism, family, gender equality, pleasure-seeking, humane orientations, teamwork, independent/interdependent self-perceptions, emotions, Machiavellianism, personal independence, power distance, relationship depth, views of the environment, risk avoidance, self-identity, self-reliance, time perception and orientation, status attribution, and rule application. In the opinion of the interviewees, many of these values are determined by personality, experiences, temporal states or emotions, and not by culture (Harris Bond et al., 2000; Taras & Steel, 2009). Studies such as that by Taras and Steel (2009) also highlight the critical gap between action and perception. Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) investigate behaviours and aggregate them into general values. According to McSweeney (2002) and Haugh and Kádár (2017) this confuses two planes: regularities in how members do things in interaction and regularities in how members evaluate those actions. In fact, Schwartz (2005) points out that values are psychological individual preferences of desirable behaviour, hence they are beliefs, related to emotions, that serve to evaluate actions, events or people. The emphasis on the speaker’s evaluation recalls the bias of social desirability, for example the fact that the subjects of sociological investigations can

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provide answers mediated by prejudice. In other words, people tend to report what they think is socially valued or adequate to the investigator, and not what they really do or think. Holtgraves (2005: note 4) notes that there does not seem to be a strong social desirability component in judgments of politeness, as is the case with value judgments. However, methodologically, this bias requires the awareness that the respondent often does not have the objective view that the researcher expects from her and people do not always act as they rationally verbalise to the researcher (e.g. as they answer in a questionnaire). On this point, Hofstede and Hofstede (2005: 21) observe that, [In] [i]nterpreting people’s statement about their values, it is important to distinguish between the desirable and the desired: how people think the world ought to be versus what people want for themselves […]. [In fact,] [n]orms are standards for behavior that exist within a group or category of people. In the case of desirable, the norm is absolute, pertaining to what is ethically right. In the case of the desired, the norm is statistical: it indicates the choices made by the majority.

To sum up, investigation through interviewing the subject must take into account that we are measuring people’s perceptions of values, that is to say what they think they do and what they think it is good to do. The alternative is to identify values through directly observable practices, but this poses the problem of using valid indicators. For the researcher it would imply identifying observable indicators that the subject recognizes as deriving directly from what she considers a value. In any case, it is evident that people’s action must be reviewed in terms of perception and evaluation. Haugh and Kádár (2017) suggest that the basis of perceiving and evaluating is moral, hence it is interesting to explore the role played by constructs of value and morality in politeness evaluation (Spencer-Oatey & Kádár, 2016; Spencer-Oatey & Xing, 2019). The moral order is “[…] the set of (inter)subjective background expectancies through which participants interpret and evaluate linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour […]” (Haugh, 2013b: 48) or, likewise, is: “[…] a set of expectancies through which social actions and meanings are recognizable as such […]” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 6). The moral order implies beliefs in evaluating what behaviour is expected in a particular context. Something is “moral” precisely because it involves evaluation (Eelen, 2001; Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 93). In other words, the moral order is what the members of a group or network take for granted, it is the familiar perceived normality that constitutes a point of reference for evaluation. Without a background of reference, any evaluation would be idiosyncratic; with a moral order, instead, it becomes shared, common, and therefore a tool of relationship (Haugh, 2018). This definition discloses several points of convergence between values and morality: ● Both values and moral order are socially grounded: they are widespread and shared among groups and networks ● Values and moral order are the means by which a group recognises its being a group and propagates to sustain the group over time

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● The moral order is constituted through practice and values; similarly, they have been theorised as perpetuating trends ● Values serve to evaluate actions, events or people, and morality also serves as a background of comparison for evaluation. In detail, values are a construct already loaded with positive evaluation that guides the actions of individuals; moral order is an an expectation subject to individual evaluation. Values and morality both have a role in politeness evaluation. Compared to the construct of value, in politeness research morality is more articulated and dynamic socially. In fact, “[t]he moral grounds for making this evaluation may vary across individuals and groups of individuals, ranging from localized relational networks through to whole societies” (Haugh, 2018: 154). Socially speaking, the moral order is multilayered as it conforms across relational networks: Localised norms are a first layer moral order, community of practice moral order is a superior second-layer moral order; cultural or societal norms are the superior third-level order. Localised norms are part of individual history; the second order are those norms that a group (such as community or an organisation) shares; the third layer are supralocal conventions. This last layer is not necessarily pre-eminent, since the three layers are embedded: localised norms are presupposed by the community and society. In addition, as Haugh and Kádár (2017: 626) point out, moral order is not static: where different moral systems meet—typically through an intercultural encounter—they can accommodate and change the moral systems themselves. Therefore, the interpersonal encounter is a potential locus of innovation of the moral order, and this entails challenges to politeness research. To sum up, in politeness, values as understood so far suffer in particular from the effects of generalisation and analysts struggle to understand to what extent a culture affects the individual. Shifting the focus to how individuals perceive and evaluate their communicative actions, however, calls into question the moral order as a factor for evaluation. In politeness, both values (as preferences of desirable social behaviour) and moral order (as expectations of normality) are references for evaluation. While values are seen more as static properties of the individual, morality is considered a dynamic multilayered social order. The question of whether the expectations of the moral order have a value basis or are only a consequence of a world order perceived as familiar through habit requires further examination. In the next section, we focus on how values are still a productive construct on the level of relationships. Being desirable social behaviour, values are also affected by the emotional sphere. The moral order, conversely, seems to be more cognitive than affective, or conceptually closer to cognitive frameworks without any great affective investment. Face is the meeting point for the exchange between individual and social values because, as it well known, face is related to values and is emotionally vulnerable.

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4.2 Face Before going more deeply into the intersection of values and face, it is useful to outline the nuances of the construct of face in the state of the art in politeness research. Face is still greatly discussed in politeness studies because where there is interpersonal interaction, there is also facework, there is relational work and therefore there is work relating to politeness. However, this intuitive account has some theoretical biases (Bargiela-Chiappini & Haugh, 2009; Ruhi, 2010; Sifianou, 2016). O’Driscoll (2011, 2017) illustrates the relationship between the construct of face popularised by Brown and Levinson (1978–1987) and the original one theorised by the sociologist Erving Goffman in the mid-1950s. He explains that face is a concept, while politeness is a behaviour. Similarly, facework is a behaviour, since it involves actions aimed at face management. Hence, it is useful to treat them as areas in their own right: 1.

2.

Facework has a wider spectrum of application than politeness alone. Politeness is only one of the possible aspects of facework, because facework, for example, includes actions attacking, defining and representing (etc.) face, that are alien to politeness Politeness is not only maintaining face, but also appropriate behaviour, for example. Technically, facework is only one of the aspects of politeness.

Treating face as a research focus independent of politeness allows for a better conceptualisation of it. Hence, politeness should be freed theoretically from the coincidence with face. Facework and politeness are different domains: politeness activities go beyond face and face is not the constant implicit basis of all politeness activities (Haugh, 2013b: 48, emphasis in the original): It is argued that face is more productively conceptualised as interpretations of personsin-relationships as well as relationships-in-interaction by participants, with an interpretation referring to a representation of the interpersonal significance of that understanding for which participants can be held accountable. Im/politeness, in contrast, can be more constructively theorised as evaluations of persons and relationships vis-à-vis the taken-for-granted sets of expectancies of participants, where evaluations refer to the casting of persons and relationship into particular valenced (i.e., positive-neutral-negative) categories according to some kind of perceived normative scale or frame.

In other words, for the speaker, face is not necessarily work related to politeness but also to group membership, rituality, fulfilling a social position and relational awareness of identities (Haugh, 2013b). On the other hand, the face pervades all instances of communication, and not only those of politeness. Many studies have assumed that face is a property of the self, although it depends on the evaluation of others. As consequence, is has been conceived as a social attribute to the self and this has led face to converge with identity. Identity is the construction of the speaker’s self and enters the area of politeness studies precisely because of the interest in how identity is constructed in discourse (Yus, 2001). Identity is forged through language, which channels both social identifications and semiotically constructed representations in discourse. In practice, the concept of face has always overlapped with the concept of identity (conjugated both as personal identity

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and group identity). Politeness scholars have tried to identify similarities and differences between face and identity. For example, Arundale considers face as punctual while identity as an enduring property of the individual. Spencer-Oatey (2007) finds them similar cognitively, but face, unlike identity, is affectively sensitive. However, according to Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Sifianou (2017) the differences are not as evident as they might seem: their overlapping margins make it difficult to separate them, to the point that the authors view face as embedded in identity. Studies on identity definition are also developing within relational work, as in Locher (2006, 2008). Duranti (2007) observes that interactional approaches are interested in conversational exchanges as a place where the language is defined and negotiated, where in the end, relations are constituted. But this notion lacks interest in the construction of the speaker as a communicating being. In fact, through language, the speaker offers a presentation of self that exposes herself to evaluation and to a moral judgement (Duranti, 2007). In this line of reasoning, face should be conceived as a relational phenomenon and not as a person-centred phenomenon. Arundale (2006, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2013b) proposes the Face Constituting Theory in order to explain how face is defined in the situated relationships of everyday life. This theory focuses on people as embedded in evolving relationships, thus going beyond traditional face attributes such as positive, negative, affiliative, autonomy, etc. Face does not belong to the socialised individual nor to the society that shapes the individual: it belongs to the relationship between speakers. Arundale (2013c) then conceptualises the individual as “built” by the people to whom she is socially connected, in other words, people are construed through relations. As a consequence, face is neither a property of the individual, nor of the society, but is relational, in the sense that it is born from the interpretations that people make of the relationship in interaction. As Haugh (2013b) states, people are constituted through relationships and relationships are established by people in interaction in a process of collaborative construction, of co-constitution. This theory methodologically overcomes the categories of the socio-cultural or the individual, and investigates concrete interactions with an Interactional approach. This makes it possible, for example, to explain ambivalent phenomena such as jocular mockery in terms of face (which at the same time attack face and support relations) and, instead, in terms of politeness the phenomena of mock impoliteness or ritual insults (Labov, 1972; Kienpointner, 1997; Briz Gómez, 2003; Zimmermann, 2003; García Vizcaíno, 2007). Having defined the current position of face in politeness, we can resume the discussion of face and values. There follow examples of two value classifications in social psychology. We can see that many of them (in italics below) are commonly associated with face in different cultures. ● Schwartz’s personal ten value constructs (2005, 2011) are: Achievement (competence, success, ambition), Power (authority, status, power, wealth,), Hedonism (fun, self-indulgence, pleasure), Stimulation (novelty, excitement, daring), Selfdirection (independence, freedom, creativity, curiosity), Universalism (honesty, justice, moral integrity, equality, harmony, broadmindedness), Benevolence

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(loyalty, helpfulness, responsibility, forgiveness), Conformity/tradition (obedience, courtesy, self-discipline, respect /conservatism, devoutness, humility), Security (stability, certainty). ● The six “national” value constructs of Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) are: Power distance, Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty avoidance, Long-term orientation, Indulgence. In particular, Hofstede’s Individualism value corresponds in a way to the distinction between positive and negative face in Brown and Levinson (1978–1987). In addition, it has been variously redefined in politeness as social distance, e.g. connection/separation, approach/withdrawal, involvement/independence, affiliation, solidarity or fellowship/autonomy (O’Driscoll, 2017; Spencer-Oatey & Žegarac, 2017). Nevertheless, the traditional connection of values and face is under discussion. Adopting the above-mentioned view that face is a collaborative construction in interaction, the question is if the values connected to face admit a dynamic redefinition as well, because values are typically conceived of as stable attributes of the individual (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich 2013; Haugh, 2013b; O’Driscoll, 2017; Bousfield, 2018). The work of Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2002a, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011) is important on this critical topic. Spencer-Oatey (2009) focuses on the fact that every person has a self-concept about her attributes (or self-characteristics). The attributes are typically personality traits, abilities, physical features, behavioural characteristics, religious beliefs, social role, language affiliations, and group memberships. A person also has a set of value judgements about her attributes and the continuum of judgement concerns: valence (positive-neutral-negative), actuality (actual-ideal), currency (past-present-future and context1-context2-contextX), and centrality (coreperipheral). The combination of attributes and evaluation constitutes a very dynamic identity that a person will then present to others. Self-presentation is the activity of controlling information about ourselves, and its implicit affinity with the concept of face is evident. In particular, there are some functions of identity pertinent to face, namely, the sense of belonging and of distinctiveness, the localisation in social worlds, and the constructs of self-respect and self-esteem (Spencer-Oatey, 2007: 642). The next interesting theoretical step that Spencer-Oatey takes (2007: 651) is associating face with value judgements, as values can specify positive face attributes. Spencer-Oatey states that identity has an individual perspective (as an individualised concept of self), but also an interpersonal perspective (the self-concept derived from relationships) and a social perspective (the collective self derived from group memberships) (Spencer-Oatey, 2007: 641). Thus, a person’s claims to face concern positive individual attributes, but also relational associations and collective affiliations. According to Spencer-Oatey’s reference studies, these three aspects are always both social and cognitive in nature: on the one hand a person builds a preferably stable representation and identification of self; on the other hand, she negotiates them through social interaction. The fact that face is always based on “positively valued social attributes” (SpencerOatey, 2007: 643) that a person claims for herself marks the difference between the

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concepts of identity and face. Identity covers a wide range of attributes, positive, neutral and negative. In addition, while identity does not necessarily involve sensitiveness to affectivity, face is highly affective-sensitive; precisely because of its social value, emotional reactions are generated when the person experiences a mismatch between an attribute claimed and what others ascribe to her. Affective sensitivity will vary dynamically in interaction and entails the evaluation of others (Spencer-Oatey, 2007: 644). Every person claims multiple positive attributes for her face, which can vary from context to context. For example, a student may claim to be good with her family, but to pass as mediocre with classmates in order not to appear presumptuous. Taking this value and identity approach to face, and investigating it as a dynamic phenomenon has methodological consequences. The first concerns the kind of data that is needed, namely whether discourse data are sufficient. If not, the research should integrate them, but people’s evaluative reports are not always reliable. Spencer-Oatey (2009) suggests that when useful data are not forthcoming in discourse, post-event comments from the subjects are necessary. Obviously these are not always reliable reconstructions, but since face issues are subjective perceptions anyway, data cannot actually be judged as true/false. They are valid anyway as individual perceptions: they help to identify people’s face sensitivities and evaluative reactions. Spencer-Oatey (2009) also suggests undertaking more longitudinal studies, which take into account ongoing relationships over a long period of time. This would certainly also help to understand processes of identification, that is how people project, negotiate and contest their identity in interaction. People employ identification practices through which they visibly associate or dissociate with values to construct a chosen identity (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). In conclusion, this chapter has discussed the limits of statistical generalisations of values in politeness studies. The evaluative aspects of the values and moral order in politeness has highlighted the emerging, dynamic, multilayered relationships between the individual and society. The constructs of face and identity have been presented as an example of a critical topic dealing with the individual and social values. Concretely, both face and values are being redefined as relational phenomena constituted in collaborative construction. Thanks to this convergence, although face is currently an independent field of study, it is still an important interface for politeness. Following the approach proposed in this chapter, politeness displays traits of an adaptive system emerging from below in a self-regulating and unpredictable process of interactions between speakers. This is a complex order of events, and, indeed, issues such as relations, emergence, and adaptation have recurred time and again in the previous discussion. In the next chapter, some methodological implications of complexity are focused on in more detail.

Key points for the researcher ● Are values a finite or an open category? ● How can I demonstrate whether a value affects a linguistic structure?

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● How can I demonstrate that an observable practice comes from a value? ● How can I obtain data not biased by social desirability? ● What data can demonstrate that the speakers are accommodating the moral systems during a communicative interaction? ● What data can demonstrate that the speakers are constructing face in interaction? ● Are discourse data sufficient to investigate politeness?

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Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002). Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(5), 529–545. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2005). (Im)politenss, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their basis and interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 95–120. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007). Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 639–656. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2009). Face, identity and interactional goals. In F. Bargiela-Chiappini & M. Haugh (Eds.), Face, communication and social interaction (pp. 137–154). Equinox. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2011). Conceptualising ‘the relational’ in pragmatics: Insights from metapragmatic emotion and (im)politeness comments. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3565–3578. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Kádár, D. (2016). The base of (im)politeness evaluations: Culture, the moral order and the East-West debate. East Asian Pragmatics, 1(1), 73–106. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Xing, J. (2019). Interdisciplinary perspectives on interpersonal relations and the evaluation process: Culture, norms, and the moral order. Journal of Pragmatics, 151, 141–154. Taras, V., & Steel, P. (2009). Beyond Hofstede: Challenging the ten commandments of crosscultural research. In C. Nakata (Ed.), Beyond Hofstede: Culture frameworks for global marketing and management (Chapter 3). Palgrave Macmillan. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics. The semantics of human interaction. Mouton de Gruyter. Yus, F. (2001). Discourse and identity. In N. Smelser & P. Baltes (Eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (pp. 3728–3732). Elsevier. Zimmermann, K. (2003). Constitución de la identidad y anticortesía verbal entre jóvenes masculinos hablantes de español. In D. Bravo (Ed.) Actas del primer coloquio del programa Edice (pp. 47–59). Libro-E.

Chapter 5

How Complex is the System?

Some of the issues discussed in the previous chapters converge in suggesting that politeness has traits of complex systems. A specific reflection on variables and system levels in politeness can give an idea of the methodological impact of concepts such as relations, emergence, and adaptation, which are recurrent in the recent literature. Hence, the aim of this section is to point out that linguistic uses that seemed linear turn out to be much more nuanced and complex in the field of politeness. This is an inspiring perspective for the researcher, which implies remaining open to the influence of unpredictable factors, and such openness has profound methodological implications. Thanks to the discursive turn in discourse analysis, politeness research now focuses on longer stretches of interaction in a wider context and this has brought out all its complexity. Hence, as we will see in this chapter, the trend is to consider the relationship between variables as mobile and not a cause-effect line, to consider covariant patterns of variables rather than single or dichotomous variables, not confusing the levels of the system but identifying their connections, and finally paying attention to both stability and variation (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). Ultimately, this is a methodological inspiration dating back to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Lev Vygotskij who worked independently on the idea of going beyond closed categories and worked on fact-based complexes without precise boundaries (Sclavi, 2003, 2005, 2007).

5.1 The Variables As suggested in the previous pages, there is a strong awareness that politeness investigation needs to approach the combined changes in individuals and their environment. Variables are evidently a main issue, because there are always many variables in dynamic action. In addition, they are correlated and not easy to isolate (Salomon, 1992). The linguistic structure itself, which was considered a variable that could easily be isolated, is no longer so, because politeness is “[…] a social behavioural © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_5

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phenomenon beyond the boundaries of language” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 3). In other words, any variable always works in multidimensional collaboration with other variables during an interaction. In the dynamics of politeness, a specific configuration of significant variables is activated and for the researcher it is challenging to understand the correlation of the variables at stake in a specific, almost unique context (Blum-Kulka, 1990). It is hard not only because of the interconnection of the variables, but also because of their mutable value for the interlocutors, socially and subjectively speaking. As Kasper (2009: 168) observes, “[r]ather than viewing the relationship of discourse context and politeness as one between dependent and independent variables, it is more appropriately conceptualised as a dynamically evolving, dialectic interplay of figure and ground”. Hence, the problem of causal indeterminacy is constant in politeness research and the relationship between variables is not a cause-effect line (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008: 242–243). To make this critical point more manageable, some scholars choose to focus on the dominant variables only (Holtgraves, 2005; Östman, 1981). However, identifying the most relevant variable is critical as well. An example is the association between informality and politeness. Some studies support the idea that an informal context reduces the need for politeness (Llorente Arcocha, 1996). Kasper (1990, 1996, 2009) argues that politeness is positioned at the centre of the acquaintance axis, while at the poles—maximum acquaintance and maximum non-acquaintance—recourse to politeness decreases. Other studies instead argue that the informal context generates a communitarian situation, which is adequately polite. In other words, it is not a reduced politeness but the politeness of confidence (Beeching, 2002; Albelda Marco, 2004). In any case, it is not clear what exactly the key variable is: the level of acquaintance and the informal genre activated (e.g. colloquial conversation) are in fact two different variables and their overlap produces causal indeterminacy. We do not know if the dynamics of politeness are determined by the level of acquaintance or by the fact that genre (e.g. the colloquial conversation) requires a certain register (for Spanish, see also Koike et al., 2001; Ballesteros Martín, 2001, 2002; Briz Gómez, 2003; Monjour, 2006). And such indeterminacy can even be superordinate, as there could be one more dominant variable that is the source of the variation of both politeness and register (e.g. a cognitive frame, a value, an emotion) (Holtgraves & Bonnefon, 2017). Another way to face complexity is to shift the focus from single variables to changing configurations, i.e. to analyse configurations of variables and how they evolve over time (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008: 242–243). To identify patterns of evolving variables, Salomon (1992) proposes using a wide triangulation, with the detection of up to six or seven variables (e.g. motivation, knowledge, attitude, skills). Somehow, this proposal is akin to Terkourafi’s (2012) who studies how some context traits (such as age, gender and social class) are preferentially associated with certain linguistic strategies, forming cognitive frames that constitute the normal circumstances for ordinary interpretation (i.e. prototypical structures of expectation). This would validate the fact that the complex system works on a daily basis for trait patterns. In non-prototypical situations, it will instead activate other variables, which are not standard, but which become salient on that specific occasion.

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From the previous consideration arises the idea that a variable is not a single and static entity, but a diffuse area intersected with others. This approach offers a further topic for reflection, i.e. the difficulty of operationalising the categories. It is not always possible to arrive at well-functioning operational definitions and empirically measurable terms (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991). To operationalise involves, in simplified terms, transforming concepts (which are largely abstract) into observable phenomena and thus making it possible to identify indicators and possible variables. Following the example of Herring (2004a), if the researcher is working on the construct of community, she has to break it down into sociability, support, identity and then into indicators of participation, shared history, solidarity, criticism and conflict, group self-awareness, roles, hierarchy, etc. Finally, each indicator, in linguistics, is supposed to show up in a linguistic structure. As is evident, it is quite difficult to quantify and grade a diffused category intersecting with others. The traditional dimensions of power, distance, and imposition of the speech act are a well-known example. Many studies have used them to interpret reality data; however, as Meier (1995) notes in a review of the Brown and Levinson model, this model was of reduced value for empirical studies. To operationalise their notions is in fact problematic, and in fact, by the authors’ own admission, the model was not designed to provide sensitive categories for quantitative research. The choice of indicators is also arduous in data collection for politeness research. It is thought that behaviours and personal data are more reliable indicators, while intentions, preferences, opinions, attitudes, etc. are less reliable. There are also, averagely reliable indicators of skills, knowledge, personal qualities. As an example, the reliability of the responses to the following prompts would decrease from top to bottom of the Table 5.1. Nevertheless, in general, if we imagine the speaker as a shifting combination of traits and her discursive action as dynamic, then even sociological and behavioural data lose compactness. On the contrary, the individual perception of reality turns into a sensitive emic indicator when evaluation is considered the fulcrum of communication. This is a relevant concern, for example, for corpus pragmatics, which is especially involved in the methodological difficulties of tagging possible indicators related to constructs of politeness, in order to capture a wider range of variables in Table 5.1 Reliability of the responses Investigator’s prompt

Indicator

Do you use Structure X to be polite?

Type of behaviour

Can structure X be considered polite?

Attitude

Can you use Structure X to be polite?

Perception of competence

Do you think structure X is used politely in context Y?

Opinion

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a corpus (such as previous discourse, co-text, type of discourse, physical context, background knowledge, social identities, relations, attitudes, feelings, etc.) (Aijmer, 2018a). To sum up, an approach to politeness as a complex system highlights specific issues regarding variables, namely their high causal indeterminacy and the way to face it (focussing on dominant variables or patterning changing configurations of variables). It also brings to our attention the problem of operationalising the constructs of politeness and dealing with the fluidity of the indicators. In general, the methodological challenge is to find a way to reflect the real speakers’ understandings of politeness, rather than the researchers’ needs and constraints (Kádár & Haugh, 2013).

5.2 Space-time The axes of space and time are also instances of complexity for politeness, more so than they already were traditionally. As a social practice, the parameters of time and space are factors interacting in politeness theory: here-and-now is the result of prior and subsequent moments. In this view, politeness is approached as a practice that emerges in a temporal flow (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). The value of space has been reconsidered in politeness research: it is now of minor significance as a diatopic space, but is instead very relevant as a social space, i.e. a field, a semiotic space. The field is a space of dynamic relations in which an individual is immersed; as it is intuitive, it contextualises the whole evaluation process of politeness. The fields of an individual are multiple and coexist, therefore their activation is based on the principle of salience with respect to a certain moment of evaluation (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). As a semiotic space, Scollon and Scollon posit that communication always takes place in a space that is configured as an arena imposing its own rules, possibilities and restrictions (Blommaert, 2012). For example, certain signs (e.g. “Don’t smoke”) are performative only in the space in which they are placed; or, some signs are allowed in one place corresponding to cultural expectations (street signs), while others are not (graffiti). In politeness, the question of how the real space and human semiotic behaviour interwine has not yet been investigated. Time, as well, is an element that has taken on particular relevance in the study of politeness as a social practice, because it puts the emphasis on the situated evaluative moment, which has a here-and-now, but which also has a before and an after. In other words, politeness has prospective and retrospective evaluations well beyond the speaker’s single turn. These evaluations are interlinked and emergent, they determine a historicity within the interaction that is formed contingently. For this reason, the evaluation of politeness is not a punctual situated moment, but is cumulative: the understanding emerges incrementally and sequentially, that is, the units of talk progress on the basis of the understanding of the previous ones. The talkers constantly adjust their communication by looking backward and forward so that the turns are interpreted holistically as interdependent. More specifically, every subsequent turn

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gives indirect hints as to how the previous one has been interpreted. Moreover, the evaluation of what happens has a basis of moral order, which, in turn, is historically sedimented in a background that has become conventionalised in social practice (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Xie (2008) stresses that evaluation still requires a broadening of horizons and raises the question of the temporality of the evaluation, as well: When does evaluation begin, and when does it stop? Does it take place while the actual interaction is under way only? Or does it take place long before the actual interaction begins and continues even after the actual interaction ends? What is at work in the evaluation process? What is taken into consideration when (im)politeness evaluations are under way? Are there any dynamic mechanisms that are used at the very evaluative moment? Can we construct a multi-level model for the evaluation of (im)politeness? (Xie, 2008: 158)

Temporality raises interesting methodological issues. As a matter of fact, it is likely that the participants in communication do not have such fine perception during the communicative event, so the process of construction and deconstruction of meaning can give different results at the moment of interaction and at a later time, of reflexive re-evaluation of the event. Therefore: One of the immediate results that may be gained from such a distinction is that what is evaluated on-line may be totally compatible, partly compatible or, against all expectations, totally incompatible with what is (re)evaluated off-line. Actually, it is possible that some interlocutors, when re-evaluating those evaluations made in the course of the interaction, will often reach completely different conclusions. (Xie, 2008: 163)

The methodological consequence is that the researcher should be conscious of the lapse between action and how interlocutors reflect after the interaction (Xie, 2008). In this regard, the issue of synchronisation that Blommaert (2012) raises is also interesting. To synchronise means treating something from the past as if it is happening here and now. Typically, when they generalise their results, ethnographers transform the real space–time of their situated data into an abstract, crystallized, static time. Something from the past (i.e. data collection) becomes something located in the here and now of the dissemination of results. In this temporal confusion, data become frozen in laws, norms or rules, which are static and atemporal. They actually lose their social and cultural contextual validity, as well as their dynamism when extracted from processes. The point discussed by Xie (2008) is similar in that something that happened after the interaction is treated as if it happened at the time. In this respect, Blommaert (2012) quotes the ethnographic work of Scollon and Scollon (2003) which shows that it is always necessary to apply an analysis of historical links, namely how an event manifests itself as a sequence of previous social activities. In this perspective of nexus analysis, human action and practice are always historically grounded, therefore the synchronic object is the result of a process of becoming. Politeness is not exempt from this consideration: Whenever people enter into social action, they bring along their own skills, experiences and competences, and this ‘baggage’, so to speak, conditions and constrains what they can do in social action. Historical bodies have been formed in particular social spaces and they represent, to use an older notion, the ‘communicative competence’ of people in such social spaces (Blommaert, 2012: 36)

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The study of the variation of politeness with respect to the space–time interaction set out in this paragraph is an area yet to be explored (e.g. those acts that are considered “out of place”). To sum up, as a social practice, politeness moves to a social and semiotic conception of space and to the impact of prospective and retrospective on the speaker’s evaluations. Methodologically, ignoring the fact that space–time transfer somehow corrupts the data presents a problem for analysts attempting to synchronise it.

5.3 Levels of the System The idea that a system has interconnected levels is a further methodological insight offered by a complex-system view (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008). In particular, the balance between micro and holistic approaches to investigation is a much debated point in politeness studies. On the one hand, macro studies (such as Brown and Levinson’s) are empirically weak because they theorize models that are too wide-ranging to be tested scientifically, as we already mentioned when discussing the issue of generalisation in Sect. 4.1. On the other hand, micro studies (such as interactional and discursive approaches) are empirically sound but often too narrow to be generalised, therefore not easily applicable or predictive (Mills, 2011a). Deeper micro studies pay the price for being less easy to generalise or transfer to the macro level. For this reason, the connection between the micro and macro levels is a prominent methodological issue for the politeness analyst. The micro approaches understand politeness as a highly subjective and contextual instance of evaluation, which is negotiated dynamically and discursively according to the speakers and the local context. If we admit that each statement is unique and unrepeatable, then real, concrete, situational data are essential in the study of politeness in order to be sensitive to complexity. As Jucker and Staley (2017: 406) stress “[…] (im)politeness researchers continue to investigate specific and narrowly defined forms of behaviour, albeit with an increased awareness that such investigations are more focused and specialized. They do not provide a comprehensive picture but they may still provide enlightening insights into specific aspects of verbal behaviour”. Nevertheless, this wealth of detail risks being a locally limited narrative if not related to wider dimensions. The criticism to this view is that it denies the possibility of theorising politeness at a macro level, merely offering descriptive glimpses of micro aspects in interaction. Terkourafi (2005, 2012), Haugh (2007b), Haugh and Watanabe (2017) emphasize the fact that whereas traditional macro approaches sought the a priori rules drawn from quantitative methods of analysis, the postmodern micro approaches condemn the politeness researcher to being a chronicler of everyday life. This implies abandoning broader theories without trying to explain what the great variability between speakers depends on, sacrificing the search for systematic or regular linguistic use beyond localised interactions.

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In terms of a complex epistemology, finding this equilibrium means paying attention to both stability and variation and identifying connections between the levels of a system (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008: 242–243). Some approaches—such as the frame-based studies of Terkourafi (2012)—aim to theorize the stability and variation of the system. Frames (and similar concepts such as schematic or minimal context) are precisely notions that have been developed as methodological intermediaries between the micro and macro dimensions (see an example of analysis in Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017). Other proposals try to identify connections between the levels of a system, introducing social transitional units, e.g. subgroups similar for some variables. Sifianou and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2017) theorise that the macro-social factors and the micro-social factors enter into interaction at the individual level where cultural identities are dynamically constructed. Hence, in order to detect trends and regularities, it is necessary to work on smaller units of analysis such as relational networks and communities of practice (Mills, 2011a). Briefly, as Haugh (2011) observes, understanding which types of data we need in order to understand the links between the individual level and the social level in a system remains a methodological problem. Eelen (2001) points out that we still do not know how the behaviour of an individual in an interaction is interconnected at different levels of the community. As Blommaert’s (2012: 44) puts it, referring to the ethnographic works of Scollon and Scollon: […] blending the small and the big dimensions of human social practice: the ways in which each act of communication is at once exceptional and typical, that it always consists of completely new forms of patterning and organisation, while it derives its communicability from sharedness and recognizability of patterns.

As a final note, it is interesting to see that space and time, discussed in the previous section, explain constructs both of the variability-stability of the systems and of the connections of the levels in it. The situated events captured by field data and subsequently frozen in timeless and delocalised scientific analyses are actually the microanalytic chronicles of politeness events. Following Scollon and Scollon, in Blommaert’s reading, they can be contrasted with the concepts of historical space, which is at the same time an agent here and now as well as the result of historical sedimentation. This sedimentation guarantees its communicability and shared understanding. Blommaert concludes (Blommaert, 2012: 44–45): Thus, whenever we ethnographically investigate a synchronic social act, we have to see it as the repository of a process of genesis, development, transformation. If we see it like this, we will see it in its sociocultural fullness, because we can then begin to understand the shared, conventional aspects of it, and see it as a moment of social and cultural transmission. In that move, the Scollons focused our attention on two things we are not much used to in the field of language: on bodies as repositories of histories of experience, and on space as historically organized, ordered and patterned, thus becoming a genuine actor in semiotic processes.

In conclusion, the methodological lesson of complexity in politeness research suggests working on situated discourses, located in real, wide, and unconstrained, contexts. In this chapter we have discussed how the variables at stake are not easily

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definable units: they are rather diffuse and dynamically merged areas, often not directly referable to operationalised constructs and indicators. Space and time, in particular, merge politeness in a temporal flow and in semiotic historical space. The methodological consequences are a need to identify the connection of system levels and report both its stability and variations. One suggestion is to choose a viewpoint based on the research mission. Arundale (2013a) points out that theory determines success and limitations in understanding a phenomenon; it is a framework that highlights – and selects at the same time – a portion of the complex system we investigate. The research question remains the beacon in politeness studies at present, as an articulated perception of that part of the system’s complexity that is useful for the researcher’s goal (Jucker, 2009; Locher, 2015).

Key points for the researcher ● Can I determine the impact of a single variable? ● Can I understand the specific correlation of the variables in a almost unique context? ● Can I detect the dynamic value of a specific variable for the interlocutors within a contingent communicative flow? ● How can I grade a diffused category in quantifiable terms? ● How can I avoid the gap in evaluation between the moment of the data collection and the moment of its interpretation? ● How can I avoid the gap in evaluation between the moment of the communication and the subjects’ subsequent reflections on it? ● Can my research question be related to a clear sub-portion of the system?

References Aijmer, K. (2018). Corpus-based metapragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 619–643). Mouton De Gruyter. Albelda Marco, M. (2004). Cortesía en diferentes situaciones comunicativas. La conversación coloquial y la entrevista sociológica semiformal. In D. Bravo, & A. Briz Gómez (Eds.) Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 109–134). Ariel. Arundale, R. (2013). Conceptualizing ‘interaction’ in interpersonal pragmatics: Implications for understanding and research. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 12–26. Ballesteros Martín, F. J. (2001). La cortesía española frente a la cortesía inglesa. Estudio pragmalingüístico de la exhortaciones impositivas. Estudios Ingleses De La Universidad Complutense, 9, 171–207. Ballesteros Martín, F. J. (2002). Mecanismos de atenuación en español e inglés. Implicaciones pragmáticas en la cortesía. CLAC Círculo 11. Beeching, K. (2002). Gender, politeness and pragmatic particles in French. John Benjamins. Blommaert, J. (2012). Chronicles of complexity. Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes. Multilingual Matters.

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Blum-Kulka, S. (1990). You don’t touch lettuce with your fingers: Parental politeness in family discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 259–288. Briz Gómez, A. (2003). La estrategia atenuadora en la conversación cotidiana española. In D. Bravo (Ed.) Actas del I coloquio del programa EDICE. La perspectiva no etnocentrista de la cortesía: identidad sociocultural de las comunidades hispanohablantes (pp. 17–46). Universidad de Estocolmo. Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. St. Jerome Publishing. Hatch, E., Lazaraton, A. (1991). The research manual. Design and statistics for applied linguistics. Heinle and Heinle Publishers. Haugh, M. (2011). Epilogue: Culture and norms in politeness research. In Z.D.Kádár, & S. Mills (Eds.) Politeness in East Asia (pp. 252–263). Cambridge University Press. Haugh, H. M., Kádár, D. Z., & Mills, S. (2013). Interpersonal pragmatics: Issues and debates. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 1–11. Haugh, M. (2007). The co-constitution of politeness implicature in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(1), 84–110. Haugh, M., & Watanabe, Y. (2017). (Im)politeness theory. In B. Vine (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language in the workplace (pp. 65–76). Routledge. Herring, S. (2004). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. In S. Barab, R. Kling, & J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 338–376). Cambridge University Press. Holtgraves, T., & Bonnefon, J.F. (2017). Experimental approaches to linguistic (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D.Z. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 381–401). Palgrave Macmillan. Holtgraves, T. (2005). Social psychology, cognitive psychology, and linguistic politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 73–93. Jucker, A., & Staley, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & Z.D. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 403–429). Palgrave Macmillan. Jucker, A. (2009). Speech and research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1611–1635. Kasper, G. (2009). Politeness. In S. D’hondt, J. O. Östman, J. Verschueren (Eds.) The pragmatic of interaction (pp. 157–173). John Benjamins. Kasper, G. (1990). Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 193– 2018. Kasper, G. (1996). Politeness. In J. Verschueren, J.-O. Östman, & J. Blommaert (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 1–20). John Benjamins. Koike, D.A., Vann, R., Busquets, J. (2001). Spanish no, sí: Reactive moves to perceived facethreatening acts. Journal of Pragmatics. Part 1 33(5), 701–723, Part II 33(6), 879–899. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford University Press. Llorente Arcocha, M. T. (1996). Organizadores de la conversación: Operadores discursivos en español. Universidad Pontificia, Caja Salamanca y Soria. Locher, M. (2015). Interpersonal Pragmatics and its link to (im)politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 5–10. Meier, A. (1995). Passages of politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 24(4), 381–392. Mills, S. (2011). Communities of practice and politeness. In B. Davies, M. Haugh, & A. Merrison (Eds.), Situated politeness (pp. 85–94). Continuum. Monjour, A. (2006). «Pasad, pasad» – «Kommen sie bitte rein». Pedro Almodóvar, los actos de habla y la comparación intercultural. In M. Schrader-Kniffi (Ed.) La cortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 15–42). Iberoamericana. Östman, J.O. (1981). You know. A discourse functional approach. John Benjamins. Salomon, G. (1992). What does the design of effective CSCL require and how do we study its effects? ACM SIGCUE Outlook., 21(3), 62–68.

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Sclavi, M. (2003). Arte di ascoltare e mondi possibili. Come si esce dalle cornici di cui siamo parte. Bruno Mondadori. Sclavi, M. (2005). A una spanna da terra. Paravia Bruno Mondadori. Sclavi, M. (2007). An Italian lady goes to the Bronx. IPOC. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the material world. Routledge. Sifianou, M., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2017). (Im)politeness and cultural variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 571–599). Palgrave Macmillan. Terkourafi, M., & Kádár, Z.D. (2017). Convention and ritual (im)politenss. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & Z.D. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 171–195). Palgrave Macmillan. Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 237–262. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Politeness and pragmatics. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 617–637). Cambridge University Press. Xie, C. (2008). (Im)politeness. Towards an evaluative and embodied approach. Pragmatics and Cognition 16(1), 151–175.

Chapter 6

How Deep Are Relations?

The multiple understandings of politeness highlight relevant points and possible routes in an interdisciplinary landscape, as we have explored in the previous chapters. In this one, we focus on the dynamic interpersonal relations emerging in communication and their impact on politeness studies. To study the relational work (or rapport management) the preferred data are linguistic but—and this is a distinctive characteristic—interpersonal pragmatics adopt different theoretical and methodological concepts to discuss them (social psychology, sociology, conflict studies, media studies, rhetoric and persuasion studies, etc.). It follows that, for research in the field of politeness, this line of investigation entails a creative opening to non-linguistic approaches that typically lead to the use of integrated methodologies to interpret complex data concerning the perception and evaluation of speakers. A specific construct related to the regulation of the relationship between interlocutors will be addressed in this chapter, namely, the role of emotions in politeness. It exemplifies new depths of analysis required by research in this field. Thus, the objective of the following pages is to illustrate the challenge for the analyst when focusing on verbal expressions, also contemplating social and personal parameters within a complex systemic approach (Watts, 1989; Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2011; Locher & Watts, 2005; Fant, 2007; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin, 2009; Locher & Graham, 2010; Locher, 2012, 2013, 2015; Haugh et al., 2013).

6.1 Relational Dynamics Relational management is understood as “the ‘work’ individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others” or “the dyadic phenomena of relating as they emerge dynamically in person-to-person communication” (respectively: Locher & Watts 2005a and Arundale 2006 cited in Spencer-Oatey, 2007: 646–647). A more specific definition emphasises the linguistic focus: “[…] how relationships are indexed

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through linguistic choices and how such linguistic cues will lead to certain interpersonal interpretations” (Locher, 2015: 6). In studies of interpersonal relationships in social practice, the construct of politeness is not central, it is simply one of the ideologies that are socially shaped (such as gender, class, age, etc.). In fact, from the relational work point of view, politeness is considered a restrictive theoretical label (Locher, 2015). Following these definitions, we might say that Brown and Levinson (1978–1987) were probably the first to take an interest in relation management in the field of politeness studies, since they postulate precisely the relationships of power and distance as central to their proposal. Their model was essentially based on the possibility of individuals to control relations, but with the discursive turn in linguistics it became evident that the individual had to be related to the system and its members. Thus, socio-psychological theories of the individual address how the social system puts pressure on relations and how relations act on the social system. Spencer-Oatey (2000, 2003, 2005, 2011) marks this passage to a broader vision of rapport management. She hypothesizes that discourse is based on five integrated domains: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

the illocutionary domain (the speech acts), the discourse domain (the discourse content), the participation domain (the management of the interchange), the stylistic domain, the non-verbal domain.

The participation domain (3) is specific to the relationship and is integrated in the sociopragmatic system of the other levels because Spencer-Oatey conjugates the construct of face (personal quality face and social identity face) with the social base (sociality rights of equity and associations) of the management of relationships. According to Murata (2008), Spencer-Oatey does not investigate in any depth how the rapport management is negotiated discursively; however, according to Haugh and Watanabe (2017) her model has the merit of shifting the focus of analysis to the subjective judgment of the speakers about the appropriateness of verbal behaviour. This point is a transition to a dynamic conception of rapport management in politeness. A dynamic approach assumes that the communicative situation has an internal flux that is formed along the way. The interlocutors constantly pick up clues to evaluate and hierarchize different variables that profile the relationship, and consequently determine enunciation and interpretation. It follows that, for the researcher the challenge is to capture how an interaction emerges in a continuous anticipatory inferential activity (what is expected to be meant) and in a retroactive activity (an inferential revision of previous passages that had already had a temporary inference). This dynamic view affects many aspects of the communication and refers to the instances of complexity discussed in the previous chapter. Inferences are not static entities in the mind of an individual, but a fluid and systemic process that allows for the gradual and unpredictable, joint exercise of complex politeness actions among the speakers (Arundale, 2006, 2010a).

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Moreover, the concept of the addresser-addressee dyad is also dynamized polyphonically. The context also hosts the physical or mental presence of other people on the communication scene (observers, casual listeners, security video recordings, audience, animist beliefs, etc.). Such presences involve the implicit awareness of the third party’s presence and its constant possibility to intervene in the interaction, that is, activates a polyphonic potential (Aronsson, 1996; Verschueren, 2002; Haugh, 2013a) As illustrated in Chap. 5, methodologically speaking, the problems of studying complex systems from a dynamic, holistic and synergic perspective entail overcoming the linear cause-effect relations of variables and considering covariant patterns in their stability and variation. In the interpersonal perspective of politeness, this implies breaking away from a descriptive approach that sees politeness as a transmitted fact (i.e. the speaker implements—“codifies”—intentions that are received and interpreted—“decoded”—by the recipient). Instead, interaction is a joint and collaborative activity that produces emerging achievements that the analyst should be able to document (Haugh, 2007a; Arundale, 2013a). Briefly, this perspective highlights the extent to which relationships are a focal point today in politeness studies. Actually, Kádár and Haugh (2013: 1) define politeness as “[…] all types of interpersonal behaviour through which we take into account the feelings of the others as to how they think they should be treated in working out and maintaining our sense of personhood as well as our interpersonal relationships with others”. Indeed, the broad disciplinary vision of rapport management brings to politeness studies the interest in identity construction, interpersonal attitudes, and the role of emotions and affectivity. The following sections are devoted, in particular, to emotions and to deeper dimensions of the system that a relational perspective poses to the researcher in politeness and which seem not to have a methodological tradition yet.

6.2 Emotions Any speaker has social emotions, developed in the interrelation with others. Emotions can define social and relational structures; trivially, the fact of being angry or in love is considered to affect communication, and potentially also politeness. In fact, the issue is quite complex because it also involves perceptions and evaluations, not just a discourse analysis of emotive communication. For example, Holtgraves and Bonnefon (2017) suggest studying whether certain transient states (such as moods) can influence localised variations in the perception of power and distance. For this reason, appraisal is an important aspect in the relationship between emotions and language. As introduced in Sect. 1.3., the Appraisal Theory assumes that the cognitive interpretation of an event leads to evaluations, which generate emotional arousal. Hence, there are at least three areas of the study of emotions that should be investigated in depth in the studies on politeness (Langlotz & Locher, 2017):

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Cognition and emotions: the role of emotions in cognitive processes Sociality and emotions: role of emotions in interpersonal pragmatics Communicative observable emotions: tools for obtaining systematic descriptions of emotions expressed.

Studies on emotional states and politeness are still in their infancy; for example, a categorization of emotions has not yet been developed for this specific purpose. Spencer-Oatey (2005: 116 and Spencer-Oatey, 2011) offers a starting point by identifying the emotional reactions of love (adoration, affection, love, fondness, attraction, caring, desire, lust, passion, longing), joy (contentment/pleasure, pride, amusement, cheerfulness, joy, delight, enjoyment, gladness, happiness, satisfaction, enthusiasm, zest, excitement, exhilaration, optimism, enthralment), surprise/amazement, anger (irritation/annoyance, frustration, disgust/disapproval, aggravation, exasperation, anger, rage, bitterness, scorn, resentment, envy, jealousy), sadness (displeasure/disappointment, shame/guilt, embarrassment/insult/humiliation, suffering, hurt, depression, despair, gloom, sadness, unhappiness, grief, sorrow, misery, dismay, regret, alienation, isolation, neglect, loneliness, rejection, dejection), and fear (alarm, shock, fear, fright, horror, terror, panic, anxiety, nervousness, worry, distress, dread). In addition, emotions are also cultural social constructs with different degrees of social appropriateness in a given context, of restrictions of expression, and salience and intensity in relationships (Besnier, 1995; Langlotz & Locher, 2017). This means that studying how they are related to politeness is an open field of investigation. The basic assumption is that human cognition is based on the flow of emotions, which are not necessarily linked to the intentions of the speaker, but emerge in the interactive dynamics of the interlocutors’ relationship. The hypothesis is that a socially competent speaker is aware of the potential emotional consequences of communication. For example, when she produces a marked degree of politeness, she can convey an emotive message; viceversa, an emotive communication can mark a dynamic of politeness (Janney & Arndt, 1992; Caffi & Janney, 1994; Gallois, 1994; Spencer-Oatey, 2000, 2002a, 2007, 2011; Holtgraves, 2005; Kienpointner, 2008; Locher & Langlotz, 2008; Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Caffi, 2015; Landone, 2019). Neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, sociology and communication studies underline the connection of emotions to cognitive processes on the one hand and to social processes on the other. This may help to identify their role in politeness. Regarding cognitive processes, Langlotz and Locher (2013, 2017) define emotions as the regulators of the relationship between the person and the environment (which is understood as physical, social, socio-cultural and inner-psychological). Thus an organism experiences different types of emotions for regulating relationships with the physical world, other humans and the self through actions and reactions (which are physical and communicative). Moreover, Xie (2008) underlines the mediation of the body in this relationship: there is a dynamic connection between mind and body in the environment and between body and language in experience. Xie’s embodiment perspective adds the biological element, and it can illuminate new factors associated with the assessment of politeness, starting from the body and including the emotional sphere. In Gibbs’ words (quoted in Xie, 2008: 161–162):

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People’s subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical, cultural worlds and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that control ongoing intelligent behaviour. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action.

This implies that emotions should not be considered mere signals of state or reactivity, but signals of relationship. Following Gregory Bateson, Sclavi (2003) stresses the cognitive value of emotions because they suggest within which frames of relationship a certain message should be interpreted. For example, in a mock fight, a blow falls within a dialogic framework of play and not of aggression. Hence, emotions are markers of context, which define the contingencies of the relationship within a certain frame. They tell us how we are dynamically framing the context, namely which scheme we are collaborating in. In fact, a person proposes a type of relationship (e.g. play) and the other adheres to it or not, modifies it, proposes another one, misinterprets it, etc. In other words, through emotional signs, the interlocutors exchange clues on which relational frame they are placing themselves in and which dialogic framework they are activating. With respect to social processes, emotions are linked to patterns of social organization and bonding, hence they are involved in relational work (Arndt & Janney, 1985; Langlotz & Locher, 2017). The position of the individual in the social environment is linked to constructs that are strong in politeness analysis, i.e. power, familiarity, roles, face, identity, rights and obligations. For example, individuals verify the self through others: confirmation brings positive emotions, but when the self is not confirmed, negative emotions arise. Since the construct of face is linked to that of identity, facework receives a similar emotional investment (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2013). Terkourafi (2012), for example, theorises the face as a universal and underspecified theoretical construct with an emotional dimension (face2) that manifests itself with a concrete psychological reality (face1) in everyday communication. From a methodological point of view, the communicative cues of emotions and emotive metacomments are useful in deepening the verbal and nonverbal component in manifestations of politeness. Emotions are actually important instruments of investigation. Langlotz and Locher (2017) use a multimodal approach to analyse the sum and combination of emotional signals in the connection between emotions, relations and sociality. This combination is considered the source of how a person interprets perceptions, feelings, thoughts, beliefs, emotions (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). In particular, as Langlotz and Locher (2017) demonstrate, interpersonal relations involve interpersonal evaluations (appraisal of people), which involve emotions. Another methodological tool is to use emotions as tools of investigation through narration (Sclavi, 2003). In this case, the researcher is an observer and a narrator, and should have refined emotional competence. By narrating what she observes and feels, the analyst can capture the underlying perceptual and evaluative matrices of a communicative event. This is possible because the researcher’s emotions are precisely an alarm signal of awareness that in the event under observation there is a mismatch

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of frames between the observer and the observed. In this methodology emotions of social regulation are particularly suggestive (e.g. embarrassment, guilt and shame, sense of ridicule, anxiety, fear). They are, in fact, a form of metacommunication: when the researcher feels them, she knows that the language can no longer be read in a linear fashion. As a matter of fact, the most emotionally marked events are those which direct our minds to recurrent thinking. In other words, the analyst’s emotions are alerts that activate her hermeneutic interpretation of implicit frames, gestalts of values, or constructs underlying her emotive reaction. This approach supports the observation that data recollection in the emotional sphere is only the first step in a challenging process. The next problematic step is to understand the role of emotions in the evaluative processes involved in politeness. As an example of this necessity, Langlotz and Locher (2017) include the following points in the politeness research agenda: ● investigating the role of positive and negative appraisal in emotive reactions to politeness. ● investigating the norms of feelings and their display that a community associates with specific activities. ● moving beyond the surface structure of communication and making an in-depth investigation of critical discourse analysis that involves the ideologies behind the rules of emotional display.

6.3 Deep Levels In this section, we introduce a further level of complexity with regard to emotions in the study of politeness. The communicative manifestation (multimodal discourse data), the cognitive process (perception and appraisal data) and the social dimension (evaluation data) introduced in the previous section, in fact, need to be investigated in greater detail as part of the self. First, feelings deserve a mention, because they are never absent from an interactional context (Besnier, 1990). Although they are generally assumed to be more durable and less intense, reactive and physical than emotions, feelings are mostly understood as being related to emotions (Lyons, 1980; Frijda, 1986). Caffi and Janney (1994:329) highlight a critical point concerning their manifestation: (1) we can all express feelings that we have, (2) we can all have feelings that we do not express, and (3) we can all express feelings that we do not have, or feelings that we think our partners might expect or wish us to have, or feelings that it might simply be felicitous to have in a given situation for particular reasons. In short, we all seem to be capable of producing, modifying, and modulating linguistic and other expressions of affect more or less at will, in very subtle ways, in order to fit the personal and interpersonal exigencies of different occasions; and we are capable of negotiating agreement about the intersubjective significance of our expressions of affect.

In other words, studying the expression of a feeling presents difficulties which could be pertinent for emotions as well. In any case, both feelings and emotions

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may not have a linear expression in communication and the researcher in the field of politeness should acknowledge this gap. This issue connects to an area of research that seems neglected, namely what the speakers do not make manifest but instead impacts strongly in communication in a subtle and invisible way. Pertinently, as Pfister (2010: 1278) notes, politeness is a game of intentions, not of words: [a]n utterance may be polite at the level—not necessarily the content—of what is said as well as at the level of what is implicated. This means: what may seem to be impolite at a (superficial) level of what is said, may nevertheless be polite at a (deeper) level of what is implicated. And what may seem to be polite at the level of what is said (or what I made as if to say), may be impolite at the level of what is implicated.

Kádár and Haugh (2013) add that evaluations of politeness are tied not only to communicative intentions (i.e. to communicate a particular content) but also to higher order intentions. The point we are interested in is whether a higher order exists, i.e. of an even deeper level than the iconic iceberg we use to represent the domains of pragmatic (i.e. a small visible part of explicit communication and a large submerged implicit part) (Fig. 6.1). Citing the clear view of Mills (2003: 18): It is obviously difficult in linguistic research to draw on this more complex model of the self where flux, uncertainty, and change are more salient than an assumed stability and control, but it seems to me, in pragmatics research in particular, this notion of the self must be integrated more, or at least there must be an acknowledgement that unconscious and possibly irrational motivations play a role in language production and reception. When speakers produce utterances, it is not just their conscious minds which construct utterances, but their unconscious motivations also play an important role. Whilst it may not be possible to access and document those motivations in any systematic or convincing way, we need nevertheless to move away from the notion that we, as analysts, know exactly what motivated the speaker or that the speaker knows and is conscious of all of his/her motivations for speaking in a particular way.

Viaggio (1999) speculates that there exists a deep sense of the communication, that comes from the speaker’s unconscious. It includes non-intentional effects and is independent of the intended sense. It emerges from the black box of the human psyche, “whence every human action—including every utterance—comes”. Viaggio adds that “[i]t is known, besides, that detectives and psychotherapists are more after

Explicit meaning

Deep sense

Fig. 6.1 Domains of pragmatics

+ Visibility -

Implicit meaning

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deep sense—that which the sender does not consciously mean to transmit […]” (1999: 14). Woods (2015: 57), as well, refers to this deep level in pragmatics, commenting on what lies behind intentions and notes that “[o]ur own motivations are not necessarily fully transparent to us. At this deepest level, we have to do with forces that are altogether more inchoate, and any account of these is likely to be either highly speculative or else the object of a scientific investigation, such as in psychoanalysis”. This deeper sense would add an unconscious dimension to politeness, a sort of psychologically-based dimension that escapes the assumptions of rational intentionality and control by the speaker. It is a sort of “sub implicit” activation of which we know little. Probably, any communication that involves some sort of basic attraction or repulsion activates such a level, which we refer to in common language with terms like intuition, reading in thought, presenting, telepathy, harmony, good smell, good/bad vibrations, having a bad/good energy, resonance (Kecskes, 2015), etc. It is also possible that this level refers to a vast and deep common ground (Rogers, 1977), where the more humanity is found, the more the relationship is freed from socio-cultural constrains. This ground provides a nest for basic aspects of living that we all share—being, feeling, and needing. In a way, politeness, is intrinsic to the social nexus and society arose to satisfy needs, such as security, protection, autonomy, affection, esteem, prestige, success, self-realisation, spiritual needs, etc. Needs, in particular, are deep constructs that should be taken more into account in politeness studies. They generate addictions and desires, as well as fears for our transience. This is the reason why researchers have not yet studied the extent to which needs emerge from deep levels of being and require the mediation of politeness. However, there are a few works that have taken into account the dependence of politeness on other constructs such as needs and fears, which are major themes of human social behaviour. To mention one example, the relationship between politeness and distance is usually investigated as a value of community sociality but, if we shift the focus to a deeper level, a higher order analysis could relate it to a need for security, a desire for recognition, or fear of isolation. Methodologically speaking, beyond those cues that can easily be identified in the surface structure of communication a need is emerging to investigate politeness (Langlotz & Locher, 2017: 316). This is not at all easy because we would have to enter areas which at the moment are considered almost para-scientific due to the simple fact that we do not have the tools for uncovering them. To sum up, this chapter has described the passage to a dynamic conception of rapport management in order to pinpoint deeper levels of the complex system of politeness. In the interpersonal perspective of politeness, interaction is a joint and collaborative activity where cognitive and social elements interact and become manifest in the discourse. However, there is also an emotional dimension that casts a light on elements of irrationality in the self. There are deeper dimensions and we do not have a methodological tradition for approaching them yet. In general, they inspire the researcher to go beyond the surface structure of communication, not in only in the cognitive realm of appraisal, but also at the subconscious level. This undiscovered

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world also reminds the analyst to move away from the bias supposing she knows what the speaker knows.

Key points for the researcher. ● How can I pick up the clues that a speaker evaluates, in order to profile the relationship with the interlocutor? ● How can I analyse the combination of emotional signals (verbal and non verbal)? ● How can I analyse the speaker’s contrasting emotional signals in a communicative event? ● How can I analyse the impact of body experience on the speakers’ perceptions and evaluation of politeness? ● How do my emotions interfere with or support my data recollection? ● How can I relate emotional clues and the speaker’s politeness evaluations? ● Can I identify clues to the deep sense of a communicative event?

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cortesía: identidad sociocultural de las comunidades hispanohablantes (pp. 86–96). Universidad de Estocolmo. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Franklin, P. (2009). Intercultural interaction. A multidisciplinary approach to intercultural communication. Palgrave Macmillan. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000). Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In H. SpencerOatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 11–46). Continuum. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002). Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(5), 529–545. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2005). (Im)politenss, face and perceptions of rapport: Unpackaging their basis and interrelationships. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 95–120. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2007). Theories of identity and the analysis of face. Journal of Pragmatics, 39, 639–656. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2011). Conceptualising ‘the relational’ in pragmatics: Insights from metapragmatic emotion and (im)politeness comments. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3565–3578. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Politeness and pragmatics. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 617–637). Cambridge University Press. Verschueren, J. (2002). Para entender la pragmática. Gredos. Viaggio, S. (1999). Towards a more precise distinction between context and situation, intention and sense. Rivista Internazionale Di Tecnica Della Traduzione, 4, 1–25. Watts, R. J. (1989). Relevance and relational work: Linguistic politeness as politic behavior. Multilingua, 8(2–3), 131–166. Wood, T. (2015). Elements of hermeneutic pragmatics. Peter Lang. Xie, C. (2008). (Im)politeness. Towards an evaluative and embodied approach. Pragmatics and Cognition 16(1), 151–175.

Chapter 7

How Relative is Everyday Politeness?

The research issues addressed in the present chapter originate from the specific nature of the pragmatic approach to language: how do speakers become so competent in the complex, everyday systems of interaction? And why is it so problematic for the researcher to study the speakers’ knowledge of everyday practice? Methodologically, research in politeness aims at detecting the linguistic cues that the speakers rely on to interpret the unsaid. These are concrete activities of the interlocutors which manifest themselves prismatically, that is, in a multifaceted form with non-linear projections. The objective of the following sections is to discuss the relevance of multiple perspectives of observation in interpreting politeness. First- and second-order politeness are the starting points for focussing on the methodological tangle of perspectives and evaluations in the interpretation of politeness by speakers. They are interconnected processes that strongly relativise any instance of politeness; as discussed in the previous chapter, they reinforce the warning that the researcher cannot know from the surface what and how the speaker evaluates. This chapter also highlights that to study politeness with a multiperspective approach entails embracing integrated methodologies.

7.1 A Matter of Everyday Life How is it that languages users know? This is a core issue in pragmatics which regards politeness in particular because it is a constant in our daily lives, a high-frequency phenomenon (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). This basic question of pragmatics intends to study the concrete activities undertaken by speakers for bridging the gap between meaning and context to interpret the unsaid. This process entails the assumption that in their daily lives people relate through verbal and non-verbal “clues”, as Sbisà (2018: 148) argues: “Illocution belongs to language because it lives “in” acts of saying something, so that it can be studied through its linguistic indicators […]”. People conduct rapid interpretative processes, which later become an object of study © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_7

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for the pragmatic linguist (Duranti, 2007; Wood, 2015). The researcher aims to access these indicators by penetrating their implicit character to understand the relationship between doing and knowing what to do: “[h]ow is it that language users know how to do what they do in the very specific contexts in which they operate, not as a theory of competence underlying performance, but as a knowledge of everyday practice?” (Pennycook, 2010: 25). Basically, this relationship between doing and knowing is theorized in the distinction between first-order politeness (politeness1) and second-order politeness (politeness2). First-order politeness is the conception of the lay speaker in practice, both in defining politeness in an abstract way and evaluating it in the situated interactions in which she is involved. Instead, second-order politeness is the understanding of politeness from the point of view of an external observer and is aimed at some form of theorizing. This first distinction highlights two dimensions of politeness, useful for warning the analyst to move beyond the original tendency to raise practice to a scientific level and to avoid projecting armchair preconceptions onto the interpretation of data (Watts et al., 1992; Eelen, 2001; Haugh & Watanabe, 2017). Nevertheless, this first two-dimensional distinction has recently become more complex, and the loci of understanding politeness have been refined to capture its complexity. One person has multiple understandings of politeness at the same time, deriving from different perspectives, and not always carrying the same interpretative relevance. Kádár and Haugh (2013) propose four dimensions and each of them has a user’s angle and an observer’s point of view (Table 7.1). The participant (point A) is intentional (ratified) or casual (unratified) and is the producer or recipient of the politeness; for this reason, she is morally accountable for it. She can be the addressee or a side participant (ratified participant) or a bystander or overhearer (unratified participant) (A1). Metaparticipants, on the other hand, are vicarious participants (for example, a TV audience) (A2). Point B underlines the complexity of the internal or external perspective. The evaluation of politeness has a background of expectancies that define the normality of reference. The evaluation of politeness must necessarily understand the positioning of the interpreter with respect to the system of expectancies: whether they are the speakers’ (emic) (B3) or if they are the outsiders’ (etic) (B4). The congruence of expectancy systems between B3 and B4 is necessary to evaluate politeness, otherwise a vision that is not that of the participants is superimposed. Table 7.1 Multiple perspectives on politeness

User

Observer

Participants’ understandings (A1)

Metaparticipants’ understandings (A2)

Emic understandings (B3)

Etic understandings (B4)

Lay observers’ understandings (C1)

Analysts’ understandings (C2)

Folk-theoretic understandings (D3)

Theoretical understandings (D4)

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Point C (Lay observers’ understandings and Analysts’ understandings) welcomes the perspective of the observer, whether she is the speaker (who finds herself observing and spontaneously evaluating interaction by others) (C1) or the observer understood as an analyst (C2). Compared to the lay observer, the analyst also wants to formalize and identify relationships in the data that support scientific interpretations on the basis of systematic evidence. C1 and C2 follow different procedures, but it should be noted that the interpretative activities both of the lay observer and the analyst are of scientific significance. Point D—Folk-theoretic understandings and Theoretical understandings – concerns the theorization of theory, which can be folk-based or scientific. The scientific theorization (D3) will be accurate, consistent, valid and possibly replicable. The folk-based (D4) will be the speakers’ knowledge about politeness, which can also be a good source of data for scientific theorization. Regarding this multi-dimensional object of analysis from a user’s angle, there are four perspectives (A1, A2, B3, and B4) on politeness: A—(1) Participants’ understandings and (2) Metaparticipants’ understandings. B—(3) Emic understandings and (4) Etic understandings. Four perspectives on politeness are also possible from an observer’s point of view (C1, C2, D3, and D4): C—(1) Lay observers’ understandings and (2) Analysts’ understandings. D—(3) Folk-theoretic understandings and (4) Theoretical understandings. This model is prismatic, hence we can rotate the object of analysis further and see that from the point of view of everyday politeness (politeness1) we have participants’ understandings, but also lay observers’ understandings. From the point of view of the study of politeness (politeness2), there are scholars’ understandings, but also metaparticipants’ understandings. One of the interesting consequences of this multifaceted approach is to direct attention to the ordinary. As Sect. 2.1 anticipated, ordinary language philosophers have adopted ordinary language as a tool of scientific analysis, and this is still an appealing intuition (Sbisà, 2011b). Sbisà points out that: “[…] once it is conceded that philosophy is no longer a matter wholly separated from actual, everyday life (or perhaps that it never really was), why should its tasks fail to include methodological advice for the clarification of everyday situations and events, which would amount to putting forward methodological claims for pragmatics?” (2011b: 8). The methodological claims for politeness are, for example, that the ordinary can be more than a point of departure, i.e. collecting data from ordinary language. This perspective opens up new horizons in directing research objectives to their applied utility in ordinary life. Since the game of politeness is played out in everyday life, the research methodology might well welcome an approach focusing on practical application. In a way, some competence in scientific research should be within everyone’s reach in the form of being able to ask questions and get useful answers. Every incident, every new encounter or every new context puts the lay speaker in front of different understandings of politeness, as we anticipated above. A scientific attitude, although

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basic, would mark the distance from acritical common sense: scientific research, even in everyday practice, produces knowledge that can be shared and is verifiable in a community, be it limited and local, or wide and academic (Bousfield, 2008). There are many occasions, including everyday contexts, where the scientific nature of the processes supports life or professional actions through the transparent, organised and accessible documentation of an empirical basis. This might encourage a didactics of pragmatics able to provide a bridge between politeness2 and everyday application. For this reason, an attitude of research and action is particularly appropriate. In fact, research in politeness has good potential since many of its results can have spin-offs that are of practical use (see, for example, Holmes & Stubbe 2003; Archer & Jagodzinski 2018). Current research, for example, brings results which are potentially explanatory for locally involved speakers and significant for their social action. This is fully in the spirit of Action Research (see Chap. 21) and implies researchers directing their investigation to assist the understanding of daily reality, work contexts, educational environments or multicultural families. Going beyond the original universal interests of politeness studies, we are now exploring dynamic and local contexts, which cover the workplace, service counters, health settings, legal settings, linguistic and cultural educational contexts, political settings, fictional texts and digital communication (Burges et al., 2019). Hence, the agenda of politeness urges us to explore new methodological paradigms that should include research with people, rather than research on people (Locher, 2015; Marra & Lazzaro-Salazar, 2018). The methodological consequences are that the researcher should involve the members of a community in decisions on research design and in data collection, as well in data analysis. This enables a deeper understanding of everyday practices, because participants are involved as co-researchers. Ultimately, the researcher is part of the social system she studies, where everyday practices are deeply subjective and relational. From this section emerges the fact that a person has multiple understandings of politeness, and this multifaceted view draws attention to the everyday efficiency of speakers, in contrast with the complicated work of politeness analysts. This unsolved gap calls for new paradigms of investigation, one of which might be researching with the speakers themselves and possibly pursuing a practical objective. The spirit of politeness research as social action and as interaction with the speakers involved challenges the researcher to be deeply aware of the salient and interconnected loci of interpretations. Hence, the next paragraph discusses the source of evaluation, addressing the specific issue of perspectives.

7.2 Perspectives Politeness research today seems to be very much linked to issues involving points of view because it requires the awareness of intersubjectivity, i.e. that the interlocutors have their own, divergent perspectives and social aims. Actually, in the meeting with the other, “[…] the moral grounds for […] evaluations cannot be readily presumed

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by participants, and must inevitably be negotiated across multiple perspectives” (Haugh & Kádár, 2017: 605). Methodologically, perspective is an important point in considering politeness because research is, in general, a social activity and the researcher, as well as the subjects studied, are part of a socio-cultural context. The research activity has a background of values and at the same time it has context limits that determine how, when, why, etc. a study is conducted. This opens up a network of relations to human groups, and there is a high risk that the cognitive categories of the researcher assimilate the observed reality with their own (Turchetta, 2000; Duranti, 2007; Haugh & Kádár, 2017). This pivotal point is specifically addressed by the etic-emic question. The emic units “are relevant to the insiders” and embed the speaker’s perspective through its explicit materialisation (e.g. verbalisation). Etic, instead, “refers to the outsiders’ accounts of insiders’ behaviour”, that is, the external perspective of an observer (Eelen, 2001: 76). Methodologically, the etic approach observes an event from the outside—often objectively and with quantitative data—to compare events on the basis of a model defined by the researcher. In fact, “[o]bserving others from an etic perspective entails framing the behaviour of others from one’s own moral perspective, through the lens of moral values, that is, one’s own perception of how things ‘should be’ […]” (Haugh & Kádár, 2017: 611). On the contrary, the emic approach is more subjective and qualitative; it observes a single event from the inside to discover structures on the basis of criteria related to that unique event (and not compared to other). Eelen (2001) and Spencer-Oatey (2002a) are among the first to draw the attention of politeness studies to these two perspectives of linguistic anthropology. They defend the need for a clear awareness that the evaluation of the speaker and the evaluation of the researcher must be distinct. The politeness studies often transfer etic categories to the emic level. Indeed, they often translate external constructs into emic notions, i.e. they overlap an analytic model of the researcher onto the psychological reality of the speakers. Eelen (2001: 81) argues that although such constructs “[…] are basically etic in origin, they are claimed to be emic. The ambiguity is thus ontological (regarding the status of the concepts) as well as epistemological (regarding legitimate practices of scientific theorizing)”. For the researcher, this problem of perspective implies discovering how to obtain discursive cues from an emic point of view. In fact, speakers constantly offer contextualisation cues that can be useful for interpreting communication in context (Duranti, 2007). As practical recommendations, Arundale (2010b) and Kádár and Haugh (2013) suggest some methods that are helpful in revealing the internal perspective and support an emic approach: ● Discourse analytical methods can be used to find out where the speaker displays her interpretation to the other during the interaction. These explicit signals are visible to both the speaker and the analyst and they include participant uptake, metapragmatic comments by the speakers, follow-up politeness behaviour, and challenges to inappropriate talk.

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● Self-report method. The analyst gathers data from the actors about the meaning of their relationship, e.g. about what they find relevant. This method is centred on the individual, hence it entails the problem of understanding what the speakers’ individual perspective can tell us about their co-constructed and dynamic, emerging interaction. In addition, this method relies on data that require recall and are not online: in this time-lapse new evaluations and perceptions by the subject may occur. As introduced in Sect. 5.2, when a set of dynamics have been concluded, reconstruction may shed retroactive light on the whole interaction. ● Interpretative methods (e.g. enquiry narrative) can offer deep insights into the speakers, in an emic approach. All these suggestions have some shortcomings. The main idea is to focus the on discursive effects or the reaction of the interlocutors, but it is difficult for the external analyst to capture them because they tend to be verbalized by the speakers with low frequency. The paradox is that although they may be difficult for an external observer to access, for speakers these clues are sufficiently transparent, otherwise communication would be impossible. At the state of the art, the internal–external dichotomy has somehow faded and, with the necessary awareness that they are distinct, emic-etic can collaborate (see Chap. 18 for a methodological tool). In fact, in intercultural encounters emic and etic intertwine: a person embeds both the internal perspective of her in-group and the outsider perspective on the interlocutor’s community (Haugh & Kádár, 2017). In other words, a speaker, always has a double perspective: we see ourselves emically and, at the same time, we see the interlocutor etically. In addition, two points of observation are no longer sufficient; instead, the plurality of perspectives referred to in Sect. 7.2 seems more promising. The assumption that everyone has the same understandings of politeness has been definitively surpassed and the loci of understanding multiplied as participant/metaparticipant emic/etic, analyst/lay-observer, theoretical/folk-theoretic (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). To study politeness from a multi-perspective approach entails embracing integrated methodologies. Several data collection methods should be used to try and grasp the many perspectives and integrate them in a multidimensional and systemic analysis. A multi-method approach implies making combinations in order to compare different views of a situation. In general, the integration of methodologies uses different types of triangulation: of data (it detects them several times, at different times and in different situations), of methods (it collects data by different techniques), of researchers (different researchers with the same techniques) and of theories (with researchers of different trends observing the same phenomenon). For example: ● There might be a classical triangulation of methods, e.g. a verbal report after a roleplay or a rating scale that precedes the construction of the roleplay scene. Other combinations might be: listening to a dialogue, noting down the emotions that the subject identifies in the dialogue and organizing them on an intensity scale; giving a questionnaire and then carrying out an informal interview on the answers to the questionnaire; doing close role playing and then a metapragmatic assessment questionnaire (e.g. rating), etc.

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● There might also be repeated observations at different times and in different situations. ● There might be two analysts working independently from different theoretical backgrounds. ● There might be two observers working independently on the same data. They may both work emically or one of them may be an observer outside the system (Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). With integrated methodology, various perspectives can interact: those of the analyst (i.e. intuition, introspection) and of the subjects (i.e. perceptions, interpretations, evaluation). For example, quantitative collection is frequently completed by a metapragmatic assessment of the subject on its own production. This combination makes it possible to match the observed patterns with what the subjects perceive. As such, they make it possible to confirm or correct the value of the contextual variables previously established by the researcher (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Ogiermann & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019). It is worth adding that the integration of perspectives only increases the validity of the results thanks to the differentiation of sources of data, as long as the researcher is aware that standards of acceptability differ from method to method (Stubbs, 1987; Kasper, 2000; Schneider, 2018). Methodological dynamism requires great awareness of what is considered valid with respect to a methodological tool. In fact, if the coherence with the research question is not well justified, the different methods integrated are often subject to criticism by those who find it difficult to understand the specificity of an instrument, claiming for it the same standards of validity typical of others (typically, quantitative standards versus qualitative standards).

7.3 Evaluations The evaluative process revolves around a concern to understand the subjectivity in politeness and its great variation, i.e. how, in everyday practice, speakers evaluate politeness in contexts of situated interaction in many different ways. Actually, what has been discussed so far on perspectives highlights the strong subjectivity we observe in politeness and this implies the need to account for the subjective evaluation of speakers (Haugh, 2013a, 2015; Haugh & Chang, 2019). As Eelen (2001: 249) underlines, “[…] the traditional focus is on the production of (im)polite behaviour, while the present perspective focuses on the production of (im)polite evaluations: the traditional research question of ‘why are people (im)polite?’ is rephrased as ‘why do people evaluate each other as (im)polite?’”. Indeed, there is general consensus “[…] that a theory of (im)politeness should offer a systematic, internally coherent account of how these subjective judgments, or (inter)subjective attitudinal evaluation arise, and what role such evaluations play in interpersonal relations” (Haugh & Watanabe, 2017: 68). Thus, politeness is an evaluation of behaviours: it is a judgement made in context that leads to a certain

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understanding of the participants (Terkourafi, 2012; Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Haugh, 2013a, 2015; Kecskes, 2015). As Eelen argues, politeness involves the qualification of behaviour at the level of the speaker. Subjective evaluation, nevertheless, implies social judgments of approval or condemnation, which are always aimed at a social effect: “[…] [politeness1] is always an instance of everyday social life, and as social practice it will always be geared towards, or at least have, some social effect” (Eelen, 2001: 38). In other words, subjective evaluation is always interpersonal, in fact it derives from social actions and meanings that are recognisable for the speakers in situated contexts. The interpersonal base of evaluation is a topic that should start to be defined according to complexity. First of all, as Eelen underlines, the researcher is warned to avoid a bias of perspective. In fact, in traditional models, “politeness is always seen as a behavioural practice with which the speaker tries to achieve something, rather than as a behavioural practice with which the hearer tries to achieve something” (Eelen, 2001: 104). This means that the true essence of politeness lies in its evaluative nature and must embrace speaker and hearer as a pair. The researcher should not underestimate the strategic nature of the recipient’s evaluation. Reception is in fact strategic, and not a mere activity of recognition. For this reason, politeness is an evaluation-centred activity, and the consequence is that an action is only polite if the recipient evaluates it as such. A second fundamental detail to bring to the attention of the analyst is the moral order of evaluations, as we introduced in Sect. 4.1. Kádár and Haugh (2013: 61) specify that “[…] interpersonal evaluations involve casting persons and relationships into certain valenced categories according to some kind of perceived normative scale or frame of reference”. This issue involves four dimensions: ● Individuals and relationships. When the single individual enters into relation with other individuals this is conceptualised differently according to the social groups in question. Moreover, this relation is variously conceptualised and becomes the heart of the evaluation process. ● Categorisation: this concerns the common-sense categories, i.e. the ordinary knowledge that speakers have about people and relationships. ● Valency: categories have a valency, i.e. a widespread area of attraction/repulsion that we conceptualise as positive/negative, good/bad, appropriate/inappropriate etc. Valency is emotively charged. ● Normative frames of reference: the evaluation needs a background of comparison, a frame that can range from a wide social level up to groups and communities, as well as small groups and couples. The fact that a social action is assessed by the speaker as recognisable is due to the fact that it is based on a normative practice, i.e. a frequency codified as a reference (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). In this approach, there is a reference background that the speakers perceive as shared. Communicative relationships are cast onto it in valenced categories for the purposes of evaluating polite behaviour in a situated contingent context. As we will see in Chap. 8, the background is a set of expectations that marks a reference point, the

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zero level of appropriateness in that specific context for all actors involved in communication (Culpeper, 2012; Terkourafi, 2012; Haugh, 2013b). The speaker automatically perceives the background as normal, and this determines discursive expectations of normality. Hence, normality recalls a neutral kind of politeness that meets social expectation and goes unnoticed. On the contrary, not-normality marks a significant break in expectations, towards the interpretation of a salient kind of politeness. The hypothesis of such a frame of reference helps to overcome the epistemological drift of subjectivity. The high subjectivity of evaluations has an epistemological risk: where everything is interpreted on the basis of the speakers’ subjective data, there can be no category of analysis and, therefore, scientific rigour (Joseph, 2004). It is worth mentioning that this issue endorses specific practical interest for the teaching of politeness. In fact, the basic question is whether politeness really is “teachable” because there is a continuum that goes from teaching politeness as identificable norms, to teaching how to manage unpredictable discourse contextually. Rose and Kasper (2001) show that instruction in pragmatics improves this competence and, to this end, conventional patterns (e.g. types of linguistic acts), principles (e.g. positive and negative politeness), and strategies (e.g. mitigation, seeking agreement, etc.) are taught. However this approach tends to be prescriptive, i.e. to explain good manners and behaviours in a static way and not to develop the discursive dynamism that politeness requires. To go in the direction of discursive dynamism teaching focused on consciousness raising is more appropriate because it develops the learners’ awareness of speakers’ evaluative processes. Usually, this sort of teaching offers explicit metapragmatic discussion in class on matters such as perceptions of power, degree of imposition, perception of evaluative attitudes, the situatedness of interaction, the emic perspective of the speakers, the negotiations, etc. Interestingly, this approach is suitable for all nuances, from polite to impolite, and in particular it can meet the challenge of preparing users for different contexts that are impossible to predict fully. For example, it even prepares learners to choose a reaction in problematic situations, both with individual agency and by socially conforming (Kondo, 2008; Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen 2012; Haugh & Chang 2015; Félix-Brasdefer & Mugford 2017; Landone, 2019). The methodology for studying speakers’ evaluation has yet to be refined. As discussed in the previous section, the speaker’s metapragmatic awareness is a good source of data. In fact, an action is evaluated as polite because it is recognisable as such, and it is recognisable as such because the speakers recognise it as such (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). For the analyst, understanding what determines such recognisability is a challenge: the speakers themselves have a variable awareness of how their communication works. In some cases the speaker has access to the process of politeness (for example, she has mental representations of what is or is not polite); in other cases, she does not (for example, she is not aware of the value configuration that sustains certain politeness dynamics). In general, what the speaker is able to verbalise about her own politeness can become a tool for the analyst. However, it is evident that in questionnaires or in a posteriori interviews the speakers report an account of an interaction, which is not the interaction itself. In addition, what the speaker is able to verbalise is not without

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metalinguistic traps, that is, the researcher may not be aware that the metalanguage the speaker uses entails a worldview that differs from hers (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 190). Hence, natural data on the evaluations of the speakers’ politeness are necessary, but they are difficult to obtain. The reason is that the speakers only rarely verbalise such evaluations spontaneously in interactions. As we saw in the previous section, one option is to focus on the effects that the evaluation produces in the interaction, shifting the relevant data from the illocutive to the performative plane (Eelen, 2001). To sum up, this chapter highlights the everyday efficiency of speakers faced with the complex system of politeness. Speakers manage the interconnected loci of politeness interpretation naturally. The different perspectives that this involves underlines the need to account for speakers’ subjective evaluation. However, the high variability of such evaluations implies a challenge for the analyst. Actually, the hints that guide speakers’ evaluations in their interaction are the main source of data. The shared reference background of speakers is also a useful construct to understand how speakers weigh their evaluations. Nevertheless, this type of data is difficult to obtain. Thus the researcher faces the methodological challenge of embracing integrated methodologies that reveal various points of view, with particular attention to the speakers’ perspective.

Key points for the researcher ● Am I using my data to theorize predictive models of polite communicative action by speakers? ● Am I projecting a theoretical model on the interpretation of my data? ● Is the aim of my investigation useful for facing problems in a community? ● How can I involve one of my communities or networks in my research design? ● How can I recollect emic data in a communicative event? ● How can I obtain natural and spontaneous data on the speakers’ evaluations of politeness in interaction?

References Archer, D., & Jagodzinski, P. (2018). Applying (im)politeness and facework research to professional settings: An introduction. Journal of Politeness Research Language Behaviour Culture, 14(2), 167–178. Arundale, R. (2010). Relating. In M. Locher & S. Graham (Eds.), Interpersonal pragmatics (pp. 137–165). Mouton de Gruyter. Bousfield, D. (2008). Impoliteness in interaction. John Benjamins. Burgers, C., Brugman, B.C., & Boeynaems, A. (2019). Systematic literature reviews: Four applications for interdisciplinary research. Journal of Pragmatics May, 102–109. Culpeper, J. (2012). (Im)politeness: Three issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1128–1133.

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Duranti, A. (2007). Etnopragmatica. La forza del parlare. Carocci. Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. St. Jerome Publishing. Ogiermann, E., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Im/politeness between the analyst and participant perspectives: An overview of the field. In E. Ogiermann, & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (Eds.) From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness (pp. 1–24). Cambridge University Press. Félix-Brasdefer, C., & Cohen, A. (2012). Teaching pragmatics in the foreign language classroom: Grammar as a communicative resource. Hispania, 95(4), 650–669. Félix-Brasdefer, J. C., & Mugford, G. (2017). (Im)politeness: Learning and teaching. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 489– 516). Palgrave Macmillan. Haugh, M. (2013a). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 52–72. Haugh, M. (2013b). Disentangling face, facework and im/politeness. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 1(1), 46–73. Haugh, M. (2015). Im/politeness implicatures. Mouton De Gruyter. Haugh, M., & Chang, W.-L. (2015). Understanding im/politenss across cultures: An interactional approach to raising sociopragmatic awareness. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 53(4), 389–414. Haugh, M., & Chang, W.-L. (2019). The apology seemed (in)sincere: Variability in perceptions of (im)politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 142, 207–222. Haugh, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Intercultural (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 601–632). Palgrave Macmillan. Haugh, M., & Watanabe, Y. (2017). (Im)politeness theory. In B. Vine (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of language in the workplace (pp. 65–76). Routledge. Holmes, J., & Stubbe, M. (2003). Power and politeness in the workplace: A sociolinguistic analysis of talk at work. Longman. Joseph, J. (2004). Language and identity. National, ethnic, religious. Palgrave Macmillan. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). Continuum. Kasper, G. (2001). Classroom research on interlanguage pragmatics”. In R. Kenneth & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 33–60). Cambridge University Press. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Kecskes, I. (2015). Intercultural impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 43–47. Kondo, S. (2008). Effects of pragmatic competence through awareness-raising instruction: Refusals by Japanese EFL learners. In E. Alcón Soler, & A. Martínez-Flor (Eds.) (Eds.) Investigating pragmatics in foreign language learning, teaching and testing (pp. 153–177). Multilingual Matters Landone, E. (2019). Los marcadores del discurso. ¿Guías inferenciales de la comunicación emotiva? Spanish in Context 16(2), 272–291. Locher, M. (2015). Interpersonal Pragmatics and its link to (im)politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 5–10. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan. Marra, M., & Lazzaro-Salazar, M. (2018). Ethnographic methods in pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 343–366). Mouton De Gruyter. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. Routledge. Sbisà, M. (2011b). Introduction. In M. Sbisà, J.O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.) Philosophical perspectives for pragmatics(pp. 1–10). John Benjamins. Sbisà, M. (2018). Philosophical pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 133–153). Mouton De Gruyter.

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Schneider, K. P. (2018). Methods and ethics in data collection. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 37–93). Mouton De Gruyter. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002). Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(5), 529–545. Stubbs, M. (1987). Análisis del discurso. Análisis sociolingüístico del lenguaje natural. Alianza Editorial Terkourafi, M. (2012). Politeness and pragmatics. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 617–637). Cambridge University Press. Turchetta, B. (2000). La ricerca di campo in linguistica. Carocci. Watts, R., Ide, S., & Ehlich, K. (1992). Introduction. In R. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.), Politeness in language (pp. 1–17). Mouton de Gruyter. Wood, T. (2015). Elements of hermeneutic pragmatics. Peter Lang.

Chapter 8

How Does the Mind Frame?

The last chapter in Part I of this volume rounds up the discussion of the relevant methodological consequences emerging from the theoretical state of the art. As in the previous chapter, the following pages deal with how speakers reach a mutual understanding of politeness in spite of the great diversity of their perspectives and evaluations. Here, the cognitive approach focuses on trying to explain how people manage the complex system of language in everyday life. A cognitive perspective assumes that the mind simplifies the system through frames of reality that grant rapid and shared access under the pressure of daily interactions. Such frames become automatic according to their usefulness, which is detectable in their frequency of use. At the same time, this view admits the ability of the speakers to bypass frames ordinarily used when the indexes of the contingent situation prove not to be ordinary. The methodological problems the researcher encounters in the cognitive model are how to investigate the evaluations of the speakers leading to the activation of ordinary frames, or deviating from them. A main point is how speakers’ perceptions converge or not into the frames that are taken as a background of reference. The objective of this chapter is hence to discuss the interplay of perception and organization of knowledge determining frameworks in politeness.

8.1 The Organization of the Knowledge At the centre of the philosophical pragmatics that study the cognitive sphere are thought processes. The relationship between language and concept is a crucial junction because “[…] one cannot leap from linguistic distinctions to the ‘language of thought’” (Levinson, 1992: 23). In the 1980s, in particular, interest in neuronal data to test speculative theories began to develop (Adornetti, 2012): through the experimental empirical data of neurosciences and cognitive psychology, scientists searched the brain to discover the localization of the pragmatic processes, to

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demonstrate the great themes of pragmatics (such as, the implicit, lexical reference, implicature, metaphors, indirect speech acts, presuppositions, etc.). Roughly speaking, two strands developed later: neuropragmatics (interested in the activation of neuronal areas) and experimental pragmatics (concerned with the articulation of pragmatic processes). The neuropragmatic strand, in particular, also includes the clinical objectives of studying deficits and syndromes involving pragmatic pathological inadequacies (autism, Asperger’s syndrome, Semantic Pragmatic Disorder, etc.). With respect to politeness, there are some themes that intersect cognitive linguistic studies that are able to provide insights on how politeness might assume some processes pertaining to the common organization of knowledge. Inference is one example of this. Kádár and Haugh state that: “[i]nference generally refers either to some kind of conclusion or understanding reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning, or to the process of reaching such a conclusion” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 216). As we saw in Sect. 2.1, politeness can be inferred by a process in which a particularized implicature (that is, an expression that is not conventionalized) is extracted. But the understanding of politeness can also be anticipated, as in the case of generalised implicatures (i.e. when an expression is conventionally employed for a particular use). The latter is a sort of default reasoning, based on the person’s previous social experience and on the frequent and non-casual co-occurrence of a certain linguistic usage and its function in a context. This hypothesis regarding politeness has a strong connection with cognitive investigations that focus on processes in the structural organization of knowledge (frames, schematas, gestalts, models, mental images) and actions (scenarios, scripts). Despite different denominations and conceptual nuances, they all conceptualize the idea that there is a certain regularity to our experience and that there are constructs that guide perception, interpretation and memorization (Palmer, 1996). Despite this supposed regularity, in practice people differ in their perception of what they see, feel or think (and how they verbalize it). The reason is that they vary in terms of the conceptual tools they have available that is, the traits that each person considers relevant in the perception of reality can differ widely from individual to individual and for the individual herself in different circumstances (Goodenough, 2001; Verschueren, 2002). The consequence is a theoretical tension between the idea that there are no objective conditions in reality but only the speaker’s personal mental universes, and the idea that contextual conditions have an objective basis although individuals perceive it in different ways (Kecskes, 2012). In any case, for the researcher, “[w]hat this variability means is that no preconceived assumptions can be straightforwardly applied to the analysis of linguistic politeness in naturally occurring data, without a careful examination of the details of situated contexts” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 43). The details of the context are first perceived by the speakers, then processed. Hence, we shall now concentrate on the fact that a speaker’s interpretation of politeness is informed by an evaluation activity, which in turn is informed by the speaker’s intentions and perceptions (Mitchell & Haugh, 2015).

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8.2 Intentions and Perceptions To introduce the subject, a brief comment on intentions may be necessary. Intentionality is an important, traditional theme in politeness research, that has closely accompanied the investigation of inferential processes. Based on the assumption of rationality in human action, traditional studies of politeness have assumed that individuals have a precise intention when communicating. The speaker strategically combines the language forms conventionally at her disposal for conveying her intention to the interlocutor. The receiver will solve the “calculation” and interpret the intention conveyed. However, ethnopragmatics has highlighted how misleading it would be to interpret the intentions of a speaker outside of an interpersonal perspective; therefore, intentions have to be re-thought as an intersubjective construct. Intentionality is thus an affective and moral concept that is the property of our thoughts, our emotions and our actions to orient towards something or someone (Duranti, 2007). In other words, it is not merely an individual state of mind, but an interactive state of emergent intentions in a dialogical dynamism. Conceiving of intentions as collaborative, makes it clear that the speaker’s intention is not sufficient and autonomous; in fact the perception and interpretation of the interlocutor has a substantial weight (Haugh & Jaszczolt, 2012; Kecskes, 2012). As far as the speaker is concerned, it should be noted that “speakers consistently over-estimate their ability to project intended meaning onto addressees” (Haugh & Jaszczolt, 2012: 107). In other words, speakers experience a sort of egocentricity and are little aware of the recipient’s perception. They somehow take it for granted that what is said coincides with what is understood. This poses the problem of the recognisability of intentions. In the frame of Hermeneutic Pragmatics, Wood (2015: 53) stresses that intention has a “false bottom”. There are two levels: one which is directly expressed, overt and directed towards uptake (intention1), and one that is tacit and adds nuances to the first (intention2). When the latter is present, it impacts on the communicative act allowing virtually unlimited interpretations, it can make a canonical act of promising a somewhat insincere promise. As we commented in Sect. 6.3, motivation is not fully transparent, sometimes not even to the speaker. That said, at the state of the art, perhaps the intention becomes a secondary problem in politeness. If the parameters at stake in profiling the interlocutors’ relationship are interpreted in situ, in a dynamic form and with a high margin of subjectivity, then the real issue that must necessarily be addressed from a methodological point of view is the detection of the speakers’ relative perception (Bolívar, 2008, Moreno Fernández, 2012). The above-mentioned, classical perlocutive problem that “[p]oliteness […] is a property of an utterance determined by the hearer […]” (Fraser, 1980: 349) is then reinforced by the fact that regardless of the speaker’s intention, the interpretation of politeness is filtered by perceptions. In short, what the receiver perceives is more relevant than what the speaker means. Perception involves concentrating on something, implying selective backgrounding and foregrounding (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 10) and the researcher should be able to understand on what basis this filtering is carried out, because it is inevitably

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linked to the process of evaluation of politeness. As we will see in the next chapter, the hypothesis is that, cognitively, there is an established set of local conventions and norms to which, unconsciously, the speaker refers as a basis for normality. This implies that the speaker does not have complete agency, but constantly refers to a set of expectancies that work as a selective perceptual frame. It is worth noting that this perceptive cognitive process has been a specific focus of interlanguage studies, because normality differs from context to context (Lado, 1957; Selinker, 1972; Sharwood Smith, 1986; Kellerman, 1990; Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Bardovi-Harlig, 2001; Kasper, 2001; Minegishi, 2001; Bettoni, 2006; Gonzales, 2013; Pizziconi & Locher, 2015; Félix-Brasdefer & Mugford, 2017; Taguchi & Roever, 2017; Bernal, 2018). The term interlanguage refers to the provisional and evolutionary system of the language being learned and refers both to the system of the mother tongue and to the systems of the other known foreign and second languages. In the field of politeness, interlanguage studies specifically focus on the appropriateness to context produced by learners in comparison with native speakers. Kasper and Dahl (1991: 239) indicate that: In IL [Interlanguage] pragmatics, a pertinent issue is to determine whether NNSs [non-native speakers] perceive the illocutionary and politeness value of speech act realization patterns differently from NSs [native speakers], as this would be one reason why NNSs might mean something different by saying the same things that NSs say, or might say something different but mean the same thing as NSs do. Finally, an important, and yet virtually unaddressed, issue would be whether such perceptions change as NNSs’ performance in the course of IL development changes.

The relevance of perception in politeness acquisition and in teaching it is evident in its various fields of application: the transfer of cultural or linguistic schemas from L1 to a FL/L2; polite communication in multicultural learning communities; the development of politeness as a soft intercultural skill; the transmission of occult ideologies in teaching materials, the development of politeness competence descriptors (Kasper & Rose, 2002; Landone, 2004, 2009; Žegarac & Pennington, 2000; Eisenchlas, 2011). From a practical point of view, methods for measuring perception have yet to be refined (Lindsay, 2009). Stubbs (1987), for example, raises the question of the native or non-native analyst. The native analyst has a high interpretative competence of the meanings of her own culture but she also inevitably has automatisms of perceptions and expectations that consequently frame what she perceives. The non-native analyst, on the other hand, although deficient in emic understanding, has the advantage of distancing and can grasp what seems trivially irrelevant to the native. This is because the non-native analyst has perceptions and expectations based on different cultural frames. Another problem is the dispersion of data: the multiplication of perceptions vary a great deal, as said: “[…] the empirical data themselves mostly witness variation rather than sharedness. People are never unanimous in their evaluations or ranking of (im)politeness or (in)appropriateness” (Eelen, 2001: 136). Haugh and Chang (2019) focus on the issue of variability of perceptions amongst individual speakers involved in the same communicative event in a study of intracultural politeness perception

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regarding an apology. Although the selected respondents share the same moral order, a significant degree of variability is demonstrated independently of their sociolinguistic profiles. The subjects evoked five different rationales to support their evaluation, sometimes the same rationales used to warrant opposite evaluations. Their results confirm that it is not viable to level the mean data calculating values in politeness perception, unless the analysis is coupled with a deeper, qualitative investigation. For example, Haugh and Chang (2019) suggest gathering data not only from participants but also from observers, who might add a qualitative triangulation. In general, the comments of all the participants are needed to gain insights into the rationales of perceptions. To sum up, perception appeared in the theoretical discussion of politeness when the importance of performativity of speech acts was relativised in terms of the role of the speakers in generating and understanding intentions. Later, intentions shifted from an individual state of mind to interpersonal negotiation, i.e. from linear inference to an issue of relative perception. The methods for investigating what perceptions select, on what basis they select and why they are highly subjective are still being developed in politeness investigation. As we will see in the next section, the issue of how perceptions also inform interpretation and evaluation is widely debated in the line of investigation of mental frames.

8.3 The Frame Work Our mind organises patterns of thought and behaviour that reduce speakers’ uncertainty when building and interpreting communication. This is the core of the cognitive perspective, which tries to explain the systematic nature of cognitive activities. Such patterns have been differentiated theoretically, i.e. as frames, scripts, scenarios, mental models, schemata, etc. (Palmer, 1996). There are multiple definitions but all of them, roughly speaking, try to answer the question of how the mass of our knowledge is organised in order to allow a quick and efficient correspondence with reality (Brown & Yule, 1983). They all imply in one way or another the pre-existence of interpretative frameworks that produce conventions, rituals and expectations. This means that speakers’ knowledge is “organized in a fixed way as a complete unit of stereotypic knowledge in memory” (Brown & Yule, 1983: 236). In linguistics, one of the first to introduce a similar concept was Levinson (cit. in Culpeper & Terkourafi, 2017: 18) with the activity type, i.e. speech acts that co-occur frequently and constituite conventionalised scripts of action (e.g. taking a taxi, buying something, etc.). Goddard and Wierzbicka (2004), similarly, conceived the scripts, that act as guides to the speaker’s expectations with respect to what is considered typical and/or appropriate. In a way the Fraser and Nolan’s conversational contract anticipated the idea that speakers activate relational schemata based on expectations of normality that inform the speakers’ evaluations of politeness. It their model, politeness was embedded in the rights/obligations that the interlocutors activate according to their situational expectations and according to what they negotiate on the basis of

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their perception of the context (Fraser, 1980, 1990b; Fraser & Nolan 1981; Bonilla Álvarez, 2007. See a variant in Charaudeau, 2012). Rights and obligations are just two aspects that actually drive the formation of frameworks. In general, the speaker seems to have stereotypes about how a life scenario works and they guide expectations to allow a quick communicative reaction. The constitutive elements of these schemes are context traits and sequences of actions or events that the speaker has fixed through cultural or individual experience. These frameworks include linguistic structures which, depending on the degree of fixation, can even end up being conventions, routines, formulas, rituals. The speakers make an evaluative inference based on these conventional fixed units to make sense of a communicative event. Hence, to be useful, frames need to be socially accepted prototypes, that is, they need to be socially recognised and accepted. For this reason, the frameworks are not purely cognitive constructs, they are also deeply social. Schemes of linguistic actions in context are fixed by the individual’s experience embedded in shared interactions and in a social community. For their social side, frameworks necessarily intertwine with values (Wierzbicka, 1985, Mesquita et al., 1997). In this regard, it is worth mentioning Bateson’s perspective in Sclavi’s reading (Sclavi, 2003) because it offers methodological inspiration. For Bateson, frames are matrices of meaning and humans behave through these sequences of actions that produce interactive patterns. Frames have implicit premises, which are the constraints that regulate our actions unconsciously. Implicit premises are values or similar constructs that delimit boundaries, beyond which we tend not to go because we move automatically inside the frame: leaving a frame means changing the implicit premises. Scalvi (2003) adds that growing up in a community and with a certain language we internalise complex hierarchies of implicit premises that in that language and culture are the safe ground that allows us to understand each other. Such implicit premises only become evident in cross-cultural comparison. When an encounter between different frames happens, it can produce a dissonance that brings premises out of the shadow. The methodological interest of this proposal for politeness is that it tries to connect with the social constrains of the frameworks to find a scheme that reveals a sort of gestalt of the frames being compared. For example, contrasting the patterns of frame underling two different school systems, Sclavi (2005) identifies power as the main constituent of the frames that determine both the systems in different ways. The application of this idea in politeness studies is worth developing, because it supposes a holistic approach to the complex system: it compares patterns of frames to identify constructs, many of which have yet to be discovered, as was observed regarding deep levels in Sect. 6.3. In addition, this model confirms that frameworks are very strongly rooted: the emotional charge that politeness phenomena often have is also linked to the need to maintain the stability of one’s own cognitive representations and their implicit premises. Similarly, EscandellVidal (1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2009) endorses the idea that politeness is based on default values for certain situations, which are formed from what is frequently experienced within a culture. Hence, the construct of implicit premises to frameworks and the idea of making them explicit is useful to understand why certain frameworks are created

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and not others, that is, if there is any deep cause that determines how a framework is culturally built and maintained. In politeness, the socio-cognitive nature of the frames stimulates interest in how normative assumptions guide the participants’ evaluative judgements in context (Wierzbicka, 1985, Watts, 2003). As Terkourafi (2012: 629) argues, there must be a basis of normal circumstances that form a minimal context or frame in a certain community, otherwise, politeness would be “a series of desperate and unrelated attempts by individual speakers at being perceived as polite (or impolite) by a multitude of hearers […] in a multitude of circumstances […] with ‘no method in their [the speakers] madness’ “. Haugh (2012) adds that social norms are self-reproducing through interaction on the basis of a shared social memory, which Haugh calls social schemata. Schemata are discursive resources rooted in social practice: due to their common recognisability, they reduce the work of interpretation. These sedimented uses speed communication up and reduce ambiguity, offering a sort of default interpretation which has a high probability of being the right one. A distinction between conventions and rituals is also made in politeness (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Conventions are routine, schematic behaviour that enters everyday life. An illocutive force and a linguistic form are fixed by usage as polite by repetition. This fixation originates the so-called politeness formulas. Much of politeness also feeds on rituals, which have a fundamental role in symbolically maintaining social dependence. A broad conception of rituals involves “recurrent action, which re-enacts the ideologies or ethos of a relational work or broader social group as a ‘performance’, and generate intense emotions and affect” (Terkourafi & Kádár, 2017: 172). Rituals belong to the normative side of politeness and have often been studied in the exclusive context of etiquette. However, there are also more localized individual and group rituals, including those that are not transparent and accessible. For example, covert rituals are individual, normative and emotionally charged practices in psychological disorders. The construct of cognitive frameworks meets with some reservations, mainly because its application in politeness is not empirically demonstrated (Leech, 2014). However, it has been experimentally demonstrated that subjects confuse the actions they read in a text with the actions of the scheme that such a text activates, thus demonstrating their strength as “structures of expectations” (Brown & Yule, 1983: 248). Palmer (1996) also reports confirmation from neurolinguistics (e.g. concerning colours). Despite this partial demonstration, cognitive frameworks are still subject to the theoretical speculations of cognitive linguistics. In particular, further empirical studies are needed to understand social influence in the formation of schemes, how exactly a subject selects the scheme relevant to a situation and how ambiguous or obscure situations are managed through frameworks (Brown & Yule, 1983; Landone, 2019). Briefly, frameworks have specific pertinence in explaining how speakers interpret politeness. More specifically, cognitive frames provide conventionalised communicative action-reaction schemes that are considered as prototypical normality. Speakers rely on these normative assumptions as a background for evaluations. Hence, the formation of frameworks necessarily intertwines with values and

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frequency of social use. In different ways they both seem to impact on how schemes of linguistic actions in context are fixed by the individual experience embedded in shared interactions and in a social community. For the researcher, the identification of recurrent patterns is a way to correlate bundles of contextual traits and their frequency. This helps to identify conventional and ritual politeness. The next step will be to see if they have implicit premises related to social constructs (such as values). It is also interesting to investigate the speakers’ agency allowing them to be by-passed, that is how and when the speakers do not use the schema of politeness. As a matter of fact, despite their shared nature, the use of frameworks may be still subject to individual variation, due for example to different perceptions of reality. That is, individuals can still make use of the same tools in different ways because, despite using them conventionally, they do not perceive reality in the same way.

Key points for the researcher ● How can I identify what a speaker perceives in a communicative exchange? ● Can I estimate the distance between the observed speakers’ perceptions and my own perceptions as an analyst? ● How do I manage the variability of perceptions of politeness amongst individual speakers regarding the same communicative event? ● How can I demonstrate that my data refer to a prototypical use? ● How can I interpret data concerning speakers’ deviation from a framework?

References Adornetti, I. (2012). Why philosophical pragmatics needs clinical pragmatics. Humana. Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 5(23), 159–174. Álvarez, S.B. (2007). El concepto de «cooperación conversacional» revisado desde el punto de vista de la teoría de los juegos. Oralia 10, 25–46 Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2001). Evaluating the empirical evidence: Grounds for instruction in pragmatics. In R. Kenneth & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 13–32). Cambridge University Press. Bernal, M. (2018). Teaching sociopragmatics: Face-work, politeness and impoliteness in L2 Spanish colloquilal conversations. In D. Dumitrescu, & P.L. Andeuza (Eds.) Spanish pragmatics. From research to teaching (pp. 131–150). Routledge. Bettoni, C. (2006). Usare un’altra lingua. Guida alla pragmatica intercultural. Editori Laterza. Bolívar, A. (2008). Perceptions of (im)politenss in Venezuelan Spanish: The role of evaluation in interaction. Pragmatics, 18(4), 605–633. Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge University Press. Charaudeau, P. (2012). Problemas teóricos y metodológicos en los estudios de la oralidad aplicados a la cortesía: aspectos lingüísticos, pragmáticos y discursivos. In J. Escamilla Morales, & G. Henry Vega (Eds.) Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el

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Kellerman, S. (1990). Lip Service: The contribution of the visual modality to speech perception and its relevance to the teaching testing of foreign language listening comprehension. Applied Linguistics, 11(3), 272–280. Lado, R. (1957). Linguistics across cultures: Applied linguistics and language teachers. University of Michigan Press. Landone, E. (2004). El aprendizaje cooperativo del E/LE: propuestas para integrar las funciones de la lengua y las destrezas colaborativas. RedELE 0. Landone, E. (2009). Reflexiones sobre la cortesía verbal en la enseñanza/aprendizaje del E/LE. Marcoele, 8. Landone, E. (2019). Los marcadores del discurso. ¿Guías inferenciales de la comunicación emotiva? Spanish in Context 16(2), 272–291. Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press. Levinson, S. C. (1992). Primer for the field investigation of spatial description and conception. Pragmatics, 2(1), 5–47. Lindsay, R. (2009). Perception and language. In S. Dominiek, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Cognition and pragmatics (pp. 272–287). John Benjamins. Mesquita, B., Frijda, N., & Scherer, K. (1997). Culture and emotion. In J. Berry et al. (Eds.) Handbook of cross-cultural psychology. Basic processes and human development (pp. 255–297). Allyn and Bacon. Mitchell, N., & Haugh, M. (2015). Agency, accountability and evaluations of impoliteness. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(2), 207–238. Moreno Fernández, F. (2012). Sociolingüistica cognitiva. Proposiciones, escolios y debates. Vervuert. Palmer, G. (1996). Toward a theory of Cultural Linguistics. University of Texas Press. Pizziconi, B., & Locher, M. (2015). Introducing the ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ of (im)politeness. In B. Pizziconi, & M. Locher (Eds.), Teaching and learning (Im)politeness (pp. 1–19). Mouton de Gruyter. Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10, 209–231. Sclavi, M. (2003). Arte di ascoltare e mondi possibili. Come si esce dalle cornici di cui siamo parte. Bruno Mondadori. Sclavi, M. (2005). A una spanna da terra. Paravia Bruno Mondadori. Sharwood Smith, M. (1986). Comprehension versus acquisition: Two ways of processing input. Applied Linguistics, 7(3), 239–256. Stubbs, M. (1987). Análisis del discurso. Análisis sociolingüístico del lenguaje natural. Alianza Editorial. Taguchi, N., & Carsten, R. (2017). Second language pragmatics. Oxford University Press. Terkourafi, M., & Kádár, D.Z. (2017). Convention and ritual (im)politenss. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D.Z. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 171–195). Palgrave Macmillan. Terkourafi, M. (2012). Politeness and pragmatics. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 617–637). Cambridge University Press. Verschueren, J. (2002). Para entender la pragmática. Gredos. Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts. Journal of Pragmatics, 9, 145–178. Wood, T. (2015). Elements of hermeneutic pragmatics. Peter Lang. Žegarac V., & Pennington M. C. (2000). Pragmatic transfer in intercultural communication. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 165–190). London: Continuum.

Part II

Routes and Tools for Investigation: Introduction to Part II

After the general overview of the key points in contemporary politeness research presented in Part I, Part II focuses on the routes that the researcher can pursue to continue the methodological exploration that the field of politeness still requires. Several methodological issues can affect research design and the conclusion of this volume—Chap. 22—will offer some methodological suggestions for addressing these critical issues. Recapitulating what emerged in Part I, they can be summed up as follows: • Weakness of theory of reference • Attention only to isolated linguistic structures (e.g. a single speech act) • Lack of attention to the subjects’ mental processes • Lack of attention to the subjects’ perceptual processes • Lack of attention to embodiment • Lack of attention to the deep levels of the unconscious • Inconsistent comparison due to incongruent categories • The research presents a weak operationalization of categories • The analysis presents impressionistic interpretations • The analysis lacks multiple perspectives • The analyst imposes herself on the data, both in data collection and in data analysis • The analysis presents generic quantifications • The analysis presents generalizations but starting from too few, or a poor variety of subjects • Limited interest of the study because it produces data that are too localized • Limited interest of the study because it produces models and principles that are too general • Limited interest of the study because it underestimates the interconnection of levels of politeness as a complex system. • Data collection and analysis ignore the impact of time • The analysis ignores space as a semiotic entity

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Many of these limits depend on the accessibility of data, which are the basis of an empirical approach. For this reason, Part II is devoted to reviewing a variety of data collection tools and their application in politeness studies. In a way, such tools constitute the navigation routes that researchers have explored so far. Some are more consolidated, others are emerging. Every chapter in Part II gives an account of a single tool: its characteristics, typical uses, strong points and limits. Subsequently, a set of studies are described in order to offer examples of the typical use of the tool, as well as of the variations in its application. The aim is to give the researcher concrete examples of practice through the experience of those researchers who have already adopted or implemented the tool. The studies selected as examples for each tool concern different languages and cultures in order to facilitate the circulation of scientific contributions in languages and cultures in their own terms (Hickey 2004, Haugh 2018). For this reason, the extracts of data reported are in the original language, and not translated. The English version is supplied only when English is used in the original article. Approximately, the time span of the selected articles is within the last 10–15 years, a range that should ensure the inclusion of studies still adopting a traditional design but also studies that experiment new paths. In other words, the criterion should be sensitive to novelties deriving from a methodological revision of earlier studies made before this timeframe, but also report the methodologies that have been consolidating over time and are still in use, precisely because they are considered sufficiently valid. On the contrary, it should exclude methodologies that have not survived community validation and consequently have been excluded from the researcher’s preferences. Chapters 9–11 introduce Part II with an overview of three data collection strategies: introspective intuition, experimentation and observation. Observation is focused on as observation both of language and of language users. These three chapters present general considerations to highlight the fact that the way data is collected affects the data themselves. This is particularly true in politeness research, where data are inherently context-sensitive. In a way, these three strategies condition the methodological framework, the research questions it can address and the caveats of the analysis. In fact, the data are not the facts, that is, scientific studies do not return facts but apply points of view to them and return interpretations. Ultimately, these chapters present to the researcher the question of what procedures make it possible to obtain scientifically justified knowledge about a reality: many researchers have preferred a single approach considering others incompatible, many others integrate approaches and, at present, politeness studies are fruitfully mixing methods. Since the data that these approaches retrieve are varied, multiple tools are used, as we will detail in the remaining chapters of Part II. The interdisciplinary nature of politeness research implies a certain variety of methods, and Chaps. 12–21 aim to enable the researcher to better evaluate different tools for data collection, elaboration and analysis. They show in detail how different ways to obtain data affect the kind of analysis that can be conducted in politeness. Chapters 12 (Discourse Completion Test), 13 (Role Playing), 14 (Questionnaires) and 15 (Interviews) illustrate tools for eliciting data, usually in controlled settings.

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Chapters 16–18 instead are devoted to Recording and Transcription, Field Notes, and Shadowing, which are tools for natural data recollection. Finally, Chap. 19 on Corpus Analysis, Chap. 20 on Tools for Online Politeness, and Chap. 21 on Community Studies and Action Research are more transversal methods or approaches concerning specific contexts or specific processes. As will become evident in many of the reported experiences of investigation, integrated methodologies can be particularly advisable in politeness to gather different types of data, putting the analysis into multiple perspectives and highlighting the complexity of the scenario where politeness is concerned. Chapter 22 concludes the book, recapitulating the methodological agenda for politeness research through a final discussion on scientificity and empiricism in relation to complex systems, since politeness exists both in everyday life and in the minds of the researchers.

References Haugh, M. (2018). Afterword: Theorizing (im)politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 153–165. Hickey, L. (2004). Spanish pragmatics. Whence, where, whither. In R. Márquez Reiter, & M. E. Placencia (Eds.), Current trends in the pragmatics of Spanish (pp. 3–14). John Benjamins.

Chapter 9

Introspection and Experimentation

The different tools of investigation in politeness that are presented in this Section need to be minimally contextualized in a methodological framework, to enable the researcher to better evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. A methodological framework combines the research questions with theoretical foundations and methods of data collections and analysis (Jucker & Staley, 2017). In the next few pages, we focus on the type of data: in politeness research, data are inherently context-sensitive; therefore the method of data collection is especially important (Johnston et al., 1998). Thus, a few general considerations open this chapter to highlight the fact that ways of collection affect the data themselves. Politeness, as every other field, admits different methodological approaches. We can roughly identify three that correspond to different working strategies: introspective intuition, experimentation, and observation. The non-empirical data of intuitive introspection and controlled empirical data of experimentation are commented on in the following sections; while the following Chaps. 10 and 11, deal with natural empirical data. Ultimately, the researcher is faced with the question of what procedures make it possible to obtain scientifically justified knowledge about a reality.

9.1 Data Collection As is known, data collection methods run along a continuum from maximally controlled data (contrived data) to uncontrolled data (authentic data). At the one end come tools like the Likert scale, multiple-choice tests and eye-tracking, etc.; at the other end are metadiscourse capturing, field notes, diary, corpus of audio/video recordings, etc. In the middle, there are tools such as discourse completion tasks, interviews, role playing, etc. (Kasper & Dahl, 1991, Kasper, 2000; Golato, 2003; Félix-Brasdefer, 2005, 2008, 2018b; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005; Jucker, 2009; Leech, 2014; Jucker & Staley, 2017). Actually, the relevant distinction is between methods that use naturally occurring data (i.e. that arise in spontaneous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_9

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interaction) and methods that elicit data (i.e. they arise in interactions stimulated by a researcher). Elicited data are simplified and easily comparable; natural data, on the other hand, maintain a natural complexity that makes them more suitable for qualitative analysis. There is an abundance of technical literature on these general issues (for example, Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991) and we refer the reader to this for further reading, since our focus is not so much on the characteristics of a method, but on its applicability in politeness studies. At the beginning of this chapter a general consideration on data collection is needed because when we observe politeness we need to be especially aware of the effects that a particular data collection method can produce. In fact, [i]n pragmatics, we are dealing with a double layer of variability: (a) variability that reflects social properties of the speech event, and the strategic, actional, and linguistic choices by which interlocutors attempt to reach their communicative goals; and (b) the variability induced by different instruments of data collection (Kasper & Dahl, 1991: 215).

In short, the high variability of politeness data that we referred to in Part I combines with the effects of the data collection method. As a consequence, the researcher needs to be particularly familiar with different methods, in order to be able to acknowledge the limits of her data and perhaps integrate various methods of data collection to compensate for the variability induced by the tools. All in all, every method of data collection involves the question of what it is really possible to know of a given reality. The researcher’s task is to evaluate whether the tools provide adequate data on the actual performance of the subject in relation to the research question. Validation of data collection methods is therefore a primary concern in politeness investigation, and this is why the integration of the methods is particularly valuable (Johnston et al., 1998; Trinchero, 2002). A second main concern for the researcher is to avoid inaccuracies in retrieval that would invalidate the study. As data recollection is not always easy to repeat in the case of inadequacies of procedure, it is a particularly delicate phase of research. As an example, to conclude this preliminary notes, we summarize the most common problems reported in the specialized literature on general research methodology in the humanities (see also: Kasper, 2000; Turchetta, 2000; Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Environmental effect: if the physical condition in which one is collecting data changes, the validity of the data will be affected

Observer effect: this is produced by the theoretical background of the observer

Novelty effect: the data collected do not depend on the treatment but on the enthusiasm that the novelty of the treatment brings

Maturation effect on longitudinal research: a long-term effect also depends on the fact that the subject matures

Instrumentation effect. if an instrument is unstable (e.g. the subjectivity of the detector) the validity of the data will be affected

The speaker does not use her natural language (e.g. hypercorrection, lack of familiarity with the researcher, etc.) (continued)

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(continued) Environmental effect: if the physical condition in which one is collecting data changes, the validity of the data will be affected

Observer effect: this is produced by the theoretical background of the observer

Novelty effect: the data collected do not depend on the treatment but on the enthusiasm that the novelty of the treatment brings

Detection effect: data collection may disrupt the detected phenomenon. For example, the researcher may disorient the interviewee by changing the topic too often or the interview may cause the interviewee emotional stress

Hawthorne effect: the subject tends to assume the behaviour she believes meets the expectations of the researcher. Or, the speaker may follow the rules of social desirability and not what she really does or thinks (e.g. she does not say what she thinks or does but what grammar rules or good manners dictate)

Interruption effect: the results are distorted by the fact the subjects are not familiar with a task and do not understand properly what they are asked to do/say

Loss effect: the subjects are lost during the data collection

Selection effect: if one works with volunteers, for example, the data may be distorted by the fact that in a sense the volunteer has a marked profile precisely because of being willing to volunteer

Multiple test effect: the pilot test, for example, might influence the results of the real test

The following two sections offer a brief presentation of two methodological approaches that involve specific methods of data collection: introspection and experimentation. Chapter 10, instead, is devoted to observation, which makes use of a more articulated range of instruments.

9.2 Introspection and Intuition Introspective intuitive data and deductive analysis characterize the philosophical approach and, as is well known, the latter has made a specific contribution to politeness studies. It is called an “armchair” approach and relies on rational thinking based on bibliographically documented topics and authorities, as in the analytical and logic traditions (Jucker, 2009). It differs substantially from other methodologies because it does not use natural data or experimental empirical data; hence, the philosophical approach is commonly considered non-empirical. Instead, it is based on analysis and reflection, which leads to in-depth knowledge of the object of the research, typically a philosophical research question: for example, it investigates the fact that the function of the communicative act is not concluded in its semantics (Jucker, 2009). Some pragmatists consider that progress in pragmatics must start from theory and can only be made by deduction. That is, the idea that the pragmatist is a scholar of language in use and therefore works systematically on the data of real interactions

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is not shared by all (Pons Bordería, 2008). This approach adheres to the idea that science generates theories in a form independent of the data of reality. For this reason, it tends to be a deductive method: it works on a theory which is then applied to reality with the intention to confirm the theory. The aim is to formulate, develop, confirm or disconfirm a theoretical hypothesis, which is then subjected to deductive reasoning, falsification, reduction/expansion of the theory. It is an inventive process that can be inspired by real data, but which can only be argued perfectly by using invented examples (Pons Bordería, 2008; Jucker & Staley, 2017; Huang, 2018). The data emerges from the analyst, and the philosopher / linguist uses intuition to invent linguistic expressions. Thus, data are based on the communicative competence of the analyst herself with respect to imagined contexts and they derive from her own judgments as a native speaker. These judgments concern possibility or adequacy in her mother-tongue. The researcher can then compare her own intuitions with those of other native speakers, non-experts or colleagues who provide, still intuitively, their own opinions and evaluations of adequacy, naturalness or grammaticality. In a way, this is a completely emic approach: the subject has unique and privileged access to personal data. As Huang (2018: 167) observes, “[w]hen linguists/philosophers […] utilize introspection to examine meaning and language use, they are merely employing, perhaps slightly more systematically, a cognitive faculty that is already in place for everyday (linguistic) functioning”. In this regard, it is worth mentioning the question of the adequacy or inadequacy of intuition in pragmatic research. In the philosophical tradition, intuitive knowledge (such as feelings, emotions, insights, etc.), is considered a source of data. And, in a way, it also has its own form of empiricism: even though it does not use the data of reality, it is empirical in the sense that its introspective data produces formulations that can be confirmed or not. However, different analysts may come to different insights on the same object of analysis because intuition can depend very much on their own idiolect. In addition, the reliability of intuition is also low because pragmatic intuition involves a hypothetical and imaginative level that semantic intuitions, for example, do not have. In other words, intuition of the meaning of an expression, for example, is easier than intuition on how an utterance should be interpreted and on how it is interpreted in a specific situation. Hence, pragmatic intuitions belong to the dimension of guessing, of hypothetical thinking, and not to the dimension of facts (Wolfson, 1989; López Serena, 2011; Clark, 2018; Huang, 2018). On the other hand, this approach is as enlightening as philosophy can be. In fact, it deals with theoretical notions which, by their nature, are not empirically testable (such as the notion of intentionality, see Haugh & Jaszczolt, 2012). It is useful to investigate these aspects of linguistic use that are potential and not necessarily reflected in an accessible corpus of natural data. Indeed, it is precisely theoretical input of a philosophical and sociological nature (e.g. practice, habitus, morality) that has inspired the recent turns in politeness studies. Regarding the topics of interest for politeness studies, Lakoff (1973) and Leech (1983) used this methodology, as well as Grice (Grice’s maxims are logical and based on intuitions), Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), and partially also Brown and Levinson (1978–1987). They produced philosophical insights into founding concepts

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such as intentionality (Haugh & Jaszczolt, 2012) or studies of polite speech acts (see Haverkate, 1994 for Spanish). However, they often worked on de-contextualized acts or with a standard context, thus disregarding many of the variables of context that are both textual, discursive, and extra-linguistic, as we commented in Part I. As Pons Bordería (2008) points out, studying language in use without observing the use of the language is methodologically questionable. Recently, this approach has been employed in neo-Gricean (e.g. Leech, 1983, 2014; Pfister, 2010) and post-Gricean theories (e.g. Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Huang, 2018; Jaszczolt, 2019). In particular, Relevance Theory typically uses introspective data, logical argumentation, and conceptual analysis. However, the introspective intuitive approach is experiencing an empirical turn with Cognitive-philosophical Pragmatics (or Anglo-American Pragmatics) because, since the 1990s, experimentalism and mixed methodologies have integrated introspective intuition. The current value of this approach is therefore that it can be supported by other methods, such as corpus analysis or comparison of cross-linguistic data, which help to limit some defects of mere intuition (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2009; Clark, 2018; Huang, 2018).

9.3 Experimentation Another approach that is strongly characterized by the type of data privileged is the experimental method; in fact, contexts are manipulated to obtain significant data variations. This methodology adopts techniques for eliciting empirical artificial data: it sets up highly constrained situations that allow the manipulation and control of single variables. The researcher modifies an independent variable and examines its impact on the other dependent variables, which are the focus of the research interest. For example, in studying the inference’s processing cost, a linguistic input is varied to measure the consequent time variation in its processing as an indicator of cognitive effort. Some examples of tools typically used by experimental pragmatics are: online composition, sentence matching tasks, word recognition, sentence and paragraph reading, form-function mapping, connectionist simulation, and grammar judgment tasks. Obviously, with this sort of method, the data obtained are not natural: they occur at the researcher’s initiative and under conditions determined by her (e.g. time, setting, place). The informants are aware of being involved in an experiment and follow the researcher’s instructions; therefore, their production does not usually have any social consequences or impact on reality (Hulstijn, 2000; Dominiek, 2009; Holtgraves & Bonnefon, 2017; Jucker & Staley, 2017; Jucker, 2018a; Golato & Golato, 2018b; Schneider, 2018). As Holtgraves and Bonnefon (2017) note, research in politeness has a relatively long tradition of experimental studies, although it has not been mainstream. The first studies date back to the time of Brown and Levinson, when social psychologists and communication scholars focused on testing their theory, in particular the order of politeness strategies and the combination of power, distance and imposition of the speech act. Typically, the experimental setting involved role playing in which the

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variables of power distance and imposition were manipulated to verify the effects on the perception and production of politeness. This first experimental approach in the studies of politeness faced serious limitations. First, the more perfect the experiment, the less natural the data, and this is a paradox that an experimentalist must account for. Huang (2018) recalls that it is impossible to design a perfect experiment that controls all the variables, and if we do, the data will not correspond to reality (the so-called experimental paradox). The lack of reality and the separation of language from its context is a strong bias in discursive and interpersonal approaches to politeness research. Secondly, by modifying a linguistic variable as input, one will not know for sure whether the observed effects can be generalized to the whole linguistic category or whether they are limited to that single construct/word (Holtgraves, 2005; Holtgraves & Bonnefon, 2017). Obviously, the experiment is just a means of data collection, which does not spare the analyst the problem of interpreting the pragmatic data (Clark, 2018). Nowadays, experimental studies have interesting applications in: ● Person perception, that is how people translate sensory data into perceptions of the other. For example, how is the level of politeness related to the perception of the other as attractive, credible, convincing, etc.? Or how does it alter for specific interactional purposes (e.g. seduction)? ● Memory: people usually forget the interlocutor’s exact words but retain the meaning; however, they also retain the wording very well when it has interpersonal implications. It has been discovered that this also happens for politeness and that, in general, people remember the overall level of politeness well. ● Role of politeness in reasoning and risk communication, which can be applied in decision-making processes. ● Communication difficulties and disease (Holtgraves & Bonnefon, 2017). They most recent studies also include XPrag (Experimental pragmatics), which originated in the Relevance Theory tradition and has a cognitivist background, so that it integrates introspection with methods derived from psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics (such as, the electrophysiological technique of eye-tracking, neuroimaging, PET, EEG and fMRI). These assess the chemical reactions in the brain in relation to pragmatic actions and measure psychocognitive aspects to study politeness in the brain in real time. These studies aim to define models based on rational and innate biological aspects common in humans. In general they are are used for understanding mental processes of interpretation and inference, such as the role of context to derive implicature, different cognitive processes involved in generalized and particularized implicature, figurative language, quantitative implicature, etc. (Levinson, 1992; Hulstijn, 2000; Katsos, 2012; Holtgraves & Bonnefon, 2017; Clark, 2018; Loureda et al., 2020). For example, Bonnefon et al. (2009) and Demeure et al. (2009) study experimentally the impact of face-threatening contexts on the interpretation of scalar implicatures.

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Discursive psychology is also increasingly present in studies of politeness for the investigation of mental states (memories, knowledge, beliefs, emotions, attitudes, values, etc.) and how they are relevant to the interpretative and evaluative processes of both inference and social action (Eelen, 2001). In this sense, experimental methods can counterbalance the greater emphasis on the social over the individual in recent generations of politeness studies. Actually, there are individual characteristics (shyness, neurosis, perceptual dominance, etc.) that go beyond cultural ones, and politeness research still has much to investigate with respect to the psychological context (e.g. feelings and psychological states and emotionality of the speakers) (see Chap. 6). To sum up, this chapter introduces data as a relevant issue in the reflection that drives the researcher to choose a methodology. The typical high variability of data in politeness, is incremented by the impact that a method of data collection might have. Two very different methodological frameworks are briefly introduced to exemplify how different types of data affect the kind of analysis that can be conducted in politeness. Intuitive introspection is based on data derived by the analyst herself from imagined contexts, hence it is useful to investigate those aspects of linguistic use that are potential. On the other hand, experimentation elicits data under highly constrained situations that the researchers create for testing theories and to understand mental processes related to politeness. As is evident, these methodologies offer interesting areas of collaboration; a philosophical approach can suggest new constructs that the experimental approach can attempt to test, and the reverse process can offer introspective intuition feedback from experiments for the generation of new hypotheses.

References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press. Bonnefon, J.-F., Feeney, A., & Villejoubert, G. (2009). When some is actually all: Scalar inferences in face-threatening contexts. Cognition, 112, 249–259. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1978–1987). Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press. Clark, B. (2018). Cognitive pragmatics: Relevance-theoretic methodology. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 185–215). Mouton De Gruyter. Demeure, V., Bonnefon, J.-F., & Raufaste, E. (2009). Politeness and conditional reasoning: Interpersonal cues to the indirect suppression of deductive inferences. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35, 260–266. Dominiek, S. (2009). Experimentation. In S. Dominiek, J.-O. Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Cognition and pragmatics (pp. 157–200). John Benjamins. Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. St. Jerome Publishing. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2008). Sociopragmatic variation: Dispreferred responses in Mexican and Dominican Spanish. Journal of Politeness Research, 4, 81–110. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2018b). Pragmática del español. Contexto, uso y variación. Routledge. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2005). Métodos de recoleción de actos de habla. In J. Murillo Medrano (Ed.) Actas del II coloquio internacional del programa EDICE (pp. 221–246). Universidad de Costa Rica: Programa EDICE.

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Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occuring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 90–121. Golato, P., & Golato, A. (2018). The real-time processing of pragmatics: An experimental psychological-conversation analytic study of obwohl clauses in spoken German. Journal of Pragmatics, 132, 21–32. Hatch, E., & Lazaraton, A. (1991). The research manual. Design and statistics for applied linguistics. Heinle and Heinle Publishers. Haugh, M., & Jaszczolt, K. (2012). Speaker intentions and intentionality. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 87–112). Cambridge University Press. Haverkate, H. (1994). La cortesía verbal. Estudio pragmalingüístico. Gredos. Holtgraves, T., & Bonnefon, J.F. (2017). Experimental approaches to linguistic (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D.Z. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 381–401). Palgrave Macmillan. Holtgraves, T. (2005). Social psychology, cognitive psychology, and linguistic politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 73–93. Huang, Y. (2018). Research methodology in classical and neo-Gricean pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 155–183). Mouton De Gruyter. Hulstijn, J. (2000). The use of computer technology in experimental studies of second language acquisition: A survey of some techniques and some ongoing studies. Language Learning and Technology, 3(2), 32–43. Jaszczolt, K. (2019). Rethinking being Gricean: New challenges for metapragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 15–24. Johnston, B., Kasper, G., & Ross, S. (1998). Effect of rejoinders in production questionnaires. Applied Linguistics, 19(2), 157–182. Jucker, A., & Staley, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D.Z. Kádár (Eds.) The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 403–429). Palgrave Macmillan. Jucker, A. (2009). Speech and research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1611–1635. Jucker, A. (2018). Data in pragmatic research. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 3–36). Mouton De Gruyter. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). London: Continuum. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Katsos, N. (2012). Experimental investigations and pragmatic theorising. In K. Jaszczolt & K. Allan (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 275–290). Cambridge University Press. Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness: Or, minding your P’s and Q’s. In C. Corum, C. SmithStark, & A. Weiser (Eds.), Papers from the 9th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 292–305). Linguistic Society. Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. Longman. Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press. Levinson, S. C. (1992). Primer for the field investigation of spatial description and conception. Pragmatics, 2(1), 5–47. López Serena, A. (2011). ¿Es empírico el estudio de la (des)cortesía verbal? El estatus epistemológico de la lingüística de la (des)cortesía. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez, E. Alcaida Lara, & E. Brenes Peña (Eds.), Aproximaciones a la (Des)cortesía verbal en Español (pp. 425–442). Peter Lang. Loureda, Ó., Cruz, A., Recio, I., Nadal, L. (2020). La pragmática experimental. In M.V. EscandellVidal, J. Amenós, & A. Ahern (Eds.) Pragmática (pp. 358–383). Akal. Márquez Reiter, M., Placencia, M. E. (2005.) Spanish pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan. Pfister, J. (2010). Is there a need for a maxim of politeness? Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1266–1282.

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Pons Bordería, S. (2008). Introduction to the special issue on empirical data and pragmatic theory. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1353–1356. Schneider, K. P. (2018). Methods and ethics in data collection. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 37–93). Mouton De Gruyter. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and cognition. Basil Blackwell. Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2009). Foundations of mixed methods research. Integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches in the social and behavioral sciences. Sage. Trinchero, R. (2002). Manuale di ricerca educativa. FrancoAngeli. Turchetta, B. (2000). La ricerca di campo in linguistica. Carocci. Wolfson, N. (1989). Perspectives. Sociolinguistics and TESOL. Newbury House.

Chapter 10

Observation of Language

Following on from the previous chapter, the next few pages aim to illustrate how different ways of obtaining data affect the kind of analysis that can be conducted in politeness. Data are a starting point because they constitute a strong determinant for the researcher: the investigation conditions in terms of time, cost, access to subjects, access to texts, ethics, values, access of the field, etc. can in fact pose concrete limits to the research questions that can realistically be addressed. This chapter presents the methodological strategy of observation, which favours natural and spontaneous data collection. The specificity of this approach is that analysis is mainly data driven, hence it entails an inductive process that allows patterns to emerge from the observed reality. The methods adopted usually collect natural data, either written or oral, embedded in their discourse and contexts. More specifically, this chapter shows the implications that a linguistic perspective of analysis has on data collection in politeness studies. Here, linguistic approaches to data are reported that all refer to the families of Discourse Analysis and Conversational Analysis. The researcher is made aware of the observation of both language and context: the starting point is the language and is then integrated with extralinguistic elements. Such data are related to the type of research questions and analysis that they allow according to the theoretical foundations of communicative interaction, which has been widely applied in the field of politeness.

10.1 Observation Observation is the basis of ethnographic research, hence, compared to the tools considered so far, we move on to the area of natural data. This approach consists of a systematic, intentional and finalized survey of abilities and behaviours as indicators of a latent factor, not visible or openly manifested. The use of language is in fact one of the observable behaviours. The ultimate objective is to trace the causes of behaviour, not merely to describe a picture; hence, the data offered by observation must be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_10

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suitable for a deep interpretative analysis (Beebe & Cummings, 1996; Trinchero, 2002). There are different kinds of observation: ● self-observation: one records one’s own behaviours using videos, journals, conceptual maps, etc. ● experiential observation: this is a sort of narration based on recordings and analysis of documents ● systematic observation: this uses grids as guides ● naturalistic (or ethological) observation: this uses video recordings and meticulous annotations; the observer is detached or disguised ● subjective observation: this is based on the emotional involvement of the observer, who records her reactions ● clinical-experimental observation: a stimulus is introduced, and reactions are observed longitudinally. A relevant distinction is whether the observer is a participant or not. In the first case the researcher interacts with the observed subjects (usually integrating into their community); in the second case she stays out of the scene. Participant observation is the experience of living from the “point of view of the natives” with the aim of documenting their life and participating in it; the researcher can also alternate moments of participation (reaching more intimate, in-depth observation), and moments of nonparticipation (which allows her to take more analytical notes) (Duranti, 2007; Reiter et al., 2005). In general, observation is considered unobtrusive and tries to limit the observer paradox as much as possible. The researcher may sometimes provoke the exchange in a “natural” way, for example by introducing a speech act in different natural contexts and noting the unaware interlocutors’ reaction. This constitutes a middle way between natural data (happening in real life) and the experimental method, hence the observer might affect the data considerably. If the observer is a man, for example, he will collect different data compared to a woman (e.g. stimulating compliments), and the same is true, for example, in relation to the observer’s social status and age. Another example is that if the researcher adopts a low profile of communicative intervention to be as unobtrusive as possible (i.e. gives the interlocutor neutral feedback), the actual effect is that the subject observed produces an abnormal, compensatory proliferation of interventions (Beebe & Cummings, 1996). Observation requires time, so it is usually part of longitudinal research design. This facilitates the connection with the subject observed, and many intuitions of observation do in fact arise from the emotional link with a person: due to the longterm contact, the research subject becomes a person, who may also be involved in negotiating the researcher’s observations. Observation requires sensitivity to the context, in the sense that its deep nature is qualitative and person-oriented (Duranti, 2007). Because of these characteristics, observation presents some risks that could lead to methodological invalidity: stereotyping the subject or having prejudices, eliminating dissonant information, projecting characteristics of the observer onto the subject.

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Having framed the observation approach in general, we shall now detail the observation of language. In the next Chap. 11, the focus will be on speaker observation.

10.2 Discourse Analysis, Digital-Mediated Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Studies Broadly speaking, Discourse Analysis focuses on the relationship between form and function in communication. According to Fetzer (2018: 418), this relationship is significant, because Discourse Analysis aims at understanding how linguistic items (e.g. words, sentences, texts, etc.) get to function socially as a discourse: “The analysis of discourse is fundamentally concerned with the nature of the connectedness between parts and wholes, and for this reason discourse is a relational construct par excellence, relating separate parts locally as well as globally with regard to their connectedness to discourse-as-a-whole”. These examples of Discourse Analysis studies in politeness shows how productive it is in contemporary research: ● Genre studies: they identify how conventional forms of politeness are involved in defining a genre (Häggkvist & Fant, 2000; Briz Gómez & Grupo Val.Es.Co., 2004). ● Argumentation studies: the Theory of Argumentation works on two concepts which are particularly relevant to politeness: topoi and argumentative orientation (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1994; García Negroni 2003, 2005). For example, topoi recall cultural and cognitive fixations, such as frameworks. ● Intonation and prosody: the prosodic study of politeness, and its intonation patterns is a promising field, as shown for example in Hidalgo Navarro (2006, 2011, 2013) and Uclés Ramada and Cabedo Nebot (2019). Discourse Analysis is rooted in a linguistic perspective, and it is a useful approach to politeness both because politeness becomes manifest in language, and because, at the same time, it does not have the same status as grammatical rules. Politeness does not have a “grammar”, but nevertheless is as necessary as grammar and can go so far as to impose a pragmatic order on the syntactical order. In a way, politeness has a special kind of linguistic status, hence linguistic data are the source of investigation, but they are not self-sufficient. For this reason, the valuable aspect of Discourse Analysis is that it goes beyond the level of linguistics (Cortés Rodríguez & Bañón Hernández, 1997; Briz Gómez, 1996, 1998; Titscher et al., 2000; Fraser 2001; Cortés Rodríguez & Camacho Adarve, 2003; Briz Gómez & Grupo Val. Es. Co 2004; Padilla García 2017). Jucker and Staley (2017) define the Discourse Analysis methods interactional to indicate that they collect natural data, written or oral, embedded in their discourse and contexts. The discourse is immersed in a sociocultural context and therefore the analysis is not only about what a text means, but how it is received and interpreted.

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Thus, Discourse Analysis manifests a growing interest in discourse as a communicative action in context. In politeness studies the strategic and interactive process of discourse is perhaps what interests most, as we saw in Part I, so the data that Discourse Analysis gathers are aimed at research design centred on interaction. In this direction, two specific subfields are worth mentioning for the developments they could have for politeness studies: Digital-Mediated Discourse Analysis and Critical Discourse Studies. Digital-Mediated Discourse Analysis has specialized in talk-in-interaction analysis of digital-mediated communication (Haugh, 2012). The source of data are digital discourses, in their audio and audio-visual varieties. The specificities of these data are due to the channel; as we will detail in Chap. 20, they are: synchronicity, text-imagesound integration, persistence, size of the message, degree of anonymity, public or private channel, level of interaction, etc. (Landone, 2012). According to Androutsopolous and Beißwenger (2008), Digital-Mediated Discourse studies are proceeding in different directions. Some of them focus on the influence of the technological channel, which they considered determinant in forming discourse patterns. Others focus on the interplay of the variables in the communicative situations of digitalmediated practices (i.e. technological, social and contextual variables). Finally, the latest trend is to investigate the widely varying social position and the identity of digital speakers; these studies aim at tackling the commonplace of considering digital-mediated discourse homogeneous. Regarding politeness, Locher (2010) points out that Digital-Mediated Discourse Analysis has not paid due attention to these specificities so far, just as politeness studies have not worked much on digital-mediated communication. Nevertheless, there are promising areas for investigation, such as: studying facework and identity construction, investigating turn-taking with respect to face-to-face communication, studying the new dynamics of emotional communication, etc. In addition, what is worth emphasising is that methodologically digital communication data are extremely valuable due to their visibility. In fact, the permanence of the text dilates the process of emerging interpretation and increases the metalinguistic and metapragmatic awareness of the interactants (Haugh, 2012). This also happens because often interpretation proves more opaque compared to traditional channels (such as face to face), and the speakers make an explicit effort to avoid possible pragmatic incidents and facilitate interpretation. These peculiarities of digital discourse offers the researcher visible negotiation data. Critical Discourse Analysis is a “[…] text-analytical approach to critical social research, aimed at revealing the power imbalance in the use of language and patterns of dominance imposed through the use of language” (Cap, 2018: 425). In recent broader developments, such as Critical Discourse Studies, the objective is to call into question power, linked to gender, prejudice, discrimination, manipulation, racism, abuse, domination, inequalities, pedagogical communication, media texts, deprivation of agency, etc. This entails the scholar’s active social and political commitment to denounce occult strategies, to demystify and problematise (van Dijk, 1985; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997). In fact, discourse is considered conservative as it tends to

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maintain the established order; for this reason, it has a role in the persuasive transmission and legitimization of values and ideologies. So, in this view, society creates discourse but in turn is created by discourse, in the sense that discourse can both reproduce the social status quo as well as contribute to transforming it. Hence, the theoretical background of Critical Discourse Studies is the strong relationship between language and context. As a consequence, a corpus of concrete language in context is used as data. Critical Discourse Analysis prefers semantic data but, in general, it deals with data of very different kinds, with perspectives that can be functionalist, cognitivist, post-structuralist and pragmatic. A specific characteristic with respect to Discourse Analysis is that, in general, it starts from a theory of social relations and then looks for confirmation in the analysis of texts. For its analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis works with metaphors, constructs and ontologies common to anthropology, psychology and cognitive studies. Lately, researchers have become interested in how ideologies are disseminated concurrently across different semiotic modes and genres (Cap, 2018; Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019). In politeness, the application of Multimodal Critical Discourse studies varies. It looks at the relationship between power and politeness, i.e., the role this relationship plays in determining or maintaining power relations in a more or less extended social group through institutional discourses. It also uses the metadiscourse of politeness to try and explain the ideological and political consequences of a moral order, i.e., to understand its mechanisms of perpetuation or defusing (Morand, 1996; Holmes & Stubbe, 2015; Watts, 2003; Locher, 2004; Carranza, 2007; Santiago Guervós, 2010; Garcés-Conejo Blitvich 2010). For example, public discourse and political debates position individuals and groups in dynamics of exclusion/inclusion through politeness discourse (Kádár & Haugh, 2013). Mills (2017) and Kienpointner and Stopfner (2017) show the link between the socially-based evaluation of politeness and ideologies and how ideologies are social forces often disguised as politeness. Cap (2018) outlines an interpretative model based on approximation as a discursive strategy with ideological aims to legitimize political actions. Similarly, in politeness, the well known metaphor of social distance represents the negotiation that leads to the legitimization or not of certain relational actions. Critical Discourse Studies is also interested in the linguistic choices of politeness and, more in general, in those ideologies that are central in collective and individual identities. To sum up, the data deriving from observation are natural, in the sense that they are not invented or elicited, as in the approaches we discussed in Chap. 9. Discourse Analysis defines discourse both as a theoretical construct and actual realization in context, both as process and product. Data come from observation of reality and are mainly linguistic, with specific attention to those data that attest the process of realization of the discourse in context. Hence, the research design and its goals are focused on interactional issues. In particular, from a methodological point of view, Digital-Mediated Discourse Analysis is proving promising in politeness thanks to the visibility of discourse data and Critical Discourse Studies for discussing the function of polite discourse.

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10.3 Conversational Analysis and the Interactional Approach Conversational Analysis investigates the structural and organizational characteristics of the conversation, and gathers very detailed information on turn-taking, interventions, exchanges, sequences, interruptions, etc. In general, the focus is strictly on the linguistic level and postulates that the analysis should not involve categories external to the language; the categories it handles are to be empirically obtained from the language and directly displayed in the data. However, Conversational Analysis relates language data to sociological factors (such as, gender, social status etc.) when they are recognizably relevant to the speakers themselves. In politeness, its fine-grained analysis focuses on the details of the conversational interaction, attempting to extract the organization and the social structure as the speakers themselves experience them (Haugh, 2012). As we saw in Part I, this approach is interesting in a discursive perspective of politeness because it conciliates the macro-social level of the norms and values within which the speakers act, and the micro-level of the individual’s evaluation perspective (see Chap. 3). Indeed, Conversational Analysis developed from Ethnomethodology, from which it inherits the sociological concept that members of a society understand social events in a subjective way. It thus inherits the interest in how the social actor organizes and interprets everyday actions. From this interpretative nature it follows that social actions are the product of how individuals interact with each other to achieve their goals in accordance with their own subjective evaluations. For example, this implies studing the unnoticed background features of common discourse to investigate the commonsense reasoning in the practices of everyday life, including ordinary conversation (Gallardo Paúls, 1996; Moerman, 1996; Golato & Golato, 2018a). Methodologically speaking, Conversational Analysis proceeds through scrupulous descriptions of talk-interaction because, in its view, much of what we do every day is achieved through talking: by talking we accomplish actions and define our identities and social relationships. In fact, Conversational Analysis has revealed the practice of talking, by working qualitatively on interactive sequences. It never works on isolated utterances, because every utterance is always seen as part of locally managed and co-produced contexts by the participants of the interaction. The importance of the turn-taking sequence emerges: each turn is based on what was said in the previous one, so the unit of analysis must be the sequence. An exchange involves a minimum of two interlocutors who construct and negotiate the discourse: each communicative moment is based on the previous one, and they are always based on the dynamic cognitive construct of the common ground, which is constantly updated. The researcher can therefore only work on data obtained from complete interactions. Conversational Analysis collects natural data and, in order to analyse them in detail, takes advantage of audio and video recordings plus transcription. Its approach is emic, and the researchers try to have data that are the same as those accessible to the speakers. So if, for example, data are telephone conversations, the researcher

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will use audio recordings. In addition, this is a highly descriptive method and transcription is always very detailed (e. g. it includes prosodic elements and gestures), with nothing left out a priori. The conversational analyst compiles large amounts of naturally occurring interactions and then looks for similar patterns, for regularity and exceptions that show that certain sequences are normative organizations of action (Golato & Golato, 2018a). In this approach, there is the basic assumption that conversation constitutes a structured activity (and can therefore be systemised), although conversations display an extensive and unpredictable variety of realizations. In other words, there is the assumption that language is a system in which underlying rules can be discovered (Duranti, 2007). Regarding politeness studies, at first Conversational Analysis was adopted to demonstrate that a specific linguistic phenomenon had a specific function in interaction or that a certain function required certain specific linguistic structures to be performed in interaction. For example, Conversational Analysis has brought in-depth analysis of the adjacency pair with respect to speech acts, the study of pauses and silences, the sensitivity to sequence (e.g. opening and closing), expansion of the segments of analysis (longer stretches of discourse), and the study of the importance of routinarity (the degree of frequency and fixation in politeness manifestations. See Haverkate, 1994, 1998 for Spanish and Wierzbicka, 2003 for Polish). In general, Conversational Analysis has raised awareness of the dynamism of discourse: each movement is decisive for the next. As Schegloff (1992) has shown, for example, a wrong inference already finds repair activity in its next turn. Thus, in the mind of the interlocutors, each discursive act relates to the previous ones and becomes an inferential guide to the current discourse. This implies that the speakers make constant choices in a more or less conscious way, not only as regards the internal criteria of the language, but also regarding external criteria. Politeness, then, can be seen as one of the clues to the speaker’s attitude (Verschueren, 2002; Cortés Rodríguez & Camacho Adarve, 2005; Müller, 2006). Blas Arroyo (2005) confirms this when observing that in a context where there is uncertainty about adequate politeness, an exploratory activity is initiated. The exploration involves the negotiation of the relationship through linguistic clues aimed at generating the relationship and/or adapting to the relationship that is taking shape in a dynamic and fluid way. The conversational tuning is constant, and politeness is the fulcrum. From the dynamism of interaction, several very productive concepts have been produced in contemporary politeness studies. They underline that interpretation cannot operate on single and independent units, but the turns taken are to be interpreted holistically as interdependent (Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Ohashi & Chang, 2017). We cite those concepts that would seem most promising: (1)

Emergence. This concept embraces the fact that the activities of the speakers merge and are reciprocally conditioned: they are always joint dynamics and not a sum of individual states (intentions, inferences, interpretations, etc.). They are not summative events where the output of one system (a speaker) is the input of another independent system (the interlocutor).

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(2)

Situatedness. The relation of politeness to context is more complex and does not just depend on the cultural context, as we commented in Part I. In addition to here-and-now, there is a historical sociocognitive sedimentation in the mental universes of the speaker, which means that an interaction cannot be interpreted solely from local, contingent data (Haugh, 2012; Haugh et al., 2011). Footing. This concept re-proposes the perspective of the participants in politeness (Koike et al., 2001; Koike, 2005). Roughly, its focus is that “[…] the question should be ‘for whom is this [a communicative event] (potentially) polite or impolite’” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 129). Accountability. This refers to the degree of commitment or responsibility of a speaker regarding the consequences of her utterance. It is based on the norms and set of values that a speaker refers to and that drives her evaluation. For example, the understanding of politeness depends on what a participant can be held accountable for in the view of the other participants (Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Mitchell & Haugh, 2015). Reciprocity. This concept refers to a social norm that creates interdependency in social relationships: it is a sense of obligation to correspondence that arises in relationships. Ohashi and Chang (2017) offer an example: they quantitatively detect the relationship signals in a conversation (e.g. back-channel cues, smiles, asking questions, nods, laughter, etc.) and verify the balance in the realization by the interlocutors. They carry out emic verification by means of a post-event interview on how the participants experienced the conversation, collecting their metapragmatic comments. They aim to verify whether, where there is a balance of obligations, the speakers positively evaluate the interaction, and where there is an imbalance and the speakers report a dissatisfied perception of it (and, consequently, impoliteness). Ties and entitlements. These two concepts are studied in settings in which the mutual relations of the speakers are explicitly evoked in order to achieve a goal. An example are the explicit statements of terms of address or the mention of roles that set the participation framework within which the evaluations of appropriateness (or not) and politeness (or not) are set.

(3)

(4)

(5)

6)

Some methodological limits of Conversational Analysis derive from the fact that it is time-consuming and manual, which lead to a high level of human error: it is highly possible that structures are overlooked due to tiredness or that different parallel analysts classify them with different functions. Applied extensively, it allows great variety in the structures investigated, but the level of detail it returns is often not productive for quantitative analysis. However, this detailed approach and its strong instance of emicity have a high value for cultural readings (Moerman, 1996). In politeness studies, Conversational Analysis is a methodology of reference for the Interactional Approach. Compared to traditional Conversational Analysis, the Interactional Approach documents both the relational history of the speakers and the contextual information. Such integration becomes part of the data in order to evaluate the emerging dynamics in conversation on the basis of both the contingent flow and the previous relational flow. As in Conversational Analysis, the researcher

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closely scrutinizes how the interaction progresses to capture emic instances. The analyst aims to use only participants’ uptakes that are evident in interaction and hence only the information available to the speakers is used. In other words, it is a micro-analysis of talk-in-interaction data and focuses on how the participants interpret, understand and analyse the other speakers through the details that they display during the conversation. To refine the researcher’s insight, it is supplemented by the analyst with elements of the wider context, such as aspects of invoked identity by interlocutors or aspects of their relational history (Haugh 2007a). For this purpose, Haugh (2007a) summarizes these methodological proposals: ● Understanding how the development of interaction is based on what is said previously and subsequently. As the speakers offer hints that guide this development, they can be used as signals of interpretative relevance. ● To combine the Conversational Analysis with elements of contextual history, ethnopragmatics tools are needed (i.e., to document the identifications of the speakers or their personal history). For this purpose, the explicit comments made in the course of an interaction are also important evidence for analysing the participants’ evaluations. The ultimate end of the Interactional Approach is to find a way to account for the high variability of subjective evaluation of politeness that is observed among speakers in situated interaction. To sum up, Discourse Analysis and Conversational Analysis deal with mainly linguistic data, which are integrated in various ways to get more holistic insights in communicatively situated and emergent dynamics. Data come from observation of reality with a specific attention to the discourse in context and to the dynamism of discourse. In politeness, the research questions are focused on interactional issues. As is evident, this kind of data strongly determines the time and the field that the researcher needs to schedule into her research design. In the following chapter we discuss how this work on linguistic data is combined with ethnographic and sociolinguistic approaches.

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Chapter 11

Observation of Speakers

This chapter completes the reflection on data and how their accessibility impacts on the research design. The focus is on three strategies for obtaining empirical data, namely, the field, sociological, and indexical approaches. They offer the tools for investigating interactional language in politeness, and support the conversation and discourse analysis presented in the previous chapter. The field approach aims to capture observable patterns of situated communicative behaviours, thus natural contexts and data are crucial issues for the location of data collection and for the role of the analyst. Sociological methods are interested in the influence of social factors on language to understand communicative behaviours. With politeness studies they share the problems of categorization of data and of analysis based on macrosocial factors. Finally, the indexical approach searches for the contextualization cues that the speakers disseminate while communicating and use them to analyse the underlying social ideologies. As in the previous chapter language is central to politeness but in this case the focus is broadened to the speakers as the agents of a field and of a society. Since the data retrieved by these approaches are varied, multiple tools are resorted to, as will be detailed in the remaining pages of Part II.

11.1 The Field The field approach aims to capture observable patterns of communicative behaviour, typically in natural contexts of interaction. The aim of the analysis is to understand a phenomenon with respect to a social system, thus grasping cultural behaviours. Placing her focus on the discourse in situation, the researcher uses linguistic materials (e.g. politeness formulas) to reconstruct a sociological object. Pragmatics welcomes contributions from linguistic anthropology and ethnography (or anthropology of language or ethnolinguistics); which share a common interest in observing the relationship between communicative actions and the social context in which they take © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_11

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place. This focus on the cultural human being within a communicative context leads to conceiving language as a social and cultural practice (Palmer, 1996; Duranti, 2007). Methodology in the field approach is marked by in situ data collection, as it is based on naturally-occurring data, in real-life occurrences, and with native interlocutors. Natural data are those that remain unchanged even if they are not the object of data retrieval, that is, they are independent of whether the researcher chooses them as a research context. In this view, field means a linguistic community, that is a social group using the same language. It also embraces a communicative situation included in a social activity. The field also has a physical dimension: geography (e.g. ethnic zones), social calendar, and community space (Turchetta, 2000; Jucker, 2009; Jucker & Staley, 2017). Data can be collected on a small scale (such as extracts from natural conversations), but can also flow into large-scale projects, including longitudinal projects, which eventually form corpora. Long-term studies, in particular, imply a participatory approach in communities so that the researcher can emically understand them. Indeed, the presence of the researcher in the field is necessary. She usually becomes part of the community in order to gain a sense of insideness; at the same time, she uses a variety of techniques to collect data in order to avoid any researcher bias. The techniques used to obtain empirical evidence in the field vary widely, from random observation (e.g. diary notes of naturally occurring specific data) to systematic recording (with subsequent transcription). Field researchers use primary data, such as recordings or ethnographer’s observation and also secondary data proceeding from informants and community members. Informants’ diaries involving politeness events, for example, are used to elicit metapragmatic evaluative comments. Researchers proceed by using detailed descriptions of the interactions they observe and are very attentive to detail and to data systematization to provide evidence for elaboration by the analyst (’s insight). In this way, they generate huge amounts of data, usually from different sources, which makes it difficult to organize and to understand exactly how relevant they are. It is well known that the elaboration of natural data presents difficulties with respect to the manageable number of descriptive categories adopted, how representative the data are of the categories and the inclusion of deviant data in the categories (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975). Although they are not always as immersive as the field approach, current politeness studies share with it the interest in natural data and how to analyze them in a qualitative way to find the meaning of human actions. In particular, some critical points commented on in Part I derive precisely from methodological issues in field research. In fact, politeness research has updated its tradition starting from two ethnographic reflections. The first is the role of the researcher: in many studies of politeness the researcher had anticipations based on her own cultural patterns, which interfered with the way she described her data. A second point is the reflection on the need for a more emic stance in politeness. Field methods usually use a fruitful combination of perspectives: emic (lay knowledge) and etic (the analyst’s academic frame). On the one hand the researcher observes and participates through her theoretical and scientific assumptions; on the other hand she tries to distance herself from her own

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ontologies in order to understand those of others. In other words: “[…] as researchers within this paradigm, we strive for enhanced contextualised understandings of pragmatic phenomena understood within the wider social system, as well as the ability to incorporate both the perspective of the analyst and the reality of the participants themselves in our interpretations” (Marra & Lazzaro-Salazar, 2018:344). This is a lesson that politeness has welcomed, as we commented in Chap. 7. Generally speaking, the field approach aims at understanding rather than demonstrating events. It does not claim objectivity, which, conversely, is considered a limit, as only a condition of empathy allows the researcher to understand the reality of the subjects. A field research is only powerful if it is immersed in the reality under examination in order to read interpretative categories which are different from those of the researcher. For this reason, the link between data and interpretation has a narrative dimension and the researcher has a high testimonial value (Chaudron, 2000; Duranti, 2007; Trinchero, 2002). In this regard, Blommaert (2012) points out that ethnography is sometimes accused of anecdotism and localism, because it relies excessively on subjectivity. This is due to the fact that ethnography depends on data obtained from a “bounded set of human encounters in real space and time” (Blommaert, 2012: 30). The specific space–time in which the data are collected determines the outcomes of such interactions. In other words, the data are completely dependent on the context shared by the researcher and her subjects. The problem arises when data are analysed and published. When data are expressed in scientific discourse, the sharing of that context is lost: the relationship between researcher and subjects is objectified outside of the space and time of the original event. When the researcher transforms the data into analysis, she shifts from talking with the subjects to talking about the subjects and, in this passage, a methodological problem arises: [..] as soon as scholars try to address structural or systemic features of a society, they have to shift from real time into abstract time, they have to extract features of dynamic lived experience and place them at a timeless, static plane of general validity. Whatever makes data social and cultural – their situatedness in social and cultural processes and histories – disappears and is replaced by ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ that appear to have a validity which is not contextually sensitive (Blommaert, 2012: 32).

As we commented in Sect. 5.2, this is an unresolved question for politeness research as well.

11.2 The Sociolinguistic Factors Sociolinguistic methodology is another approach to obtain empirical data on communicative interactions useful for politeness research. The methods of social science are interested in the impact of social factors on language in order to understand how habits and norms of communicative behaviour unfold. Their aim is also to give an account of how social perceptions weigh on communicative interactions and for this

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reason they study how the language varies according to the synergy of macrosocial factors, such as region, gender, age, ethnicity, social class, etc. (Kasper, 1990; Chalupnik et al., 2017; Schneider & Placencia, 2017). The sociolinguistic perspective tends to be quantitative, with an oscillation between natural and non-natural data: on the one hand, there is a strong preference for natural data, on the other hand the latter are difficult to handle on a quantitative level, due to their variety. Hence, analysts use a variety of data collection methods: field notes, natural data recordings and transcription, existing corpora, completion tasks, role playing, focus group discussions, etc. For a research with quantitative significance, elicited controlled data are more accessible and analytically manageable. The researcher thus applies techniques for controlling the variables of interest and, at the same time, for retrieving data that are as representative as possible. This procedure makes it possible to compare data more homogeneously in the analysis phase (Turnbull, 2001; Gass & Mackey, 2007; Doquin de Saint Preux, 2011; Schneider & Placencia, 2017). The sociolinguistic focus on language variations according to social factors converges with the methodological discussion on variables in politeness. As we saw in Sect. 5.1, in complex systems such as politeness, the reciprocal relationship between variables matters more than a single variable. Another important sociolinguistic input for politeness research is the interest in the frequency of the data as a parameter of normality, adequacy, predictability and acceptability (EscandellVidal, 2003). An example is the frame-based view of Terkourafi (2005) which argues that certain linguistic forms have inherent politeness meanings on the basis of their frequency of use. In other words, frequency forms habits of normality, which in turn determine what is considered adequate. This approach uses a quantitative methodology: the frequency is scientifically demonstrable by observing the co-occurrence between linguistic forms and contextual social factors. Such data can also be integrated with politeness metadiscourse able to identify the inherently evaluative dimension for the speakers (Albelda Marco & Barros García, 2013; Terkourafi & Kádár, 2017). Nevertheless, Leech (2014) observes that it is not so trivial to combine the linguistic data with recurring conditions of appearance—hence, the coordinates of social variation—in order to fix the form-meaning-context relations. In recent years, sociological methods have experienced a general shift from a social and quantitative focus to the local qualitative level. As we saw in Chap. 3, this trend has reached politeness studies too. One of the causes is that factors at the social macrolevel are more widely extended nowadays. This is due to the high mobility and merging of subcultures, to the impact of worldwide communications, and to digital social networking. In fact, in the pragmatics of globalization, the traditional social categories have to be reviewed, homogeneity can no longer be assumed, and identity has shifted to identification (i.e. how people display, perceive and evaluate their constructed identity in interaction) (Haugh & Kádár, 2017; Schneider & Placencia, 2017; Sifianou, 2013; Sifianou & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2018). These conditions impact the data, for example what used to be simple retrieval of the subject’s identity data becomes very complex. Moreover, the traditional analysis

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of macrofactors has to be revised because each individual interpretative and productive sensitivity can adhere to varying degrees to what is supposed to be typical of the macrofactor. This methodological issue, in particular, affects politeness because empirical data show that speakers share very little, i.e. there is a high variability of data, evaluation and individual interpretations. In general, traditional sociolinguistic procedures level out and try to control variability in order to have more comparable or more interpretable data. Levelling out data by quantitative processes to return the average value is not a desirable practice in politeness because systematicity and generality in groups of individuals does not allow for the fine-grained explanations needed in politeness (Eelen, 2001).

11.3 The Index The indexical approach to politeness is also a sign of the shift from the macroto the micro level. This approach was encouraged by the third-wave variationist sociolinguists (and sociolinguistic anthropologists) and implies a change of paradigm that is mirrored by the discursive turn in politeness (Pizziconi & Christie, 2017; Christie, 2018). In fact, the indexical approach converges with the discursive turn in the need to use “[…] authentic, situated data, such as actual occasions of utterance or observable evidence of metadiscourses about (im)polite behaviour, as well as an account of the broader cultural and historical background against which these occur” (Pizziconi & Christie, 2017: 165). The index is an element—in our case, a linguistic element—that stands for an object with a relationship of association by contiguity. Indexicality refers to the fact that speakers constantly offer contextualization cues, that is, guidelines for interpreting what they say. Thus, the indexical approach identifies the index and the object that it evokes, and interprets its meaning according to the context. In other words, this approach studies the constant dependence of the discourse on the context. In terms of data, it includes very varied phenomena, such as treatment, pronouns, demonstratives, deictic, etc. (Ochs, 1996; Duranti, 2007). Indexes exert an influence in the construction of the social meaning. Thus, this approach also tries to understand how indexes are activated as such, that is, which contextual and ideological mechanisms intervene. In particular, it hypothesizes that several layers of meaning are latent in an indexical form. The index has a latent composite meaning which has the potential to configure the context. In order to activate its potential, the index must have a concrete context. Therefore, indexes are context-dependent and load their social meaning according to the contexts in which they are prototypically used. Such layers of meaning are ordered: for example, the treatment is an index that has a first layer (indicating the referent), a second layer (indexing a communicative competence of the speaker) and may have a third layer (social class, cultural status, etc.).

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As the layers have ideological foundations, these index orders vary according to social groups, so the same sign can receive a different valorisation in different sociocultural contexts. This implies that even a fixed form-meaning association remains open to revaluation and re-interpretation in use. In other words, indexes are never entirely established and the relation between language and social categories is not static as in traditional sociolinguistics, but dynamic and multidimensional. For this reason, within this approach the macrocategories of traditional sociolinguistics are no longer considered as independent variables but as “types of social meanings actively and creatively constructed through language” (Pizziconi & Christie, 2017: 153). This point echoes the assumptions of the discursive turn in politeness that we saw in Part I, i.e. that everything emerges in interaction at local and global levels, at verbal and non-verbal levels and in contingency and historicity. Accordingly, the indexical approach: 1.

2.

Looks for evidence of the conventionalisation of a form in an indexical association. The regular evaluative behaviour of the speakers is the source of such evidence. Technically, researchers combine a sociolinguistic methodology with corpus analysis; Investigates the ideologies stratified in the index and tests their stability in the varied uses of the index, perhaps using metapragmatic discourse (such as newspaper commentary, for example) (Pizziconi & Christie, 2017).

In politeness research, indexical studies are supporting the interest in “how meaning emerges from co-textual interactions rather than being coded in individual linguistic forms” (Pizziconi & Christie, 2017:154). The concept of index stimulates politeness studies’ engagement with context. This involves the methodological challenge to document the emerging nature of some social meanings, the role of ideologies in interpretation and the social action of politeness in society. In fact, the identification of a linguistic form used in politeness dynamics is a mere starting point for the indexical approach. What is required is to focus on the underlying social evaluations of linguistic form: ideologies are supposed to shape different values of linguistic signs (Minegishi Cook, 2001; Kádár, 2017). To sum up, the global research design can refer to different methodological frameworks. The conditions and the constraints that determine the researcher’s choices are various; among them, the way of obtaining data is particularly relevant because data are the evidence that any research needs. The field, sociological, and indexical approaches exemplify some conditions that affect the collection of data. The location of data collection, the categorization of data, the indexical nature of data are some examples of the influences that the researcher needs to take into account to obtain empirical data on communicative interactions useful for politeness research. In Chaps. 12–22, we review several techniques for collecting data that have been particularly productive in politeness studies. For each tool a general critical discussion will be provided along with a report of recent politeness studies that have applied it.

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References Albelda Marco, M., & Barros García, M. J. (2013). La cortesía en la comunicación. Arco/Libros. Blommaert, J. (2012). Chronicles of complexity. Ethnography, superdiversity, and linguistic landscapes. Multilingual Matters. Chalupnik, M., Christie, C., & Mullany, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and gender. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 517–538). Palgrave Macmillan. Chaudron, C. (2000). Métodos actuales de investigación en el aula de segundas lenguas. In C. Muñoz (Ed.), Segundas lenguas. Adquisición en el aula (pp. 127–161). Ariel Lingüística. Christie, C. (2018). The indexical scope of adios: A relevance theoretic analysis of discursive constructions of gender and institutions and their impact on utterance interpretation. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 97–120. Doquin de Saint Preux, A. (2011). Algunas consideraciones respecto a la metodología de investigación en sociolingüística y pragmática: Comentario al artículo de Carlos de Pablos: Attitudes of English Speakers towards thanking in Spanish. Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada, 5(4). Duranti, A. (2007). Etnopragmatica. La forza del parlare. Carocci. Eelen, G. (2001). A critique of politeness theories. St. Jerome Publishing. Gass, S., & Mackey, A. (2007). Input, interaction, and output in second language acquisition. In B. VanPatten, & J. Williams (Eds.), Theories in second language acquisition (pp. 175–200). LEA. Escandell-Vidal, M. V. (2003). La investigación en pragmática. Interlingüistica, 14, 45–58. Haugh, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Intercultural (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 601–632). Palgrave Macmillan. Jucker, A., & Staley, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, and Z. D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 403–429). Palgrave Macmillan. Jucker, A. 2009. Speech and research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1611–1635. Kádár, D. (2017). The role of ideology in evaluations of (in)appropriate behaviour in student-teacher relationships in China. Pragmatics, 27(1), 33–56. Kasper, G. (1990). Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 193– 2018. Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press. Marra, M., & Lazzaro-Salazar, M. (2018). Ethnographic methods in pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 343–366). Mouton De Gruyter. Minegishi Cook, H. (2001). Why can’t learners of JFL distinguish polite from impolite speech styles? In R. Kenneth, G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 80–102). Cambridge University Press. Ochs, E. (1996). Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity (pp. 407–437). Cambridge University Press. Palmer, G. (1996). Toward a theory of Cultural Linguistics. University of Texas Press. Pizziconi, B., & Christie, C. (2017). Indexicality and (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 143–170). Palgrave Macmillan. Schneider, P. K., & Placencia, M. E. (2017). (Im)politeness and regional variation. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 539–570). Palgrave Macmillan. Sifianou, M. (2013). The impact of globalization on politeness and impoliteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 55, 86–102. Sifianou, M., Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2018). Introduction: Impoliteness and globalization. Journal of Pragmatics, 134, 113–119.

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Sinclair, J., & Coulthard, M. (1975). Towards an analysis of discourse: The English used by teachers and pupils. Oxford University Press. Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 237–262. Terkourafi, M., Kádár, Z.D. (2017). Convention and ritual (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, Michael Haugh, & Z. D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 171–195). Palgrave Macmillan. Trinchero, R. (2002). Manuale di ricerca educativa. Milano: FrancoAngeli. Turchetta, B. (2000). La ricerca di campo in linguistica. Carocci. Turnbull, W. (2001). An appraisal of pragmatic elicitation techniques for the social psychological study of talk: The case of request refusals. Pragmatics, 11(1), 31–61.

Chapter 12

Discourse Completion Test

This chapter is the first of a sequence (Chapters 12–22) devoted to different techniques of data collection, both those that have been mainstream in politeness research, and those that are emerging. This descriptive overview intends to give the researcher a methodological panorama of a variety of tools. As we demonstrated in Part I, variety is particularly important to capture the complexity of politeness. Each of the tools is described and critically assessed, and then shown at work in a selection of recent research. The aim is to help gain a better understanding of which data collection technique—or rather which combination of techniques—best fits a researcher’s methodological framework and specific research objectives. The technique reviewed in this chapter is the DCT (Discourse Completion Test/Task), which is a production questionnaire that elicits data. As the examples at the end of the chapter will show, subjects must judge or produce speech acts in plausible imaginary situations (i.e. scenarios). It is perhaps one of the most widely used methods in traditional politeness studies, and in general in interlanguage and variational politeness to contrast cross-cultural realities. It was used for the pathfinder CCSARP project (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Project) to study the speech act of requests and apologies (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989. See also Blum-Kulka, 1996). In general terms, DCTs are useful for focusing on speech acts isolated from their interactional dimension and in particular when they are articulated as one act or in simple sequences of one adjacent pair. This makes it possible to deal with simple patterns that have to be quantitatively compared across groups, a strategy that is particularly useful in cases of poorly described languages or understudied acts because it allows basic profiles to be identified. DCT is a type of data collection that imposes restrictions on data and subjects; indeed, the scenario controls the speakers’ profile, the content of the act, the register, etc. Each scenario presented to the subject describes a situation to which she has to react. For example: Scenario: You ask a friend for a favour and she consents. However, when you see her again, she has not done what she had promised.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_12

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The task structure can either be open (there is an initial prompt, such as an initial line of direct speech) or closed (the speaker is guided to produce a specific speech act). The prompt will also depend on whether the required acts are active (e.g. to pay a compliment) or reactive (e.g. to respond to a compliment). This is an example of an open prompt for an active act: Scenario: You ask a friend for a favour and she consents. However, when you see her again, she has not done what she promised. You:____________________

This is an example of a close prompt for a reactive act Scenario: Your friend needs the lesson notes and you have them. Your friend: I wonder if you can lend me the lesson notes You accept: ___________________________

The scenario design is crucial because it is the means controlling the variables. Usually, the starting point is provided by previous natural data or previous pilot studies, on the basis of which the researcher identifies possible scenarios. The researcher can start by selecting a limited number of structures, chosen from the natural data, or can collect the canonical structures of speech acts by means of an open questionnaire. As shown in the examples at the end of the chapter, the description of the scenario can be generic and open (leaving the subject more leeway) or detailed and controlled: the former retrieves less artificial data, the latter controls the variables tested more closely (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). In general, the researcher tries to re-create plausible situations and the design of the task depends on the type of speech act investigated: for example, Golato (2003) uses a DCT presenting the speech act of the compliment as a prompt in order to study the response to the compliment. The prompt is extracted from natural data, previously collected in the field. The subject reads the scenario, imagines the suggested scene and reacts as required by the instructions, writing spontaneously: evidently, the expected result is not natural language, but what the respondent considers socially and culturally appropriate/typical/desirable, etc. The task asks the respondents how they would behave, how they would respond or how they would react. For this reason, Golato (2003:92) defines the DCT as metapragmatic: “[…] DCTs are in a crucial sense metapragmatic in that they explicitly require participants not to conversationally interact, but to articulate what they believe would be situationally appropriate responses within possible, yet imaginary, interactional settings”. In other words, not pragmatic action but symbolic action is properly elicited. The most common format of the completion task/test is written and regards single speech acts; as it evident, this format does not capture the features of spoken discourse. The typical written DCT consists of presenting a mini-dialogue to which the respondent has to react, often with only one response to complete a blank. Nonetheless, there are various types of completion tests that make this basic format more sophisticated. Instead of being limited to a single exchange, the test/task can be longer to construct complete sequences of dialogue. This option is particularly

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necessary for acts that develop complex negotiation sequences or rituals in which a single adjacency pair is not enough (e.g. invitations). The format with a dialogue to be completed can include two interventions (act and reaction) or three interventions (act-reaction-counter-reaction). Sometimes, a second round is predefined, called rejoinder, which stimulates a more complex sequence with further reaction by the subject (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Le Pair, 1996; Johnston et al., 1998; Kasper, 2000). This is an example: No rejoinder

Preferred rejoinder

Dispreferred rejoinder

Scenario: You ask a friend for a favour and she consents. However, when you see her again, she has not done what she promised You:____________________

Situation: You need the lesson notes and your partner has them: You:______________________ Rejoinder: Sure, I can lend them to you, but please bring them back tomorrow

Situation: You need the lesson notes and your partner has them: You:______________________ Rejoinder: Actually, I need them by Monday

The above shows that the situation without a rejoinder requires the subject to act freely, the two situations with rejoinders, on the other hand, introduce the dialogic dimension to stimulate a more likely production. However, the use of rejoinders requires caution because they produce the anomaly that the respondent knows in advance what the fictitious interlocutor will answer, and this influences the response (Jucker, 2009). There is also the free DCT version where the speakers are required to complete all the rounds by writing, which is actually a roleplay in which the subject interprets all the characters. In a sense, it is not a “completion” task, but a script or written roleplay. DCT administration is mainly written and avoids time-consuming transcription. But there is also the orally administered variant where the task has an oral prompt. In other words, the researcher can use different combinations to compensate some of the shortcomings of DCT that will be commented on later: an oral stimulus can be combined with a written response or with an oral response; a written stimulus can also be combined with an oral response (López Morales, 1994). Yuan (2001) compares this oral methodology with the written DCT and the natural data for the speech act of the compliment and concludes that oral DCT is the one that captures data that are closest to the oral ones. Finally, we also mention the DCT variant combined with thinking aloud to access how the subject is imagining the proposed scenario. In this case, data are integrated by asking the subject the reason for her production, to gather metapragmatic insights into the participant’s politeness production (Félix-Brasdefer, 2010a). To evaluate what this tool is most suitable for, it is important to remember that the DCT does not obtain natural data, but canonical answers. It may also offer the pragmalinguistic knowledge that a speaker has of strategies, of sociopragmatic knowledge and of the linguistic forms that she uses (Kasper, 2000). If the DCT data cannot be considered as representative of natural language, they can instead be considered as speaker perception data: with respect to the complexity of natural data, this approach is more suitable for quantitative treatment because it tends to document general and

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stereotyped forms. For example, respondents might produce more indirect answers in the DCT than they actually use in natural communication because they consider indirectness more polite in their conventional representation of the polite act. In short, being a controlled method, it offers the most conventionalized forms of language and these are more easily comparable for the researcher. For this reason, DCTs are suitable for stereotyped categories of politeness or, rather, those categories that the speaker perceives as canonical. In other words, the DCT well detects the social rationalization of a linguistic phenomenon, on the basis of the projection imagined by the subject in a prototypical context: the subject usually reports what she thinks she should say in the stimulated situation, on the basis of her pragmalinguistic knowledge (i.e. required structures and formulas) and sociopragmatic knowledge (i.e. conditions of adequacy in that context). For example, Beebe and Cummings (1996) study the speech act of refusal and, using a DCT, they find that American subjects usually decline with the following standards: an expression of positive feelings + an expression of regret + an expression of inability or will + an apology. They confirm that the DCT develops its potential well when investigating how “native speakers of a language are in fact able to write stereotypical responses that reflect the values of the native culture” (Beebe & Cummings, 1996: 75). This is not necessarily what actually happens in natural language use in context, but data are anyway interesting in their kind. To sum up, DCTs are an elicitation method that can obtain large amounts of data that are directly comparable in a short time, also through statistical analysis. In fact, in the written format, the administration is easy and time-consuming transcription is not necessary. Moreover, codifying is facilitated for large-scale projects because the test/task is built on categories that have been previously elaborated in a structured form. Such categories are descriptive, and their quantities and frequencies are significant. DCTs are therefore a typical quantitative tool that offers quantity and comparability of categories, although they clearly lose in qualitative penetration (Chaudron, 2000; Ogiermann, 2018). Different studies have compared different types of DCTs, or DCTs with other methods (such as role playing or natural data), to check their validity. Although DCTs have been highly criticized, in the actual comparison of such methods DCTs have provided an acceptable approximation with natural data (Bardovi-Harling & Hartford, 1993; Jucker & Staley, 2017). Precisely the fact that the DCT allows for extensive data with comparable categories has determined the great success of this tool in cross-cultural politeness studies. It has frequently been used for the comparison between different languages, between natives and non-natives and between stages of development of foreign language acquisition. It allows typical and stereotypical patterns to be identified, in different contexts controlled by the researcher, varied according to the variable of interest. In politeness studies, the variables are typically speech act imposition, power and social distance, but also gender and age, or language proficiency: on the same scenario the variable is modulated (for example, high social distance and low social distance) and then how the respondent changes the strategy accordingly is verified (Ogiermann, 2018). The same DCT is replicated in different cultures and then data are compared. However, DCTs have also stimulated critical considerations about the

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real correspondence of the categories used in the cultures compared (Jucker, 2009). For example, Brislin (1986) and Kasper and Dahl (1991) raise the issue of the translation of the DCT to be submitted to subjects in a different language, since the DCT should be administered in the subject’s native language. This implies the need for reverse translation of the texts and a possible cultural adaptation of the scenarios, as well as a pragmatic adaptation of the prompts. In this respect, Spencer-Oatey (2000) applies the decentring suggested by Brislin (1986: 160): by moving back and forth with translation and reverse translation between languages several times, the researcher can identify those constructs of the DCT that survive the process (and therefore are “natural” in all cultures and languages involved). She can also identify those which cannot be translated painlessly that is, those that are culturally specific to one language and not to others. Other critical methodological points are usually raised on the DCT format. The first is the fact that the written form does not reflect the features of the interactive spoken discourse. Actually, the interactive structure of the DCT is prefabricated (i.e. type of response, number of turns, sequence of turns, length of interventions, etc.), so it levels out the dialogical management structures of the polite relation, such as repetitions, hesitations, ellipses, some discourse markers, suprasegmental traits, etc. (Johnston et al., 1998; Kasper, 2000). For example, in Beebe and Cummings (1996), the DCT is applied to the study of the speech act of refusal with a written test involving a prompt and a single turn of response, i.e., a dialogue with only two turns. The respondent must complete her refusal in a single adjacent pair, condensing unnaturally semantic formulas that in English would typically be diluted in a much more complex ritual. In fact, the comparison with the same natural exchange reveals a semantic density per intervention which is much lower than the results of the DCT, as well as an altered interchange of interventions and turns. To give another example, Hinkel (1997) compares the DCT to a multiple-choice questionnaire with non-native subjects and finds that the responses to DCT are more direct, probably because the non-natives cannot fully articulate their written responses. A further critical issue are the difficulties that arise in defining and describing the scenario. The number of influential variables in a natural context is high and they are interrelated (e.g. the emotional variable interacts with power, imposition and distance) but a scenario can control only a small part of them (Ogiermann, 2018). In addition, many scenarios do not allow a plausible variation of many variables (and those that allow it are reduced to a few situations typical of a specific speech act). For example, if the researcher is investigating compliments and social distance, she would present the scenario of compliments extending the variable of compliments to friends, family members, colleagues, etc.; but eliciting compliments from strangers would be an unusual scenario. More generally, the most important problem of the scenario is that it is only theoretically controlled. It is impossible to be sure that the variations in the respondent’s answers depend on the scenario variables manipulated by the analyst and not on another element of the context (Doquin de Saint Preux, 2011). In fact, starting from the description offered by the researcher, the respondent imagines a context and this imaginative process is out of the researcher’s control even in very closed DCTs. For

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example, for the DCT respondent the scenario may activate an imagined interlocutor who escapes the researcher’s intentions, even if she defines the scenario in detail (i.e. level of intimacy, hierarchy, age, gender, community membership, profession, diastratic or diatopic traits, etc.). Hinkel (1997), for example, observes that the English language, unlike others, allows the gender of the interlocutors to be neutralized, and the fact that the subject can imagine a scene with a female or male interlocutor must be evaluated very carefully in politeness, because this is a sensitive variable. In general, the researcher will never be able to know how closely the subject has adhered to the indications of the scenario, how much the situation evoked refers to a real experience of the respondent or how much she had to invent on the basis of idealizations. For this reason, often the scenario and the prompt are highly articulated and offer parts of dialogue to guide the imagination, but, conversely, this may interfere with the variety of structures that a spontaneous dialogue might have. As for the prompt, difficulties also arise for complex events because the researcher should foresee the necessary turns of negotiation in order to construct the prompts consequently. Instead, in natural conversation, turns cannot be predetermined because the speakers proceed by joint construction. In particular, the written mini-dialogue resulting from the DCT produces unnatural answers in terms of length, i.e. subjects tend to provide short answers, also because they omit redundant colloquial structures even in dialogues that aim to encourage oral conversational data. The solution might be to provide a recorded oral prompt and to ask the subjects to complete the dialogue in oral form, although this does not avoid the problem of lack of negotiation with the interlocutor. A consideration should also be added with respect to time. The written DCT imposes on the respondent a compilation time that is very different from the time available to the speaker in natural conditions. In general, the respondent has more time available compared to the natural conditions of enunciation—having to put in writing what she would normally say—and therefore can give more elaborate answers (Golato, 2003) or, on the contrary, less elaborate ones out of haste to finish the time-consuming task of writing. Regarding the type of data collected, it should also be considered that the respondents produce on stimulus, therefore without intrinsic communicative intentions or an emotional dimension (Jucker, 2009). If the person is not under the pressure of interaction, vital strategies of politeness, such as attenuation, hedging, etc. are not activated (Beebe & Cummings, 1996). In other words, the DCT does not detect the linguistic consequences of the psycho-emotional dimension of interaction. DCT simulation tends to lead to standard and socially compliant answers, according to the respondent’s frames. Thus, the answers do not really develop according to the variables that are salient in a natural interaction for the subject (e.g. the affective investment of face). Finally, one must consider that the data are bound to a definite context. For example, Billmyer and Varghese (2000) study the data collected by DCT creating two versions of the scenario: one described briefly and another with the same situation explained in detail. They demonstrate that the more detailed version allows far more useful and elaborated data to be collected. Billmyer and Varghese claim that, by improving the contextualization of the statements, it is possible to obtain data

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closer to authentic discourse. However, it should always be kept in mind that DCT requires a preliminary classification of the data that will be elicited, which implies that the researcher already knows what she is looking for. For this reason, it is not a tool that can offer the strategic breadth of the structures that speakers would use. For example, the DCT hardly records omission or avoidance strategies at all, i.e. when the speaker wants to avoid the act solicited by the prompt. DCT is also unable to offer the real frequency of natural occurrence of a structure, because it forces its appearance as an object of investigation. Notwithstanding these methodological issues, DCT is still a widely used data collection tool in politeness research. Examples are numerous and accessible in many publications (e.g. Escamilla Morales & Henry Vega 2012; Flores Treviño & González Salinas, 2015; Coloquio, 2018). In order to exemplify what we have set out in this section, we now propose a few examples selected from approximately the last ten years of publications that stand out for the explicitness of their data collection. Regardless of the overall relevance or robustness of the selected study, we summarize only the aspects of interest in this section and therefore omit methodological elements that are secondary for the purpose of this chapter. They concern different languages, and we have chosen not to translate the examples to avoid mistranslating culturally-marked items. When the author herself presents an English translation, it is reproduced. González-Cruz (2012) presents eight scenarios to investigate the act of apologizing in the context of politeness with a written DCT. She analyses the relative importance of the offence given and the gender of the person apologizing, the degree of familiarity (or social distance) between the participants and the age of the offended person. Her objectives are to identify predominant strategies in Canarian Spanish as imagined by the speakers, to verify the variation in gender, and to attest the impact of the variables of social distance, age and severity of the offence. The study concludes that direct apologies with “Lo siento” (sorry) are the most frequent, that there is some variation related to gender (e.g. the use of humour in men and promising forbearance in women), and that the three factors studied seem to play a role in the speaker’s choice of the strategies. Her respondents are 100 college students aged 18–26 and the following situations are presented to them in Spanish (the translation by González-Cruz into English is given the article). Tags in parentheses show the relationship between the variables investigated and the scenario construction, and were not visible to the respondent (González-Cruz, 2012: 552): 1.

Your friend has just left his glasses on the sofa. You don’t notice and sit on them, so you break them (SERIOUS/CLOSE/YOUNG).

2.

You are accompanying your aunt, an old lady you get on very well with, on a short trip by bus. You leave a bag with some souvenirs on the rack above your aunt’s seat. On a sharp bend, the bag falls down, hitting your aunt’s glasses, which break (SERIOUS/CLOSE/OLD).

3.

Backing out of a car park, you crash into another car which was passing by. The driver is a young man you don’t know (SERIOUS/DISTANT/YOUNG).

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4.

One of your teachers, a rather old professor, has lent you a book which you have spoiled: you dropped a little coffee on it and also some pages have come out (SERIOUS/DISTANT/OLD).

5.

You have arranged to play a basketball (or football, etc.) match with your group of friends, but you arrive 20 min late (MINOR/CLOSE/YOUNG).

6.

You are eating at a restaurant with a close friend and his parents, whom you have known quite well for a long time. By mistake you take your friend’s father’s glass and drink. Then you realise what you have done (MINOR/CLOSE/OLD).

7.

You are away from home, in another city (Madrid/Barcelona) and you get lost. Then you see a group of students talking and sharing their books and class-notes. You approach them and interrupt to ask them for directions to get to your hotel (MINOR/DISTANT/YOUNG).

8.

You are walking quickly along a busy street and suddenly you bump into an old lady who almost falls down (MINOR/DISTANT/OLD).

These examples of situations are simple, but scenario design can reach high degrees of complexity, as in Hatfield and Hahn (2014) who investigate facework in apologies outside immediate interaction in American and Korean. This is an example of one of their scenarios (Hatfield & Hahn, 2014: 232): You have had a bad week at work and go to your favorite restaurant, but the meal is bad. You complain and get the meal free, but then you complain more such that [sic] other tables are watching. A couple [sic] minutes later, you have relaxed and the waiter goes by the table.

In this setting, the ability to put the situation into perspective from three different points of view is required because the situation concerns the face of someone not present in the scenario (the waiter, in this case). The study aims precisely at investigating facework at a distance, that is, when the offended person is not on the scene at the time of the offence. In this example there is no linguistic prompt and the response is open, as the prompt is precisely the event described, to which the respondent reacts, imagining the interlocutor’s possible reaction to the incident. In Lázaro Ruiz (2016) there are some examples of a common DCT with a scenario that asks the respondent to produce a speech act using a direct question (¿Cómo le contestarías?—What would you answer?). Lázaro Ruiz submits an online DCT to 20 Spanish and 20 Japanese university students aged 18–24. He collects responses to compliments as part of a cross-cultural analysis applied to teaching Spanish as a foreign language. The author submits 12 situations with a closed description that we deliberately report in full to give an extensive exemplification of a typical DCT scenario design (Lázaro Ruiz, 2016: 152–153): 1.

Trabajas en una empresa a tiempo parcial. Te encuentras con el director de un departamento diferente al que tú trabajas. Él se acerca a ti y te dice: “He leído su último informe. Me ha parecido un trabajo interesante y muy bien documentado. Su jefe tiene suerte de contar con usted”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

2.

Empiezas una nueva asignatura optativa en la universidad. Ninguno de tus amigos acude a esta clase y no conoces a nadie. Te sientas al lado de una chica que parece que

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tiene más o menos tu edad y comenzáis a hablar. Después de una breve presentación la chica te comenta: “¡Guau! Me he fijado que tienes unos ojos súper bonitos”. ¿Cómo le contestarías? 3.

Vas a celebrar el cumpleaños de un amigo y te has puesto elegante para la ocasión. Al salir de casa te encuentras con el portero que lleva poco tiempo trabajando en tu comunidad. Parece que tiene unos 60 años. No le conoces bien pero cada vez que le ves le saludas. Al saludarle te dice: “¡Qué elegante! ¿Tienes una cita o algo?”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

4.

Por la recomendación de un profesor vas a ser ponente en un seminario muy importante en que participan varios expertos de tu campo. Acabas de terminar la ponencia y te encuentras con uno de los profesores. No le conoces pero parece que es un profesor que viene de otra universidad. Él te reconoce, se acerca a ti y te dice: “Ha sido una ponencia muy clara e interesante, lo ha hecho usted estupendamente”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

5.

Has quedado con tu mejor amiga para ir a tomar algo. Como hace tiempo que no sales por los trabajos que tenías que hacer para la universidad, te has puesto guapo/a para salir. Al verte, tu amiga te dice: “¡Qué guapo/a estás!” ¿Cómo le contestarías?

6.

Acudes a una entrevista de trabajo para optar a unas prácticas en una empresa. Tras la entrevista la jefa de personal, a la que no conocías hasta ese momento, te comenta: “Muchas gracias por venir. Siempre es un placer para nuestra empresa contar con la colaboración de alumnos de tu universidad”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

7.

Te dispones a volver a casa después de las clases de la universidad. Te diriges al parking para recoger tu bicicleta. Allí te encuentras con un compañero de clase. Le conoces de vista y habéis hablado alguna vez pero no tenéis una relación cercana ni sois amigos. Cuando él ve tu bicicleta te comenta: “¡Vaya, me encanta tu bici! Siempre he querido tener una como ésta”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

8.

La tutora que te está dirigendo tu proyecto de fin de carrera y tú os veis casi todos los días e intercambiáis opiniones sobre el trabajo. Aunque es bastante mayor que tú, tenéis una relación relativamente cercana. Te has cortado el pelo de forma diferente a la habitual. En la facultad te encuentras con la tutora que al verte te dice: “¿Te has cortado el pelo? Te queda muy bien. Me encanta tu nuevo look”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

9.

Tu amigo y tú asistís a una clase de idiomas en la universidad. Hoy es el día de la presentación de los proyectos de evaluación. Cuando termina la clase tu amigo te comenta: “¡Lo has hecho genial, ojalá yo pudiera hablar la mitad de bien que tú!” ¿Cómo le contestarías?

10.

Eres el presidente de una asociación universitaria. Ha empezado el curso académico y la organización ha recibido nuevos miembros. Para celebrarlo y conoceros mejor habéis organizado una cena de bienvenida. Durante la cena tú sacas la cámara para hacer una foto del grupo. En ese momento una chica que acaba de incorporarse a la asociación te dice: “¡Guau! Tienes una cámara muy buena. Estoy ahorrando para comprarme una igual”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

11.

Hay un chico más joven que tú que está haciendo prácticas en la empresa en la que tú trabajas a tiempo parcial. Tú eres su jefe/jefa. Aunque no lleváis mucho tiempo trabajando juntos os lleváis muy bien. Un día él ve un trabajo que escribiste para la universidad que está sobre tu mesa y te pide si puede echar una ojeada. Cuando él te lo devuelve te dice: “¿Cómo es que escribes tan bien? transmites el contenido de una forma súper clara ¡Ya me gustaría a mí escribir la mitad de bien que tú!” ¿Cómo le contestarías?

134 12.

12 Discourse Completion Test Llevas 3 años trabajando en una empresa a tiempo parcial. Tu jefa y tú os lleváis muy bien y tenéis una relación amistosa. Ella parece bastante joven, de unos 26 años. Hoy te has puesto unas zapatillas nuevas. Cuando os encontráis en una pausa te dice: “¿Esas zapatillas son nuevas? Son muy chulas”. ¿Cómo le contestarías?

Constructing scenarios of this type raises questions of what familiarity the respondents have with the situation presented. For example, in no. 3 the supposed interlocutor is a concierge, which is a role that some respondents may not be used to communicating with. In addition, the concierge is a 60-year-old man, and the respondents answer will depend on if she is a young woman or a young man. As previously mentioned, the control of variables is another delicate design issue. Finally, where the data will be compared with those concerning other cultures, the researcher needs to evaluate if it is better to prepare situations specific to each language/culture or to translate them from one language to the others. Placencia and Fuentes (2013) offer an example of open dialogue. They study the regional variation of compliments with respect to face and relation management in the variety of Quito Andean Spanish and Southern Peninsular Spanish. They focus on university women and through the dialogues of the scenarios they control the socioeconomic variable, age and gender of the participants, as well as the variables of intimacy, power and routine. A questionnaire is submitted with different contexts taken from other studies on spontaneous speech in the Ecuadorian Spanish of Quito and Peninsular Spanish of Madrid. They choose a free DCT, presenting four situations inherent to appearance, possession, and ability (Placencia & Fuentes, 2013: 107, 134). The authors prepare two versions for the two variants (Quito and Seville variants): Versión para el español de Sevilla Apariencia: Aspecto: 1 Estás en una fiesta y entra una de tus amigas (Gabriela), muy bien vestida y arreglada. Hazle un cumplido. Apariencia: Corte de pelo/peinado: 2 Notas que tu amiga Marcela se ha cortado el pelo/se ha hecho peinar. Hazle un cumplido. Pertenencia: Teléfono: 3 Tu amiga se ha comprado un nuevo celular que te parece muy bueno. Hazle un cumplido. Habilidad: Bebida/pastel: 4 Tu amiga ha preparado una bebida/un pastel exquisita/o. Hazle un cumplido. Versión para el español de Quito 1. Estás en una fiesta y entra una de tus amigas (Gabriela), muy bien vestida y arreglada. Hazle un cumplido. Tú: Tu amiga: Comentario: ...................................................................................................... 2. Notas que tu amiga Marcela se ha cortado el pelo/se ha hecho peinar. Hazle un cumplido. Tú: Tu amiga: Comentario: ......................................................................................................

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3. Tu amiga se ha comprado un nuevo celular que te parece muy bueno. Hazle un cumplido. Tú: Tu amigo/a: Comentario: ...................................................................................................... 4. Tu amiga ha preparado una bebida/un pastel exquisita/o. Hazle un cumplido. Tú: Tu amiga: Comentario: ......................................................................................................

Placencia and Fuentes ask the respondents to write down how they would respond, admitting the hypothesis that they might not say anything. The DCT instructions report: “[…] Si piensas que no dirías nada en alguna de las situaciones, explica por qué al pie de la situación”/If you think you would not say anything in any of the situations, explain why at the bottom of the situation (Placencia & Fuentes 2013: 134). As the examples show, this is an open variant, that is, respondents are asked to recreate the pair of the compliment and its response, in this case over two rounds. The researchers obtain about 200 compliments with response for each variant of Spanish and conduct a pragmalinguistic analysis. They detect the sociocultural variation of frequency with respect to one of the situations (above n. 3) and also notice similar patterns which present syntactic and semantic variations in the two regional variants. In DCTs of this type, the researcher should estimate, for example, whether two turns are sufficient for the type of act under investigation or if it would require multiple turns in a natural context. A reflection is also needed when the same respondent responds and also reacts to her own response, as this is an unnatural dynamic. A solution might be cross-administration of the DCT so that the respondent reacts to another participant’s response. Flórez Salgado (2012) is an example of oral DCT and is aimed at the study of face in relation to expressions of apology in the Mexican Spanish of Puebla. The variation is observed with respect to the variables of social distance, power and level of the offence. The author concludes that: social distance, power and the offence are variables that condition the strategies chosen by the speaker; “Disculpa” (and its variants) prevails while “Lo siento” is the least used; and intensification is sensitive to the power variable. She adopts a DCT based on the presentation of 12 caricatures to 36 informants. Caricatures were accompanied by a brief description explaining the relationship between characters in terms of power, social distance, theme or purpose of the situation, place of the event, and age. The scenarios were based on the daily lives of the participants (i.e. university students with extracurricular activities or part-time work). The respondent observed the image, read the description and individually audio recorded her reaction. The situations were selected following piloting with students and professors to ascertain the naturalness and the familiarity of the situations in their ordinary life context. The recorded responses were transcribed and coded for a quantitative analysis. Here are some examples of Flórez Salgado (2012: 243–245):

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12 Discourse Completion Test Situación 1 Al estar estudiando para tus exámenes de mitad de curso, te das cuenta que no entiendes algunos temas. Una compañera tuya parece entender la clase mucho mejor que tu, le pides sus apuntes prestados para preparar el examen. Tu compañera te presta sus apuntes. Vas a la cafetería a trabajar y olvidas los apuntes allí. Cuando te das cuenta de tu error regresas inmediatamente a recogerlos, pero no los encuentras. ¿Cómo le dirías a tu compañera que perdiste sus apuntes? Situación 11 Eres el presidente del consejo estudiantil de tu facultad. Durante una reunión en la que estas tomando café, lo pones cerca de ti mientras explica algo, mueves tu mano y derramas el café sobre los libros de un miembro del consejo (al cual no conoces personalmente) que está sentado a lado tuyo. ¿Cómo le dirías para disculparte? Situación 12 Eres el líder del equipo de baloncesto de tu escuela. Hay un miembro nuevo (que no conoces personalmente, solo has oído acerca de él) que se va a unir al equipo hoy para la práctica. Llegas al gimnasio con todo el equipo y ves a un muchacho jugando. Le pides salir del gimnasio porque vas a practicar. El te dice que él es el nuevo miembro del equipo. ¿Cómo te disculparías?

These descriptions are paired with the caricatures, and end up closing the scenario as a normal verbal DCT. Nevertheless, in the case of using images as input, one might want to evaluate what specific contribution they make, i.e. whether they can make the scenario more open or bypass semantic conditioning. For this reason, images can be useful in some intercultural research design, as they allow the researcher not to use terminology that could influence the respondent. Nevertheless, although they can help in making certain categories more open, they do not solve the problem of cultural characterisation of the scenarios illustrated. Mulo Farenkia (2012) uses a method very similar to the previous ones, but we cite it to give an example of a closed DCT supplying a preferred rejoinder that closes off the informant’s possible responses. He studies the production of compliments in Cameroon and Canadian French and this is an example of a scenario (with the translation by Mulo Farenkia) (Mulo Farenkia 2012: 452): Tu assistes à un match de soccer/hockey/basketball et tu es particulièrement impressionné(e) par la prestation d’un(e) joueur/joueuse. A la fin du match, tu vas voir le/la joueur/joueuse en question pour lui dire ton admiration. Toi:______________________________________________________________________ Le/la joueur/joueuse : « C’est vrai ? Merci d’avoir assisté au match ! » You attend a soccer/hockey/basketball game and you are particularly impressed by the performance of one of the players. At the end of the game, you go to see the player in question to let him/her know your admiration. You: _____________________________________________________________________ The player: “Really? Thanks for coming to the game!”

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Finally, we mention Martínez-Flor and Usó-Juan (2011) to exemplify how the DCT can be complemented by other methodologies, namely oral roleplay and an awareness test by a rating assessment. The authors study the speech act of refusal as a face-threatening act in relation to the variables of social status and social distance in a setting familiar to their subjects, i.e. university students. They focus on the comprehension and production of refusals in foreign language contexts. The participants respond as themselves and do not have to impersonate other roles, as in Flórez Salgado (2012). The oral roleplay consists of nine situations presented with a photograph and a verbal description. The DCT consists of nine situations different from those of the roleplay and they are presented with verbal descriptions that control the variables of social status and distance. The awareness test presents nine other new situations containing a refusal and the respondents have to assess its appropriateness and give a justification of their evaluation. Martínez-Flor and Usó-Juan (2011) do not specify the results of the integrated application of the three tools, they only focus on their design. The use of mixed methodologies, as in this example, obliges the researcher to evaluate the methodological contribution of each tool. Since each instrument requires time for preparation and administration, it is important to understand how meaningful it is for the research objectives: what does one tool offer that another doesn’t? What grey area does it cover? In addition, triangulating data collection results in a large quantity of data and the researcher should evaluate in advance if such data can be integrated or if they are too heterogeneous in nature. When different tools reveal conflicting data, the analyst should be able to interpret them within the time constraints of her research.

References Bardovi-Harling, K., & Hartford, B. (1993). Refining the DCT: Comparing open questionnaires and dialogue completion tasks. In L. Bouton, & Y. Kachru (Eds.), Pragmatics and language learning (Vol. 4, pp. 143–165). Urbana: University of Illinois. Beebe, L., & Cummings, M. (1996). Natural speech act data versus written questionnaire data: How data collection method affects speech act performance. In S. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures (pp. 65–86). Mouton de Gruyter. Billmyer, K., & Varghese, M. (2000). Investigating instrument-based pragmatic variability: Effects of enhancing discourse completion tests. Applied Linguistics, 21(4), 517–552. Blum-Kulka, S. (1996). Variaciones en la formulación de peticiones. In J. Cenoz & J. Valencia (Eds.), La competencia pragmática: Elementos lingüísticos y psicosociales (pp. 179–194). Servicio Editorial Universidad del País Vasco. Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (1989). Investigating cross-cultural pragmatics: An introductory overview. In S. Blum-Kulka, J. House, & G. Kasper (Eds.) Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies (pp. 1–34). Ablex. Brislin, R. (1986). The wording and translation of research instruments. In W. Lonner & J. Berry (Eds.), Field methods in cross-cultural research (pp. 137–164). Sage Publications. Chaudron, C. (2000). Métodos actuales de investigación en el aula de segundas lenguas. In C. Muñoz (Ed.), Segundas lenguas. Adquisición en el aula (pp. 127–161). Ariel Lingüística.

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Coloquio. (2018). VIII Coloquio Internacional del Programa EDICE (Sevilla, 2018). Libro de resúmenes: https://edice.asice.se/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/LIBRO-DE-RES%c3%9aM ENES-DEFINITIVO.pdf. 10 Jan 2021. Doquin de Saint Preux, A. (2011). Algunas consideraciones respecto a la metodología de investigación en sociolingüística y pragmática: Comentario al artículo de Carlos de Pablos ‘Attitudes of English Speakears towards Thanking in Spanish’. Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada, 5(4). Escamilla Morales, J., & Henry Vega, G. (Eds.). (2012). Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico. Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2010a). Data collection methods in speech act performance. DCTs, role plays, and verbal reports. In A. Martínez-Flor, & E. Usó-Juan (Eds.), Speech act performance (pp. 41– 56). John Benjamins. Flórez Salgado, E. (2012). La imagen social en la selección de las expresiones de disculpa. In J. Escamilla Morales, & G. Henry Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 214–245). Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Flores Treviño, M. E., & González Salinas A. (2015). Diez estudios sobre (des)cortesía: Atenuación, identidad, imagen social y argumentación. Texto en contexto 1(2), 149–182. Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occuring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 90–121. González-Cruz, M.-I. (2012). Apologizing in Spanish: A study of the strategies used by university students in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Pragmatics, 22(4), 543–565. Hatfield, H., & Hahn, J.-W. (2014). The face of others: Triadic and Dydic interactions in Korea and the United States. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(2), 221–245. Hinkel, E. (1997). Appropiateness of advice: DCT and multiple choice data. Applied Linguistics, 18(1), 1–26. Johnston, B., Kasper, G., & Ross, S. (1998). Effect of rejoinders in production questionnaires. Applied Linguistics, 19(2), 157–182. Jucker, A., & Staley, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and developments in methodology. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & Z. D. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 403–429). Palgrave Macmillan. Jucker, A. (2009). Speech and research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1611–1635. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). Continuum. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Lázaro Ruiz, H. (2016). Estrategias de respuesta al cumplido en universitarios españoles y japoneses. Pragmalingüística, 24, 133–135. Le Pair, R. 1996. Spanish request strategies: A cross-cultural analysis from an intercultural perspective. In K. Jaszczolt, & K. Turner (Eds.), Contrastive semantics and pragmatics. Volume II. Discourse Strategies (pp. 651–670). Pergamon Press. López Morales, H. (1994). Métodos de investigación lingüística. Ediciones Colegio de España. Martínez-Flor, A., & Usó-Juan, E. (2011). Research methodologies in pragmatics: Eliciting refusals to request. Estudios Lingüística Inglesa Aplicada, 1, 47–87. Mulo Farenkia, B. (2012). Compliment strategies and regional variation in French: Evidence from Cameroon and Canadian French. Pragmatics, 22(3), 447–476. Ogiermann, E. (2018). Discourse completion tasks. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 119–228). Mouton De Gruyter.

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Chapter 13

Role Playing

In this chapter role playing is discussed and exemplified in its application to politeness research. Roleplays are simulations of real-life communicative events under controlled conditions in which participants are required to play a role, which is more or less familiar to them (teacher, policeman, etc.). Hence, it is a data collection tool that requires production by an informant, usually on the basis of categories predefined by the researcher. The participants are presented with a scenario and are asked to impersonate their roles, following the instructions provided for their conversation. The scenario can be described—usually in written form—in a very detailed way to better control a certain variable (i.e. enriched scenario) or in a more generic way to leave more freedom of response. This technique makes it possible to predefine contextual parameters (e.g. distance, power, register, etc.) and, theoretically, to control them. Evidently, roleplay has a certain similarity with DCTs because they are both tools with some restrictions due to the presence of a scenario with controlled variables (for example, the roleplay can stimulate the same speech act in contexts defined according to variation of a single role variable). The difference with respect to DCT is that role playing is usually oral and that the simulation of communicative situations requires spontaneous discourse. Moreover, compared to DCT, roleplays require recording and transcription, which Kasper and Dahl (1991) estimate at ten hours of work for one hour of recording. In this case as well, as the data are elicited, their validity with respect to natural data is subject to any of the critical considerations already put forward for DCT in the previous chapter (Kasper, 2000). We can identify different types of roleplays (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; FélixBrasdefer, 2018a): • Closed roleplay with no interaction: this option is similar to the oral DCT and (actually they are) does not involve actual face-to-face interaction: the respondent receives an input (visual or audio) to which she has to react with a unilateral single intervention focused on the speech act under investigation. The participant’s oral response is recorded. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_13

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• Open roleplay demands a partially self-directed interaction between the role players. This face-to-face option allows a speech act to be observed in a complete discursive context, so it does not predetermine the dynamics of the conversation. Role playing is different from role enactments: in the latter, the participant enters the communicative simulation by interpreting herself in plausible scenarios of her everyday reality; in the former, she participates in the simulation by interpreting a role defined by the scenario, then the speaker can assume a role of any kind (sometimes, not even close to her own experience). Role enactments have a higher degree of validity, even in spite of their control of the types of scenarios and the systematic variation of parameters for data comparison purposes. Another interesting tool of this type is naturalized role playing in which participants are unaware of the research focus and are involved in a distracting task that works as a cover for the target task under investigation. Finally, we can assimilate the stimulation of a flow of conversation to a form of role enactment, in which participants are required to talk about a topic. This is often used to study management and organizational aspects of the conversation (Kasper, 2000). Cooperative production tasks, i.e. tasks aimed at understanding language production through a joint activity are a variant of role playing. These tasks traditionally imply production, e.g. watching a video and describing it to another person or recalling past events. In recent years, more interactive tasks have prevailed, in which the speakers must coordinate and cooperate naturally, for example, to complete a map or to construct Lego® models, to direct someone else to solving a problem, or to discuss a specific topic (Gibbs, 2018). Some tasks also use a natural, real-life scenario where the participant is asked to intervene (e.g. the participant has to ask real passers-by for information on a real street). Obviously, not all research contexts allow this format from an ethical point of view. Role playing has been widely used for cross-cultural studies and interlanguage studies, as well as for second language acquisition studies and politeness research (Félix-Brasdefer, 2018). It is used to investigate interpersonal and conversation functions (e.g. back channels, turn-taking, etc.); it is also suitable for the study of oral traits (i.e. turns, prosody and intonation, gestures), and for discourse interaction in general. The reason is that role playing spontaneously captures the interactive negotiation of the participants and therefore retrieves results similar to natural data (of course depending on the subjects’ interpretative skills). Compared to the observation of natural data, role playing is a faster data collection tool, but obviously the retrieved data are artificial. Ultimately, roleplays offer data with controlled and comparable parameters, saving a good degree of spontaneity depending on the type of role play employed. Role playing has been methodologically compared to other techniques: for example, DCT and closed role playing offer similar data—because neither are interactive—while DCT, open role playing and field notes report the same linguistic forms, but with different lengths and complexity (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Turnbull (2001) offers a comparison between oral and written DCT and semi-controlled open

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roleplay. The interactions obtained were compared with natural language productions and it was shown that the language used in the oral and written DCTs was not representative of natural language and that, in contrast, in the open roleplay, the language was closer to it. Turnbull concludes that the best tools are those where the participants feel free to speak, without considering themselves to be observed. In a similar study, Kasper (2000) also compares the characteristics of discourse produced through DCT, role-play and natural language, and reaches the same conclusions. Notwithstanding these strong points, role playing has some critical aspects. Although it is sensitive to the conversational dimension and partially also to relation management, it is inevitably a simulation that has no consequences on the participants’ real life. This gap highlights the great awareness the researcher must have of the differences between natural data and stimulated data. In fact, if in natural conditions the problem is to sift through the phenomena studied in a variety of real conditions, in artificial conditions, on the other hand, the problem is to direct the informants’ production towards the phenomenon under investigation in the most probable way possible, that is, without telling them what they have to say. In other words, it is difficult to invent roleplays that come up with communicative situations linked to the specific speech act studied in such a way that the act is necessarily and naturally produced by the speaker. In cross-cultural studies, this point is particularly critical because the same scenario is proposed to elicit the speech act under investigation in two different cultures, but it could well have a different frequency (or be absent in that situation) in one of the cultures compared (Jucker, 2009). The researcher therefore ends up with evidence of an act that is forced by the roleplay and which in natural conditions, for example, would not appear in that situation. In addition, the production stimulated by the role playing depends on the understanding of the scenario—which, we know, is highly variable—and the interpretation of the participant, which is also driven by a constellation of forces. As discussed for DCT, as well, the participants’ uptake of the scenario framework for the roleplay is never really controllable, because participants understand and interpret instructions in very different ways, according to their own life and communication experience. In addition, the possibility that clichés are activated through being linked to the character to be interpreted is very strong. This is relevant if the researcher is investigating social competence, while it is less relevant if the analyst is studying the internal structure of the language (communicative competence) (Jucker, 2009; Félix-Brasdefer, 2018; Gibbs, 2018). Role playing has been widely used in politeness research, particularly to capture oral data. We have drawn some examples from the specialized, scientific literature of approximately the last ten years to clarify its design. We summarize only the elements of interest in order to illustrate the potential of this data collection tool, beyond any other general evaluation of the study quoted. Dumitrescu (2011) studies the speech act of gratitude in Spanish by combining a test of social habits and a written roleplay. The roleplay is presented to 25 native Spanish-speaking university students from Mexico and Argentina. Participants have to read a prompt such as the following and write down the exact words they would say (Dimitrescu 2011: 42):

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Tu novio/a, como sabe que estás atareadísimo/a, te arregla el apartamento y cocina una cena fantástica para la llegada de tus padres [translation by Dimitrescu (2011): Your boyfriend/girlfriend, as he/she knows that that you are very busy, cleans the apartment and cooks a fantastic dinner for your parents’ arrival]

The following are examples of the informants’ responses (Dimitrescu 2011: 52): [Mexican Spanish] ¡Qué padre que me hayas ayudado con la cena, te lo agradezco muchísimo! Que Dios te lo pague, mi vida [translation by Dimitrescu: How great it is that you have helped with dinner, I appreciate it very much! May God pay you, my dear] [Argentinian Spanish] Gracias, mi amorcito, mi corazoncito de melón…muchas gracias. Sos el más bueno del mundo, sos divino. Te quiero mucho [translation by Dimitrescu: Thank you, my love, my little melon heart, thank you very much. You are the best in the world, you’re divine. I love you a lot]

This written format coincides with an open DCT and some of the questionnaire designs that we will see in the next chapter. In this case, the student plays herself, in supposedly familiar life scenarios (e.g. in the above example, the role is of a college student who does not live with her family). Ruytenbeek (2020) also adopts a written roleplay, but it is a more coherent choice because there is consistency between the communicative channel and the roleplay. In fact, Ruytenbeek’s roleplay involves a scenario in which the participant actually has to write, since she has to perform an indirect request via e-mail. The data are therefore consistent with the same situation if it were real, because it would be a situation requiring written production. The following are the instructions that the researcher provides to the university students in his study. The participants were in front of a laptop and had 20 min to write two e-mails in Belgian French (one to the Faculty Dean and the other to a student) (Ruytenbeek, 2020: 127–128): Le Doyen de la Faculté/Une étudiante, Amandine Castani a oublié de vous envoyer le texte qu’il/elle a rédigé pour la revue. À partir de la messagerie affichée sur l’écran de l’ordinateur, écrivez-lui un email en lui demandant de vous envoyer ce texte (adresse du Doyen/d’Amandine Castani: […]). – L’objet de l’email est : « revue des étudiants ». – Signez l’email avec vos nom et prénom. – Quand vous avez terminé d’écrire votre email, appuyez sur « envoyer ». [Translation by Ruytenbeek (2020). The Faculty Dean/A student, Amandine Castani forgot to send you the text he/she wrote for the journal. From the email account displayed on the screen of the computer, write an email to him/her, requesting him/her to send you this text (Dean/Amandine Castani’s address: […]). – Email object is: “student journal”. – Sign the email with your own name and surname. – When you are done writing your email, click on “send”.]

Mirzaei Jegarlooei & Allami (2018) use oral roleplay (combined with a DCT) with a two-round mini-dialogue, and both turns are supplied by the same informant. They study the use of discourse markers as buffers to soften the imposition of commands.

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Their informants are Iranian students and teachers of English as a Foreign Language and are also compared with Iranian and American native speakers. Here are the instructions and four examples of roleplay from Mirzaei Jegarlooei & Allami (2018: 19): You will read 21 scenarios. Please tell the researcher how you react to each of them. Your reaction will be recorded and will, for sure, be used for research purposes only. Your car broke down, so you had to tow it to a garage nearby. You want to know what kind of problem your car may have and how much it may cost you to fix it. You: ……………………………………………………………………………………………. The mechanic ……………………………………………………………………………….… You are driving your car at high speed. Suddenly, a police officer stops you to ask about why you are driving so fast and to give you a ticket. The police officer: ……………………………………………………………………………. You: ……………………………………………………………………………………………. You work as an engineer in a company. It is mandatory that all employees wear a suit while working. Unfortunately, you forgot to wear a suit today and your boss is angry with you. Your boss: …………………………………………………………………………………….. You: ……………………………………………………………………………………………. You are a prominent lawyer in your city and want to defend your client whom you believe that [sic] he is not a criminal. The attorney general talks too much and does not allow you to introduce and defend your client. After some time, the attorney general tells [sic] you what evidence you have t [sic] defend your client. Attorney general: ……………………………………………………………………………... You: …………………………………………………………………………………………….

These situations are unfamiliar, and the informant must play roles that may be distant from her own experience, scrolling through 21 situations and quickly moving from the role of speaker to that of recipient who responds in turn. To face this problem, Nguyen and Ho (2013: 707), for example, in their roleplay instructions include this check on the participant: Question 1 : Can you imagine yourself in this situation? Circle the score that best fits you. 1

2

3

4

5

Definitely NO

Definitely YES

Question 2 : How much pressure do you think your request might exert on your friend to say  Yes Circle the score that best fits you. 1 Not at all

2

3

4

5

Very much

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Now start your role - play in Vietnamese. The researcher will be your flatmate.

Bataller (2013), on the other hand, chooses common situations, in which the participant is herself and relates to a real interlocutor. Among other things, the author wishes to study the mitigating devices used in service encounter interactions. She records a role-play that is later compared with audio recordings of real-life interactions. The participant receives an instruction, as in this example (Bataller 2013: 115): Estás en una cafetería cerca de la universidad porque quieres beber algo (agua, una Cocacola, un zumo, un café…). Vas a la barra y le pides algo para beber a la camarera, a la cual no conoces de nada (Translation by Bataller (2013): You are in a cafeteria close to the campus because you want to get a drink (water, a Coke, some juice, coffee…). You go up to the counter and order something to drink from the person behind the counter. You do not know her)

The subjects are Peninsular-Spanish university students in Valencia (Spain—EU), and they must enter an empty room at the university which is to be considered an imaginary bar. They interact with a 31-year-old Spanish female performing the role of the bartender. This real interlocutor enacts a dynamic which is supposedly very different from that in Mirzaei Jegarlooei & Allami (2018), both in terms of realism and determination of variables. However, the study leads us to us reflect on whether the data would have varied if the bartender had been played for example by a 60-year-old man and not a young girl. Fant et al. (2011) use role playing to compare native Chileans in interaction with both native monolingual Swedes who immigrated to Chile more than five years earlier (observed group) and native Chileans (control group). They study the socio-cultural competence (in particular issues of politeness) that is activated in the situation in which the participant asks the boss for two-days leave from work. The leave is for an important and sudden family reason that unfortunately coincides with a company meeting in which the participant’s presence is vital. The roleplay takes place through a telephone call in Spanish between a boss (played by a native Chilean contracted for the part) and an employee (played by the respondent). This example is based on an extreme scenario in order to stimulate the contribution of the participants, who are nevertheless aware that they are in a situation, however difficult it may be, without any real consequences. For a similar technique, see also, for example, Platz (2014): the scenario involves giving advice to a pregnant friend who has strong suspicions that her husband has been cheating on her for 4 years! In Fant et al. (2011) it should be emphasized that the format of the phone call allows for roleplay with distant participants, thus saving the verisimilitude of the scenario. It is also interesting to reflect on the role of the contracted “actor" in order to evaluate if she is able to give the same inputs and feedbacks in terms of quantity and time to different participantsinterlocutors: for example, the more roleplays she participates in, the more experience the actor gains in terms of response, making the interaction increasingly difficult for later interlocutors, who instead face the exercise for the first time. In this case, however, the congruence of the scenario is not affected, because a boss is usually

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experienced in denials or concessions of this kind. In addition, it is interesting to see how the native boss-actor reacts to input from non-native participants who do not necessarily follow her own cultural patterns. Félix-Brasdefer (2010b) adopts a design similar to Fant et al. (2011) to study the regional variation of Mexican Spanish and Costa Rican Spanish in the realization of the speech act of request with different degrees of power and distance. We mention this study because it gives an example of detailed role-play instructions, which highlight how important it is that the participants memorize all the elements of the pragmatically complex scenario presented to them in order not to depart from it. 1. A student asks her professor for an extension on a final paper (Paper: +Power, +Distance) La calificación final para tu clase de (una de tus clases en la universidad) es un trabajo de investigación. Estás muy contenta porque prefieres escribir un trabajo final en vez de matarte estudiando para el examen final. Además, el tema del proyecto es de bastante interés para ti. Desafortunadamente otros dos profesores tuyos te han dado examenes para hacerse en casa y tu tiempo se agota. Te das cuenta de que la única forma de poder terminar los dos exámenes a tiempo es descuidando el trabajo final. Si pudieras tener el fin de semana para juntar todo lo que has investigado, sería perfecto y entregaríasas el trabajo dos días después de la fecha de entrega. El problema es que la profesora especificó desde el comienzo del semestre que no aceptaría ningún trabajo tarde, pero a pesar de esto tú decides hacer el intento y preguntarle. La relación entre tú y tu profesora es académica y sólo hablas con ella para asuntos relacionados a la clase. Tú has sido buena estudiante y decides hablar con tu profesora sobre esta situación. ¿Qué le dices? (Félix-Brasdefer 2010b: 3007)

García (2016) also chooses role playing to control variables through the variation of an element of the scenario (e.g. power, distance, etc.). The author is interested in the speech act of expressing gratitude in a rapport management approach, and she clarifies the instructions for the interlocutors according to two different points of view, for example (García, 2016: 28–29): Interlocutor A: Ud. fue al banco a retirar dinero para su viaje al extranjero. Cuando llega a casa se da cuenta que no tiene su billetera con todos sus documentos personales y su dinero. Ud. está desesperado(a). En ese momento suena el timbre de la casa y Ud. ve a un(a) extraño(a) a la puerta. Abre la puerta y reacciona a lo que él/ella le dice. (Translation by García, 2016) ‘You went to the bank to withdraw some money for a trip abroad you were going to make. When you get home you realize you don’t have your wallet with all your personal documents or your money. You are very upset. At that very minute, the doorbell rings and you see someone you don’t know at the door. You open the door and react to what he/she says.’ Interlocutor B: Ud. estaba en el banco esta mañana y encontró una billetera en el piso con mucho dinero y papeles personales (identificación personal, brevete, etc.). Ud. decide ir a la casa del/de la dueña de la billetera y regresarla con todo su contenido. (Translation by García, 2016) ‘You were at the bank this morning and found a wallet with a lot of money and personal papers (ID, driving license, etc.) on the floor. You decide to go to the owner’s house and return it with all its contents.’

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García (2016) also gives some examples of recorded and transcribed interactions, which demonstrate that open roleplays admit many variations: in García’s study, the reactions of the interlocutors A vary from gratitude to the suspicion that money has been embezzled. Similarly, Siebold (2012) uses natural roleplays presenting ordinary situations where the interactants impersonate themselves. In her case, however, the analysis is contrastive: data are collected through roleplays between native Spanish speakers and native German speakers for the purpose of a contrastive study of expressions of thanks in the frame of politeness. Like many studies of this kind, data are pragmalinguistically analysed with the aim of tracing them back to structures that the researcher considers functionally comparable in the two languages (i.e. the speech act’s frequency, internal structure of the speech act, discourse organization, and syntactic and lexical intensifiers). Tran (2006) uses a naturalized roleplay to study complimentary responses and demonstrates that the data collected resemble real-life speech. The author details the instructions for the two interactants in a manner similar to García (2016), but Tran introduces into the roleplay some distracting actions not directly related to the focus of the research. In this way, the interactant does not know and cannot guess the speech act under examination. In addition, one of the two interlocutors is defined as the “conductor” because she gives a direction to the communicative exchange. Tran (2006: 6) points out that: “[as] interaction proceeds and when the informant is absorbed in the given tasks, the role-play conductor will lead the conversation to the point when the informant produces the communicative act in focus spontaneously without being aware that the data they produce in these instances is the focus of research”. We present an example of the instructions the conductor receives, in a scenario where the focus is the speech act of responding to a compliment (Tran, 2006: 23): About a week after that situation, you invited this new classmate/colleague to a dinner party of classmates/colleagues at your house. Today is the day of the party. Now you are greeting him/her at the door. You two will talk while you lead him/her to the living room. The social talk should include but is not limited to the following points (See the card for role-play conductors below). In the card for the role-play conductors: • (When being asked) Please assure him/her that he/she has parked in the right place. • Please respond to his/her question expressing concern about your health (which is asked because he/she did not see you at the departmental seminar a few days ago and they said you were not feeling well). • When it is most natural during the talk, compliment him/her on: — his/her appearance that day — his/her clothing (e.g. her dress or his tie) Please make the conversation as natural as possible. Speak as you would in real life. It is very important that you compliment naturally and make your compliments a part of the normal social talk. Do not make it obvious that the compliments are among the tasks listed in the card for you.

Instructions evidently direct the interaction to a great extent and do not leave room for variations, as in García (2016). However, Tran (2006) points out that conductors

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can tune the conversation and vary its course with the goal of building up a situation from which the act can emerge naturally. Finally, we can mention Ohashi (2010) as an example of how roleplay is used to capture verbal and nonverbal data. The author studies the act of thanking in Japanese and chooses the roleplay to deepen the conversational organization of the bowing gesture in thanking and responding to gratitude. In this case, the roleplays are video-recorded and transcribed, and make it possible to freeze sensory data that in real contexts might escape the attention due to the instantaneous nature of the communicative event.

References Bataller, R. (2013). Role-plays vs. natural data: Asking for a drink at a cafeteria in Peninsular Spanish. Íkala Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 18(2), 111–126. Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. Peter Lang. Fant, L., Forsberg, F., & Olave Rosco, C. (2011). Cómo pedirle dos días de permiso al jefe: El alineamiento pragmático de usuarios avanzados de EL2 en diálogos simétricos. In L. Fant, & A. M. Harvey (Eds.), El diálogo oral en el mundo hispanohablante: Estudios teóricos y aplicados (pp. 217–249). Veuvert Iberoamericana. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2010b). Intra-lingual pragmatic variation in Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica: A focus on regional differences in female requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2992–3011. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2018). Role plays. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 305–331). Mouton De Gruyter. García, C. (2016). Peruvian Spanish speakers’ cultural preferences in expressing gratitude. Pragmatics, 26(1), 21–49. Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (2018). Psycholinguistic production tasks. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 281–303). Mouton De Gruyter. Jucker, A. (2009). Speech and research between armchair, field and laboratory. The case of compliments. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(8), 1611–1635. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). Continuum. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Mirzaei Jegarlooei, S. H., & Allami H. (2018). (Im)politeness strategies and use of discourse markers. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 5, 1–24. Nguyen, T. T. M., & Ho, G. A. L. (2013). Requests and politeness in Vietnamese as a native language. Pragmatics, 23(4), 685–714. Ohashi, J. (2010). Balancing obligations: Bowing and linguistic feature in thanking in Japanese. Journal of Politeness Research, 6, 183–214. Platz, R. (2014). Giving advice in Nicaragua and Panama. Lodz Papers of Pragmatics, 10(1), 89–116. Ruytenbeek, N. (2020). Do indirect requests communicate politeness? An experimental study of conventionalized indirect request in French email communication. Journal of Politeness Research, 16(1), 111–142. Siebold, K. (2012). Implicit and explicit thanking in Spanish and German. In L. Ruiz de Zarobe & Y. Ruiz de Zarobe (Eds.), Speech acts and politeness across languages and cultures (pp. 155–172). Peter Lang. Tran, G. Q. (2006). The naturalized role-play: An innovative methodology in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research. Reflections on English Language Teaching, 5(2), 1–24.

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Turnbull, W. (2006). An appraisal of pragmatic elicitation techniques for the social psychological study of talk: The case of request refusals. Pragmatics, 11(1), 31–61.

Chapter 14

Questionnaires

Data collection in politeness research tries not only to capture data on behaviour or language production, but also tries to explore the reason why interlocutors speak in a certain way. As we will see in this chapter, questionnaires are essentially tools for asking people questions, hence they are useful for investigating the reactions or the opinions of informants. In politeness studies, the questionnaire is frequently used, especially in combination with other techniques. It is a typical tool for triangulation, data completion and mixed methodologies. The types of questionnaires range from very closed (i.e. tests) to very open (i.e. a sort of interview to explore opinions, ideas, and evaluations). The most controlled questionnaires close the possible answers, i.e. they present limited options to choose from. They are useful for surveys on the basis of predefined categories, therefore they are adequate for quantitative analysis. These controlled formats should be triangulated with interviews or thinking aloud, because it has been observed that frequently the closed answer is inconsistent with the free comment. Instead, the less structured questionnaires are more open, so are more used for qualitative analysis to study the informants’ politeness perceptions, evaluations, and metapragmatic comments. They retrieve rich and articulated information, although this depends on the expressive capacity of the respondent. These more open formats triangulate profitably with more controlled tools, such as a discourse completion tests (DCT). The questionnaire is also successful because it is easy to distribute to informants in written form. In addition, the closed formats are more convenient for informants than productive tasks (such as role playing, for example), because they offer constrained, somewhat more passive options that are preferred by those informants struggling to determine what to write (or how to write the minimum necessary). Closed questionnaire data are also very quick to encode and analyse: they collect a lot of data in a short time and, if the questionnaire is highly structured, the data are also directly comparable. In this case, the options of the closed questionnaire are predetermined by the analyst, and for this purpose a pilot open questionnaire is administered previously to guide the analyst in formulating the questions and options, and defining their order and compilation time. In order to check if it is reliable, some researchers administer © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_14

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the pilot pre-test twice within the space of a few days: if the subjects answer the same way as they did the first time, the questionnaire is considered reliable (Kasper, 2000). The closed questionnaire can present the questions in different formats, mainly, closed-answer questions with multiple choices, with alternatives to be ordered or with a degree of agreement to be expressed on a scale. To anticipate some examples that will be reported at the end of the chapter, there are: rating tasks involving paired comparison of categories and a consequent rating assignment, multiple choice questionnaires requiring the selection of a choice out of a predefined set of options, and scales requiring the subject to order categories on a scale (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Some types use a stimulus that supports the question, such as thematic apperception tests in which a vignette is observed, or comprehension tasks for specific hypothesis testing. In some cases, questionnaires are combined with eye-tracking systems to track the focus and timing of attention on the input to be assessed during the task (Veenstra & Katsos, 2018). In fact, the most closed questionnaires appear very similar to tests and therefore can be similar to various instruments, such as: test of knowledge and skills measurement (e.g. to verify the achievement of learning or linguistic and communicative competence), sociometric tests (to collect data to reconstruct a system of relationships, behaviours, opinions and attitudes of the subjects in a sociogram) and cognitive, attitudinal and personality tests (which aim to detect cognitive skills, attitudes, personality traits in comparison with a reference group) (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Trinchero, 2002). Many of these tests are rating tasks and use a Likert scale which is considered appropriate for quantitatively measuring opinions and attitudes, thus in politeness they are useful for assessment of appropriateness or to give relative values to some variables. The Likert scale with even numbers (0–2–4–6) is preferred when the researcher needs answers that are, even minimally, polarized, because it avoids the presence of an intermediate neutral answer that the informant can select as a compromise (such as the middle “3”: 1–2–3–4–5). For the construction of the scale, sociometric and psychometric principles are used. First, a construct is selected and dimensions are identified (e.g. imposition of the speech act of apologizing => type of offence, obligation to apologize, etc.). Then the dimension is operationalized with at least two indicators (e.g. type of offence => entity of the damage, level of anger, etc.); and, finally, each indicator is given in a scale of x levels where the respondent must express an evaluation (Kasper, 2000; Doquin de Saint Preux, 2011). A type of questionnaire of particular interest in politeness research is the perception questionnaire, which requires subjects to make a judgment on a written or an audio/video input representative of a natural situation. For example, the subject must rank an input in terms of agreement or disagreement, or must indicate a degree of politeness, or the distance perceived in an input situation (Hill et al., 1986). The aim is to investigate how people interpret language pragmatically. Similar types of questionnaire are comprehension tasks and judgment tasks; the former is focused on how the subject understands an input in a prefabricated scenario (e.g. how she interprets an implicit), the latter on the subject’s expression of a judgement (e.g.

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a judgement of politeness, appropriateness, perception of power, distance, imposition, etc.). Typically, the assessment required is binary: correct/not correct, acceptable/not acceptable, adequate/not adequate, appropriate/not appropriate, polite/not polite, etc. According to Veenstra and Katsos (2018), the most appropriate formats are those that do not force binary judgment, but introduce a more nuanced space, through intermediate options, whether they are expressed in degrees or scores or magnitude scales (i.e. without upper and lower limits, where the respondent decides the number of distinctions she thinks necessary). For example, Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei (1998), who worked on the recognition of pragmatic errors by non-native learners, used video recordings of situations that presented this type of error, asking informants through a 6-point Likert scale if the situation seemed problematic to them and if the problematic statement seemed appropriate or not. There are also the ranking tasks and scale tasks to obtain a comparison judgment. For example, two or more variants of a speech act are proposed and, in the case of ranking, the informant must report which one she considers more, or less, polite; in the case of scaling, she is asked to create a graduated scale. In some cases the respondents are asked to imagine a specific context, in others a context is offered, and in others they are asked to ignore any element of the context. In this case as well, the researcher deals with metapragmatic judgements; effectively they are not direct indexes of the perception of the act, but they detect the adherence of the subject to the typical patterns of her acculturation (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). The difficulty of these tools is to make informants understand exactly what they have to assess, to do which prior training may be necessary. As this is a metalinguistic judgment, it has two levels of complexity: the understanding of the pragmatic meaning (i.e. whether or not the respondent perceives the phenomenon under scrutiny) and the pragmatic judgment that the informant consequently forms (i.e. after identifying the phenomenon the respondent can then decide if it is pragmatically acceptable or tolerable or not). In some variants, therefore, attempts are made to verify the understanding without a metalinguistic phase, e.g. by requiring the respondent to take action. Indeed, the problem is also of a semantic nature: if, for example, the researcher wants to study the perceived distance, she has to be sure that the informants know what this is about, where to identify it and what the parameters of distance are. In addition, the researcher must be sure that they know what she means by “distance” and how it is connoted in the respondents’ mother tongue. A second order of criticality is that these tools are dependent on the description of the scenario. As for politeness, a judgment is closely linked to the context and one cannot make a judgment on a speech act with little context, hence the way the scenario is built to represent a context becomes a dominant variable. However, Leech (2014) rejects this point and argues that if the study is pragmalinguistic (i.e. code-centred), contextualization is not essential. For example, Leech argues that it is trivial for a native speaker to make a judgment of comparative politeness between the following sentences, even without context: “Just hold the line, will you?” ➜ “Could you possibly hold the line for a minute?” ➜ “Would you hold the line a minute?”

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For Leech (2014) this is a context-invariant politeness that does not pose problems to the judgment of the native speaker, despite the lack of contextualization. A similar type of questionnaire is the attitudinal questionnaire, which has been widely used in cross-cultural sociological studies. The theme of the questionnaire is aptitude, so it is particularly difficult to translate the questionnaire in the case of comparative studies, and, in addition, there are cross-cultural differences in response style, as well as differences in the interpretation of scale (for example, some cultures tend to polarize responses) (Taras & Steel, 2009). For example, Le Pair (1996) notes that in studies comparing the politeness of non-native learners with natives, it is observed that non-native learners tend to be more polite, not necessarily because of their culture of origin, but probably because of the perceived status of the foreign learner. We can also mention the social habits tests, which are questionnaires with questions about the social behaviour of respondents. They collect metapragmatic information, since the answer does not correspond to a real-life event but reports shared social behaviours based on beliefs, values, and attitudes. Social habits tests thus report an abstract perception of adequacy and configure prototype models that the researcher can draw on for the formulation of hypotheses or the interpretation of natural data. As the different formats demonstrate, the questionnaires are very versatile, in fact, they allow the researcher to collect personal data, behaviours, linguistic uses, but also opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and evaluations. In general, questionnaires are a procedure that make it possible to approach the thoughts of the informants, which are intangible by nature. The peculiarity of the questionnaire is that it is written and filled in by the subjects themselves, so it is easy to administer. This makes it very popular, despite a number of drawbacks and limitations that should not be underestimated (Dörnyei, 2007; Doquin de Saint Preux, 2011). Among the most important drawbacks the following can be pointed out: ● If the questionnaire is complex or lengthy, respondents will tend to give hasty or incomplete answers. The consequence is that the necessary simplicity of a questionnaire limits the depth of an investigation. ● Informants may misinterpret the questions: the researcher is unable to check whether the participants actually understood the questions. ● If the questionnaire is not completed in the researcher’s presence, she does not have the certainty of the subject’s identity. ● Usually, the informants are not particularly worried about the outcome of the investigation so that there is a real possibility they will not respond truthfully. ● Informants tend to generalize. ● Informants tend to answer with what they think is expected of them. This is an acquiescence effect, i.e. the tendency to give positive answers regardless of the content of the question. It is a way of not disappointing the researcher, which occurs especially in some cultures (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005: 81). Undoubtedly questionnaires are difficult to prepare, because they must be synthetic and the order of the questions should prevent them from biasing one another,

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especially if the format of the questionnaire allows the subject to read all the questions before answering. In general, a heterogeneous sequence of concrete/abstract or general/particular questions should be avoided and the questions should be focused, short and clear, in a language appropriate to the respondents, with a simple grammatical structure (e.g. avoiding double negations). Care should be taken with sensitive topics (i.e. avoiding mentioning discredited concepts or suggesting socially unacceptable opinions), and not making the subject uncomfortable in the face of unknown or embarrassing topics. Double questions should be avoided (e.g. asking two questions in a single formulation or involving a linguistic and metalinguistic response at the same time), as well as those questions that influence the answer or are tendentious (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Trinchero, 2002). Finally, we must mention the problem of the influence of the researcher, because the questionnaire emerges from the culture of those who draft it and therefore in crosscultural surveys problems of semantic or pragmatic mismatch of the categories under analysis are frequent. As Hofstede and Hofstede (2005) point out, the construction of a questionnaire always runs the risk of hidden ethnocentrism that leads to trivial results. The questionnaire, with its versatility of forms, is widely used in politeness research and the examples abound. We have chosen some studies published over the last decade and extract those aspects that are of interest in this descriptive section. We are not particularly interested in the overall soundness of a study, but in the explicit description of its methodology. The combination of an open and a closed questionnaire (tests) is chosen by Jang (2012) in a study of the momentary pronominal change of tú/vos (pronombres de solidaridad) and usted (pronombre de distanciamiento) in the family relationships of university speakers from Medellín (Colombia) in the context of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) negative politeness. Initially, 201 informants were given an open questionnaire with only one question (Jang, 2012: 180): ¿Hay algunas situaciones en que usted trate de usted a la persona a quien suele tratar de tú o vos como padre, madre, hermanos, novio/novia o amigos?

The purpose was to obtain the items for the actual research questionnaire, which on the other hand was closed. Following the responses obtained in the preparatory phase, the following format was presented to 1231 respondents (Jang, 2012: 181): ¿En las siguientes situaciones trata de usted temporalmente a una persona a quien suele tratarla de vos o de tú como su familia, novio(a) o amigos? Cuando está enojado(a) Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__ Cuando está serio Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__ Cuando está bromeando Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__ Cuando pide que le preste 100 pesos para hacer una llamada Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__

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14 Questionnaires Cuando pide que le preste 5 millones de pesos Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__ Cuando solicita que le financie un doctorado en E.E.U.U. Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__ Cuando pregunta la hora Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__ Cuando pregunta si le va a ayudar con un asunto académico Siempre__ A veces__ Nunca__

In Pablos-Ortega (2010), another example is offered that combines an open response with closed responses on a graduation of perception expressed on a 5-option Likert scale. The author compares the perception of the absence of the speech act of thanking in Spanish, American and British English, in the framework of Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness. Data are analysed by contrasting nationality, gender and the reason for thanks. He prepared the questionnaire for 300 native speakers of the three languages, selecting 12 scenarios. The scenarios are based on the dialogues found in the textbooks used for teaching and learning Spanish as a foreign language, omitting the original thanking formula. The author takes into consideration the relationship between the interlocutors, the type of reason and the action for which the thanking takes place. The questionnaire was written in English (for American and British participants) and in Spanish (for Spanish participants). Here are a few examples of verbal exchange found in the textbooks that contextualize the scenario with the missing thanking formula (Pablos-Ortega 2010: 165–170): Scenario 1. At a metro station: a.

Excuse me, how do I get to Metropolitano?

b.

Well, you have to take line 4 towards Parque de Santa María until Avenida de América. There you need to change to line 6, the Circular one, and I think there are four or five stations to Metropolitano.

a.

O.K.

Scenario 7. After class at the University: a.

Are you coming for a drink?

b.

No, I can’t. I’ve got a job interview.

a.

Good luck!

b.

Enjoy your drink!

Scenario 11. A conversation with a foreign student: a.

How long have you been in Spain?

b.

Six months

a.

Really? You speak Spanish very well!

b.

I started learning Spanish two years ago, in my country.

After reading the dialogues, participants have to communicate their attitude towards the absence of the thanking formula, by answering this questionnaire (Pablos-Ortega 2010: 165–170):

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Do you think that person [A/]B’s final reply is appropriate? NO ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ YES If not, what do you think s/he should have said?___________________________ How likely do you think this conversation would have been in the United States? not likely ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ very likely and in Spain? not likely ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ very likely If person [A/]B was American, s/he would have been: impolite ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ polite thoughtless ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ thoughtful If person [A/]B was Spanish, s/he would have been: impolite ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ polite thoughtless ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ thoughtful How sure are you about your own answers? NO ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ YES (American version of the questionnaire)

These items investigate the speaker’s perceptions both with an open-ended question (If not, what do you think s/he should have said?), and with a judgment between two poles (positive and negative aspects) graded from 1 to 5 on the Likert scale. Pablos-Ortega (2010) notes that native Spanish speakers offered many alternatives to the open-ended response (i.e. formulas other than thanking) and thus observes that the situations included in the textbooks do not reflect Spanish socio-cultural reality. It is worth noting that the Likert scale leaves it up to the respondent to grade categories that may be semantically difficult to define. An alternative is to make the grading explicit: for example, Rodríguez Andrade (2019: 184) specifies the frequency of an event through never, rarely, sometimes, usually, always. Fukushima (2013) also uses a perception questionnaire. The author studies the evaluation of (im)politeness in cross-cultural (Japanese and American) and crossgenerational comparisons. In particular, Fukushima observes how a hearer perceives non-linguistic attentiveness (kikubari) in the context of politeness, i.e. a pre-emptive response to a beneficiary need which takes the form of offering. 298 respondents compiled a questionnaire with six situations varying in degree of familiarity, which were identified previously through field notes on everyday-life situations. The following scenarios are submitted to the participants in their native language (the translation is by Fukushima) (Fukushima, 2013: 283–284): Situation 1 You get on a train. You carry a lot of baggage. There are many standing passengers, but there is a vacancy in a priority seat in the same car. Your acquaintance, A, is sitting in a train, reading a book. A does not have any heavy baggage. A offered you a seat. How would you evaluate that? Situation 2 You and your close friend (colleague), B, have gone for lunch in the canteen (at a restaurant near the company). You have carelessly left your wallet at home. You live near the campus (the company). B paid for your lunch. How would you evaluate that?

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14 Questionnaires Situation 3 You are looking for a book, Y, for your thesis (project). C, your seminar friend (colleague), is in a big city and has stopped at a big bookstore, X. C happens to find a book, Y. It costs $50. The book, Y, is not available at local bookstores. C bought you a book, Y. How would you evaluate that? Situation 4 You have to suddenly take a five-day leave, because of a funeral service. According to the work schedule, your colleague at a part-time job (company), D, does not work on the days of your leave. You found that D would work for you. How would you evaluate that? Situation 5 You are a professor at the university (a section chief in a company). There were presentations from every group in the class (every project group). There has been a huge amount of papers submitted to you from every group. One of your students (subordinates) helped you carry the papers to your office. How would you evaluate that? Situation 6 When you are walking in a train station, it seemed that you have dropped your rail pass. Someone has handed you the rail pass. How would you evaluate that?

For these situations, the participants were asked to evaluate attentiveness on this five-point Likert scale: they appreciate the attentiveness very much 1 2 3 4 5 they do not appreciate the attentiveness at all

Then respondents are asked to select a reason from (1)

I needed that. Or that was helpful

(2)

I felt it as a burden. Or it was imposing

(3)

Other.

Finally, they are asked to evaluate the degree of imposition of attentiveness on a five-point Likert scale (1 = a small imposition/5 = a big imposition). Interestingly, Fukushima (2013) combines the questionnaire with an interview in which he asks the same perception questions about the same situations, with oral (and recorded) open-ended responses. Do the results of the two techniques bring coincidental data? We defer to Fukushima’s reading (2013). In this regard, we suggest two interesting examples for comparison because they both analyse scalar implications with respect to politeness via a 5-point Likert scale, that is, they both ask the participants a “How likely…” question. For example, on the discourse marker well in the following example (Bonnefon et al., 2014: 5): Yesterday, you pitched an idea to a group of five persons. Today, you ask Bob (who was in the group) what people thought of your idea. Bob replies: “Well, some people hated your idea.” How likely is it that everyone in the room hated your idea?

And regarding good (Terkourafi et al., 2020: 21):

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Paul is playing guitar in a competition with a notoriously strict panel of judges. After Paul plays his song, the first judge is silent for a while and then mutters, “You have a good sense of rhythm.” How likely is it the judge means that Paul has an excellent sense of rhythm?

The reader can refer to the two studies to have an example of how the scale requires an accurate design of the scenarios and administration to the participants: in itself a scale seems simple, but everything depends on the experimental variation of the scenarios and its mode of administration. Takimoto (2012) tests the effect of two treatments in teaching English to Japanese university students: the grammatical learning of downgraders in the speech act of asking and the pragmatic competence in their real use. In addition to a Discourse Completion Test, Takimoto makes use of a written acceptability judgment test in which the participants have to rate on an 11-point scale. According to the author, a large scale should encourage greater accuracy in the respondents. Takimoto also submits the rating to the judgment of 10 native English speakers in order to have a term of reference that will be used in the statistical phase to verify that there is consistent agreement among them. Thus, the Japanese participants who rated in accordance with the acceptability of native English speakers scored five points, the others scored no points. Here is an example of an item of the written acceptability judgment test (Takimoto, 2012: 82): You overslept and missed the final exam for Professor Jackson’s course. You are not so familiar with Professor Jackson, and you know that Professor Jackson has to hand in students’ grades in a few days and does not like to offer students a make-up exam. However, you need to pass the final exam to graduate, and you have decided to go and ask Professor Jackson to give you a make-up exam. What would you ask Professor Jackson? (based on Takahashi 2001) a: I was wondering if it would be possible for me to have a make-up exam. not appropriate at all 0—1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10 completely appropriate b: I want you to give me a make-up exam. not appropriate at all 0—1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10 completely appropriate c: Could you possibly give me a make-up exam? not appropriate at all 0—1—2—3—4—5—6—7—8—9—10 completely appropriate

Fernández García and Aguayo Cruz (2019) study cultural and situational variation of the speech act of disagreement in the framework of politeness. The method they choose inherits the nature of a Discourse Completion Test; however, they introduce a direct relationship between two different scenarios to highlight the variable that is being manipulated (in this case, social distance). An example follows in which the two questions that create the comparison are reproduced (Fernández García & Aguayo Cruz, 2019: 13): Imagina la siguiente situación. Te encuentras charlando animadamente, en un ambiente distendido y de confianza, con un/a amigo/a (compañero/a de trabajo, vecino/a, etc.). Estáis en casa o en un restaurante. Hablando sobre algún asunto de actualidad que te interesa mucho, tu amigo/a expresa alguna opinión con la que no estás en absoluto de acuerdo. ¿Cómo reaccionarías? Intenta reproducir aquí cuáles podrían ser tus palabras.

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14 Questionnaires Imagina ahora que te ocurre algo parecido (no estás en absoluto de acuerdo con lo dicho por tu interlocutor), pero en la consulta del médico, con el que no tienes ninguna especial relación de confianza. ¿Qué dirías?

Significantly, their 240 native Spanish and English-speaking participants responded in different ways, either directly or indirectly, to explain what their reaction would be, although the instructions asked them, as in a DCT, to report the exact words the respondent would use. We report three examples of this variety of participant output (Fernández García & Aguayo Cruz, 2019: 14, 17, 21): That’s interesting. I’m not sure I agree. What makes you think that? I would try to understand where they got their opinion from and may agree to disagree with them Intentaría no hacerle la contra si veo que no domino el tema, pero si lo conozco pues le diría que eso no es así, que se informe major Usted no se moleste, pero me gustaría tener una segunda opinión sobre mi diagnóstico. No es cuestión de desconfianza hacia usted, sino que me gustaría estar seguro del diagnóstico y tratamiento que usted me indica

The authors extract analytical categories from the responses qualitatively, for a subsequent phase of quantitative analysis. It is interesting to evaluate how categories might be defined from the heterogeneous responses that emerge from the open-ended questionnaires: in this study, for example, the first difficulty is to define whether or not the respondent expresses disagreement (which is precisely the speech act under investigation) (Fernández García & Aguayo Cruz, 2019: 15). Barros García and Terkourafi (2014)—and Bravo (2019)—also use a mix of openended and closed-ended questions, which implies a previous work of categorization for the subsequent analysis. Specifically, Barros García and Terkourafi (2014) test a cultural positioning hypothesis on the politeness rapprochement-distancing axis. Their 66 informants are native speakers of Spanish from Spain, non-native speakers of Spanish from the United States, and English native speakers from United States. They use this written questionnaire administered in the participant’s native language (Barros García & Terkourafi 2014: 32–33): (1)

How would you describe a polite speaker?

(2)

In general, do you think Spanish speakers are less or more polite than English speakers (when speaking their own languages)? Why?

(3)

Who do you think it is important to be polite with? Very important Your family Your friends Your professors A stranger A shop-assistant

Important

Not important

Why

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When you try to be polite with the people above (question #3), what do you do?

Your family Your friends Your professors A stranger A shop-assistant

(5)

When talking with an English-speaking friend in English, what do you think is important? Mark the appropriate cell from the table Very important Important Not important That he/she doesn’t meddle in your personal life That he/she waits until you finish your turn to start talking That he/she uses mitigation and indirectness. For example: Could you close the door, please? Versus Close the door That he/she shows you closeness, intimacy That he/she makes positive comments about you (your virtues, your belongings, your actions, etc.).For example: You are very smart, I love your bag, You did a great job, etc That he/she invites you to make plans together, such as having a coffee, shopping, going out, etc

(6)

When talking with a Spanish-speaking friend in Spanish, what do you think is important? Mark the appropriate cell from the table. [same table as above]

(7)

If you made any changes to your answers from question #5 to question #6, why do you think that is?

As can be seen from the example, the questions are: general questions (similar to an interview) (1, 4 and 7), ranking questions (2) and judgment questions (5, 6). As a result, they will obtain heterogeneous data and the hard work of the researcher is to semantically sift through the responses and extrapolate from them a limited number of symmetrical categories that are comparable between two cultures (e.g. consideration, engagement with the interaction, manners or courtesy, appropriateness, niceness, confianza). We now report an example of ranking scales. Kyong-Ae (2011) aims to “[…] challenge the widely accepted notion that politeness is a socio-cultural-linguistic universal, focusing on indirectness and politeness in English, Hebrew and Korean

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requests” (Kyong-Ae, 2011: 386). The study reaches these three conclusions: indirectness does not correlate with politeness in Korean but may imply politeness in Hebrew and English; politeness is perceived differently cross-culturally; and the indirectness scales have cross-cultural validity (Kyong-Ae, 2011: 396). She prepares her ranking scale using a Discourse Completion Task with 95 participants to isolate objective categories adequate for cross-cultural politeness studies. Through the DCT, she identifies different request strategies and thus obtains five different situations: a student asks his or her roommate to clean up the mess in the kitchen, a student asks another student to lend him or her some lecture notes, a student asks a neighbour for a ride home, a policeman asks a driver to move his or her car, a professor asks a student to present his or her paper a week earlier than scheduled (Kyong-Ae, 2011: 392). From the incomplete discourse sequences of the DCT, she extracts nine request patterns for the five situations, to which the author adds “a few appropriate responses composed by the researcher in cases where the test did not have suitable data for a given strategy type” (Kyong-Ae, 2011: 392). The nine request patterns are as follows (Kyong-Ae, 2011: 393—situation 1) and are presented to the respondent without internal and external modifications because they would be possible competitors of indirectness (e.g. hedges, intensifiers, etc.): MD Bueok cheongso hae. Clean up the kitchen. P Bueok cheongso but’ak hae. I ask you to clean up the kitchen. HP Bueok cheongso but’akhaedo doilkka? Would it be okay to ask you to clean up the kitchen? OS Bueok cheongso haeyaman doi. You have to clean up the kitchen. WS Bueok cheongso haejumyeon johgesseo. If you do (give) me the favor of cleaning up the kitchen, I would like it. SF Bueok cheongso haneunge eottae? How about cleaning up the kitchen? QP Bueok cheongso hae jul su isseo? Can you do (give) me a favor of cleaning up the kitchen? SH Uri bueoki dwaeji uri gat’damyeon ne chemyeonedo munjega issji anheulkka? If our kitchen looks like a pigsty, isn’t there a problem losing your face, too? MH Eumsik mandeul ttae kkaekkeus. han goseseo yori hal su issge hae jugessni? Will you do (give) me a favor so that I can cook in a clean place when I cook?

The researcher obtains manipulated and standard categories that she submits to 40 new participants who are asked to rate the request on a scale of indirectness, and to 41 other new participants who are asked to rate the request on a scale of politeness. The two scales were presented in three languages (Korean, Hebrew and English) with a description of the situations and the request to be evaluated in random order. The scale of indirectness is a degree of nine levels from the most indirect (1) to most direct (9), the same for the scale of politeness. The analysis of the data is statistical and is related to how the subjects perceive and rate the manipulated strategies on the described scenario (which is not how participants would actually make a request, it goes without saying). In eliciting data of this type, some of the methodological issues are worth thinking about:

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● Is it better to extract the strategies with a language/culture-specific DCT or it is better to use one language and then translate the strategies to the languages in comparison? ● On a scale of 9, will the speaker be accurate in placing one strategy over another? Is a speaker actually able to indicate that two strategies are perceived to be equivalent and not graded against each other? Kumar (2017) offers another example of perception evaluation using ranking scales. The author investigates the scalar nature of conventional linguistic forms relating to politeness. Kumar concludes that speakers reach a certain agreement in the politeness ranking, judging and scaling certain linguistic structures on scenarios in where a minimum of context and no explanation of what the scholar means by "polite" and "appropriate" has been given. The respondents’ ranking choices for the structures proposed turns out to be non-random. Kumar chooses undergraduate students with a native-like competence in Hindi/Urdu and prepares the study in three phases. In the first phase, the researcher uses the Indian Language Corpora Initiative to select language structures that he considers potentially conventionalized in computer-mediated communication. The second phase is a pilot survey based entirely on ranking: respondents had to rank the utterances of phase 1 on a scale of five positions, 1 being the least polite and 5 being the most polite. Respondents had the option to rank two or more sentences equally. For stage three, the researcher decided to combine ranking with two other instruments, a double choice of sentences that the participant would use in a situation and a Discourse Completion Test to complete the sentence with the most polite form. Kumar considers the piloting ranking helpful for obtaining the informants’ metapragmatic judgments but less valid for comparing these judgments with the actual usage of the speakers. This is a concern due to the fact that the linguistic forms were selected by the researcher through a corpus and not field observation. Kumar therefore proposes a comparative ranking, though not on a scale of five (as in the pilot), but out of a pair, so that the cognitive load of the respondent is reduced. Here is an example, which Kumar (2017: 266) offers with the Hindi version (which we omit here due to font limits): In this stage you will be given 28 sets of sentences. Each set contains 2 sentences each. You are required to rank the first sentence depending on how appropriate or polite you consider it to be in the given context in relation to the other sentence. Select ‘1’ if you think it is less polite than the second one, ‘2’ if you think it is more polite and ‘0’ if you think that both of them are equally polite. Context: This sentence occurs on an official health portal where the writer is giving instructions about the post-pregnancy stages and what should be done in case some complications arise after the pregnancy. [Hindi input] sentence 1 [Hindi input] sentence 2

Nadeu and Prieto (2011) present a similar design, but the input to rank and evaluate is acoustic (and, later in the study, also audio-visual). They study the pitch range in the expression of politeness in Catalan using as input an information-seeking yes–no question (Tens hora? – Do you have the time?). They test for the presence

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of systematic cues for conveying politeness. The input question is frequent and not considered an imposition in the Catalan environment. The input is digitally manipulated to cover a gradual pitch range (increasing and decreasing with rising and falling contours) that constitutes 18 different acoustic stimuli. Informants had to rank pairs of stimuli – the pair was made up of consequent stimuli in the continuum of the range manipulation – saying which one was more polite (the option of equivalence was not contemplated). In a second step, the stimulus was presented individually and subjects were asked to rate its level of politeness/appropriateness in a specific situation on a five-point Likert scale. The same procedure was followed for a second experiment, which combined the acoustic stimulus with an image (a gloomy or smiling face) to verify the dependence of the acoustic on the prosodic cue. The same methodology of audio-visual stimulus and ranking pairs in comparison was used by Hübscher et al. (2020) to investigate how three-year-old children infer polite stance from intonation and facial cues: children took a very short test after a careful familiarization with the experimental environment and ethical precautions. Subjects had to compare two videos in which a girl performed a request and indicate which speakers she or he thought had asked more nicely. We now report some examples of surveys on social habits. Dumitrescu (2011) studies the speech act of wishing in the context of ritual politeness through a social habits questionnaire administered to 66 informants aged 17–72 who were Spanishspeaking residents of Los Angeles. The questionnaire asks for both the exact words that the informant would say on a very open scenario, as well as her expectations concerning the interlocutors. In fact, the initial instruction also indicates: “[…] mention the reaction of the person to which the words that you write are directed, if it is the case (for example, if you should thank or say something similar)”; while an end note adds: “Please add here any comment that seems to be relevant with regard to the theme of the wishes that people express in a situation or in another in your country or your culture” (Dumitrescu, 2011: 70–72). As shown in the example, it is similar to an open-ended Discourse Completion Test where participants must provide all interactions (Dumitrescu, 2011: 70–72 – Dumitrescu’s English translation): What do people in your country of origin say in the following situations? Upon meeting with some friends that have returned from a vacation After finishing eating To a person that is going to sleep Before beginning to eat Upon someone sneezing Upon someone mentioning the age of their children, parents, or other family members Upon someone mentioning a deceased member of his family Upon seeing that someone is wearing new clothes To mark the birthday of someone

Being social habits, these situations are obviously stereotypes and the request is not personal (what you say) but requires the national habit (what do people in your country of origin say).

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Other researchers conceive open-ended interviews as a test of social habits. For example, González (2019: 29) asks her informants: 1.

¿Qué es para usted la cortesía?

2.

¿Podría dar dos o tres ejemplos concretos de cortesía?

3.

¿Cree que es necesaria la cortesía en la sociedad? ¿por qué?

4.

¿Podría dar tres ejemplos concretos de descortesía?

5.

¿Hay algunas costumbres en la conversación cotidiana que considere corteses?

6.

¿Algunas que considere descorteses? Por favor explique.

Responses are then compared to contrast the perspectives of two cities, Orange City (Iowa—USA) and Bahía Blanca (Argentina). The following is the result of her semantic approach, and shows that the validity of the study is based more on semantics than on the participants’ responses (González, 2019:12): Orange City: Respect [Respeto], Kindness [Amabilidad], Being considerate [Ser considerado], Thinking of others before yourself [Considerar a los demás antes que a uno mismo], Good manners [Buenos modales], Doing or being what is “normal” within a society [Hacer y ser lo que es “normal” en la sociedad], Social norms [Normas sociales], Common manners [Modales “normales”], Respect to the rights of others [Respeto a los derechos de los demás], Social grace [Gentileza] [Translation by González]. Bahía Blanca; Amabilidad, Respeto, Buenos modales, Ser educado, Ser atento, Buen trato, Buena conducta, Ser considerado, Ser agradable, Buenos valores, Empatía, Gentileza, Virtud, Generosidad, Aceptación.

In conclusion, we mention an interesting co-constructive cascade procedure for studying social habits (Santiago Guervós, 2012a). The themes of his questionnaire are personal relationships, social conventions and ritual behaviours in daily life, which easily relate to the field of politeness (Santiago Guervós, 2012b). The author presents a questionnaire to the first informant, who passes it completed to a second informant. The second respondent completes it specifying, adding, and changing what the previous informant wrote. And so on for a sequence of 3 informants. Santiago Guervós observes that the participants tend to add something that others have not written and he also notes that they all add and no one corrects, so in fact they always confirm what the previous respondents wrote.

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References Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Dörnyei, Z. (1998). Do language learners recognize pragmatic violations? Pragmatic versus grammatical awareness in instructed L2 learning. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 233– 262. Barros García, M. J., & Terkourafi, M. (2014). First-order politeness in rapprochement and distancing cultures. Pragmatics, 24(1), 1–34 Bonnefon J.F., Dahl, E., Holtgraves, T. (2014). Some but not all dispreferred turn markers help to interpret scalar terms in polite contexts. Thinking and Reasoning, August, 1-20. Bravo, D. (2019). Los contenidos socioculturales de los actos de habla: El contexto del usuario ideal en cuestionarios de hábitos socials. Sociopragmática Cultural, 7(3), 271–296. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1978–1987). Politeness. Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press. de Pablos-Ortega, C. (2010). Attitudes of English speakers towards thanking in Spanish. Pragmatics, 20(2), 149–170. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics. Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies. Oxford University Press. Doquin de Saint Preux, A. (2011). Algunas consideraciones respecto a la metodología de investigación en sociolingüística y pragmática: Comentario al artículo de Carlos de Pablos Attitudes of English Speakears towards Thanking in Spanish. Revista Nebrija de Lingüística Aplicada 5(4). Dumitrescu, D. (2011). Aspects of Spanish pragmatics. Peter Lang. Fukushima, S. (2013). Evaluation of (im)politeness: A comparative study among Japanese students, Japanese parents and American students on evaluation of attentiveness. Pragmatics, 23(2), 275– 299. Fernández García, F., & Aguayo Cruz, M. D. (2019). Variación cultural y situacional en la gestión del desacuerdo. Pragmalingüística, 27, 10–31. González, D. (2019). Contraste en perspectivas sobre (des)cortesía entre dos comunidades cultural y lingüísticamente diferentes: el caso de Bahía Blanca y Orange City. Tonos Digital, 36. Hill, B., et al. (1986). Universals of linguistic politeness: Quantitative evidence from Japanese and American English. Journal of Pragmatics, 10, 347–371. Hofstede, G., & Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Cultures and organizations. Software of the mind. McGrawHill. Hübscher, I., Wagner, L., & Prieto, P. (2020). Three-year-olds infer polite stance from intonation and facial cues. Journal of Politeness Research, 16(1), 85–110. Jang, J. S. (2012). Cambio pronominal momentáneo en las relaciones interpersonales solidarias en los jóvenes universitarios de Medellín (Colombia). In J. Escamilla Morales & G. Henry Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 178–212). Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). Continuum. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Kumar, R. (2017). Conventionalized politeness structures: Empirical evidence from Hindi/Urdu. Journal of Politeness Research, 13(2), 243–279. Kyong-Ae, Y. (2011). Culture-specific concepts of politeness: Indirectness and politeness in English, Hebrew, and Korean requests. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8(3), 385–409. Le Pair, R. (1996). Spanish request strategies: A cross-cultural analysis from an intercultural perspective. In K. Jaszczolt, & K. Turner (Eds.), Contrastive semantics and pragmatics. Volume II. Discourse Strategies (pp. 651–670). Pergamon Press. Leech, G. (2014). The pragmatics of politeness. Oxford University Press. Márquez Reiter, R., & Placencia, M. E. (2005). Spanish pragmatics. Palgrave Macmillan. Nadeu, M., & Prieto, P. (2011). Pitch range, gestural information, and perceived politeness in Catalan. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 841–854.

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Rodríguez Andrade, I. P. (2019). Lo cortés no quita lo valiente, un estudio del uso de la cortesía en Quito y Salamanca. Normas, 9, 175–194. Santiago de Guervós, J. (2012a). Pragmática intercultural: hacia una enciclopedia endocultural para la comunicación global (I). Takushoku Language Studies, 128, 99–115. Santiago de Guervós, J. (2012b). Pragmática intercultural: hacia una enciclopedia endocultural para la comunicación global (II). Takushoku Language Studies, 128, 95–116. Takimoto, M. (2012). Assessing the effects of identical task repetition and task-type repetition on learners’ recognition and production of second language request downgraders. Intercultural Pragmatics, 9(1), 71–96. Taras, V., & Steel, P. (2009). Beyond Hofstede: Challenging the ten commandments of crosscultural research. In C. Nakata (Ed.), Beyond Hofstede: Culture frameworks for global marketing and management (Chapter 3). Macmillan. Terkourafi, M., Weissman, B., & Roy, J. (2020). Different scalar terms are affected by face differently. International Review of Pragmatics, 12, 1–43. Trinchero, R. (2002). Manuale di ricerca educativa. Franco Angeli. Veenstra, A., & Katsos, N. (2018). Assessing the comprehension of pragmatic language: Sentence judgment tasks. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 257–279). Mouton De Gruyter.

Chapter 15

Interviews

The interview is a conversation—typically oral—with an informant who is asked questions. As we will see in this chapter through various examples, the structure of the interview can be very free or with rigidly structured questions, similar to an oral questionnaire: if it is free, it lends itself to qualitative analysis, if it is completely structured, it is suitable for quantitative analysis. There is also the semi-structured variant, which meets the need to have somehow structured categories, but maintains the nature of the interview as a construction of both the researcher and the informants. Like the questionnaire, the interview is useful for collecting personal data and behaviours, but also metapragmatic data such as opinions, attitudes, knowledge, skills: as it is dialogical, compared to the questionnaire it involves a relationship with the interviewer, whose human and relational skills are therefore very important in order to overcome distrust and obtain more articulated information for in-depth surveys (Trinchero, 2002; Dörnyei, 2007; Marra & Lazzaro-Salazar, 2018). The interviewer must also know how to stimulate the conversation. The following techniques are frequently used: ● request to mention examples and experiences, ● echo reply (e.g. repeating a statement to cue the informant to specify it), ● mirror interventions (e. g. the interviewer can say: “If I understand correctly you say that [reformulation of the interviewee’s words]”), ● complementation (e. g. the interviewer adds data), ● request for clarifications, ● request for specific opinions, etc. Obviously, the interviewer must not overwhelm the interviewee or insist if she is reticent. Some interviewers use the technique of empathy (e. g. imagining themselves in the interviewee’s shoes) to have clues about what to ask for in terms of clarification; on the contrary, sympathy is not recommended, in order not to lose lucidity or objectivity. In fact, interviewing is an art because the answers depend on how the interviewer sets the question. There are different types of questions. Descriptive questions retrieve © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_15

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descriptions, hence they should always be set in a general way because a detailed or analytical structure risks conveying the researcher’s preconceptions or suggesting an answer. Then there are structural questions to reconstruct conceptual or linguistic categories and contrastive questions to confirm or invalidate a researcher’s hypothesis. Finally, there are indirect questions, where the interview is centred on one theme (e.g. project management), but questions are on another theme (e.g. evaluations of politeness) (Spencer-Oatey, 2011). In general, what we have already observed about setting and sequencing questions in the questionnaires in the previous chapter applies to interviews as well. In addition, it should be remembered that interviewing, too, is a culturally marked tool because through the type of question, the interviewer may unintentionally impose her cultural system on the interviewee (Turchetta, 2000; Wierzbicka, 2003). In this regard, Palmer (1996) recalls the ethnosemantic experience, which developed a technique for eliciting semantic data on how a culture organises and categorises its knowledge. To avoid projecting the anthropologist’s ontology onto those of the culture-language studied through culturally marked questions, for elicitation controlled questions are used that avoid, for example, naming objects or concepts. The risk of ignoring relationships or categories that a culture has whilst the researcher’s has not (or the risk of overestimating the researcher’s culture) is not completely eliminated, but an attempt is made to limit a transfer of conceptual artefacts from the questions to the respondent’s answers. The interviewee’s willingness to listen is a fundamental requirement and there must be unconditional positive acceptance of what the interviewee says, without judging it morally or legally or classifying it under a stereotyped reaction. The researcher may categorize after but not during the interview. It is also essential not to influence the respondent in any way, for example by somehow revealing one’s own points of view. For the same reason, the setting of the interview is also fundamental for the naturalness of the data: sociolinguistic interviews have taught us that subjects must be at ease. Hence, often the interview starts with a free and natural conversation between participant and researcher to break the ice and maybe to collect some first general information about the interviewee. In general, as Spencer-Oatey (2011) recalls, the interview itself is in turn a co-constructed speech event in which interviewer and interviewee position each other. Physically speaking as well, the interview is a whole-body event in which the gestuality and physical appearance of the interviewer are influential (Wengraf, 2001). We can mention different kinds of interviews. The typical interview is face to face and can be non-directive, such as the Rogersian interview that guides the interviewee through mirroring or echoing inputs to prompt spontaneous memory and free expression on a subject. Then we have the spoken reflection to detect intellectual operations in solving a problem through the interviewee’s thinking aloud; the biographical interview to reconstruct aspects of a subject’s life history; and the hermeneutical interview to reconstruct the world of a subject’s daily life through her background knowledge. Further types of interview are the brainstorming (which entails the free expression of ideas and associations in a creative autopoiesis) and the nominal group (in which,

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starting from a private collection of personal opinions the interviewer elaborates the themes to be discussed in the group and later again privately). Finally there are the group interviews (or focus groups). A focus group is typically made of 6 to 10 people plus a moderator, who together engage in a discussion. The goal of focus groups is an illuminating reflection: they are explorative tools in which meanings are co-constructed by sharing and comparing, organizing and conceptualizing. The group can consist of homogeneous or heterogeneous members with respect to a characteristic and this depends on the type of research question. The moderator may ask closed questions or stimulate informal discussion and remain in the position of observer. The moderator may also use stimulating activities, such as games, drawings, cards, questionnaires, etc. The moderator is often not the same person as the researcher (Dörnyei, 2007; Vanderstoep & Johnston, 2009). As Morgan (2012) points out, the process of interaction in the group is crucial, in fact the advantage over single interviews is precisely the group interaction, which produces a mutually stimulating effect of synergy on the respondents. Shared meanings are created and negotiated in the group in an interplay of identities. Thus, interaction is the central concern of focus group design, both with respect to content data (i.e. what is said) and to conversational dynamics data (i.e. how things are said). The analysis of the material offered by a focus group depends on the aims of the research. The data are typically discursive, such as quotes or long interactional excerpts. Thus, they can be analysed as conversational data, but also as content data (for example shades of meaning, contradictions, discursive patterns, topics, etc.). From this analysis, categories, perspectives, ideas, beliefs, or habits can emerge. In addition, the interactions are usually subtended by argumentative structures that can affect both the contents and the positioning of the interlocutors. Hence, focus groups migrate from applied work to the theoretical work of explanation (Barbour, 2014). The critical elements of this tool thus typically concern the dynamics of interaction. For example, the discussion may polarize positions or it may fossilize on one aspect of the topic. In addition, the discussion may not go as deep as an interview would, or it may take a long time to get through a “warm-up” phase. It is also possible that some members may become inactive and silent, so that the discussion ends up being monopolized by a few more communicative members of the group. For this reason, it can be very useful to compare different focus groups, with varying components and different moderators, and in different settings. For example, assumptions from one focus group can be refocused on with subsequent focus groups (Morgan, 2012). Going back to the characteristics of the interview, mention can be made of some tools that are not real interviews, but have a very similar use: ● thinking aloud: the subject thinks out loud while performing a task, ● stimulated recall: the participant looks at herself in a recorded situation and comments on what she thought at the time, ● recall protocols: the respondent must remember an event experienced, describing the situation and the exact words she used (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Félix-Brasdefer, 2010a).

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With regard to the last two techniques, it should be remembered that much of what we know about our language and its use remains in the unconscious, so we cannot expect detailed and reliable descriptions of their communicative behaviour or of that of their interlocutor from most speakers. As for the first technique, thinking aloud, it is a verbalization of thought processes during the task and therefore an online data collection protocol with access to short-term memory while the subject is carrying out a communicative task. It should only require the informants to say what they are thinking and not to describe, explain and hypothesize, because that would require cognitive activities that might interfere with those required by the task. Thinking aloud has the advantage of providing ‘live’ data in context not mediated by retroactive reconstructions, which would be affected by the fact that the subject has already developed a global interpretation of the interaction. However, it is a very invasive protocol, which can be combined with reading and writing, but is impossible to combine with oral conversation (Kasper, 2000). Narrative interviews are worth mentioning in detail because they have the potential to obtain in-depth information from native speakers and are useful for investigating the meanings of communicative practice. In essence, they explore how people relate their life stories, so they are effective for understanding personal and social relationships qualitatively. This tool is usually reserved for biographical narratives, to obtain aspects of human lives illuminated by the psychological insight of the interviewee. Hence, it requires expertise beyond the spontaneity of a subject’s narration of personal experiences. The actual focus of the interview is how the respondentnarrator constructs her social reality and self-generates meaning; the quality of the data is precisely in the difference between a description of facts and a story. The latter includes relevance to the subject, it is a meaningful episode. The analyst assumes a supportive or interactive voice in relation to the narrative: she needs to be a good listener. Indeed, the interview shapes the way a story is told and it is a co-construction with the interviewer, at the level of unconscious intersubjective dynamics, too. Therefore the analyst must understand the levels of complexity of the narrative, in its contradictions, failure of meanings, mutual constitution of meanings, positioning of the subject, etc. In fact, the narration rarely returns a linear voice or stable themes, but more usually internal conflicts and gaps. The interviewer also has to be prepared to listen to multiple voices embedded in a narrative. All this makes it difficult to understand whether meanings pre-exist or emerge from the interview, and of course to what extent they are mediated by memory. Hence, an interesting variant is the free-association narrative interview, which replaces questioning with free-association elicitation and limits the imposition by the interviewer of topics, question sequence and implicit questions. By following a path of unconscious logic, it facilitates access to the concerns of the narrator that may well remain latent in an interview (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Kasper, 2000; Brinkmann, 2013; Esin et al., 2014). In politeness, a narrative perspective is relevant for the study of identity in its spatio-temporal dimension: it is useful to elicit little stories to focus on how people use narrative in their daily activity to present and construct their identity (Georgakopoulou, 2013; Haugh, 2013; De Fina, 2016).

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Interviews are widely used, and in politeness research they frequently triangulate with other methods- for example, the post-recording interview through stimulated recall. This is conducted after the interaction of the participants, who are asked to comment on their mental states during the recorded interaction: the event is recorded and then reviewed by the participants and an evaluation of politeness is requested. In a way, this facilitates the ethic approach to the value of communication practices in a community (Kasper, 2000). In a study on face sensitivity based on social psychology, Spencer-Oatey (2011) observes that post event interviews are needed because the discursive data alone does not detect the dynamics related to the absence of communication. The post-event interview includes playback comments in combination with discourse data to gain insights into how people’s face concerns and interactional goals emerge in authentic interaction. Of course, speakers’ comments are not speakers’ evaluation: they are perceptions of their evaluations and hence they might be biased by memory or frames. Nevertheless, even though they may be reconstructions and reinterpretations, they enlighten some implicit assumptions and values that drive speakers in communicating or in describing communication. We now exemplify some uses of interviewing drawn from studies of politeness over the last decade. As in the previous chapters, we limit our interest to the illustrative value that the studies we cite may have. The nature of the interview as a way of obtaining information from a person is also inherent in discourse completion tasks, role playing and questionnaires. It is sometimes difficult to define the boundaries between these tools of data collection. When the interview involves very structured questions, it is in fact a questionnaire because the latter may not involve a proper interaction with the interviewer. For example, Sifianou and Tzanne (2010: 687) study how young Greeks understand politeness, using this questionnaire to investigate the respondents’ perceptions and evaluations: 1.

What does “politeness” mean to you? What are the characteristics of a “polite” person?

2.

Please give an example of a person, behaviour or act that you considered polite.

3.

Please give an example of a person, behaviour, or act that you considered impolite.

4.

Greek people are: a.

Very polite

□

b.

Moderately polite

□

c.

Not polite

□

5.

Are Greek people today more polite □ or less polite □ than in the past? Please provide an explanation for your answer.

6.

Expressions such as ‘How can I help you’ or ‘Thank you for calling us’ are typically heard today when contacting services over the phone. Do you understand these to be examples of politeness or something different? Please explain.

7.

Please use the space below to add any comments you consider relevant to the questionnaire.

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A questionnaire of this type is very close to a closed-ended interview. If it were conducted orally as an interview, i.e. interacting with the interviewer, it would probably allow good opportunities for deeper insights. Mapson (2014) investigates non-manual features—that is, expressions and movements of the upper-body and the head—in linguistic politeness in British Sign Language. The author collects her data through five semi-structured interviews as a single instrument of data collection. However, in the interviews, she inserts the elicitation of two speech acts (requests and apologies) by using a discourse completion task format. The participants are five deaf professionals, who answer a 40-min interview in British Sign Language. The interview included metapragmatic questions about politeness in British Sign Language. At the beginning of the interview the participants are also asked to simulate a request and an apology and, later, this performance provides grounds for comment in the interview. At the end of the interview, the same eliciting is re-enacted, simulating a recipient at a greater hierarchical distance. And, again, the interviewee comments on it. For the purposes of analysis and accessibility of the results, the videotaped interviews are transcribed using a British Sign Language gloss, then translated into English and complemented with comments to represent the visual data in written form. To implement an emic approach, Murray (2017) chooses a semi-structured interview carried out by a single researcher. She studies the conceptualisation of politeness in Australian-born heritage speakers of Greek. The interviews were approximately one and a half hour long and elicited both general beliefs and small narratives of lived experience. The questions were structured to encourage the participants to recall their own experiences or experiences observed in others. Murray’s interest is in the personal evaluation of the events: in fact, if the event has been recalled and reported, it must have been judged significant for the interviewee, therefore it can be considered illustrative. Participants are prepared in advance to be interviewed on the following set of core areas so that they have time to reflect on them (Murray, 2017: 171–172): 1.

The story of the family (questions aimed at obtaining mainly the family’s geographical background and affiliations)

2.

Identity questions (mainly concerning the relation to the ‘Greek’ and ‘Australian’ culture)

3.

Language questions regarding the acquisition of Greek

4.

Using Greek in Greece: to recount in detail the stories of the interviewee’s visits to Greece

5.

Using Greek on social media: to investigate social media in transnational identities

6.

Differences in English and Greek: specific questions: a.

Do you think Greeks and English speaking [sic] Australians have different ideas about what it means to be polite or impolite?

b.

What does ‘being polite’ mean in Australia?

c.

What does ‘being polite’ mean in Greece?

d.

What experiences have led you to think this of politeness this way?

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We report an illustrative excerpt from an interview by Murray (2017:180): SANDRA: Because I grew up with it I always expected the Greeks were going to be more curious. Like ‘what are you doing?’ and ‘who is this?’ and ‘how long?’ and ‘what are you going to do?’ and ‘why are you here?’ and ‘how long are you going to stay?’ You’ve just arrived, ‘how long are you going to stay?’ Whereas, and again I think that’s the definition of the level of, like of politeness. So … Researcher: How is it related to politeness? SANDRA: Well most, ah, like English speakers would … you don’t ask people about their political affiliation, about their religion, about whether they’re married and who they’re married to, and why they aren’t married and all that. They think they’ll offer that, and if they offer it it’s okay. Otherwise, it’s not polite to ask. Whereas for… Researcher: In Greek, do you think it’s impolite not to ask? SANDRA: Um … It shows an indifference.

As shown in the extract, the researcher-interviewer stimulates the elaboration of the recall or directs it toward her own research focus, introducing direct questions about politeness. In addition, being a partial insider (she knows the language and culture she is investigating), Murray introduces some examples from her own experience to elicit the interlocutor’s recall. However, the author notes that her technique does not always guarantee results: some interviewees spontaneously expand their answers by providing narratives of experience, while others do not elaborate on them or do so only minimally (in her case, mainly younger participants). The same variability in participants’ narrative reaction is noted by Fukushima and Haugh (2014). They choose the interview because of its potential for emic penetration and employ it to study the understanding of the notions of attentiveness, empathy and anticipatory inference in Japanese and Taiwanese Mandarin Chinese speakers of different generations. The interview is conducted in the respondents’ native language, and the goal is to obtain metapragmatic data to gain insights into the moral grounds on which evaluations of politeness are made. Participants are asked about their understanding of the above mentioned three notions and to describe instances of use they remember having experienced. Fukushima and Haugh point out, however, that access to the respondents’ emic understanding is not as easy as this linear framework might suggest. First, all interviews in one language need to be conducted by the same interviewer in order to eliminate the variability in responses that might result from having different interviewers. In fact, the participants’ understandings emerged through dialogue with the interviewers. Second, the very open-ended nature of this instrument leads to data that are then complex to read: […] the three notions were not always clearly separated in participants’ accounts of them. In other words, the participants did not always clearly distinguish between the three concepts when questioned about them. For example, in responding to a question about anticipatory inference, one participant cited an example of attentiveness (e.g. a pre-emptive offer to pick up her sister at the station) (Fukushima & Haugh, 2014: 170).

Morollón Martí (2017) also goes more deeply into the elicitation of metapragmatic awareness and uses a methodology similar to the interview. As part of the explicit teaching of politeness in the university setting, group reflection sessions are prepared.

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They involve Danish students who had previously attended both online conferencing sessions with native Spanish students and explicit instruction sessions for an intercultural approach to politeness issues. For the research, intracultural reflection sessions are animated through a list of stimulus questions; in this way, the teacher structures the group’s reflection toward interpreting the social meaning of greetings, compliments, offers, and invitations. The group conversation is recorded, transcribed and encoded in NVivo10. Metapragmatic awareness related to politeness is manifested both in the report of intercultural experience and in the mentioning of concepts learned in the classroom during the explicit instruction. This awareness is encoded in episodes of metapragmatic reflection (EMPR), which are then analysed with respect to students’ conscientiousness in establishing relationships between the speech act and its context, and are used as metapragmatic data proceeding from the sociopragmatic awareness achieved by students with respect to politeness. Similarly, to investigate impoliteness in Peninsular Spanish, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich et al. (2010) use a focus group to triangulate the data collected with a corpusbased terminological analysis and a multimodal questionnaire. Their methodology involves the selection of terms useful for the construction of the questionnaire through a corpus. The questionnaire was administered as input to two groups of four people: the participants had to complete the questionnaire jointly. Thus, the questionnaire worked as a conversation trigger, as the decision on what answers to choose resulted from a discussion amongst the group members. The discussion was then transcribed and analysed by the researchers with respect to the terminology that emerged on impoliteness and perception of identity. Isosävi (2020) also resorts to this multi-perspective using a focus group to study politeness through the evaluation of an observer belonging to another culture. Crossperceptions of Finnish and French politeness are collected through five groups of 3–5 people belonging to the researcher’s relational network. The researcher asks them questions focused on the research objective. The researcher then acts as moderator and the discussions are audio- and video-recorded. In addition, an assistant takes notes and the notes support the subsequent transcription of the discussions. The group discussions (which last from 60 to 105 min) are then studied through discourse analysis that returns a collective retrospective introspection on socially shared representations. Participants think together and the result is different from the sum of individual interviews: it is a sort of distributed cognition. Isosävi studies the transcripts, identifying topical episodes, recurrent topics, themes, and key verbal and non-verbal acts which are framed in the analysis as collaborative constructions. Since this study uses cross-cultural contrast as a methodology, it would be interesting to evaluate the weight of the researcher’s perspective, both in the type of questions with which she stimulates the group, and with respect to the identification of the categories of analysis. As stated, the interview is the main tool for completing or cross-checking data, usually used in tandem with other methods. Hernández Flores (2019) studies interpersonal respect as facework in medical consultations in Galicia (a Spanish community that is mostly bilingual, speaking Castilian Spanish and Galician). In addition to natural data recorded for the purpose of pragmalinguistic analysis, the author adopts

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two sociocultural tools to investigate values: for patients, she uses the questionnaire on social habits; for doctors, she uses the interview. To justify the choice of the method, Hernández Flores emphasizes the emic requirements of her research and hence the importance of accessing the participants’ personal opinions. In fact, the specific questions in the interview would allow the researcher to investigate more specific aspects instantaneously, that is to take ideas from the interview itself and then dig deeper through further questions The interviews—which by nature are more time-consuming than questionnaires—are only administered to the 10 doctors, while information from the 148 patients is obtained through questionnaires (Hernández Flores, 2019: 381). In this case, the two instruments do not have a direct relationship, they are used in parallel for different participants, in fact, in the article, it seems that the interview is limited to asking doctors about the use of tú/usted between doctor and patient and the attitude of respect or lack of respect they experienced. Santamaría García (2017) uses metapragmatic comments to gain support for her data, which are natural data from classroom interaction and from email and virtual educational platform exchanges. From these two specialized corpora, she selects 200 speech act units and, by applying a corpus analysis methodology, she tags discourse acts, appraisal and strategies of (im)politeness. This mixed-method approach is then integrated with an ethnographic approach to life stories: the author adds a collection of 100 students’ reports concerning their perceptions of (im)politeness in teacher– student interaction in their lives. Students were asked to reflect and talk openly about their teachers’ behaviour in their academic lives (most and least positive aspects) and to report typical expressions they used in class. In this way, Santamaría García is able to gain qualitative depth in her results about the emotional and educational consequences of (im)politeness in educational contexts in the theoretical frame of motivation and learning in rapport management, the appraisal theory and the selfmotivation theory. Finally, Bella (2014) also uses triangulation in the study of apologies produced by Greek native speakers and English learners of Greek as a foreign language. The author combines an assessment questionnaire of communicative competence, a classical Discourse Completion Task and a verbal retrospective report by the subjects. The verbal report is similar to the interview and is chosen by the author to supplement the DCT with emic perceptions immediately after the DCT itself. The same scenarios as in the DCT are used and the participants are asked the same questions with the aim of capturing intentions, cognitions, planning and evaluations. The following are examples (Bella, 2014: 688): 1.

What did you notice about the situation?

2.

How difficult did you find it to answer?

3.

What were you paying attention to?

4.

What were you trying to achieve by saying what you said?

5.

Were you satisfied with your answer?

During the interview, Bella adds some data-driven questions in order to prompt learners to elaborate on their answers. Some are more open-ended than those mentioned above, such as:

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15 Interviews You said situation X was difficult for you. Could you say more about that? You said you felt your answer was ’inadequate’ in situation X. Why do you say that?

References Barbour, R. (2014). Analysing focus group. In U. Flick (Ed.), The Sage handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp. 313–326). Sage. Bella, S. (2014). A contrastive study of apologies performed by Greek native speakers and English learners of Greek as a foreign language. Pragmatics, 24(4), 679–713. Brinkmann, S. (2013). Qualitative interviewing. Understanding qualitative research. Oxford University Press. De Fina, A. (2016). Narrative analysis. In Z. Hua (Ed.), Research methods in intercultural communication (pp. 327–342). Wiley Blackwell. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics. Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies. Oxford University Press. Esin, C., Fathi, M., Squire, C. (2014). Narrative analysis: the constructionist approach. In U. Flick (Ed.), The Sage handbook of qualitative data analysis (pp. 203–216). Sage. Félix-Brasdefer, C. (2010). Data collection methods in speech act performance. DCTs, role plays, and verbal reports. In A. Martínez-Flor, & E. Usó-Juan (Eds.), Speech act performance (pp. 41– 56). John Benjamins. Fukushima, S., & Haugh, M. (2014). The role of emic understandings in theorizing im/politeness: The metapragmatics of attentiveness, empathy and anticipatory inference in Japanese and Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics, 74, 165–179. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., Lorenzo-Dus, P., & Bou-Franch, P. (2010). A genre approach to impoliteness in a Spanish television talk show: Evidence from corpus-based analysis, questionnaires and focus groups. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 689–723. Georgakopoulou, A. (2013). Small stories and identities analysis as a framework for the study of (im)politenss in interaction. Journal of Politenss Research, 9(1), 55–74. Haugh, M. (2013). Im/politeness, social practice and the participation order. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 52–72. Hernández Flores, N. (2019). El respeto como valor social. Un estudio de Pragmática sociocultural en encuentros comunicativos de consultas médicas. Pragmática Sociocultural, 7(3), 371–396. Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (2000). Doing qualitative research differently. Free association, narrative and the interview method. Sage Isosävi, J. (2020). Cultural outsiders’ evaluations of (im)politeness in Finland and in France. Journal of Politeness Research, 16(2), 249–280. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). Continuum. Mapson, R. (2014). Polite appearances: How non-manual features convey politeness in British Sign Language. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(2), 157–184. Marra, M., & Lazzaro-Salazar, M. (2018). Ethnographic methods in pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 343–366). Mouton De Gruyter. Morollón Martí, N. (2017). El potencial pedagógico de la pragmática sociocultural como herramienta de mediación en la interpretación de experiencias interculturales. Intercultural Pragmatics, 5(1), 59–86. Morgan, D. (2012). Focus groups and social interaction. In J. Gubrium et al. (Eds.), The Sage handbook of interview research. The complexity of the craft (pp. 161–176). Sage.

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Murray, J. (2017). Politeness and the Greek diaspora: Emic perceptions, situated experience, and a role for communicative context in shaping behaviors and beliefs. Intercultural Pragmatics, 14(2), 165–205. Palmer, G. (1996). Toward a theory of cultural linguistics. University of Texas Press. Santamaría-García, C. (2017). Emotional and educational consequences of (im)politeness in teacher-student interaction at higher education. Corpus Pragmatics, 1, 233–255. Sifianou, M., & Tzanne, A. (2010). Conceptualizations of politeness and impoliteness in Greek. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 661–687. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2011). Conceptualising ‘the relational’ in pragmatics: Insights from metapragmatic emotion and (im)politeness comments. Journal of Pragmatics, 43, 3565–3578. Trinchero, R. (2002). Manuale di ricerca educativa. FrancoAngeli. Turchetta, B. (2000). La ricerca di campo in linguistica. Carocci. Vanderstoep, S., & Deirdre, J. (2009). Research methods for everyday life. Blending qualitative and quantitative approaches. Jossey-Bass. Wengraf, T. 2001. Qualitative research interviewing. Biographic narrative and semi-structured methods. Sage. Wierzbicka, A. (2003). Cross-cultural pragmatics. The semantics of human interaction. Mouton de Gruyter.

Chapter 16

Recording and Transcription

Naturally occurring data derive from natural and spontaneous interactions, they are real life data. They exist potentially without research or a researcher: undoubtedly spontaneous interaction in a real shop will be more natural than roleplay, and in the latter case, the interaction would not even take place if there were no research. Even if the interlocutors of the roleplay had not been informed about the research, their exchange would not have taken place without it. So this is not a natural event, although speakers may use natural language. As we will see in this chapter, the prototype of natural data is the recording of spontaneous interactions, although the concept of what is natural is broadening. For example, interactions in digital-mediated communication, public radio and TV broadcasts, collections of documents (like a portfolio), and even fictional data (such as movie scripts, or plays) can be considered natural data. Compared to factual data, the language of novels, movies or TV series has traditionally been of little interest for discourse analysis studies so far because considered fictional language, an inauthentic transposition of natural language into the very different enunciative conditions of artistic construction. However, today, it is used not as a substitute for natural data, but as a source of authentic examples of fictional language itself (Seco, 1983; Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Oesterreicher, 1996; van de Vijver & Leung, 1997; Narbona, 2001; López Serena, 2007; Brumme, 2012; Floyd et al., 2018; Jucker, 2018; Landone, 2019). The ‘naturalness’ of natural data is an ideal and the debate on what constitutes natural language is ongoing. In fact, while the researcher strives to be as little invasive as possible, she cannot avoid the observer paradox: her sole presence makes the data somehow unnatural and, in addition, the ethical precautions do not improve the situation. The mere obligation to inform the subjects about the research process and aims interferes substantially with the possibility of working on natural data. In fact, for any type of recording the informed authorisation of the subject recorded is necessary. More in general, natural data pose a technical problem for the observer: she will obtain the most natural data if she is not a participant, but the data might remain somehow obscure because the non-participant researcher does not know the shared © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_16

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history and previous communicative events that exist between the participants. On the other hand, if she is a participant-observer, she will have the tools to understand the communicative event better, but her presence will generate the observer paradox. Natural data have the great merit of being very context sensitive, so in politeness research they are used both to work on the language and for metalanguage studies, e.g. to observe if any spontaneous metapragmatic evaluative comments from the speakers are made in the natural interaction. Nonetheless, when dealing with a specific linguistic phenomenon, the probability of its occurring a sufficient number of times in natural data is very low. Instead, natural data allow us to identify things that speakers are not aware of. For example, they are indispensable for the study of paralinguistic features, politeness does in fact have a decidedly multimodal nature that makes prosody (timing, loudness, pitch, accent), gestures, facial expressions, postures and proxemics, and any iconic support (such as symbols) very salient manifestations (Hidalgo Navarro, 2006, 2011, 2013). Usually the researcher collects data from individual cases and then describes in detail both common patterns that reveal recurrent and significant behaviours, as well as irregular occurrences that denote a deviant case. If the corpus of natural data collected is large, the analysis is exhausting and thus reduced corpora are often preferred. It follows that this methodology is not statistical but descriptive: nothing is discarded as a deviant error that affects an average and all the data make sense for the analyst because they reflect something to which the subject has given sense and is significant for her (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Golato, 2003). However, it should be said that, in the wake of Chomsky’s concept of well-formedness, some researchers consider that even natural data can be purged of utterances that are not well formed— i.e. pragmatically not acceptable to a competent speaker—and therefore excluded from the analysis. In general, natural data are the most complete, but obviously they are not easily comparable due to the infinite variability of the contexts and the level of detail in which they are collected. The most common method of capturing natural data in their integrity is by recording or video recording, which are techniques centring on oral data. On the one hand recordings offer completeness of collection; on the other hand, there are several critical issues to take into account. First, recording is a field activity, and as we mentioned in Sect. 11.1, this involves the difficulties of being present on site and having access to a community. Theoretically, on a scale of researcher’s interference, recordings are low on the scale of researcher control, particularly speech recordings without the researcher’s involvement and surreptitious recordings. Nonetheless, recordings without the presence of the researcher usually present (s) contextual information gaps that the researcher may be unable to reconstruct, precisely because she was not present (Stubbs, 1987; Kasper, 2000; Sakel & Everett, 2012). On the other hand, non-surreptitious recordings by the researcher are invasive (especially video recordings) because, as previously stated, the greater the presence of the researcher, the greater her potential influence on the data. It is a common belief that the unnatural effect of the recorder gradually disappears during the recording, especially when the situation reaches a high emotional level (such as in judgements,

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dramatic narrations, etc.) or when the subject presents herself as part of a group and speaks as a member of it. Nevertheless, a concerted recording detracts from spontaneity and naturalness, it inhibits the speakers—at least at the beginning—and produces data from people who might feel uncomfortable in a situation that is not normal for them (Stubbs, 1987; Jucker, 2018). To attenuate this effect, it is helpful for the participants to be familiar with the researcher (as in Spencer-Oatey & Xing, 2000). Recording is subject to strict ethical issues and operational restrictions. In the majority of research fields, it is no longer conceivable (or legal) to record without the subjects being informed and having authorized the use of the data. In addition, if published, the data must be completely anonymised (Kasper, 2000). From a technical point of view, Stubbs (1987) advises that the recording should be as long as possible and with an ideal number of speakers of three, because more would produce overlaps that are difficult to transcribe. It should also be ensured that important features such as phonetics, rhythm, intonation, etc. are not left out or that the camera guarantees overall visibility. In addition, the natural data recorded usually need to be supplemented with information on the subjects (e.g. sociolinguistic data) and with information on the context that might be useful in subsequent interpretation. Indeed, recordings are not data, they require theoretical and methodological elaboration in order to be converted into data for analysis, through transcriptions which will then be automatically or manually analysed. Transcription best documents the oral processes, taking into consideration the factors of the oral production. At the same time, it is a reflexive tool of systematic analysis that helps the researcher to become familiar with data and to develop hypotheses. As a consequence, it is not exactly a mechanical activity to be entrusted to a copyist, but a practice for understanding the phenomena being studied. The transcription of natural data presents practical difficulties regarding the number of descriptive categories adopted. The best solution would be to define a limited number of categories, which cover all data and are validly exemplified, rather than opting for very detailed descriptions of highly selected aspects. However, in reality, this is not feasible, and one should acknowledge the limits of data description. In fact, transcription is very time consuming; according to Stubbs’ estimate (1987) it varies from twenty hours for a one-hour group conversation up to many more if phonetics or intonation are included. Technically, the transcription in itself represents a choice of the data to be analysed (following the analysis objectives), and hence presupposes that the analyst already knows what is important to transcribe. Thus, she makes choices of what to report or omit, e.g. if she suspects that pauses are meaningful, they will be included in the transcription, otherwise, they will not. To sum up, as Pallotti (1999) observes, transcriptions are not data in themselves, but written representations of orally collected data. In order to become data, they must pass through a process, which is already marked at the theoretical level by the objectives and interests of the research (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Stubbs, 1987; Calsamiglia Blancafort & Tusón Valls, 1999). Stubbs’ (1987) argument on etic prospecting further clarifies this aspect. The transcription is a selection made by the researcher according to her purpose, so

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it is not necessarily what the speaker considers significant. When speaking in the natural context, a speaker probably listens selectively bypassing false beginnings, hesitations, etc., which are occurrences that the analyst nevertheless sometimes transcribes carefully. This produces a distance between what the analyst sees (a mass of “incoherent” or irrelevant structures) and what the speaker gets (a coherent and linear final understanding). In the analysis, this implies that one may end up paying a lot of attention to details that are not significant for the speakers. On the contrary, this level of detail can reveal the unconscious levels of language use that are invisible to the speaker but become visible to the researcher working on detailed transcriptions. Different transcription systems have been developed, each suitable for different analytical needs. They vary by detail of description (number of coded categories), by type of coded data (including verbal signals, prosodic signals, non-acoustic or extralinguistic signals such as gestures, and paralinguistic signals such as sighing and laughing), and also by graphic design (Briz Gómez, 1998). See for example Ochs’s (1996) proposal to use adjacent columns for two or more speakers so that both interaction and individual continuity are visually evident. The analyst will not necessarily use complete transcriptions, she may also resort to targeted transcriptions of the phenomena of interest. What the various transcription systems have in common is that they are important tools of analysis, whose fundamental purpose is to make underlying patterns and systematic data more evident or digitally analysable. This is why transcriptions should consistently use non-subjective symbols. However, as Kreuz and Riordan (2018: 99) point out: “[…] transcription is always subjective and interpretative to some degree, and transcription inevitably leads to data reduction”. With respect to politeness, the systems illustrated by Kreuz and Riordan (2018) are helpful for the researcher to make a choice, considering also the need of politeness research to integrate intonation and non-verbal aspects. Linguistic transcription has not traditionally devoted much attention to the coding of many elements of context, so that we do not have a specific transcription system that mirrors the high context-sensitiveness of politeness. This could not be otherwise, because codifying, for example, “a pause of three seconds” as “shocked silence” already involves an etic process of interpretation by the person transcribing (who is not necessary the analyst). Probably, to get to a transcription system specific to politeness, it would be necessary to develop an automatic, digital analysis of the co-occurrence of verbal and non-verbal codes that allow, for example, to encode “shocked silence” whenever the codes of “prolonged pause” and a specific gesture or expression co-occur (Kreuz & Riordan, 2018). Transcriptions usually form a corpus, which will be characterised by the choices of data type and quantity made during transcription. If several researchers work on the same corpus, there is the problem of the intersubjectivity of the encoding, which might impact on the subsequent quantitative analysis: all encoders should give categories the same name. Instead, the transposition from audio to written data frequently changes what is perceived, and this is why the level of disagreement between different encoders/researchers about what is heard (and transcribed) is very high (especially at the levels of phonetics and intonation).

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We now go on to comment on some examples in the over the last ten years, taking into consideration audio and video recordings in which verbal data are fixed, often including extraverbal data. We omit those works that build on already existing corpora, because we are more interested here in demonstrating field recording techniques. The studies we mention have been selected for the explicitness of their methodology for the sake of illustration, so we are not particularly interested in commenting on their other features. Afterwards, a few final pages will be devoted to multimodal analysis, which is a methodology that relies on the recent improvements in video recordings and annotated video corpora. Researchers often choose to record in situations that are highly productive and, at the same time, practical. A recurring setting is dinner parties, where it is easy to place the recorder on the table and pick up all the speakers’ voices. However, they can have noisy backgrounds, as Xia and Lan (2019) note by recording an authentic Chinese conversation at a dinner table to study politeness in a multi-party context. Noisy backgrounds can obscure parts of the conversation and, in general, make it difficult to reconstruct the connection between voice and person. Van der Bom and Mills (2015) use a discursive approach to politeness data analysis, relying on data from a dinner party in English as a lingua franca (i.e. an intercultural conversation) among friends. They record both the event—warning the interlocutors beforehand— and the post-event metapragmatic comments of the participants themselves. Their focus is how politeness is discursively negotiated in intercultural interaction, and not a specific speech act; therefore, the authors decide that the points of interest in the overall recording can be considered those that they and the participants themselves consider difficult or awkward moments. As Van der Bom and Mills explain (2015: 194): Rather than starting our analysis with a focus on linguistic elements which we as theorists might have isolated as indicators of politeness (such as “sorry” or the use of “would you mind”), what we focus on here is moments in the interaction where, according to at least one participant, there appears to be some difficulty or interactional problem. We then track through that moment of difficulty, to isolate the elements or strategies which are used by interactants to avoid or resolve the difficulty. Politeness seems to us to be a key element which is drawn on by participants when difficult interactional situations arise.

In order to analyse agreement and disagreement in conversation, Henning (2012) also chooses to record a lunch between family and friends, but in this case the researcher records two lunches, as parallel corpora, of two hours each: one with a secret recording between natives in Spanish (who were subsequently informed) and one with an explicit recording between natives in Swedish. The Swedish family that has gathered for the lunch counts 11 members; the Spanish family has 9 participants. The speakers generate a varied and dense conversational network; however, the author does not mention any particular problem with respect to the identification of the speakers in the recording. Henning argues that the modes of the recording (secret or open) is irrelevant with respect to data comparison, because the subjects openly recorded quickly forgot that they were being monitored. Bouchara (2015) also records five dinner parties, where he is the host, thus a participant observer. Because he studies the politeness (i.e. the speech act of greetings) of Moroccan Arab and German

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speakers in the same contexts, he gives appointments to the Arabic speakers half an hour before the German speakers, so as to record greetings separately. Ainciburu and Ramajo Cuesta (2017) opt for surreptitious recording to investigate the Arabic social formulae used to display and negotiate identities among secondgeneration immigrants in Argentina. Their 10-h corpus is recorded during dinner parties reuniting family and friends in Argentina and in Lebanon. They use a digital recorder camouflaged as a mobile phone, and participants’ consent is asked after the recording. The recording instrument, as this study shows, deserves special attention, both for its appearance and location, but also for its technical features: for example, Locker (2004: 108) describes the problem of having to turn a tape in a tape-recorder in the middle of the interaction under observation. In other cases, recordings occur in the place where the communication focused on by the research occurs naturally and typically. Georgakopoulou (2013) studies politeness from an identity analysis perspective with a narrative framework through anecdotes recounted by students in London, with particular attention to students’ engagement with the new media. The interest is in how the nine subjects observed construct their identities in daily interactions at school. The researcher then conducts an ethnographic observation and audio records 180 h of interactions in class and in the playground. The recordings are also triangulated with field diaries, interviews, playback sessions and supplementary didactic documentation. The students’ anecdotes about themselves or others are captured in the data, which the researcher can analyse in detail by listening to the recordings again and again, even commenting on the playbacks with the observed subjects themselves. Finally, for some unpredictable structures, time-extended random recording is required. Maíz-Arévalo (2012) investigates the pragmatic motive that underlies the use of implicit compliments (rather than direct compliments). Their appearance in the natural context is unpredictable, so she opts for random recording, in natural situations, thus without stimuli from the researcher, which would be impossible in the case of a non-formulaic act such as implicit compliments. The researcher audio records conversations in Peninsular Spanish over three years and obtains 70 workable ones. The conversations were surreptitiously and randomly captured, that is by switching on the recorder without knowing what would happen during the conversation (topic, participants, etc.). The researcher is an occasionally involved participant and participants were informed after the recording. The researcher’s participation is very useful because, knowing the background of the conversation, she is able to remove ambiguity from the data later in a subsequent phase of analysis. Given the objective of her research, the recordings are supplemented by interviews with some of the participants. Recording can also occur without the researcher’s presence, for example Marquéz Reiter (2008) works on 30 phone calls in Spanish from a Uruguayan service provider to study apologising strategies. The calls were recorded by the companies for monitoring purposes, and the researcher obtained them from the companies and ensured the participants remained anonymous for research motives. Therefore, she has access

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to contexts that are not in her immediate circle of acquaintance, which is quite interesting, even though, in this case, she does not have access to the speakers for complete data: the analysis is limited to what emerges linguistically. In some cases, the researcher stimulates the “natural” data (or, to be more precise, stimulates natural language use) in order to speed up their appearance. Moghaddam (2019) records surreptitiously with a mobile phone to study the response to compliments in Persian during everyday conversations involving 160 speakers. The act is stimulated in the natural context: a research assistant was instructed to offer compliments on a particular topic and record them during his personal conversations with his friends and classmates over a period of three months in his university settings. The assistant had to pay the same compliment twice to the same person with different syntax: the goal was to obtain two different appraisals, since the object of the study is the comparison between the first and the second appraisal. Another example is in Schröder (2018), who works on conversations between German and Brazilian exchange students in Germany. They are stimulated with tasks to study (dis)alignment and (dis)affiliation in the framework of the Face Constituting Theory. The discussion is video recorded, and the task that prompts it consists of putting a small group of participants around a table on which cards are placed. This is to stimulate a one-totwo -hour discussion on cultural and intercultural topics, i.e. expectations in the new culture with respect to university, friendship, romantic relationships, etc. Similarly, Aoki (2010) records stimulated group discussions to study rapport management (i.e. establishment of common ground, how the ‘self’ is dealt with, and engagement) in Japanese and Thai subjects during when socialising. The researcher summons three small groups of university students for each culture and, in this case, the task is a problem-solving situation, that is, to get consensus on who to rescue on the scenario of an accident with ten survivors (where only three could be rescued). One way of working on natural data collection is also to form a corpus of written documents. For example, to compare requests in Spanish and British English, Bou Franch and Lorenzo-Dus (2008) collect impromptu emails, which are considered a source of representative natural data of current communicative practice. In a more specific way, Schnurr and Zayts (2013) collect a corpus of several hundred emails concerning refusals in multicultural workplaces in Hong Kong. In addition, they audio/video-record more than 80 h of authentic spoken discourse to complete the written natural data with participant interviews (along with organisational documents and extensive participant observation). Their aim is to gain a deep understanding of the normal everyday patterns, i.e. the typical communication practices of the participants. The following is an example of the sort of email data they gather (Schnurr & Zayts, 2013: 606): [request] Hi Brad, I’d like to call in a couple of times tomorrow to check on your progress – please can you let me have your mobile number? Many thanks Neil

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Observation turns out to be fundamental with specific categories of speakers, for example children. Burdelski (2010) studies socialisation in politeness routines in a Japanese pre-school context through a one-year ethnographic and linguistic study. Given that his interests are verbal and non-verbal strategies, the author makes 48 h of audio-visual recordings of children in the classroom and in the playground. For this purpose, the researcher uses two cameras and wireless microphones and, as it is a longitudinal study, the recordings are made once to twice a month for 4– 5 h at a time. Chen (2017) also chooses a longitudinal design of 19 months of two Mandarin-speaking children spontaneously interacting with their parents in different activities with a focus on politeness (i.e. request forms). In this case, the context is domestic and familiar, and although there are no pre-determined activities or topics, the researcher is an anomalous presence, so that several visits are paid by her prior to the study to familiarise the children with her presence and the camcorder. Similarly, each recording session doesn’t begin until parents and children feel comfortable. We report an example of the transcripts between a subject (YOU) and her mother (MOT) (with Chen’s translation) (Chen, 2017: 130): (1) YOU, 2;0, Line 1062 Context: YOU and her mother were playing a doctor-patient game, where YOU was the doctor while her mother was the patient in the pretend play. YOU: Zhang kai-lai [% mimicking a doctor]. ← spread open ‘Open your mouth.’ MOT: A -:[% open the mouth]. Ah ‘Ah…’ MOT: YOU fa-yan ma? Have infection Q ‘Is there an infection?’ MOT: Wo YOU fa-yan ma? I have infection Q ‘Do I have an infection?’

Finally, we cite two examples to show the utility of audio and video recordings of natural data for the study of segmental and suprasegmental traits in politeness. Hidalgo Navarro and Martínez Hernández (2017) study the prosodic, paralinguistic or gestural elements in the expression of mitigation in the context of politeness in a discursive corpus of Spanish. For their purpose, they decide to use a corpus of spontaneous colloquial conversations of different varieties of Spanish, complementing the

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Corpus Val.Es.Co (http://www.valesco.es/corpus/corpussrch.php) and its expansion as Corpus Ameresco (http://esvaratenuacion.es/). On the other hand, Devís Herrais and Cantero Serena (2014) form their own corpus for the study of the melodic characteristics of expressions of politeness attenuators in Catalan. They create a specific corpus of spontaneous speech with a wide number and variety of participants, video recording 20 television programmes with public participation (in 1996 and 2000). The researchers decide not to include radio programmes because the participants tend to be less spontaneous; instead, they extract spontaneous talk from reports, interviews, debates, chat shows, etc. Within the corpus, the study selects only those utterances with good vocalisation, no speech defects, and when the participant speaks naturally. In addition, Devís Herrais and Cantero Serena avoided having too many utterances from a single participant and removed any utterance that was disturbed by background noise. The useful corpus was 580 utterances, which were then coded for analysis. We conclude this chapter by mentioning multimodal analysis, which is an approach for studying complex patterns of signalling; it follows the cognitive turn in linguistics, but also the enhancement of video recording devices and multimodalannotated video corpora (Rühlemann, 2019). It aims at the combined detection of both linguistic and non-linguistic cues with metapragmatic comments, thus it works on a combined and integrated collection of data that respects the multimodal nature of communication. This kind of analysis would not have been possible without the digital management of video recordings, and it is useful for having a nuanced analysis of politeness. Human communication is in fact naturally multimodal, and the new technologies afford us more direct access to multimodal data. For this reason, multimodality now overlaps with digital communication analysis. For example, Herring (2019: 39– 40) proposes a reconceptualization of Computer-Mediated-Communication as multimodal (see Chap. 20). In addition, the consolidation of multimodal analysis depends, as a first step, on the development of methods of transcription and on the digitalization and retrieval of data. In particular, new methods are required for the multimodality of digital communication and to overcome language-centred investigation practices (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019). The theoretical background is that the communicative cues are always multimodal semiotic constructions—combinations of verbal, somatic, bodily and vocal signals (Lyons, 2016). As Xie (2008) and Mondada (2019) point out, referring to the embodiment theory, body and materiality (i.e. the manipulation of objects) are fundamental in interaction, and for this reason multimodal analysis is required. The concept of sensory pragmatics also supports the need for multimodal analysis, investigating how objects are sensed in social interaction (texture, odours, sounds, etc.). Humans have different sensory access to the world which gives rise to intersubjective and intercorporal practices (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2013; Mondada, 2019). Methodologically, multimodal analysis uses video recording to develop the practice of systematically describing the communicative cues in an integrated way. For example, Langlotz and Locher (2017) study the patterns of emotional signalling in relation to politeness on the basis of emotional cues combined with metacomments or descriptions of emotions. The idea is that emotional signalling is fundamental

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for semiotic construction and management of relations: “[t]he interactional partners employ multimodal emotional displays to perform complex communicative acts of social sanctioning and moral coding” (Langlotz & Locher, 2017: 310). Emotions are considered particularly important to obtain emic judgments on relational work. The analyst only has access to what is observable in interaction, so the focus is on the expressions and interpretations of the emotional states that the speakers offer to the outside world. Therefore, communicative emotion cues are video recorded, in particular: • Verbal cues: language-specific emotion vocabulary, metaphors, speech acts, morphosyntax, interjections, discursive structures (e.g. exclamations) • Vocal cues: voice quality and features • Body cues: movements, physical actions, gait, body postures, gestures of hands and arms • Physiological cues, such as blushing, heart rate, etc. • Face cues and expressions (Langlotz & Locher, 2017). Sometimes, communicative cues are absent in naturally-occurring data, due to the suppression of emotional signalling. Moreover, signalling may follow sociocultural norms of display (for example, showing grief at a funeral even if one is not emotionally touched). For this reason, Langlotz and Locher (2017) provide a summary of the dimensions of analysis that may refer specifically to the methodology of politeness. To the above communicative cues, they add: • Social norms (feeling rules, display rules, and emotional socialisation): they are useful to study conventions and norms that determine appropriateness in emotional states and display in a given situation and in the context of specific cultural socialisation • Relationship building (positioning, footing, etc.): they define the interactional negotiation of relationship against the normative background • Cognition (frames and scripts, which are the benchmark for appraisal): they affect the frames of situationally appropriate emotional behaviours • Emotions (type, intensity and duration). The combined study of the cues speakers use to indicate their stance in relation to one another is considered essential. Above all, it is necessary to elaborate its synergistic interaction. It is a particularly useful approach to capture, through correlation, the synergy of those phenomena that we have attributed to a deep level (see Sect. 6.3). In fact Langlotz and Locher (2017: 316) state that “[…] we are not arguing that analysts can or should only work with those cues that can be easily identified in the surface structure of communication”. In other words, it is an approach that directs attention to the fact that, when we observe relationships, we are only observing the tip of the iceberg. Some studies in the last ten years have been able to offer examples of multimodal politeness analysis. Idemaru et al. (2019) conceive of multimodality as deepening the phonetic realisation of speech. The researchers distinguish the characteristics of deferential voice from non-deferential voice and observe how politeness can be

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perceived through vocal cues only in Japanese. The chosen methodology is consistent with the authors’ assumption that politeness is a complex phenomenon communicated via a number of phonetic cues, rather than a single cue (e.g. pitch). Their procedure is based on different tools. The first is a production task where participants read a text simulating a conversation with ten sentence pairs, each containing a request (addressing a professor or a close friend who were also represented graphically). The second tool is an oral Discourse Completion Task with different speech acts addressed to a superior and to an equal/inferior interlocutor. The third is a perception study in which respondents listened to pairs of short utterances with no honorifics specified and had to indicate whether they were addressed to a superior speaker (deferential option): they had three seconds to give spontaneous answers based on sound or feeling. Data are analysed acoustically on pitch, intensity, jitter, stimulus, and speaking rate duration. Brown and Winter (2018) had already explored this issue of politeness in a study of Korean, in which, however, they chose a different multimodal methodology. They used data from televised dramas, because they offered a variety of situations, easy to collect in a short amount of time. Brown and Winter believe that the scripts are nonetheless credible from the point of view of nonverbal communication because they are a matter of the actor’s interpretation (2018: 31). In the scenes selected as intimate or deferential, the researchers note nonverbal cues such as body position (posture, standing/sitting), orientation (body and gaze), selftouching (the face, the mouth, other body parts), haptics (any touching of the interlocutor), prerogative (initiation of behaviours such as standing, saying cheers, etc.), facial gestures (head bows, head nods, smiling, eyebrow movements), and manual gestures (pointing, waving, other gestures). They observe that deference generally leads to body constriction, while situations of intimacy show a more relaxed bodily attitude. In this study, therefore, the verbal component is used to discriminate the level of social and power distance, but in further studies it could be correlated to other multimodal data, for example to verify whether the modal indexes add up, substitute or mismatch. In fact, the authors refer to other studies that relate nonverbal data to acoustic and morphological data and conclude that in Korean this type of politeness provides robust communication due to its social significance, i.e., Korean makes multiple cues and channels for honorification (i.e. verbal, vocal, and bodily) redundant (Brown & Winter, 2018: 49). Langlotz and Locher (2013) also choose fiction as a source of data. They study gesture and facial expressions as displays of emotions in relationship constructions with a multimodal approach. They use a comic strip, because it is “suitable for an analysis of the relational and emotional dimensions of interaction. This is the case especially because we are presented with an exaggerated and condensed representation of the combination of multi-modal relational cues” (Langlotz & Locher, 2013: 97). In other words, the researchers think the comic strip is a type of data particularly salient in terms of emotional signalling, not only because the comic must create a feigned illusion of emotions through shared semiotic acts, but also because its humorous function works precisely thanks to the violation of social appropriateness. The cues that Langlotz and Locher detect are verbal affective cues (vocal features, i.e., written codes for loudness, lengthening and stress; morphosyntax; lexicon and

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discourse structure of affective speech acts), and nonverbal affective cues (body positions, gestures and facial expressions of the drawings). This type of data allows them to clearly demonstrate the composite structure of the emotional signals and their role in relation management, namely the role of emotional cues in creating evaluative meanings through the composite signals of voice, hands, arms, body, face, eyes, etc. In contrast, when using authentic data, the challenge that would arise is the visibility/occultation of emotional cues, as well as the individual-to-individual variability of the interpretation process. In fact, Fiehler (2002), who adopts a methodology of emotion analysis that is not multimodal (but only verbal), needs to choose natural conversations that are emotionally pregnant (e.g., a dispute or a therapeutic communication) to obtain a greater guarantee of “verbal” visibility for the researcher. In other words, when a multimodal approach is not used, it is necessary to have very specific and explicit data on a single channel (i.e. verbal channel). Keisanen and Kärkkäinen (2014) choose a multimodal analysis to study direct compliments (and their responses) in English, adopting the framework of embodied actions. In this case, the study investigates the linguistic material, the prosodic features, and the visual bodily displays (gaze, gestures, body posture) in combination. The authors observe that, along with prosody, gaze direction has a specific role in the production of both compliments and their responses. Data are extracted from eight hours of video-recorded casual face-to-face conversations with 27 different speakers, mainly proceeding from the Oulu Video Corpus of English of the University of Oulu. The conversations were transcribed for the verbal part, while the non-verbal part was extracted in selected screen shots (actions of the material context) and transcribed. In particular, the following prominent prosodic features were identified: truncated intonation unit, truncated word, final intonation contour, continuing intonation contour, appeal intonation contour, speech overlap, short pause, pause, tongue click, exhalation, inhalation, laughter, higher pitch level, forte, loud, whispered, uncertain hearing, and indecipherable syllable (Keisanen & Kärkkäinen, 2014: 669). Pennock-Speck and Saz-Rubio (2013) study the verbal and non-verbal codification of politeness in five television charity commercials in English via multimodal analysis. They investigate the interplay of paralinguistic and extralinguistic modes of communication. The authors opt for the plain transcription of spoken and written discourse and for the description of para and extralinguistic elements. As shown in the following example of the first part of one of their ads, the researcher must rely heavily on transferring other semiotic dimensions into written descriptions (Pennock-Speck & Saz-Rubio, 2013: 53): Arm of man in yellow sweater stroking a happy looking dog. The dog tells us that his name is Harry On-screen-text: sponsor a dog/DogsTrust Registered Charity Numbers: 227523 SC037843 Dialogue: Please Hi, I’m Harry. I live at DogsTrust Music: Upbeat electronic clavichord

Pennock-Speck and Saz-Rubio observe that to study how music, voice, images and other non-verbal aspects interact, a qualitative approach using a small corpus

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is required. In fact, although the medium-by-medium statistics would not be too difficult quantitatively, what requires a qualitative approach on the other hand is the cumulative effect of language, images, voice, sound and music. Finally, Rehm and André (2007) highlight the necessity of multimodal analysis for the purposes of communication simulated by computer systems (i.e. embodied conversational agents). They study multimodal human politeness strategies with the aim of going beyond mere verbal expression, which proves to be insufficient even for Conversational Informatics. The authors aim to find correlations between verbal politeness and gestures that can be applied in conversational agents. They study video data from a specially recorded corpus in German produced in threatening experimental contexts (namely, they collect 66 acts of criticism). The authors annotated the corpus frame by frame, considering both verbal strategies and non-verbal polite behaviour. They tag gestures as adaptor, beat, deictic, iconic and metaphoric. Rehm and André conclude that non-verbal behaviours play a role in politeness strategies following identifiable combinations with verbal structures. In addition, they state that “[t]he more vaguely the criticism is formulated, the higher the amount of metaphoric gestures and vice versa the more directly the criticism is delivered the higher the amount of iconic gestures” (Rehm & André, 2007: Sect. 1.4). The researchers also give an example of implementation to enhance the polite behaviour of a communicative engine and test its effectiveness. They demonstrate that gestures do produce an effect but a high representational quality is required, i.e. the graphics of the automatic conversational agent must be precise, because an approximate gesture does not produce direct effects.

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Burdelski, M. (2010). Socializing politeness routines: Action, other-orientation, and embodiment in a Japanese preschool. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 1606–1621. Calsamiglia Blancafort, H., & Tusón Valls, A. (1999). Las cosas del decir. Manual de análisis del discurso. Ariel. Chen, Y. (2017). Children’s early awareness of the effect of interpersonal status on politeness. Journal of Politeness Research, 13(1), 121–142. Devís Herrais, E., & Cantero Serena F. J. (2014). The intonation of mitigating politeness in Catalan. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(1), 127–149. Fiehler, R. (2002). How to do emotions with words: Emotionality in conversations. In S. R. Fussell (Ed.), The verbal communication of emotions. Interdisciplinary perspectives (pp. 79–106). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Floyd, S., Rossi, G., Baranova, J., Blythe, J., Dingemanse, M., Kendrick, K. H., Zinken, J., & Enfield, N. J. (2018). Ethics Universals and cultural diversity in the expresion of gratitude. Royal Society, 5, 1–9. Georgakopoulou, A. (2013). Small stories and identities analysis as a framework for the study of (im)politenss in interaction. Journal of Politenss Research, 9(1), 55–74. Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occuring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 90–121. Henning, S. (2012). Un análisis contrastivo de la realización del acuerdo y el desacuerdo en conversaciones entre españoles y conversaciones entre suecos. In J. Escamilla Morales, & G. Henry Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 290–324). Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Herring, S. (2019). The coevolution of computer-mediated communication and computer-mediated discourse analysis. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse. New insights and future directions (pp. 25–68). Palgrave MacMillan. Hidalgo Navarro, A. (2006). La expresión de cortesía en español hablado: marcas y recursos prosódicos para su reconocimiento en la conversación colloquial. In M. Villayandre Llamazares (Ed.), Actas del XXXV Simposio internacional de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística (pp. 957–979). Universidad de León. Hidalgo Navarro, A. (2011). En torno a la (des)cortesía verbal y al papel modalizador de la entonación en español. In C. Fuentes Rodríguez, E. Alcaide Lara, & E. Brenes Peña (Eds.), Aproximaciones a la (des)cortesía verbal en español (pp. 75–100). Peter Lang. Hidalgo Navarro, A. (2013). La fono(des)cortesía: marcas prosódicas (des)corteses en español hablado. Su estudio a través de corpus orales. Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 51(2), 127–149. Hidalgo Navarro, A., & Martínez Hernández, D. (2017). Hacia una propuesta metodológica para el estudio de la atenuación fónica en Es.Var.Atenuación. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 5(1), 25–58. Idemaru, K., Winter, B., & Brown, L. (2019). Cross-cultural multimodal politeness: The phonetics of Japanese deferential speech in comparison to Korean. Intercultural Pragmatics, 16(5), 517–555. Narbona Jiménez, A. (2001). Diálogo literario y escritura(lidad)-oralidad. In R. Eberenz (Ed.), Diálogo y oralidad en la narrativa hispánica moderna (pp. 189–208). Verbum. Jucker, A. (2018). Data in pragmatic research. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 3–36). Mouton De Gruyter. Kasper, G. (2000). Data collection in pragmatics research. In H. Spencer-Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp. 316–341). Continuum. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Keisanen, T., & Kärkkäinen, E. (2014). A multimodal analysis of compliment sequences in everyday English interactions. Pragmatics, 24(3), 649–672. Kreuz, R., & Riordan, M. (2018). The art of transcription: Systems and methodological issues. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Ed.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 95–120). Mouton De Gruyter.

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Xie, C. (2008). (Im)politeness. Towards an evaluative and embodied approach. Pragmatics and Cognition, 16(1), 151–175.

Chapter 17

Field Notes

The observation approach to collecting data can adopt more or less structured procedures. The observational log, checklists and scales of evaluation are structured forms because they provide preconceived categories that guide the observation. Logbooks, observation grids, recordings of anecdotal episodes to document a case study longitudinally are, on the other hand, considered to be semi-structured. Finally, field notes and diaries are considered open forms; in this chapter their characteristics are outlined and exemplified. They are the main tools for qualitative analysis, and their openness should guarantee a data driven process and hints for insightful reflection. Field notes are descriptive notes gathered in the field, which are as objective as possible: they are usually limited to short exchanges that the investigator can record. They are mainly a tool of reflection that helps to organize ideas and retrieve specific points of what happened. Their aim is not merely to describe, in fact they are a systemising tool that allows for regular and repeated reflection. The act of notetaking follows the perception, identification, and selection of the note-taker. This is already a sort of analysis, because when taking notes, the researcher is already interpreting, analysing, and selecting on the basis of previous knowledge (general, cultural, scientific). For this reason, field notes cannot be replaced by recording: they are a substantial description and this is already the beginning of the analytical process (Stubbs, 1987; Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Marra & Lazzaro-Salzar, 2018). Field notes require deep reflection on how to observe: according to what principles does the researcher observe? What role do the observer’s reactions play? Does the researcher contribute ideas and evaluations? Which voices are of interest to her? In fact, the researcher may tend to see what she is looking for (a certain linguistic structure, for example) or to find support for what she already believes is true, ignoring what does not fit. In addition, field notes imply a selection because the researcher will tend to notice what is within her range of expectations or what is more evident because it is most (or least) frequent. In other words, the researcher tends to notice stereotypical form-function associations and if the linguist is not as well trained as the ethnographer, she runs the risk of not detecting other less conventional or else more extraordinary forms (Huang, 2018; Schneider, 2018). As Golato observes (2003: 95), © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_17

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“[t]here is thus the real danger that memorisation and taking field notes will result in recording salient and expected (or particularly unexpected) facets of the interaction, at the expense of less salient but perhaps decisive (often indexical) material”. Moreover, as previously stated, descriptive accuracy is not the purpose of field notes, in fact annotation is unlikely to be accurate for articulated structures because memory cannot accurately recall long utterances, even if they have just been heard (Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Golato, 2003). Memory processes are relevant in field notes because the transcription of what is observed will be as memory conventionally returns reality. The processes of understanding language have a perceptive focus aimed at content, at the rapid extraction of meaning and significance. Schmidt (1990) shows that conscious attention has a limited memory capacity and cannot deal with the linguistic form when engaged in the interpretation of meaning. This is why, for example, literal structures (e.g. syntactic inversions, supportive moves, elaborations, reformulations, explanations on different turns) or procedural categories (such as discourse markers, hedges, intensifiers, conjunctions, and modifiers) are recalled less than words with full semantic value integrated in the sentence. Hence, field notes are not suitable for studies centred on form and linguistic structures (Yuan, 2001; Golato, 2003). In addition, whilst observing, the researcher should capture all the integrated channels and, as we know, it is difficult to record both verbal and extra-verbal elements at the same time in a precise form. This is particularly relevant because, cognitively, the visual mode predominates, so the role of the visual extralinguistic elements can be very relevant in the comprehension of the linguistic ones, both for the speaker and the observer/researcher (Danesi, 1988; Penny, 1989). If linguistic precision is not the purpose of the diary, it can instead be very useful to profile subjects, small groups or communities for case studies. A case study is an investigation of a system that has its own internal unity and cohesion (such as an event or process, group or organisation, or a critical incident). The objective of the study may be exploratory or explanatory to examine a complex social phenomenon using a real-life and holistic approach. The diaristic process supports the etic understanding of the characteristics of the case and its context. The diary is usually accompanied by complementary documents or artefacts to demonstrate that the case is emblematic (Nunan, 1992; Dörnyei, 2007; Vanderstoep & Johnston, 2009; Yin, 2018). Field observation tools are frequently used in politeness research. In addition to field notes and diaries, other usual forms of recording observation are the observational log (this describes in written form everything that happens without any subjective insertions by the observer), the anecdotal card (it isolates an element with the purpose of profiling a subject or a situation longitudinally), observation cards (these are closed and focused, during the observation nothing is noted that is not on the card), and, finally, the checklist (this is a quick observation card compiled through thinking in predefined elements). Kasper and Dahl (1991) also mention the verbal report (or protocol analysis) to record the processes in the form of a classic, descriptive, information report. We now propose a few examples of the tools illustrated in this chapter. We shall dwell on the illustrative value of the methodology employed, rather than on the evaluation of the study cited in general; our intent is to report how natural data are

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captured without the aid of recording equipment. Although these tools are not suitable for precise descriptions, the focus of the investigation may even be strictly linguistic, such as for example in Sifianou (2001). However, data are inevitably mediated by the perception of the researcher, so that in studying compliments in Greek Sifianou relied on students and colleagues equipped with a “specially prepared observation sheet where they were asked to write down the exact exchange as it occurred as accurately as possible along with part of the interaction which preceded and/or followed the compliment” (Sifianou, 2001: 392). Puga Larraín (2012) carries out a participant observation study on mitigation in two variants of Spanish (Chilean and Valencian Spanish of Spain). The author uses the field diary, which is compiled by the Chilean researcher herself and is based on her own daily experience in Valencia. Specifically, Puga Larraín jots down the situations that astonish her in a notebook over several years. This is followed by letters elaborated from the diary, which were actually sent to her family and friends in Chile. We report an example of her diary notes, in which two speakers show the researcher their new teeth (Puga Larraín, 2012: 427): Caso 3. Cierta vez, me crucé con la señora Luchi y don Pepe, su marido, en la calle, cerca de casa. Luchi me dijo: “Juana, mira, nos han puesto dientes nuevos. Mira que bien nos han quedado.” Y dirigiéndose a su marido: “Pepe, enséñale los dientes”. Y la blanca sonrisa de ambos se dibujó frente a mí. Luchi sonreía y se golpeteaba un diente con la uña de su dedo pulgar. Comentario: Los dientes en Chile no constituyen un tópico de conversación público. Si además se trata de dientes falsos, el tópico se busca ocultar por cualquier medio. La pretensión es, justamente, parezcan dientes auténticos. Reacciona nuestro evaluador o evaluadora: “aparte de los rasgos socioculturales mencionados antes sobre la sra. Luchi (no me imagino esta situación con hablantes más jóvenes y de condición sociocultural más alta), habría que citar el factor confianza. Parece que estas personas han establecido una relación de confianza con la investigadora (como si fuera alguien de su familia o de su círculo más próximo) que les permite tratar de aspectos privados, como su dentadura postiza.” Una vez más, el evaluador acierta, ahora en la descripción del tipo de relación que ha entablado la informante con la señora Luchi, a quien consideraba su “madre valenciana”.

The researcher writes down fragments of life and conversations, creating a rich report that also takes advantage of the metaconversations the researcher has about the observed cases. The cases she records emerge from the everyday and are configured, in Puga Larrían’s words, as symptomatic pragmatic objects, that is, pragmatic “symptoms”—including that of politeness—that the author generalizes in her own analysis of the two linguistic variants. The cases are noted because they touch the researcher’s sensibility, which is therefore the focus of the methodology: Puga Larrían starts from a “commonplace”, namely that Spanish speakers are more direct and appear impolite to many Hispanic American speakers, like her. The surprise produced by certain interactions or expressions is the criterion that leads the researcher to annotate the case; her linguistic and cultural competence is therefore the reference point for the contrastive analysis. Bieswanger (2015) addresses a similar case of variational pragmatics, namely responses to the speech act of thanks (or, as he terms them, imbalance reducers after thanks, or IRAT) in varieties of English in New York (USA) and Vancouver

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(Canada). He adopts natural data collection inspired by a Labovian-style fieldwork methodology, that is, he is a participant interlocutor covertly triggering the speech act under analysis in spontaneous real-life interaction. In each city, the researcher intervened in parallel settings in terms of place, time, day of the week, informants (white, aged between 30 and 50, male and female in equal numbers, dressed in casual business attire). He does not identify himself as a linguist, but pretends to be a tourist asking a question. At every triggered interaction, Bieswanger produces exactly the same wording, with no variations (Bieswanger, 2015: 535), such as in this example: Researcher: Excuse me, are you from around here? Informant: positive / negative Researcher: Could you tell me how to get to [a well-known sight]? Informant: directions Researcher: Thank you Informant: possible IRAT (verbal and non-verbal)

The first question is important to establish the variable of the interlocutor’s local status. After the exchange, the researcher behaves naturally, follows the directions, and takes notes of the speech act as soon as he is out of sight of the informant. Both verbal and non-verbal information is retrieved from his short-term memory. In this way, two comparable corpora of 60 acts were collected. Bieswanger (2015: 536), appropriately, comments on the research ethics issue because these data do not have informant consent: he cites the Economic and Social Research Council (Framework for Research Ethics. Swindon: Economic & Social Research Council, 2012, pp. 2–3 and 30) which states that covert research is admitted when “[…] it may provide unique forms of evidence or where overt observation might alter the phenomenon being studied […], as long as the research participants take part voluntarily without coercion and remain unharmed”. Bieswanger (2012) considers his methodology adheres to this principle. In contrast, Márquez Reiter (2020) employs non-participant observation, centred more on the observed subjects in order to “understand the way members of a social group, rather than the analyst, perform and interpret (im)politeness by way of understanding the social conventions on which it is based” (Márquez Reiter, 2020: 2). The researcher is also aware that her own appearance—albeit as a Latin American customer—may identify her as different from the subjects in the contemporary migratory context she approaches. She collects about 60 h of observation on topics of (im)politeness between 2013 and 2015 in stores run by Latin American retailers in two London malls. Either in casual conversations or identifying herself as the researcher, Márquez Reiter visits the field over the weekend and combines direct observation with field notes and interviews of the subjects observed. This is an example (Márquez Reiter, 2020: 12–13): Example 1 – Parador Rojo – Seven Sisters – fieldnotes 10/4/2013 While standing by the counter of the Parador Rojo eatery and talking with the cook as he was preparing the dishes, a man in his late twenties approaches the counter and addresses him

17 Field Notes 1.

Man: Muy buenos días caballero ilustre

2.

Cook: Mmm?

3.

Man: quihubo?

4.

Cook: (silence)

5.

Man: [sic] Necesitás a alguien que te de un mano en la cocina?

6.

Cook: pues no mijo, a nadie y tenés que hablar con el dueño

7.

Man: gracias entonces

201

Translation [by Márquez Reiter] 1.

Man: ‘Good morning honourable gentleman’

2.

Cook: ‘Mmm?’

3.

Man: ‘hello?’

4.

Cook: (silence)

5.

Man: ‘Do you need someone to give you a hand in the kitchen?’

6.

Cook: ‘well no son, nobody and you need to talk to the owner’

7.

Man: ‘thank you then’

Following this, the enquirer proceeded to sit at a table where two other men were seated. I approached the table with a view to conducting an interview with him. 1.

Me: Buenos días, perdonen la molestia

2.

Man: No Doña ninguna molestia [sic] en qué podemos colaborale?

3.

Me: Quería saber si podría hacerles unas preguntitas para una investigación que estoy haciendo sobre el español en Londres.

4.

Man: (while the other two are eating) Ay qué pena con usted Doña pero es que estamos desayundo recién

5.

Me: No hay problema, buen provecho

Idiomatic translation 1.

Me: ‘Good morning, sorry to bother you’

2.

Man: ‘No Ma’am not at all, how can we help you?’

3.

Me: ‘I wondered if I could ask you a few questions for a study I’m conducting on Spanish in London’

4.

Man: (while the other two are eating) ‘Ah what a shame with you Ma’am but we’re about to have breakfast’

5.

Me: ‘No problem, bon appétit.’

The subsequent analysis is carried out case by case, in order to approximate the cultural practices and interpretations of (im)politeness of the social groups under observation. Observation is often combined with other methods. The researchers might need to use a multi-method approach to better complete the natural field data, particularly when they wish to grasp the observed event more holistically or to investigate the

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emic view of the subjects. González-Cruz (2014)’s theoretical background is the speech act of request and politeness in Canarian Spanish. She adopts role-play and a DCT, in addition to creating a corpus of field notes of 100 spontaneous requests made directly to the researcher or those she overheard on a daily basis. As soon as she heard a request, the researcher wrote it down immediately or tried to memorize it, taking as many notes as possible about the situation, for subsequent transcription. The non-homogeneity of informants and the prevalence of informal situations between acquaintances render the data from these field notes very different from the role play and the DCT data. Culpeper et al. (2010) resort to a diary in asking students in England, China, Finland, Germany, and Turkey to record “rapport sensitive” incidents. To investigate cross-cultural perceptions, the researchers collected 500 reports, which looked like this example (Culpeper et al., 2010: 610): At home; the two of us: (I can’t remember the exact words) Boyfriend: What can women become when they get older? Like when a man can become ‘charming’? I: I guess a woman could be ‘beautiful’ or ‘elegant.’ Boyfriend: Name one older woman who’s beautiful. I: (Pointing at a picture of Helen Mirren). And Susan Sarandon. Boyfriend: (Disagrees) I: You don’t think an older woman can be beautiful? Boyfriend: On average, older men and women tend to lose their looks, but some men are charming when they’re old. (I fell silent and the conversation ended as we started watching TV). I felt that my boyfriend was implying that older women can’t be beautiful. I was annoyed and a bit depressed about it but then I forgot the whole conversation.

Although it concerns impoliteness, this study is interesting for politeness as well because it points out that the researchers avoided using labels (such as impolite, rude, etc.) to prevent speakers from being conditioned to report stereotyped events and, moreover, to avoid limiting the variety of labels that the informants would use spontaneously. For this reason, the researchers’ instructions regarding the compilation of the field diaries asked the participants to report in their own words conversations that had had a particular “effect” on them. Prompts are provided for rich descriptions (Culpeper et al., 2010: 601), for example: What was actually said, implied, or done? How was it said, implied, or done (e.g., was it something about the pronunciation?)? Where was it said, implied, or done (e.g., in class, on the bus)? By whom was it said, implied, or done (e.g., what was your relationship with them?)? Were there others who heard it, too? What were your reactions (e.g., what did you say, imply, or do?)?

However, informants rarely met the prompts systematically, often forgetting the format and its reminders. Consequently, many reports lack the richness or contextual

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detail that an ethnographic approach needs; hence, the researchers analysed only 100 reports out of 500, choosing those that were more detailed. In this way the authors obtained valuable clues to what a speaker considers contextually salient. Culpeper and colleagues complemented the field diaries with questionnaires (with Likert scales and open-ended responses), asking participants to reflect on their reports. These are examples of the questions they focused on (Culpeper et al., 2010: 602): How bad did the behavior in the conversation make you feel at the time it occurred? Do you think that person meant to make you feel bad? We know you felt ‘bad,’ but describe your feelings Why did this particular behavior make you feel bad? How would you describe the behavior of the person who made you feel bad (how would you label this kind of behavior?) This metapragmatic integration of the subjects’ spontaneous field notes allows researchers to classify the events for subsequent analysis.

Mousavi (2020) studies the terms of address in Lori (an Iranian language) in the context of (im)politeness, choosing interviews as a tool; however the author also decides to check their reliability with direct observation. In five different situations (houses of relatives, taxis, banks, doctors’ offices, and butchers’ and supermarkets), Mousavi finds 27 occasions where the linguistic forms under study occur. The researcher records them on a mobile phone, also annotating relationships (i.e. solidarity deduced from the content and tone of the conversation), age and gender. Obviously, age was conjectured, and it was not possible to ask about the level of education (which, on the other hand, is a variable that is registered in the interviews). Mousavi (2020: 245) comments that, in fact, a discrepancy is produced in his data between what the subjects say in the interview and what the researcher specifically observes in reality, […] male participants used [fictive kinship terms] for addressing total strangers. However, in interviews, few informants confirmed the use of fictive kinship terms. Regardless of their education, the informants seemed to have concealed the fact for one reason or another. One reason could be the observer’s paradox, as one of the informants corroborated. He said that although others might think he was crazy, he actually used fictive kinship terms to address his older cousins.

Babai Shishavan (2016) chooses ethnographic observation to study refusals of invitations and offers in Persian. Ninety-six spontaneous instances of genuine and ostensible refusals (face to face and telephone occurrences) were recorded through field notes in naturalistic settings in a university context. Both participant and nonparticipant options were recorded, that is, the occurrences involved the researcher but those overheard were also reported. Considering the focus of the research (genuine vs. ostensible), not only was linguistic communication transcribed, but also non-verbal communication. In addition, Babai Shishavan feels the need for a complementary tool to the field notes, so the researcher introduces a focus group interview to investigate cultural schemas and sociocultural norms. It is important to note that the three small focus groups were made up of university students, i.e., they were similar to the

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participants in natural situations. We report an example of the questions the participants were asked in order to illustrate what is needed to integrate natural data in a sociopragmatic framework to study politeness (Babai Shishavan, 2016: 38): Sometimes when we are invited to an event or offered goods or a service we refuse to accept at first, but we might accept it later if the interlocutor insists on his/her invitation/offer. Why do you think we do this? Would you consider it impolite/rude if the addressee accepts your invitation/offer without rejecting it for a few times? Why? What social and cultural factors do you think underlie production of such refusals? When refusing offers and invitations ostensibly, would you refuse explicitly or would you use more implicit refusal strategies? Why? When someone refuses your offer or invitation, how do you know that the refusal was not a genuine one? What clues indicate that the refusal was ostensible?

References Babai Shishavan, H. (2016). Refusals of invitations and offers in Persian: Genuine or ostensible? Journal of Politeness Research, 12(1), 55–93. Bieswanger, M. (2015). Variational pragmatics and responding to thanks—Revisited. Multilingua, 34(4), 527–546. Culpeper, J., Marti, L., Mei, M., Nevala, M., & Schauer, G. (2010). Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey. Intercultural Pragmatics, 7(4), 597–624. Danesi, M. (1988). Neurological bimodality and theories of language teaching. SSLA, 10, 13–31. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics. Quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodologies. Oxford University Press. Golato, A. (2003). Studying compliment responses: A comparison of DCTs and recordings of naturally occuring talk. Applied Linguistics, 24(1), 90–121. González-Cruz, M.-I. (2014). Request patterns by EFL Canarian Spanish students: Contrasting data by languages and research methods. Intercultural Pragmatics, 11(4), 547–573. Huang, Y. (2018). Research methodology in classical and neo-Gricean pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 155–183). Mouton De Gruyter. Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 215–247. Márquez Reiter, R. (2020). How can ethnography contribute to understanding (im)politeness? Journal of Politeness Research, 17(1), 35–59. Marra, M., & Lazzaro-Salazar, M. (2018). Ethnographic methods in pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Ed.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 343–366). Mouton De Gruyter. Mousavi, H. (2020). Terms of address and fictive kinship politeness in Lori. Journal of Politeness Research, 6(2), 271–247. Nunan, D. (1992). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge University Press. Penny, C. (1989). Modality effects in delayed free recall and recognition: Visual is better than auditory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 41(3), 455–470. Puga Larraín, J. (2012). La observación participante en el estudio de la atenuación del castellano de Chile. In J. Escamilla Morales, & G. Henry Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 413–450). Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE.

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Schmidt, R. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning. Applied Linguistics, 11(2), 129–158. Schneider, K. P. (2018). Methods and ethics in data collection. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in Pragmatics (pp. 37–93). Mouton De Gruyter. Sifianou, M. (2001). “Oh! How appropriate!” Compliments and politeness. In A. Bayraktaroglu & M. Sifianou (Eds.), Linguistic Politeness across Boundaries: The Case of Greek and Turkish (pp. 391–430). John Benjamins. Stubbs, M. (1987). Análisis del discurso. Análisis sociolingüístico del lenguaje natural. Alianza Editorial. Vanderstoep, S., & Deirdre, J. (2009). Research methods for everyday life. Blending qualitative and quantitative approaches. Jossey-Bass. Yin, R. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods. Sage. Yuan, Y. (2001). An inquiry into empirical pragmatics data-gathering methods: Written DCTs, oral DCTs, field notes, and natural conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 33(2), 271–292.

Chapter 18

Shadowing

This chapter presents a field technique which has had little application in politeness research so far, although it has great potentiality. Czarniawska (2007) defines shadowing as “fieldwork on the move” and it is a method widely used in organisation studies (e.g. education, nursing), consumer studies, urban-life studies, and workplace studies. Examples in the field of politeness are rare, but Sclavi’s (2003, 2005, 2007) study suggests a promising future for this technique. For this reason, the chapter presents a detailed report of Sclavi’s framework, as well as a general introduction to shadowing. Shadowing is a type of dynamic, one-to-one observation in which the researcher physically follows her subject in daily life, taking field notes. The observation is direct and not mediated by the observed participant’s narrative. Shadowing can return both quantifiable data (e.g. regarding the frequency and duration of an activity) and qualitative data. In general, it gives access to the network and sequence of practices of the shadowee. It thus captures a productive dynamism, not least because the bodies of the shadowee and shadower are in significant movement in space over time. Thus, body-space and time return their own semantics in the specific network of practices and discourses of the observed subject. For this reason, shadowing offers unique access to situated data that are invisible to the shadowee herself, and in fact shadowing is often used to make daily or work routines more visible to those who experience them, for purposes of professional development. Shadowing also returns interesting data on how a subject shifts from one context to another in daily life, tracking the shifts of meaning when a person interacts in different roles and situations and with different identifications (Polite et al., 1997; McDonald, 2005; Dewilde & Creese, 2016; Knutas, 2019; Trouille & Tavory, 2019) As shadowing is a strict form of participatory observation, it brings the researcher close to intimate everyday matters. It is, in fact, a very intrusive and exhausting method (even physically) for both the researcher and the shadowee. Especially if extended over time, shadowing creates a close relationship, which should be as good as possible to grant the shadower maximum access to the shadowee’s life. In a sense, this method involves mutual study between the subjects and requires a sort © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_18

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of emotional chemistry. An intimate relationship like this also implies methodological considerations. The mere presence of another human longitudinally produces a relationship effect alien to the research design. This effect can also result in a sort of spontaneous participation in a situation, as well as maturing a progressive identification with the shadower and her life view. Especially in data analysis, this close relationship also produces the ethical problem of how the shadowee will later see herself represented: she will, for example, not expect to see herself represented critically. To sum up, moral dilemmas of rapport management are involved (Fine, 1993; Gill et al., 2014). Technically, this relation management requires specific practical and psychological attention, as to, for example, shared rules, rituals of separation, camouflage of the shadower in the context (e.g. dress code), as well as sensitivity to the implications of gender, age, physical aspect, etc. Due to its dynamism in the field, in the practical phase, shadowing also involves the researcher in unexpected choices, for example, how to motivate a shadowee is problematic because any form of incentive might represent a form of unethical pressure on the subject. Secondly, it is always possible that the relationship may deteriorate as the shadower begins to be perceived as an irritating stranger. In other cases, the shadower—who should assume the part of an invisible presence—may be required to participate actively in the ongoing scene (e.g. to express an opinion). The voluntary participation of the subjects is fundamental, and this also implies that in some way the subjects implicitly have a marked profile since they accept this intrusive method. Nevertheless, the fact that the subjects might not be representative of the population is not a particular problem of scientific validity. The shadowing analyst can easily work on contrast (and not on normality), so being representative, average or typical may be not of particular interest. The non-average subject, in a way, has the advantage of making the premises of the daily frames more explicit. So, even a particular case can function as a generative metaphor, providing, by contrast, data that improve intuition. An integral part of shadowing is the post-sharing. After the session, the shadower and the shadowee can make sense of the events collaboratively, through interviewing. This involves a shift from the practices observed to their conceptualisation, creating a practice-based ontology of the behaviours mapped. For this reason, shadowing is considered an approach based on the intersubjective construction of social practices. This is why Gill (2011) emphasizes that the site of shadowing research is the interaction between shadowee and shadower, in the mixed roles of reciprocal actor and spectator. This is an interesting approach to identity studies, because it is precisely the implicit or explicit negotiation of the identities of the shadowee and shadower that is a source of hermeneutics, as well as mutual empowerment. Various types of shadowing are possible. The number of subjects observed, the settings, and the duration of both the sessions and the study are variable. For example, Bøe et al. (2017) use two simultaneous shadowers at different distances from the shadowee and, in addition, they videotape. Video recording introduces an element of observational detachment in the researcher’s post-viewing, but it can also be very

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useful material to share with the shadowee during a recall interview. Others audiorecord with a microphone on the shadowee (controlled by the shadowee herself) for specific linguistic ethnographical purposes. Usually the shadowing is a silent observation, but in certain cases the shadower can ask questions by interacting with the participant in the context. For example, discursive shadowing focuses on the conversation between researcher and participant during their joint movements with common reflections (Dewilde & Creese, 2016). Finally, online shadowing is also possible, in which the shadower follows the shadowee via a videoconferencing digital connection by means of a mobile phone or micro-camera. This technique attempts to cancel out the physical visibility of the shadower and hide the filming devices, which however do not record (so this is radically different from the methods examined in Chap. 16). In this case, it is always necessary to check the current legislation on public filming and, in addition, to consider that in private meetings between only two people, the presence of an “invisible” shadower is not so invisible. It will be necessary to warn the interlocutors, and this involves the virtual entry of an observer on the scene, hence the shift from a dyad to a group, more specifically, from a private conversation to a public conversation. Finally, the extensive and intensive interfacing between researcher-shadower and shadowee involves important ethical issues. In the procedural stage, prior to shadowing, the researcher needs the consent and approval of of her institution’s ethical committee. One of the biases that Johnson (2014) reports having to deal with for shadowing is informed consent, which obviously concerns the shadowee, but more problematically concerns also third parties with whom the shadowee comes into contact. From a practical standpoint, this issue becomes difficult to manage, especially if there is rapid contact with third parties or if they are strangers, or if the shadowee does not give notice of the shadowing practice taking place to third parties. In addition, the consent of third parties may not be obtainable (e. g. if children are involved as occasional third parties) or can be conditioned (e.g. the shadowee puts pressure on others). It is interesting to note that, in these cases, the informed consent of third parties is likely to become even more unethical than covert research because it is intrusive and stressful in the lives of the participants. A second ethical problem is that the consent normally has to specify the shadowee’s time commitment, which is not always predictable because a shadowing session can be linked to extemporaneous occasions or impediments, thus it has to be agreed upon each time. In addition, the fact that the shadowee (or third parties interacting with her) may be subjected to discomfort and wish to be on her own must be contemplated. Finally, confidentiality must be ensured at all times, although in the field it may become difficult for the shadowee and shadower to identify what can be recorded and what cannot. One of the rare examples of investigation using shadowing in the field of politeness comes from Mullany (2006). The author examines small talk in business meetings among women managers to strategically create solidarity, in-group identity and to set social distance between themselves and men colleagues. The author conducts two observations—one in a retail company and one in a manufacturing company in the United Kingdom—and employs the shadowing of men and women managers

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attending and observing meetings. During the meetings, data were both audiorecorded and annotated as field notes. In addition, Mullany employs interviewing (both observed subjects and others) and analysis of written company documents. The researcher is a peripheral member of the community of practice, so she has a participatory role that aids in interpretation. In spite of its scarce presence in politeness studies, shadowing is a tool with a methodological profile that suits many of the issues that are discussed in Part I, mainly regarding the perspectives on politeness and the role of emotions as tools for investigation. To detail these aspects, Sclavi’s (2003, 2005, 2007) framework is outlined in the following pages. Sclavi proposes both a theoretical framework and a field study contrasting two different school systems. The methodological interest of her investigation also for politeness is that it contrasts perspectives on social frameworks to identify the main constituent of the frame. Her interpretation is based on the shadower’s competence as an observer, and it is at the same time subjective and objective, situated, negotiated, and emotionally driven. Competence of observation is the starting point for shadowing and is closely related to a question of perspectives (see Chap. 7). When researchers undertake research in communities of which they are already a part, they are insiders; when they compare data from communities of which they are not a part, they are outsiders. This interplay between the perspective of the outsider and the insider is very useful for the researcher to estrange herself, to make the familiar unfamiliar and to perceive the assumptions that can go unnoticed. Hence, the premise for the researcher is to be aware of her socially constructed ways of looking. The consequence is that the observer needs to be competent in observation (which Sclavi calls active listening): Active listening does not require abandoning empirical observation; on the contrary, it requires a much more accurate and reflective mode of observation, attentive to details and forms, less subject to the urgency of classification and the influence of common sense. It is “experimental observation” in a full and radical way. (Our translation, Sclavi, 2003: 75)

The real object of active observation is not the subject’s action or behaviour, but the researcher’s reaction to the subject’s reaction. This type of observation consists of the active identification of the contrast between the implicit premises of the researcher’s frames and those of the subject observed. Precisely this contrast is scientific data. In this regard, Sclavi questions the objective/subjective dichotomy of research (involvement/detachment in her terminology). She starts by questioning the concept of lay knowledge as associated only with subjective involvement, and of scientific knowledge as associated with objective detachment: The neutral, nonpartisan approach favoured by many social scientists would classify value judgments and emotional responses as merely subjective. An epistemology of active listening and creative conflict transformation, on the contrary, suggests involvement and detachment and displacement to reach the multiplication of frames, the exploration of other possible worlds and constructive meta-communication. (Sclavi, 2008: 166)

Sclavi argues that in the etic vision the external observer observes another person and interprets. The external observer is unaware of her own implicit premises and

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applies her own frames to the subject observed. At present, much research on politeness adheres to this vision: the researcher, responding to a sort of urgency of classification, considers herself representative of the culture she studies. In the emic vision, on the other hand, the observer is empathic and aims at grasping the emic signals of what she observes. The researcher approaches the frames of the subject, who observes, but still remains unaware of her own implicit premises. In politeness studies, this often leads to the description of behaviours, but does not always address the frames and implicit premises that underlie them. In other words, in the etic approach we have a description from one point of view (that of the researcher) that frames the point of view of the observed subject; in the etic case we have a description that assumes as far as possible the perspective of the observed subject so that, in a certain sense, it is the observed subject that frames the observer. Sclavi opts for a third way. Through shadowing, the observer is external and is sensitive to her extraneousness from the observed subject: she is not in front of a Diverse, but of the Other (therefore she admits similarities and differences). The fact of being in–out (emic–etic) is a privileged perspective for insight, making it a powerful interpretative key, as already also experimented in other fields (e.g. Rogers, 1977). Sclavi argues that an observer can be simultaneously detached and involved (object and subject), and this happens when one experiences something alienating (i.e. a displacement, a “twist”). It might be a pragmatic incident of politeness, that is a rapport-sensitive incident or critical incident (Spencer-Oatey, 2002; Spencer-Oatey & Harsch, 2016). An alienating moment like this makes us experience an emotion and, at the same time, makes us take note of situational patterns (in Sclavi’s terminology: the dances or choreographies of everyday life). Such patterns are structured scenarios of our everyday routine, and configure an unconscious sequence of action-reaction. Thus, speakers take part in whole dialogic frames and unconsciously bounce entire dialogical settings to each other. Until an event produces a state of displacement. The effect of feeling out-of-place moves the here-and-now semantics of the body into a different space. This displacement consists in viewing something, at the same time, as taken for granted in our daily life (in—emic) and seeing it from a new perspective (out—etic). Sclavi names this double synergic perspective bisociation and theorizes that it leads to the discovery of the implicit premises and the tacit values of the observer and observed person. This insight detonates the creative generation of an end-linkage, i.e. a framework of superordinate functioning of a dynamic. This allows us not so much to detect behaviours, but to take note of the basic frames from which that and other behaviours stem. To sum up, in people’s everyday lives events that produce a clash of frameworks happen and project the speaker into a state of bisociation. This state is marked by rising emotions and consist of intensively experiencing both the habitual framework of practice and a different one. For the reasearcher, this status is an emic-etic fusion that highlights the implicit premises of the frameworks (see Chap. 8). The technique that Sclavi uses is precisely shadowing which, as stated, includes the observer in the observation as part of the interactive dynamics studied. The shadower does not observe actions but herself reacting to reactions (of the other). As Sclavi (2003) points

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out, shadowing is the intrusion of a researcher into a foreign environment to use the incidents in which the shadowee is involved in order to study the environment. The observer is not transparent, she is active, and fully accepts the observer paradox. The shadower’s extraneousness is considered a necessary condition for understanding, hence the shadower does not translate the Other into her language. As Duranti also observes Duranti (2007), the estrangement is necessary to produce a suspension of judgement, yet, at the same time, to understand human behaviour we must be human, so we must at least be able to imagine the other (which is the opposite process to “estrangement”). In this, the paradox of bisociation is produced. For example, let us imagine a subject involved as a field researcher in her daily life (e.g. a teacher doing action research): when confronted with the evaluation of politeness divergent from her set of expectations (e.g. a student addresses her in an inappropriate way), the subject researcher has an emotional reaction (e. g. spite, dislike, discomfort, etc.) and will start to observe her emotional reaction, accepting the discomfort and uncertainty it produces without classifying it (e.g. the teacher does not judge the student as rude). This process will produce bisociation (e.g. the teacher accepts that the student can be both polite as she expected and rude as she perceived it, thus accepting two perspectives) and this will force understanding of the frame of the researcher subject’s unconscious daily life (e.g. the student-professor/teacher relationship requires the recognition of a power relationship). The roles of bisociation, frames and emotions are very familiar to the literature of politeness research, as we saw in Part I. Sclavi traces the concept of bisociation back to Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation, 1964) and, as Sclavi (2008: 159) quotes literally from Koestler, it is an unhinging of the “stubborn coherence of the perceptual frames and matrices of thought in our minds”. Therefore, bisociation means seeing the same facts from incompatible points of view and from this drawing awareness of the premises that support their frame. More precisely, Sclavi speaks of “the overlapping with equal legitimacy of two divergent matrices of meaning” (2005: 119). Interestingly, in this model, emotions are a tool of investigation (see Sect. 6.2). The emotions produced by an alienating incident (e.g. disorientation, anger, bewilderment, astonishment, discomfort, shame, pleasure, etc.) are the detonator of a creative and hermeneutical shock, provided that the emotion is not immediately followed by the automatic reaction induced by the subject’s frames. Such automatism is to be inhibited, to make way for the paradox of bisociation. Bisociation contrasts our tendency to classify and requires the ability to live together with discomfort and uncertainty. From bisociation comes a process in which automatism is revealed, the objective being not to explain behaviours, as previously explained, but to understand what conditioning factors have led to that reaction of the observed subject and to that reaction of the observer. The scientific nature of this observation process is marked by the pause and slowing down after the emotion, a point when from in one passes out and defuses the automatic reaction typical of a lay speaker. In this way the emotion becomes data for analysis. As stated, there is a process of etic-emic dialogue: where one does not annul the other through objective observation (typical of hard science), the observer is not annulled to let the subject speak (as in ethnography and

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participatory sociology) and there is an observed observer—as Krishnamurti (1997) would say—who records her own interpersonality in context, at the moment of the contingent, co-constructed and dynamic relationship. Bisociation is combined with a humorous style of observation in Sclavi’s proposal, i.e. sensitive to inconsistencies and paradox. Bisociation is based on the idea that two or more inconsistent visions are possible simultaneously. It is not only a matter of adopting different points of view and accepting that reality is polymorphous, e.g. one looks at a Lego® cube from above and sees a rectangle, but if she looks at it from the side, she sees a square. Instead, it is a question of imagining and being able to see one thing as if it were another, and accepting that reality is subject to variation, e.g. it can be a Lego® cube or a chocolate in the shape of a Lego® cube. This opens up infinite possibilities and observation becomes a variational investigation: the observer does not passively record what she observes, but is attentive in making a leap from one perspective to another imagined one. This passage draws energy precisely from the discomfort of the cognitive conflict between frames. As Sclavi (2003) points out, openness to bisociation is the fundamental act from which humour, scientific discovery and artistic creation originate. In a certain sense, in pragmatics, the hiatus between implicit and explicit is a sort of bisociation, because saying “I’m tired today” to mean “you will prepare dinner” in some way involves the assumption of a double vision. In many cases this is automatic as when politeness is conventionalized into frames; in other cases, it is less automatic. In fact, pragmatics works to understand how the speaker solves the bisociation that produces a statement which, at the same time, has three perspectives: a locutive, illocutive and perlocutive force. The more automatic the configuration of these perspectives is (i.e. a frame), the less creative the cognitive work will be; the less automatic it is, the more the speaker must proceed by creative imagination. The Relevance Theory, for example, investigates how the speaker uses the implicit premises of the frame in which a sentence is framed. When a speaker asserts “Sorry, I’m tired” to mean “I don’t want to go out” and also to mean “Our relationship is going badly”, the relevance ranges between the implicit premises of being tired and the implicit premises of not wanting to go out (Table 18.1). In bisociate perspectives, the relevance also includes the implicit premises of a relationship that is going wrong. In a bisociated multiperspective, the speaker identifies a possible, normal and ordinary framework for the contiguous context of communication. In other words, the choreography that activates a statement can be different depending on the cluster of premises that the interlocutor forms, and that cluster works by frames that are usually closed and repetitive (in the previous example, the interlocutor will reply “You are always tired”, for example). If, on the other hand, the bisociated multiperspective is new, we have a situation that appears ambiguous, incoherent or not very relevant. In this case, disorientation is produced from which an imagined development of possible frames starts (e.g. one looks for plausibility contexts). As Haugh and Kádár (2017: 626) point out, precisely the intercultural encounter—that is any interpersonal encounter—is a place of encounter between different moral systems and therefore, the core of a creative instance. In politeness research we are interested in the implicit premises of a situated communicative relationship and the choreographies (or frames) activated. The Sclavi

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Table. 18.1 Examples of implicit premises coexisting in bisociate perspective

Examples of implicit premises of “being tired” in a Western culture

Explicit meaning ➔"Sorry, I'm tired"

Those who are tired don't move They are bored There are hours to rest that are more adequate than others Rest has a certain duration One rests alone One rests with others One has the right to rest Resting is a primary need Rest is healthy One shouldn’t rest too much One has to rest a lot Examples of the implicit premises of not wanting to go out in a Western culture

Implicit meaning ➔ “I don't want to go out”

The will of the individual is sovereign and must be respected The will is fickle and one can change her mind The will is followed by an action One goes out alone One goes out together Examples of the implicit premises of a relationship that goes wrong in a Western culture

Deep sense ➔ "Our relationship is going badly"

In good relations many things are done together Doing something together is good Not doing something together is bad Doing too many things together is bad

proposal illustrated in these paragraphs indicates that we can understand them when we are part of a choreography where the emotions we feel tell us that a dissonance is taking place: this kind of observation is creative and imaginative, and helps the researcher to extract these premises and to read their underlying matrix through contrast and similarity. As stated, in this type of analysis the focus is not on an event, a behaviour or a linguistic structure, as they are just an occasion, a detonator: the real focus is on the premises that support them. Therefore, whether it is a typical

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or atypical event, whether it is politeness or impoliteness, whether it is unique or frequent, etc. is not relevant, because what is relevant is what such an event reveals in terms of implicit premises through the reactions, which will mark it as consonant (and not noteworthy) or dissonant (and noteworthy).

References Bøe, M., Hognestad, K., & Waniganayake, M. (2017). Qualitative shadowing as a research methodology for exploring early childhood leadership in practice. EMAL, 45(4), 605–620. Czarniawska, B. (2007). Shadowing and other techniques for doing fieldwork in modern societies. Liber. Dewilde, J., & Creese, A. (2016). Discursive shadowing in linguistic ethnography. Situated practices and circulating discourses in multilingual schools. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 47, 329–339. Duranti, A. (2007). Etnopragmatica. La forza del parlare. Carocci. Fine, G. (1993). Ten lies of ethnography: Moral dilemmas of field research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 22(3), 267–294. Gill, R. (2011). The shadow in organizational ethnography: Moving beyond shadowing to spectacting. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 6, 115–133. Gill, R., Barbour, J., & Dean, M. (2014). Shadowing in/as work: The recommendations for shadowing fieldwork practice. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 9(1), 69–89. Haugh, M., & Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Intercultural (im)politeness. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 601–632). Palgrave Macmillan. Johnson, B. (2014). Ethical issues in shadowing research. QROM, 9(1), 21–40. Knutas, A. (2019). Shadowing or what? Experience of shadowing acts of being in the field of education. Qualitative Enquiry, 25(7), 661–669. Krishnamurti, J., & Martin, R. (Ed.). (1997). Krishnamurti: Reflections on the self. KFI Pubblications. McDonald, S. (2005). Studying actions in context: A qualitative shadowing method for organizational research. Qualitative Research, 5(4), 455–473. Mullany, L. (2006). “Girls on tour”: Politeness, small talk, and gender in managerial business meetings. Journal of Politeness Research., 2, 55–77. Polite, V., McClure, R., & Rollie, D. (1997). The emerging reflective urban principal. The role of shadowing encounters. Urban Education, 31(5), 466–489. Rogers, C. (1977). On personal power. Delacorte Press. Sclavi, M. (2003). Arte di ascoltare e mondi possibili. Come si esce dalle cornici di cui siamo parte. Bruno Mondadori. Sclavi, M. (2005). A una spanna da terra. Paravia Bruno Mondadori. Sclavi, M. (2007). An Italian lady goes to the Bronx. IPOC. Sclavi, M. (2008). The role of play and humor in creative conflict management. Negotiation Journal, April, 157–180. Spencer-Oatey, H. (2002). Managing rapport in talk: Using rapport sensitive incidents to explore the motivational concerns underlying the management of relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 34(5), 529–545. Spencer-Oatey, H., & Harsch, C. (2016). The critical incident technique. In Z. Hua (Ed.), Research methods in intercultural communication (pp. 223–238). Wiley Blackwell. Trouille, D., & Tavory, I. (2019). Shadowing: Warrants for intersituational variation in ethnography. Sociological Methods & Research, 48(3), 534–560.

Chapter 19

Corpus Analysis

A corpus is a reasoned and pondered collection of texts of any nature that can be analysed on paper or in audio–video or digital form. It becomes data when it is accessed with a research objective. A digital corpus offers an empirical basis with automated access, but as Clark (2018) points out, this does not exempt the analyst from the use of intuition. This chapter focuses on corpora, and outlines examples of recent studies in politeness research. These show how a corpus is a tool for sharpening intuitions, that is, an adjuvant which does not exempt the analyst from keeping a clear position with respect to the data she is going to analyse. The corpus analysis is somehow an evolution of the philological method, which is a method of data collection with ancient origins that consists of sifting through many texts to scour for occurrences of the linguistic structures under analysis. Nowadays, this time-consuming process is digitally supported by storage of texts, data retrieval and statistical analysis. The researcher can compose her own corpus or use a corpus composed by other analysts. To address a certain specific research question a corpus can be created ad hoc (i.e. a purpose-built corpus), in which case it will most likely be small. In order to have a larger corpus available, the researcher must rely on those already created in public projects, provided that they are suitable for her research question. Mention should also be made of a kind of sui generis corpora. Whatever the type, corpora are data sets: clusters of untagged and unweighted digital texts, which have the advantage of having examples of language which are constantly updated. This is a evident advantage over more formal academic corpora that result from large, but finished, projects, and which are usually frozen in time (Schneider & Barron, 2014). In any case, the corpus should be accessible. For this, the general principle applies that: [a]s in every scientific enterprise, if one wants her statements to be taken as true, one must offer as many people as possible the possibility of falsifying them: making one’s own database, or large segments of it, available is a way of involving the community of interpreters even more in the process of validating a hypothesis (Pallotti, 1999: 405, our translation).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_19

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The extent of a corpus is variable. Traditionally, digital corpora have been the method for big data (millions or billions of items), i.e. a macro dimension of analysis on factors liable to be quantifiable. They have therefore been used to measure quantities and frequencies in large sets of data. However, large corpora often do not specify clearly the traits of context or the sociolinguistic elements and often mix types of texts and genres. Hence, the size of a corpus must find a balance: if it is too large, it is overwhelming but detects a wide variety of cases; if it is too small, it is more manageable but does not detect infrequent occurrences, nor does it offer a wide variety of cases of the structure sought (De Beaugrande, 1996; Teubert, 2001). No matter how large, the composition of the corpus will never offer the guarantee that it is representative of the whole language. It will always be a sample of a given geographical, chronological, sociolinguistic, genre, register context. For example, many corpora underrepresent the variety of digital genres, because the corpus is not updated. So the concept of representativeness—which has been based largely on the genre concept—needs to be reviewed. The digital redefinition of genres, on one hand, and the possibility of regular automatic updates of digitallybased corpora, on the other hand, are constantly expanding what a corpus should and can represent. If a completely representative corpus is a not feasible ideal, then its goal should be the balance of the sample, that is, to include texts that are representative of a wide range of the language (Andersen, 2018). This objective is urgent in politeness particularly for digital analysis of orality and multimodality, hopefully without the mediation of the transcription. Corpus pragmatics is a rapidly expanding field, despite the fact that broadly speaking pragmatics tends to prefer a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach. In fact, digital research in corpora is a quantitative data collection technique based on the concept of formal strings, which is effective if the researcher has a fixed formal research key. It is therefore suited to the automated search for words or sequences of a syntactic, lexical and morphological type and, as a result, it offers lists of the keyword with its co-text, collocations, frequency, n-grams, keyness, etc. Corpus research also offers statistical analysis tools for frequency comparison, including normalisation where comparisons between different corpora are made. The objective is to identify patterns and verify if they can be generalised by sifting through large amounts of data. This approach is typical of corpus research: it starts off from a predefined linguistic element already observed previously and looks for its occurrences. A corpus-driven exploratory approach is also possible, when recurrent phenomena, such as collocations, are extracted from the corpus to identify units or categories that were not previously identified. The combination of the two options improves the reliability of data because it avoids a predetermination that ignores patterns not yet identified (Jucker, 2013, 2018; Adolphs, 2008). To date, digital corpora have not been greatly exploited in politeness research, partly because the data retrieved in large corpora are often not well contextualised, as they lack the coordinates of the situation or refined identification of the speakers. However, digital corpora can well be exploited to search for recurrent patterns of a pragmalinguistic nature (e.g. typical surface patterns, lexical items, or devices indicating illocutionary force). Basically, however, there must be a careful definition

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of categories and classifications through qualitative studies. In pragmatics, the size of a corpus is not that decisive, hence the need for a refined qualitative analysis is predominant to delimit the items of interest. After the quantitative extraction, there is usually always a second qualitative phase, that is, the manual work of cleaning up, in which irrelevant tokens are excluded. The genre or text type, co-text, speakers and their relationship, topic, domain, etc. are context information that the corpus should supply because it would be useless to have many occurrences without the context information for discriminating them (Diani, 2015). Such a praxis is a sort of semi-automated approach to corpus studies because it involves both automated methods of identifying tokens and their manual analysis (i.e. an item by item analysis made by a human being, using some kind of software). In general, it is always necessary to find a compromise between automated and manual processes. Some analysts consider that only manual analysis can be effective so that the linguist’s keen eye can discover underlying patterns. Others consider that only automatic search in a large corpus can give statistical power to the analysis. In actual fact, it all depends on the data that the linguist is investigating: some data are perfectly suitable for quantitative analysis, others, however, are less useful because, although they had a certain surface regularity and identifiability, an automatic computer analysis is not enough to disambiguate their functions (Garretson & O’Connor, 2007). When the analyst has strings that work well, the quantitative element is very useful because on large corpora it offers a variety of examples of use in different contexts, with different sociolinguistic or genre parameters, and with relevant combinations or placements. In these cases, the corpus analysis is helpful for identifying the conventionalisation of structures: where we identify a repeated pattern of frequent and non-random co-occurrences of a structure and function in a context (including social categories, age, gender, social class, social relation, etc.), we have a conventional structure. Nonetheless, when it comes to discourse analysis, many phenomena do not correspond to a closed class of linguistic structures (Rühlemann, 2019). Instead of using strings, the researcher can also work on linguistic proxies i.e. “surface forms that indicate rather than embody the phenomenon”. After the automatic retrieval from the large corpus, proxies are screened manually. These are reasonably good indexes of the phenomenon when they are sufficiently univocal (Garretson & O’Connor, 2007: 89). The research keys that Spencer-Oatey (2011) uses on a corpus of interviews to track events of politeness judgements might be used for proxies of politeness: admiring, affable, agreeable, amiable, attentive, benevolent, bland, chivalrous, civil, courteous, courtly, decent, deferential, dignified, friendly, gallant, gentle, good-tempered, graceful, gracious, humble, kind, knightly, mannerly, mild, nice, pleasing, polite, refined, respectful, reverent, smooth, sociable, suave, sweet, tasteful, urbane, well-behaved, well-bred, well-mannered. But we know that in politeness research the univocal element is a rare condition because politeness is often better defined by functions and not by forms. Hence typical linguistic strings and proxies are not always entirely suitable for automatic retrieval. Moreover, the pre-identification of the strings prevents the detection of new patterns because unconventional polite

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realisations cannot be synthesized in a string or word, thus they escape the digital screening. As mentioned, to reach a precise formal description, the search string should be based on a prior qualitative categorisation, for which two basic approaches are identified. One is the form-to-function approach, in which the string is a linguistic form (for example, discourse markers, interjections, address terms, vocatives, hesitation markers, etc.) whose various communicative functions are detected in the corpus, depending on the prosody, position, collocation, distribution, etc. that the digital retrieval offers. This has been the predominant approach in politeness to date because it is based on a grammatical key, which is usually quite easy for automatic corpus retrieval. The form-to-function approach is useful because it supplies many and varied contexts of a form’s appearance. However, a function-to-form approach is also possible, when the starting point is the function—typically a speech act—and the researcher maps its different formal realisations. This is the natural direction of many pragmatic studies, but it is the opposite to the computer-based approach, which instead needs univocal strings and not acts that can potentially be produced in a very high number of different forms. So, in this approach, one must proceed manually to identify the speech act in the corpus. To help in this task, some self-matched systems are being developed, such as the illocutionary force indicating devices (i.e. a typical element that identifies a speech act, such as Sorry for the act of apologizing), the use of a typical feature (e.g. positive adjectives for compliments), and metacommunicative expressions (e.g. apologise for the act of apologising) (Jucker, 2013, 2018; Aijmer, 2018; O’Keeffe, 2018). Form-to-function and function-to-form can integrate, however, both are lacking in those aspects of politeness that imply linguistic absences, therefore many phenomena related to implicitness and relevance. Many corpora facilitate the retrieval by annotation, i.e. by adding coded information to the linguistic elements of the corpus to allow a unique automatic digital identification. To annotate the corpus, automatically identifiable tags label the data. The granularity of the tagging can vary: multidimensional ones with several layers have many labels, monodimensional ones, on the other hand, tag only a few things. Multidimensional tagging is not economic but it has widespread applicability because the labels are not related to any specific areas. Monodimensional tagging is light but not versatile, so only suitable for analysis with specific purposes (Savy & Solís García, 2008). To be consistent, tags need a priori theoretical definition concerning language (e.g. grammatical tags), context (e.g. sociolinguistic and demographic tags), and text (e.g. register tags). Corpora tagging has usually been grammatical and form-based, so it is not easily applicable to politeness, which works precisely on polyfunctionality and polyformity; however there are also pragmatic tags, such as speech acts, discourse markers, exchange, aspects of context, etc. Although not all structures are suitable for tagging, the pragmatic tags are very useful in politeness research because they offer context or disambiguation information for the qualitative completion of data. For this reason, at the current state of the art, tagging has a high potential for development in politeness studies as well. The quantitative phrasing, with appropriate pragmatic

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annotations, can in fact extract data both on structural elements and on communication strategies, e.g. index of stability/variability of communication functions and how they are related to communication styles (Archer & Culpeper, 2018). There are, however, a few considerations to bear in mind. Andersen (2018) warns that tagging often occurs on oral corpus transcriptions, but the transcription itself is usually problematic. Transcription, as mentioned in Chap. 16, is always subjective, especially concerning traits such as pauses, interjections, prosody, etc. If such subjective elements were the aim of tagging, the annotation would necessarily be unreliable. In fact, the tagging must identify an element in a countable form and in the most univocal way possible, therefore two or more coders/analysts should independently tag a phenomenon in the same way with a percentage of coincidence of at least 70%. In order to check this, an interrater reliability test should be performed and, if this is insufficient, the category must be redefined or better described (Jucker, 2018). Another consideration to remember is that pragmatic tagging necessarily has an interpretative nature, i.e. the coder must make assessments. The analyst must sift through the corpus and identify all the instances that can be categorized, for example, as speech acts of request, or apology, etc. The speech act is in fact the basis of much pragmatic tagging, which is done manually. If the act is not strongly conventionalised in a stable form, it will be difficult to identify. In addition, it is necessary to work with categorisations of acts that are consistent, despite their frequent fuzziness. A balance of granularity is also needed: few generic categories will give results to be refined manually, while many detailed categories risk not offering relevant statistical results with respect to the category. In short, with fuzzy categories, flexibility is required (Flöck & Geluykens, 2015; Archer & Culpeper, 2018). The segmentation of the linguistic item that is tagged can also pose difficulties, i.e. it can be hard to determine where the structure begins and where it ends. Especially for those speech acts that have complex structures (such as an invitationrejection-acceptance sequence) the segmentation is a challenge. The reason is that the communicative performance can be organised at the level of enunciation (actions and information of speech acts), argumentation (intentions and implicit or explicit assessments of speech acts) and interaction (relations with the interlocutor). These levels have units of analysis – and therefore units of segmentation – that are different. It should also be considered that, at the state of the art, a tagged unit can have only one labelling, to the detriment of its multifunctionality: it is difficult to multitag a statement with two illocutive forces, e.g. to tag an item both as a question and also as an answer to a previous question (Briz Gómez, 1996, 1998; Briz Gómez & Grupo Val.Es.Co, 2004). Finally, an important element in pragmatic tagging is context information, and the corpus should supply it in a cross-referenced way, so that it is possible to pinpoint contextual patterns. In particular, the challenge is to provide tagging that captures the interpersonal flow of communication, for example coding not only the static characteristics of the speakers (e.g. age, gender, etc.) but also the dynamic ones (e.g. who is talking to whom, if the speaker is representative of a group or not, etc.) (Schmidt & Wörner, 2009; Archer & Culpeper, 2018). For example, Archer (2014),

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carries out an impoliteness study tagging the speech act as usual, but also adding semantic tags like good/bad, true/false, anger/violence, polite/impolite, respect/lack of. To conclude this outline, we can also mention two common options for politeness research. The first is the possibility to compare corpora. The researcher can compare parallel corpora, that have the same or very similar texts in two or more different languages (usually translations). The analyst can also compare cross-lingual corpora, i.e. corpora in different and comparable languages but not parallel. Usually, already existing corpora are hard to compare, unless they have already been constructed as parallel corpora. The second interesting option is to apply corpus analysis within metapragmatic studies, aiming at investigating how speakers display their awareness of their use of language (e.g. how politeness is denominated). The metapragmatic language of politeness in historical documents (such as etiquette manuals) and synchronic texts (such as dictionaries or the Web) involves the explanation of notions, norms, speeches, etc. that are useful to deepen the folk beliefs about politeness. Lay participants’ comments reveal in fact their metapragmatic awareness, i.e. the way speakers systematically conceptualize their behaviours. It is a way to understand how they construct their moral order, and hence to understand both collective consciousness about language and practices that go beyond individual idiosyncrasies. Such corpusbased metapragmatics involve the creation of a corpus of metapragmatic expressions and the study of their frequency of appearance in order to obtain clues about the value configuration that underlies them. Metapragmatic comments fit into corpus data extraction. In fact, they are usually conventionalised forms within a semantic field and with frequent collocates, hence they are suitable for digital corpus retrieval with a form-to-function approach. They are interesting because they may offer an emic perspective on how speakers evaluate specific instances of their ongoing communication. The element identified in the corpus, however, must always be carefully contextualised in the dynamics of its occurrence, thus requiring a qualitative supplement of the analysis. The difficulty of studies of this kind is that corpus analysis is very linguistically inclined and to be more pragmatically refined it should be accompanied by lexical or conceptual mapping to achieve a more structured network (Ide, 2005; Watts, 2008; Culpeper, 2009, 2012; Kádár & Haugh, 2013; Culpeper et al., 2019). The examples of corpus analysis reported below are taken from publications from the approximately the last decade and show in detail how the politeness researcher interfaces with a corpus, whether by creating a new one or consulting or adapting an existing corpus. The studies are selected for how make their methodology explicit, and the overall soundness of the study is not an aspect considered here. There are many studies that rely on data extracted from pre-existing corpora, thus not created by the researcher herself. Some of these are minor or small existing corpora, especially in the case of language for specific purpose studies. For example, to justify in terms of verbal politeness some conversational traits in formal, legaltype Spanish discourse, Cervera Rodríguez and Torres Álvarez (2015) use a corpus collected and published on a CD-ROM by another author. Thus, they rely on a

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very specialized corpus of ten transcribed court cases, sourced from a publication by another researcher. Some other corpora are the results of large projects. For example, Molina Martos (2015) uses the Spanish PRESEEA large corpus (https://preseea.lin guas.net/Corpus.aspx) from which she selects the Madrid area and then a specific neighbourhood, reducing the corpus to 18 h of semi-structured interview recordings; in fact, she proceeds to a manual analysis of speaker turns, which the corpus makes it possible to stratify by gender, age, and educational level. Molina Martos identifies 886 turns that contain the attentional strategies that she is interested in. Aijmer (2015) chooses the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language (COLT) which, compared with the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), offers an interesting result for the researcher: the word please appears with a much higher frequency. Starting from this quantitative difference, Aijmer studies the functions of rapport strengtheners and the creativeness of please in the teenage variety of London speech, where a mismatch between polite and impolite items is produced (such as: Will you fuck off please?). Aijmer proceeds with an automatic extraction of the single word and then a qualitative discrimination of its polyfunctionality. Archer and Malory (2017) recur to substantial corpora in a sophisticated way: they use a dataset of UK parliamentary speeches (the Hansard data set of official UK Parliamentary Proceedings from 1803) on which they semi-automatically capture facework in a historical political context. The researchers identify Potential Facework Indicators (PFIs) using three methods: portmanteau tag searches (to capture word or multi-word units that have a meaning that transcends two or more semtags), HT codes and HTOED classifications, and meaning constellations (specific combinations of semantic fields and/or parts of speech). As is evident, the level of complexity of corpora can vary greatly: searching can range from an almost manual extraction to a very refined one with a combination of data retrieval techniques. But above all, basically, the coding is a fundamental step, as exemplified by Archer and Culpeper (2003) whose data consists of 240,000 words from trial proceedings and drama from 1640 to 1760. The researchers tag them specifically for pragmatics research. Their annotation incorporates classic sociolinguistic variables (status, age, and role) and more dynamic aspects of interaction, that is, who is talking to whom at a particular point in time. The annotation is utterance-by-utterance and the final format looks like this example (Archer & Culpeper, 2003: 41): Look upon this Book; Is this the Book?

Other researchers create ad hoc combinations of existing large corpora. For example, Jiménez Martin and Mendieta Garrote (2017) work on compliments in Mexican Spanish and combine a subcorpus of the PRESEEA (24 semiformal interviews for a total of 90 min) with the AMERESCO corpus (24 spontaneous conversations for a total of 30 min). The researchers aim at complementarity because the interviews of the PRESEEA corpus do not present variables favourable to the appearance of the compliment (in terms of theme, context and relationship between speakers)

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which, on the other hand, the AMERESCO conversations do present. In fact, these variables are a determining element in the study of compliments. The absolute data seem quite balanced: in fact, the authors find 68 compliments in PRESEEA and 59 in AMERESCO. However, given the very different size of the two subcorpora, Jiménez Martin and Mendieta Garrote infer the higher frequency of compliments in AMERESCO and consequently interpret the frequency of appearance in relation to the greater informality of AMERESCO compared to PRESEEA. Their subsequent analysis maintains the distinction between occurrences in the two subcorpora and confirms that genre (and related register) is a relevant variable on the frequency, syntactic structure, and function of the compliment. Another option is to create a corpus tailored to one’s own research. For example, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2013) use Wikipedia and Stack Exchange as data for their study of politeness. This is a huge amount of unstructured data from which the authors extract their own corpus related to the sites’ editors’ questions and answers in the two online communities. The goal is to make use of key components of politeness by identifying domain-independent lexical and syntactic features, with the subsequent objective of studying the relationship between politeness and social power. The researchers label over 10,000 utterances of request data with politeness annotations using Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). In particular, each request was labelled by five different selected annotators, and each annotator read a group of 13 requests. For each request the annotator had to indicate how polite she perceived the request to be, from “very impolite” to “very polite”, using a continuous slider. Subsequently, a standard z-score normalisation was applied to each worker’s scores, in order to define, for each request, the average of the five scores assigned by the annotators. The inter-annotator agreement was also tested. Relying on the requests that had received a secure annotation of politeness, the researchers extract lexicon and structures related to politeness and bring them into relation with the power and status of the editor (i. e. those editors who reached admin status). The authors note that politeness decreases with the achievement of higher power status by a member of a community. Other authors use the genre as the main variable of their corpus; in fact, the genre is a popular restriction for obtaining a manageable corpus. For example, Pablos-Ortega (2015) forms a corpus of 128 textbooks to study the representation of thanking in 1382 prefabricated dialogues proceeding from the materials used for teaching Spanish and English as foreign languages. King (2011) studies power and indirectness in historical business interactions using a corpus of 100 late-18th-century letters that the author obtains or transcribes from copies of the Louisiana State University Libraries’ Special Collections of original documents from the General Archive of the Indies in Seville (Spain—EU). Karl de Marlangeon (2012) creates his own corpus of 50 scholarly, Spanish-language journal reviews to study evaluative discourse in relation to facework. Davies (2018) collects a corpus of 338 users’ online comments related to the Penelope Soto court hearings from a mid-market tabloid’s articles over one month to study the process of evaluations and individual understanding of politeness. Such specific corpora usually combine the ease with which the researcher can create them (i.e. accessibility of the texts) and the research questions. This means that often,

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the data drive the question, and not the contrary; nevertheless, a good theoretical background can achieve general significance. Combining corpora is a methodologically delicate choice. The Val.Es.Co corpus is a reference for colloquial discourse in Peninsular Spanish and is used, for example, by Briz (2012), who is a founding member of the working group that built it (http:// www.valesco.es/?q=corpus). Briz (2012), in particular, addresses mitigation, and notes that the more or less dialogic dynamism of a communicative exchange affects mitigation for the purposes of politeness. Through his study, he also emphasises the need to have colloquial corpora that are highly varied with respect to genre, register, and diatopic variation, and this requires the combinations of corpora. For example, Meléndez Quero (2019) uses a heterogeneous combination of corpora for a survey of Spanish discourse markers (en fin) in relation to politeness in persuasive discourse. He combines a digital corpus of blogs, forums, web pages, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube messages (Macrosintaxis del Español Actual—MEsA http://grupo.us.es/grupoapl/acceso/actividades/pdf/gunaco rpusmesa.pdf), with the political texts of another two corpora (CREA—http://corpus. rae.es/creanet.html and CORPES XXI—https://webfrl.rae.es/CORPES/view/inicio Externo.view). After the automatic extraction, the author proceeds to the qualitative discrimination of the cases. Another example of combination of corpora is in Estellés Arguedas and Albelda Marco (2014). To analyse the prosody of three Spanish evidential particles (namely: al parecer, por lo visto, según parece) in relational work they assemble a corpus of three million words which reflect the registers and genres of Peninsular Spanish. The corpus is created by combining a set of 13 oral macrocorpora (1,650,000 words) and a personal corpus compiled ad hoc, consisting of parliamentary interventions (1,350,000 words). This breadth is considered appropriate by the researchers, indeed further expansion is considered too difficult to manage. The composition of the corpus pays particular attention to the language varieties but has to deal with the problem of breadth, so the authors exclude the American varieties of Spanish and do not check the diastractic varieties because not all the corpora offered such information. Estellés Arguedas and Albelda Marco also privileged the data for which transcription is available, despite the fact that the research deals with prosody. The investigation based on this corpus is linear, proceeding by automatic search for the particles, isolation of the fragments that contain them, annotation, and the subsequent qualitative analysis to classify the particles as purely evidential or with relational nuances. It is important to emphasise that, being a prosodic analysis, the quality of the audio is fundamental and the authors note that, in the complete corpus, about 50% of the examples did not meet the standards of quality, so out of a corpus of 3,500,000 words they manage to extract only 55 occurrences of the three items. Finally, we report some examples of comparison of corpora, which can be either contrastive between different languages or between variants of the same language. Kádár and House (2020) revisit the widely used concept of “politeness marker” that includes the controversial issue of the association between forms and politeness. They compare the British National Corpus (BNC) with two Mandarin Chinese corpora, and then, to achieve a comparable size, they use the Modern Chinese

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General Balanced Corpus (MCGBC http://corpus.zhonghuayuwen.org/) and the Balance Chinese Corpus (BCC http://corpus.zhonghuayuwen.org/CnCindex.aspx). They adopt a bottom-up approach and start from one-word and multi-word expressions which are commonly associated with the speech acts of request and apology in Chinese and English. It is a corpus-based approach that identifies “ritual frame indicating expressions” (RFIEs). In order to contrast them interlinguistically, the researchers identify comparable RFIEs starting from the perception of frequency reported by a panel of native speakers. For example (Kádár & House, 2020: 9): (1)

English: please; would/could you please; if you please

(2)

Chinese: qing请; fanqing 烦请 (lit. ‘trouble you by requesting’); jingqing 敬请 (lit. ‘respectfully ask’)

With this procedure, Kádár and House automatically collect 50 instances of RFIEs with random sampling batches of five examples, and then identify the recurrence of a situation sufficient to determine pragmatic salience. Their goal is to have two datasets of RFIEs that are comparable between the two languages, in fact, they state that: “[i]n this respect it is particularly productive to contrastively examine typologically distant languages, because comparable RFIEs in such languages may have significantly different pragmatic characteristics in terms of the standard situations they indicate and the interpersonal scenarios in which they are used” (Kádár & House, 2020: 28). Muñoz Arruda and Godoi (2012) also use parallel corpora to study politeness in different languages (Brazilian Portuguese and Argentinean Spanish). They study specialised written legal language, in particular civil lawsuits, and this choice of formal and ritual texts allows homogeneity of register and, therefore, more comparative stability between the two languages. The restriction is also imposed by the difficulty of obtaining access to legal documents; the two corpora are in fact very restricted, because they include only ten casually selected documents for each of the two languages. The researchers consider this corpus sufficient for their objective of qualitative analysis, but conclude that it would be necessary to repeat the study with a larger one. Similarly, Goethals and Blancke (2013) compare a small-scale corpus with 150 Spanish, French and Dutch interventions in 50 plenary debates in the European Parliament in order to study the politeness strategy of thanking. Plenary debates and interventions were selected arbitrarily on the EU Parliament web page. This procedure is quite easy: the texts are ready and available online with transcriptions, the corpora are parallels, and the linguistic objectives are sufficiently identifiable. The analysis, in this case, was done manually on frequency, addressee, intensification and the discourse position of thanking. The study is only exploratory in their article, but the authors identify enough material to promise systematic differences among the three subsets of the corpus. Finally, Douglas et al. (2018) study instances of attenuation in Argentinean and Valencian Spanish colloquial conversations. For their study of intralinguistic contrastivity, they rely on existing corpora (Pra.D.O and Val.Es.Co 2.0) in which they select 15,000 words each (three conversations for each corpus). Comparability is granted by the corpora (they all consist of secretly recorded colloquial conversations)

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and the selection of the researchers (the speakers are of the same age and sociocultural level). However, the researchers do not mention any control of the conversation content or of the themes of the corpus, although it is likely they are captured in the subsequent qualitative analysis of the attenuation (i.e. Es.Var.Atenuacion by Albelda et al., 2014). Murphy and De Felice (2018) also make an intralinguistic comparison between the American and British variants of English with respect to the use of please in the speech act of requests. They use two comparable workplace email corpora, in which they identify and annotate 675 requests for each variant. The genre restriction (workplace emails) provides a first level of comparability, although the researchers complain that the two corpora do not have enough contextual information about the interpersonal relationships of the correspondents, which are considered relevant. The two corpora already existed (EnronSent Corpus for American English and Corpus of Business English Correspondence COBEC for British English), so the the researcher’s main task was not so much the composition of the corpus, but its annotation. The authors proceed manually on one corpus and both automatically and manually on the other. This process allows them to extract not only occurrences of please, but a range of different structures, which is relevant to study the use, but especially the non-use, of please.

References Adolphs, S. (2008). Corpus and context. Investigating pragmatic functions in spoken discourse. John Benjamins. Aijmer, K. (2015). “Will you fuck off please”. The use of please by London teenagers. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 3(2), 127–149. Aijmer, K. (2018). Corpus pragmatics: From form to function. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 555–585). Mouton De Gruyter. Albelda Marco, M., Briz Gómez, A., Cestero, A. M., Kotwica, D., & Villalba, C. (2014). Ficha metodológica para el análisis pragmático de la atenuación en corpus discursivos del español. ES.POR.ATENUACIÓN. Oralia, 17, 1–44. Andersen, G. (2018). Corpus construction. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 467–494). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Archer, D., & Culpeper, J. (2003). Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics. In A. Wilson, P. Rayson, & T. McEnery (Eds.), Corpus linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech (pp. 37–58). Peter Lang. Archer, D. (2014). Exploring verbal aggression in English historical texts using USAS: the possibilities, the problems and potential solutions. In I. Taavitsainen, A. Jucker, & J. Tuominen (Eds.), Diachronic corpus pragmatics (pp. 277–302). John Benjamins. Archer, D., & Culpeper, J. (2018). Corpus annotation. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 495–525). Mouton De Gruyter. Archer, D., & Bethan, M. (2017). Tracing facework over time using semi-automated methods. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(1), 27–56. Briz Gómez, A. (2012). La (no)atenuación y la (des)cortesía, lo lingüístico y lo social: ¿son pareja? In J. Escamilla Morales, G. Henry Vega (Eds.), Miradas multidisciplinares a los fenómenos de cortesía y descortesía en el mundo hispánico (pp. 33–75). Universidad del Atlántico-Programa EDICE. Briz Gómez, A. (1996). El español coloquial. Situación y uso. Arco/Libros.

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Briz Gómez, A. (1998). El español coloquial en la conversación. Esbozo de pragmagramática. Ariel. Briz Gómez, A., & Grupo Val.Es.Co. (2004). Cortesía codificada y cortesía interpretada en la conversación. In D. Bravo & A. Briz Gómez (Eds.), Pragmática sociocultural: estudios sobre el discurso de cortesía en español (pp. 67–93). Ariel. Clark, B. (2018). Cognitive pragmatics: Relevance-theoretic methodology. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 185–215). Mouton De Gruyter. Culpeper, J. (2009). The metalanguage of impoliteness: Eexplorations in the Oxford English Corpus. In P. Baker (Ed.), Contemporary corpus linguistics (pp. 64–86). Continuum. Culpeper, J., O’Driscoll, J., & Hardaker, C. (2019). Notions of politeness in Britain and North America. In E. Ogiermann & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), From speech acts to lay understandings of politeness (pp. 177–200). Cambridge University Press. Culpeper, J. (2012). (Im)politeness: Three issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1128–1133. Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., Sudhof, M., Jurafsk, D., Leskovec, J., & Potts, C. (2013). Computational approach to politeness with application to social factors. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 250–259). Association for Computational Linguistics. Davies, B. L. (2018). Evaluating evaluations: What different types of metapragmatic behaviour can tell us about participants’ understandings of the moral order. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 121–151. De Beaugrande, R. (1996). The ‘pragmatics’ of doing language science: The ‘warrant’ for largecorpus linguistics. Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 503–535. de Pablos-Ortega, C. (2015). Thank you for a lovely day! Contrastive thanking in textbooks for teaching English and Spanish as Foreign Languages. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 3(2), 150–173. Diani, G. (2015). Politeness. In K. Aijmer & C. Rühlemann (Eds.), Corpus pragmatics. A handbook (pp. 169–191). Cambridge University Press. Douglas, S., Soler Bonafont, M. A., & Vuoto, J. (2018). La atenuación en conversaciones coloquiales argentinas y españolas: un estudio contrastivo. RILCE, 34(3), 1280–1312. Estellés Arguedas, M., & Albelda Marco, M. (2014). Evidentials, politeness and prosody in Spanish: A corpus analysis. Journal of Politeness Research, 10(1), 29–62. Flöck, I., & Geluykens, R. (2015). Speech acts in corpus pragmatics: A quantitative contrastive study of directives in spontaneous and elicited discourse. In J. Romero-Trillo (Ed.), Yearbook of corpus linguistics and pragmatics (pp. 7–38). Springer. Garretson, G., & O’Connor, M. C. (2007). Between the humanist and the modernist: Semi-automated analysis of linguistic corpora. In E. Fitzpatrick (Ed.), Corpus linguistics beyond the word: Corpus research from phrase to discourse (pp. 87–106). Rodopi. Goethals, P., & Blancke, B. (2013). Un estudio exploratorio de las convenciones discursivas en el Parlamento Europeo: Los agradecimientos en español, francés y neerlandés. Revista De Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas, 8, 93–102. Ide, S. (2005). How and why honorifics can signify dignity and elegance. The indexicality and reflexivity of linguistic rituals. In R. Lakoff & S. Ide (Eds.), Broadening the horizon of linguistic politeness (pp. 45–64). John Benjamins. Jiménez Martin, E., & Garrote, E. M. (2017). Aproximación al uso del halago en el español de Monterrey. Normas, 7(1), 169–187. Jucker, A. (2013). Corpus pragmatics. In J.-O. Östman & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 1–17). John Benjamins. Jucker, A. (2018). Data in pragmatic research. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 3–36). Mouton De Gruyter. Kádár, D., & House, J. (2020) ‘Politeness markers’ revisited—A contrastive pragmatic perspective. Journal of Politeness Research, forthcoming. Kádár, D., & Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding politeness. Cambridge University Press. Karl de Marlangeon, S. (2012). Actividades de imagen de rol, de autocortesía y de (des)cortesía en reseñas de publicaciones científicas. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 1(1), 74–99.

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Chapter 20

Tools for Online Politeness

In this chapter specific ways to study politeness in online contexts are presented, and the focus is on digital-mediated discourse analysis, which is a specialised approach for the collection and analysis of data produced through different types of digital channels. From a general point of view, studying politeness in online contexts does not display any specific features beyond those identified in politeness in other contexts. However, closer scrutiny reveals that the online contexts imply the redefinition of some relevant variables, such as the units of analysis (e.g. what is an utterance in a chat?), the speakers’ identities, etc. This involves the development of a dedicated field of study—Digital Politeness—which is especially attentive to interpersonal relations, in fact the data of digital discourse are very much used by discursively focused politeness studies (see Sect. 1.2). Digital Politeness embraces many developing subfields, ranging from the comparison of politeness on different platforms (e.g. similar groups on different channels) to politeness with respect to multimodality of channels or to the moral attitude to (im)politeness in internet-mediated interactions (Herring, 2007; Seargeant & Tagg, 2014; Graham & Hardaker, 2017; Xie, 2018). Digital communication includes networks of members living at a distance from one another who form a communicative community via Internet or, and more in general, via electronic devices. Obviously each digital medium has specific characteristics, but some traits are common and can influence politeness. For example (Graham & Hardaker, 2017): ● Asynchronous/Synchronous channels: times for reaction and accuracy are quite relevant ● Private-oriented networks or public-oriented networks: expectations change according to the level of closeness/distance of the interlocutors ● Relational-oriented or task-oriented means ● Interaction-focused (e.g. Facebook® ) or declaration-focused (e.g. Pinterest® ) situations ● Anonymity: this can reduce the feeling of accountability ● Longevity: communicative behaviour changes if the texts are saved and retrievable ● Possibility of (multiple) identity constructions. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_20

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To date, the main field of digital-mediated politeness analysis has involved the topics of classical politeness, e.g. speech acts. In general, such studies question notions of (amongst others) performativity or relevance, because communicative interpretation seems to be more open in more mediated and non-face-to-face contexts. Other studies focus more specifically on digital phenomena (e.g. netiquette), which call into question issues of sociolinguistics, such as forms of address and codeswitching. Finally, we should mention studies dedicated to digital genres. Generally speaking, such specialised literature mainly occurs in the traditional fields of sociolinguistics and computer-mediated communication (CMC). Hence, it has paid particular attention to type of medium and multimodality, register, virtual community of practice, digital type of text and genres, space–time constraints, forms of textual and intertextual coherence (e.g. between posts), units of analysis (e.g. turn taking), and identity/identification. However, the impact of the specific variables of digital-mediated discourse has not been well defined yet, and comparison to the dynamics of non-digital discourse is lacking. For example, we have yet to understand the extent to which digital communicative behaviours are the result of the conditions imposed by the medium or whether they depend on other variables that are active in non digital contexts as well. This point is particularly relevant because it would allow us to understand whether digital politeness has specific dynamics or is just politeness mediated through an uninfluential channel (Batson, 1992; Androutsopoulos & Beißwenger, 2008; Herring et al., 2013). From a methodological point of view, in general, the researcher works empirically on natural and unelicited data (e.g. online interactions). Digital discourse supplies easily accessible interactions to the researcher, thanks to its abundance in written or recordable exchanges. Such accessibility, though, requires the development of new methodological paradigms. In fact, digital data are only seemingly easy because, to be meaningful, they must be supplemented with interaction data that are hard to obtain and compare. When forming a corpus of digital data, a selection is needed. Selection is unlikely to be statistically random, because it would have an unmanageable universal population as a base for the random selection. So the selection leads to convenience corpora (for example, with data from personal exchanges between the researcher and her network) or to motivated corpora, that is, corpora based on a theme, a time lapse, a group, etc. As for the size of the corpus, in principle, the rarer the phenomenon under analysis or the greater the number of variables under analysis, the greater the number of samples will have to be. Typically, this involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis: the quantitative type can select centres of attention for the subsequent qualitative analysis (Herring, 2004a; Giles et al., 2015; Yus, 2018; Xie & Yus, 2018). Finally, ethical considerations have high methodological relevance for digital data. They range from the protection of sensitive data (i.e. obtaining consent and/or removing identifying elements) to the recognition of copyright (i.e. obtaining consent and/or adding identifying elements). Ethical issues must be calibrated by an evaluation of the public or private level of the data. In fact, broad public data do not

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pose significant problems as they do not require authorization; while public data in medium-size and restricted communities are problematic because it is not feasible to get permission from everyone (e.g. the friends-of-friends network in Facebook® ) (Graham & Hardaker, 2017). Regarding methodology, Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis offers an approach that is useful in digital politeness. It is a tool for researching interactive online behaviours and is based on the analysis of logs of verbal interaction (characters, words, phrases, messages, exchanges, threads, files, etc.), that is, on textual observation (written and oral). Text is indirect—and not direct—evidence of what speakers think, know, or feel, hence this approach observes behaviours indirectly through language. For this purpose, it shares the methodological paradigms of Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis, Interactional sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Studies with politeness research. Of particular interest is the fact that the focus of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis is not linguistic but sociological and psychological, so it addresses broad phenomena such as decision making, gender ideology, cultural identity, and social construction of knowledge. Compared to traditional discourse analysis it shares the theoretical premise that linguistic choice is potentially significant beyond the requirements of lexicon and grammar (Herring, 2004b). However Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis pays specific attention to the influence of the technological channel, so it adapts its methodological toolkit to analysis situated in the larger digital media context (Herring, 2001, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010, 2019; Herring et al., 2013). Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis analyses the following areas in particular, with the aim to identify recurrent patterns and regularities of discourse through a mainly inductive approach, in order to observe what emerges from the data: 1.

2.

3.

4.

Language structures (morphology, syntax, spelling, etc.). It describes and classifies the texture of text to investigate issues such as genres, text organisation, cohesion, etc. Meanings (of words and speech acts). It investigates speech acts, relevance, and politeness by interpreting the intentions of the speakers on the basis of discursive evidence. It also examines content by codifying structural and semantic characteristics and then examining them in a selected corpus. It also uses sociometric methods (e.g. to analyse the relationships of the websphere’s networks) to offer new encoding and units of analysis (such as the “link” or “comment” for a blog or forum to capture the relations in hypertext content). Interaction (through turns, sequences, exchanges, threads, etc.). It reviews the role of cultures in shaping and interpreting interaction and analyses sociocultural meanings indexed in interactions. It also studies assumptions, intertextuality, and conversational control to interpret language meanings and structures in relation to ideologies and power dynamics. Social behaviour, that is: linguistic expressions of conflict, power, community membership, status, face management, negotiation, play, etc.

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Participation patterns in digital threads or extended speech. It conceives interaction as a common negotiation enterprise between speakers and analyses turns, sequences, topics etc. for a detailed understanding of interactional mechanisms.

Herring (2007) details the categories of analysis for computer-mediated communication, which we report in full because they well illustrate different types of digital data that are relevant in digital politeness research. Each category shows a variation, and its parameters of variation reveal the specificity of each medium. For example, the category of connection ranges from asynchronicity to synchronicity; the persistence of the message will range from short to long, etc. First of all, the following technological factors should be taken into account: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Connection: Asynchronicity/Synchronicity Transmission: Message-by-message vs keystroke-by-keystroke transmission Persistence of the message Length (limits or no limits to the message size) Channel and message format: Text-based channel vs audio, video, graphics Identification (anonymous or not) Quote and reply system Private/public Order of visualization.

These factors are interwoven with discursive ones, because it should be remembered that “[…] there is still a need to investigate the empirical validity of the alleged homogeneity of the use of language on the web and to focus on the diversity and social variation that characterizes every communication” (Bou-Franch, 2011: 1772). We will therefore have different ● Participation structures (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, public/private, degree of anonymity, group size, number of active participants, amount, rate and balance of participation, etc.) ● Participation characteristics (sociolinguistic features, proficiency, experience, role and status, attitudes, beliefs, ideologies, motivations, sociocultural knowledge, etc.) ● Purpose of communication (professional, social, etc.) and goal of interaction ● Topic or theme of the group or of specific exchanges ● Tone ● Activity (e.g. genres) ● Norms (e.g. social) ● Code (language and verbal/nonverbal system) (Herring, 2004b). This sort of model is constantly adapting to technological evolution. ComputerMediated Discourse Analysis arose as a medium-centred approach based mainly on textual linguistic analysis. Since the 2000s, more interactive and social-digital communication requires a view more oriented towards speakers, and so the study of digital social practices developed. The 2020s mark the turn of the interconnection of media, hence multimodal methodology development is required (see

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Chap. 16). The analysis of the actual digital discourse must take into account multimodal and multisemiotic data accessible in the digital world (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019). Thus, Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis now needs methodologies to reach beyond the analysis of text-only interactions, towards multisemiotic interactions. For this reason, Herring (2019) proposes a multimodal conception of Computer-Mediated-Communication, including audio, video, robots and graphics; the methodology used for Computer-Mediated-Communication is in fact also adequate for non linguistic and multimode integrated phenomena when mediating human-to-human communication in social interaction. Ultimately, the methodological adequacy of Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis is not affected by broadening the concept of Computer-Mediated-Communication, because its paradigm applies equally to interaction in non textual and non verbal modes. As it is evident, Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis can be a good methodological starting point for digital politeness analysis because it focuses on technological and social constraints. Regarding politeness we should add some specific centres of interest: ● Often the software integrates tools of evaluation (e.g. Likes, Blocks, etc.) that foster an explicit assessment and that can be intended as an etic clue or a metapragmatic comment. ● The validation of the personal data of the speakers is never certain and, in general, all the identity management and facework is very specific. In digital interaction, the visibility of elements that can constitute the face may be absent or exclusively related to virtual self-presentation. ● Synchronicity allows free expansion of (im)politeness perceptions in the community, while asynchronicity allows for greater accuracy (for example, through mitigation) ● Social relationships are characterised by new parameters of stability and commitment (Dorta, 2008). The recent examples that we shall now report have been selected with the intention of bringing out the methodological specificity that digital communication channels entail. We aim to give examples of the nature and type of data that digital politeness study specifically requires. For example, the time lapse between an issue and a response has a specific significance in the digital world. Regardless of the overall evaluation of the study, we are interested in the researcher’s attentiveness to the variables that are specific to digital communication; thus, we have not considered those studies in which the digital text is analysed like any other type of text. Neither do we consider those studies where the medium constitutes more of a way of easy access to data than an element of potential communicative impact. For example, Sifianou and Bella (2019) use a corpus of almost 20,000 Twitter messages in Greek and search the keywords “politeness is/is not” to investigate first-order politeness assessment – the folk notions of polite behavior—in natural, informal and spontaneous everyday interactions carried out by a heterogeneous group of speakers. The main analysis, in fact, is metalinguistic: the aim of the research is metapragmatic and the digitalmediated environment merely provides easy access to public real-life data. In other

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words, no correlation is investigated between politeness and the specificity of the digital context, hence the digital context is simply a source of textual data retrieval. However, Sifianou and Bella (2019: 349) acknowledge that the compelling brevity of the medium’s format (140 characters per micromessage) has an impact on the definition of politeness in their data, i.e. brevity fosters creativity in metaphoric definitions. In addition, digital intertextuality is visible in the import of information from other sources, which fosters a process of appropriation and recontextualisation of recursive quotes on politeness (Sifianou & Bella, 2019: 352). In this study, observations are related to identity display and construction with a wide and indefinite audience; however, it would also be relevant to correlate the study’s conclusions with the characteristics of social and digital media, as Sifianou and Bella themselves (2019: 356) stress: “While processing the data, it soon became evident that the design features and the constraints and affordances of the specific medium exerted a strong influence on the content of these messages […]”. Theodoropoulou (2015) focuses on politeness in an online environment (Facebook) and investigates the reply to birthday wishes that 400 native Greeks users received on their digital walls. Data collection takes place longitudinally (over 3 years) through systematic observation (and capturing) of online data; these data are supplemented by interviews with participants. The author defines her approach a discourse-centred online ethnographic one. The participants are selected from the researcher’s friendship network and this makes it easier to manage the ethics of this sort of semi-public data and obtain consent to use the personal information. Locher and Bolander (2014) study identity construction in relation to politeness, collecting 474 status updates and 795 responses in the status updates received from two Facebook groups. Status is a peculiarity of the person’s display that has developed specifically from this digital feature (in fact, dealing with status turns out to be the most prominent activity in Facebook). The data chosen are very specific digitally speaking, because the authors take the textual data of codeswitching from different languages or varieties of the same language. It is interesting to stress that the action and reaction pair is chosen, thus obtaining important data from the polydiscursive and intersubjective network of the original post and/or the other reply posts. In other words, codeswitching is considered significant when it occurs from a post and its response, because it is an index of joint action and group co-construction. Locher and Bolander (2014: 186) point out that textual data, such as the ones they used, would prove to be useful in relation to other types of activities as well, such as accepting digital gifts, posting pictures and videos, creating groups, etc. Eslami et al. (2015) investigate the Persian language in cyberspace in reactions to photographs posted which receive compliments, and the responses to the compliments on Facebook. They do not focus on the co-joint interaction because they extract only the response to the compliments in the exchange. Nevertheless, they pick up some verbal and nonverbal data that show how users take innovative advantage of various online communication tools and affordances. In particular, they quantify a few specific strategies of the medium, also in combination, such as: the absence of response to a compliment, the use of the “like” function, and emoticons. Interestingly, the authors observe that the “violation” of the adjacency pair—that is, leaving

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a compliment with no response—is not considered impolite, as it is in face-to-face interaction in Persian. They hypothesise that one of the possible reasons is the asynchronicity, which has an impact on the automatism of the ritual response, and which could easily be demonstrated by collecting data on the time of posting. Bou-Franch (2011) investigates openings and closings of e-mail conversations in Peninsular Spanish as a technologically-conditioned discursive practice of a professional community. Her approach is not medium-related, but user-related. The author uses communicative pairs (and not collective e-mails) in which she detects the power relationship of the interlocutors and the position of the e-mail within the complete interchange. In particular, the researcher analyses the opening and closing movements of 100 short spontaneous e-mail conversations (2 or 3 interchanges). BouFranch (2011: 1783) notes that “[i]n all, patterns reveal that users were sensitive to the technological, social and interactional parameters surrounding their contributions and varied their style accordingly”. Thus, indirectly, she supports the important point that digital discourse is not homogeneous. (In)formality and (in)directness in 100 spontaneous interaction-initiating e-mails in Peninsular Spanish and British English are analysed in Lorenzo-Dus and BouFranch (2013). The authors carry out a discourse analysis, so textual data (e.g. the internal structure of the e-mail) are used to detect stylistic traits which could be correlated with the written and asynchronous traits of the digital communication channel. Such a correlation is a very ambitious research aim, because the variables under observation may depend both on the technological channel and on the presumed cultural patterns of the two languages, as well as on the fact that the interlocutors also have live and asymmetrical contacts in the academic environment. In fact, the results reveal complex patterns that are difficult to interpret. Web-mediated service encounters are analysed by Bou-Franch (2015) through a corpus of 20 woman-oriented non-profit websites based in Spain and the United Kingdom. The e-service encounters are interesting because they combine multiple authors and multiple recipients. They also lack physical co-presence and they use different media. For this reason, Bou-Franch triangulates the content analysis of the websites creating a taxonomy of content categories and the politeness strategies employed in relation to the genre. She then adopts the discourse analysis of this pure digital genre and highlights its specificity as a hub of multiple discourses with the salient presence of the negative politeness strategy of giving options. In Bou-Franch and Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2014) we find an analytical framework for studying the digital polylogue (in Youtube) that takes into consideration: the number of participants, the number of contributions per participant, the type of closing formats, and the participants’ value position. The study concludes that it is necessary to track the multifunctionality of utterances, the multi-sequentiality of the discourse and the fact that an online discourse does not have a proper end, but a continuous middle which calls for a re-discussion of theoretical models (in this case, of impoliteness). Similarly, Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2012) analyses 458 unsolicited comments in response to a Youtube video clip using the framework of the evaluative assessment of politeness by the receiver. In the case of the genre under scrutiny, the recipient is

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involved in a deindividual polylogue (i.e. in an environment where individual saliency is not fostered, being highly uncertain and unverifiable). Although Garcés-Conejos Blitvich codes the messages only thematically (e.g., relevant/irrelevant topic), this proves sufficient to discover whether, in a deindividuated environment, social identity and the sharing of the same ideology become the bases for politeness assessment. Langlotz and Locher (2012) study a similar kind of data (120 comments on online newspaper articles in English) looking at the signalling of emotions in disagreement. This is a meaningful research objective in the context of studies on politeness, as it places the focus on modes of expressing emotions in communicative contexts that are not face-to-face. This study is noteworthy because, in addition to written verbal elements (e.g. to identify the target of the disagreement), it also takes into consideration the number of words in a post (which ranges from 1 to 186) and the quoting practice with the explicit coherence link that it establishes with the article or with a previous post. This data is valuable for analysis of the interactional order of the discourse and can be very useful in addressing the plots of the digital polylogue. Watson et al. (2016) investigate (im)politeness in online collaborative professional learning. They analyse the web of interactions on a forum where participants were engaged in a critical discussion of specific topics. Their data set is constituted by 300 posts of elaborated threads, that is with a web of exchanges between interventions. This choice allows the authors to identify negotiations involved in relational work and to qualitatively analyse impoliteness and politeness in the forum transcripts. They specifically focus on references to relational work and found that participants agree with each other, name other participants, involve others in the exchange, and use compliments. Watson et al. found that participants support each other in making criticisms while defining their professional identity. Hence, politeness is confirmed as supporting individuals in presenting themselves to others and accomplishing collective face wants of participants in the online community. Although anonymity could arguably favour more impoliteness or less politeness in online spaces, Watson et al. (2016) found that participants use politeness to foster the construction of their individual identity as a professional who is part of a collectivity recognised as such. Thus, the study confirms the strong connection between facework and identity construction online, and specifically how the construction of face enters into the performance of identity through polite, mutual support. Finally, Darics (2010) investigates interactional politeness in synchronous, textbased interactions naturally occurring in a team working together in the virtual environment. The researcher uses a corpus of instant messages by a team of 18 members of a U.K. company connecting from different places in the world and communicating in English as their native and non-native language. The conversation logs were saved with the help of six volunteers on the team, at regular intervals, over two months, who deleted any confidential information before handing the log over to the researcher. The computer-mediated discourse analysis carried out takes into consideration some medium constraints (such as, the lack of audio-visual information) in relation to the strategies that the participants employ to compensate the medium’s constraints in the management of politeness. The analysis of the texts concerns specifically: orthography in relation to the absence of audio, symbols to compensate for

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the lack of visual information, turns (gap, pauses and overlapping), acronyms and abbreviations, extended clarification, and backchannel signals. The conclusion is that some commonplaces of digital communication need to be revisited (i.e. unconventional orthography, capitalisation, economising, emoticons, backchannels, signals and turn-taking strategies).

References Androutsopolous, J., & Beißwenger, M. (2008). Introduction: Data and methods in computermediated discourse analysis. Language@Internet, 5. Batson, T. (1992). Finding value in CSCL. ACM SIGCUE Outlook, 21(3), 26–28. Bou-Franch, P. (2015). The genre of web-mediated service encounters in not-for-profit organizations: Cross-cultural study. In M. de la O. Hernández-López & L. Fernández Amaya (Eds.), A multidisciplinary approach to service encounters (pp. 65–83). Brill. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2019). Introduction to analyzing digital discourse: New insights and future directions. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse. New insights and future directions (pp. 3–22). Palgrave MacMillan. Bou-Franch, P. (2011). Openings and closings in Spanish email conversations. Journal of Pragmatics, 43(6), 1772–1785. Bou-Franch, P., & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2014). Conflict management in massive polylogues: A case study from YouTube. Journal of Pragmatics, 73, 19–36. Darics, E. (2010). Politeness in computer-mediated discourse of a virtual team. Journal of Politeness Research, 6, 129–150. Dorta, G. (2008). Politeness and social dynamics in chat communication. In M. Grein (Ed.), Dialogue in and between different cultures (pp. 111–124). University of Mainz. Giles, D., Stommel, W., Paulus, T., Lester, J., & Reed, D. (2015). Microanalysis of online data: The methodological development of ‘digital CA.’ Discourse, Context and Media, 7, 45–51. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2012). Politics, “lies” and YouTube: A genre approach to assessments of im/politeness on Obama’s 9/9/2009 presidential address. In L. Fernández-Amaya et al. (Eds.), New perspectives on (im)politeness and interpersonal communication (pp. 62–90). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Graham, S., & Hardaker, C. (2017). (Im)politenss in digital communication. In J. Culpeper, M. Haugh, & D. Z. Kádár (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im)politeness (pp. 785–814). Palgrave Macmillan. Herring, S. (2001). Computer-mediated discourse. In D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen, & H. Hamilton (Eds.), The handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 612–634). Blackwell Publishers. Herring, S. (2004a). Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. In S. Barab, R. Kling, & J. Gray (Eds.), Designing for virtual communities in the service of learning (pp. 338–376). Cambridge University Press. Herring, S. (2004b). Online communication: Through the lens of discourse. In M. Consalvo & C. Haythornthwaite (Eds.), Internet research annual (pp. 65–76). Peter Lang. Herring, S. (2007). A faceted classification for computer-mediated discourse. Language@Internet, 1. Herring, S. (2010). Web content analysis: Expanding the paradigm. In J. Hunsinger, M. Allen, & L. Klastrup (Eds.), The international handbook of Internet research (pp. 233–249). Springer. Herring, S. (2019). The coevolution of computer-mediated communication and computer-mediated discourse analysis. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse. New insights and future directions (pp. 25–68). Palgrave MacMillan.

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Herring, S., Stein, D., & Virtanen, T. (2013). Introduction to the pragmatics of computer-mediated communication. In S. Herring, D. Stein, & T. Virtanen (Eds.), Pragmatics of computer-mediated communication (pp. 3–31). Mouton de Gruyter. Langlotz, A., & Locher, M. (2012). Ways of communicating emotional stance in online disagreements. Journal of Pragmatics, 44(12), 1591–1606. Locher, M., & Bolander, B. (2014). Relational work and the display of multilingualism in two Facebook groups. In K. Bedijs, G. Held, & C. Maaß (Eds.), Facework and social media (pp. 157– 191). Lit-Verlag. Lorenzo-Dus, N., & Bou-Franch, P. (2013). A cross-cultural investigation of email communication in Peninsular Spanish and British English—The role of (in)formality and (in)directness. Pragmatics and Society, 4(1), 1–25. Seargeant, P., & Tagg, C. (2014). Introduction: The language of social media. In P. Seargeant & C. Tagg (Eds.), The language of social media. Identity and community on the Internet (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Sifianou, M., & Bella, S. (2019). Twitter, politeness, self-presentation. In P. Bou-Franch & P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (Eds.), Analyzing digital discourse (pp. 341–365). Palgrave Macmillan. Theodoropoulou, I. (2015). Politeness on Facebook: The case of Greek birthday wishes. Pragmatics, 25(1), 23–45. Watson, C., Wilson, A., Drew, V., & Thompson, T. (2016). Criticality and the exercise of politeness in online spaces for professional learning. Internet and Higher Education, 31, 43–51. Xie, C. (2018). (Im)politeness and moral order in online interactions. Internet Pragmatics, 1(2), 2005–2015. Xie, C., & Yus, F. (2018). Introducing Internet pragmatics. Internet Pragmatics, 1(1), 1–12. Yus, F. (2018). The interface between pragmatics and internet-mediates communication: Applications, extensions and adjustments. In C. Ilie, & N. Norrick (Eds.), Pragmatics and its interfaces (pp. 267–290). John Benjamins. Zohreh, E., Jabbari, N., & Kuo, L.-J. (2015). Compliment response behaviour on Facebook: A study with Iranian Facebook users. International Review of Pragmatics, 7, 244–277.

Chapter 21

Community Studies and Action Research

It could be argued that anyone can be practical researchers—the scholar who investigates politeness academically, and the lay speaker who becomes an action researcher in her own community and draws on scientific insights to improve aspects of everyday life. This final chapter explores the theme of communities and Action Research. Communities are places where politeness is co-constructed among members during their historical development. In the community of practice, members are mutually engaged in a common enterprise. More than a specific research tool, the theme of this chapter is a research horizon that places the social construct of community in relation to politeness, because community can be a manageable intermediate unit of analysis between the individual and the macrosocial level. This area is booming due to the growth of virtual communities, which arouse particular interest in the relationship between politeness and transculturality, identity and politeness and media and politeness. The aim of these closing pages is to describe the Action Research approach, which is localized in communities and has rarely been applied in politeness studies. We shall argue that it is a promising one, both because of the impact of its results and because of the methodological tools that the community perspective requires. The concept of community has been revisited, to account for the fact that communities are no longer fixed cultural entities. While the constructivist view according to which it is people’s behaviour that constructs their culture is still prevalent, it is now accepted that culture has a major influence on people’s behaviour. In addition, the concept of the multilevels of realities should be integrated: there are multiple sub-cultural and social networks embedded in a cultural macro-level. Each community has its own moral order, a background of normality internally recognised as valid, which is superior to smaller layers and is included in higher cultural and social layers. From this point of view, communities are microcosms aligned on a point of contact, that can be a practice or a purpose, but there are also, amongst other things, communities of imagination. In simple terms, a community of practice is a group of people involved in cultural processes based on shared practices that distinguish them from other communities (professions, hobbies, rituals, etc.). They can be material or virtual, geographically © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_21

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contiguous or dispersed, but in any case their members share values and practices. From a linguistic point of view, communities have been a subject of interest for the study of languages for specific purposes. In pragmatics, studies of “specialised” politeness have been developed, e.g. politeness in legal language, medical language, etc. However, communities are more interesting as units of analysis than as a locus of shared language or specific discourse repertoire. In fact, the community of practice is a mesolevel that mediates the individual and the social, as seen in Sect. 5.3 (Mills, 2011; Marra & Lazzaro-Salazar, 2018; Garcés-Conejos Blitvich & Sifianou, 2019). Communities of practice come together for mutual engagement and in their mutual endeavour they generate practices through negotiation (beliefs, values, relations, ways of doing things and ways of talking). They thus develop a system of values that becomes more salient than others within the community itself. A distinctive characteristic is that the identification that gives cohesion to the community is not abstract, but linked to joint activities. Joint practices over time form the ways of communicating and viewing values and relations. In this way, the community develops a tacit knowledge of the roles, rights and obligations which generates its own frames, i.e. structures of socialisation. Such community frames conform to structures of expectations with respect to action and communication that have been historically consolidated with practice. This is why they constitute an intermediate unit of analysis in politeness: they reproduce the same social dynamics of politeness on a smaller scale (Graham, 2007; Locher, 2013). Linked to the study of communities of practice is the Action Research protocol, which albeit to this day rarely applied in politeness studies, appears to be very promising. Action Research is an ethnographic family of methodologies that integrates reflective theory and action. It is tailored to the demands of important organisational, community and social issues in an ongoing cycle of co-generative knowledge (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014). Since Lewin introduced it into the social sciences, it has been widely applied in educational and social contexts, where a member of the community becomes an ethnographer to study the culture of her community. As Coghlan and Brydon-Miller (2014: xxv) state, “[a]nother way to think about this [Action Research] is that it is really a shared-values stance founded on a commitment to generating knowledge through democratic practice in the pursuit of positive social change”. In Action Research, the members of a community identify a locally significant research demand and, using scientific tools, produce a proposal, from which they draw new practices related to the initial problem. Basically, it concerns cycles of research and action with respect to the ongoing activity of a social group. Action Research is a field of applied research, so it is oriented towards problem solving. It produces scientific results that cannot be generalised but are completely contextualised, therefore, it is suitable for the fine-grained reading of a reality and for its transformation. The focus of the research is usually narrow, concentrating on solving a problem or evaluating a process. The outcome is a perspective of change or improvement that arises from the collaborative effort of the community. Such outcomes can be concretely applied, and later evaluated with further action research. For this reason, the action research settings are varied and the methodologies used

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are flexible (Nunan, 1992; Koshy, 2005; Vanderstoep & Johnston, 2009; Kemmis et al., 2014). Action research is oriented towards the idea of ethical and moral restitution to the participants of a study. Participants are themselves researchers at the same participatory level as the researcher: they define the problem, choose and collect data, and analyse them. The construction of meanings by the participants is fundamental. The research process itself produces the participants’ empowerment because it aims at self-analysis and the acquisition of awareness of the members of the community itself. It involves learning for all participants through reflection and awareness of their own agency. This process is based on the idea that everyone can access scientific research and that it is a very concrete instrument for morally founded transformation. According to Lacorte and Cabal Krastel (2002), in this sense, Action Research is also useful for building up theories of social change. Indeed, Action Research highlights a generation of actionable knowledge that is a source of change. This comes about by empowering subjects who usually do not have such agency in research (Liebman-Kleine, 1987; Chaudron, 2000; Somekh, 2006; Lonnie et al., 2017). We stated that Action Research is promising in politeness investigation because it has a strong sense of complex systems and takes into proper account the systemic and collaborative nature of human activities. This inner nature brings advantages and limitations. The advantages are that it is tailored to a certain context and its specificities, hence, it is sensitive to the community’s cultural point of view. In general, it has flexible protocols that leave room for the emergence of research themes or the improvisation of the researcher in the field. Therefore, it is a very creative process that arises from the multiple forms of knowledge that different members of the community may have. It is also open-ended, allowing for cyclical processes. On the other hand, Action Research is often not recognised as sufficiently rigorous or meaningful at institutional research levels. Interestingly, precisely because of this perceived limitation, it can reach places that institutional research usually cannot. In addition, Action Research generally does not allow for precise early planning, because the process has to be identified by the community. Also, it may contemplate non-academically-recognised avenues of dissemination. Another difficulty is that the community would have to be fully represented by all its stakeholders, and they might not be available at all levels, either to participate in the research or to accept the results to be applied. In addition, the researcher might not have everyone’s trust or willingness to share power. Ethical issues, too, are particularly sensitive because the small-scale design may compromise anonymity and, in general, there is a greater likelihood that the research will involve sociallysensitive issues. Another issue is that the presence of many stakeholders may require a preliminary phase of sharing constructs and terminology, a phase for defining a language of mutual understanding. Stakeholders may well have very different conceptual frameworks, which makes the clear and shared identification of the central problem a delicate step in the process (McNiff & Whitehead, 2006; Leavy, 2017). Action Research is an approach suited to changing situations, to transform practices from an insider’s consciousness and not from outsiders’ impositions (Somekh, 2006). In this perspective, it is worth mentioning Participatory Action Research,

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which is based on liberating knowledge framed in socio-political action and adult education (Kindon et al. 2007). It stems from the empowerment of oppressed groups to address socio-political processes as agents of change, through experience and commitment. The creative key to this approach lies in the non-hierarchical encounter between academic knowledge and popular knowledge to produce scientific knowledge with transformative potential (Kemmis et al., 2014; Leavy, 2017). Fals-Borda and Rahman (1991: 7) specify the background of this perspective: “[…] science is not a fetish with a life of its own or something which has an absolute pure value, but is simply a valid and useful form of knowledge for specific purposes and based on relative truths”. Thus, the underscoring concept is that self-aware people can improve their environment by liberating themselves from the social power of knowledge (Freire, 1982). The most suitable targets for Participatory Action research are precisely social and educational ones. Precisely because the subjects are agents of their own change, methodologically this perspective admits an “affective logic of the heart and feelings” combined with dialectical processes and more formal scientific instruments (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991). Compared to Action Research, it uses more specific techniques for data collection on a group basis, and not from a total of individuals. For example, public assemblies (and not surveys), narratives of collective memory, and the identification of folk values are favoured. Technically, there is a bridge figure who instructs on the methodology of scientific research so that the members of the community can use it according to their skills. The methodological options are more articulated, and vary according to the weight one wants to give to scientific rigour as opposed to the practical goal of problem solving (Elden & Levin, 1991). Finally, a key element is that the results are returned to the community in a systematic way, and the community itself decides on their use and dissemination. Thus, “[a]n immediate objective of PAR [participatory action research] is to return to the people the legitimacy of the knowledge they are capable of producing through their own verification systems, as fully scientific, and the right to use this knowledge […] as a guide in their own action” (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991: 15). In other words, the validity of the results in this approach is not related to the scientific community but (with respect to the verification systems of a specific community that recognizes them as valid) the results are seen in real life. Several current critical instances of politeness research make Action Research a very interesting approach for politeness because it closely links the research process to its context on the basis of an applied objective. The researcher/member investigates a context within the specificity of the community of practice, on the basis of an applicable objective or a problem to be solved. The outcome of the study leads to applications limited to the context itself, tailored and localised, and with the highest degree of relevance. The research is therefore a tool for action through the acquisition of social awareness, and the constructs involved in politeness research are certainly a key element for sensitivity to the context by the members of a community. Finally, we can mention a few studies with a research framework that places the community aspect as the starting point of data, and in the case of Perkins (2016) also as the arrival point of the results. We cite works from approximately the last ten

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years that demonstrate that the tools adopted can be the same as those described in the previous chapters, although they often necessitate specific integration or precautions to ensure that they capture significant and shared local practices more sensitively. Perkins (2016) conducts an ethnographic study using field methods in the Hobongan (Borneo) cultural and linguistic community. She investigates politeness and notes that idiomatic politeness routines are almost non-existent, while there are several other ways to express politeness. For example euphemisms are used to avoid the use of given names to protect from evil spirits or to avoid mentioning bodily functions. On the other hand, she notes the existence of situational politeness, in which actions (and not words) demonstrate it. In particular, rituals provide a way to conduct politeness which does not require overt verbal politeness: for example, participating or not in social rituals is the main way to express politeness. The results of the study question the domain of politeness within pragmatics because, for example, they introduce the area of not-impoliteness as proper to this community. In other words, the centrality of verbal politeness in some cultures (such as in European ones) has to be reviewed with respect to others, which prefer a pragmatically implied politeness through specific social actions (such as rituals). The interest of this anthropological study with respect to this chapter lies in the fact that Perkins (2016: 6) frames her work in Community-Based Language Research, i.e.: […] [a] language research conducted on a language or languages, for the language community, with the language community, and by the language community. In other words, the linguist(s) involved are active participants as opposed to external observers […], and native speakers are intimately involved in the process of data collection and analysis, and implicitly, there is some benefit to the community from the language research. In the case of the Hobongan, that benefit has yet to be realized but is in progress; language documentation is part of the process toward gaining protection for minorities in Indonesia.

Thus, research can demonstrate through a pragmatic theme—politeness—a salient community specificity for the purpose of protecting its uniqueness. Žegarac et al. (2015) start with a case study: a naturally-occurring intercultural incident that occurs in a foreign language classroom between teacher and students. The situation would lend itself to an analysis in terms of positive/negative face: the conflict involves behaviour which is covertly offensive to the teacher by the students in their native language (not understood by the teacher). The authors adopt the following methodology: they submit the description of the offending behaviour independently to ten external foreign language experts and ask what they would do if they were in the teacher’s situation. The researchers also ask the same professionals to evaluate the effectiveness of the action that the teacher actually took. Their data show that the opinions of the focus group of pedagogical experts suggest a response that is distant from what the teacher had done in the event: the experts suggest short-term interventions to solve the problem immediately in a conventional and non-risky way (e.g., disciplinary reports). Conversely, the teacher had chosen a completely different strategy for managing personal relationships, a strategy that was high-risk because of its creative unconventionality (i.e. the use of codeswitching, informal register and humour). Žegarac et al. (2015) show that the teacher acted on

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the basis of her own specific community (the classroom) and real personal involvement in it for the maintenance of a positive long-term relationship. She acted, in other words, as an authentic fully integrated person-teacher (in Carl Rogers’ sense). Starting from this mismatch, the authors bring the issue of rapport management to the Relevance-theoretic approach. They argue that the latter can better explain different politeness phenomena in terms of the interactants’ orientation towards affirming each other as worthy persons. This orientation gives the optimal, specific, local relevance that a communicative strategy has for all the interactants involved. In fact, the teacher managed to simultaneously communicate to the students her disapproval of the behaviour while accepting them as people, that is, she was successful on cognitive and affective relevance. This case study shows how direct involvement in a community situation challenges theoretical frameworks and a mismatch between data is highlighted: what non-participants say they would do (face management, for example) is far from what a participant actually does successfully (looking after relations). Luchjenbroers and Akdridge-Waddon (2011) present a study of forensic linguistics and investigate a speech community using a corpus of email exchanges as data. As the community of practice is highly illegal (paedophiles), the researchers investigate the covert community signals of in-groupness expressed in linguistic strategies, including politeness strategies. They find that politeness is a way to help members enter the community, begin socialisation and be recognized as insiders, following a communicative practice that is internally adequate (although socially and legally condemned). The authors detect lexical and topic choices, and correlate them to strings of discourse, that is, to multiple messages between users embedded in a single e-mail. These strings capture the progression between contributions and how quickly the members seek to meet up. Luchjenbroers and Akdridge-Waddon observe that the community develops its own configuration of face management, which is revealed in patterns that have a high consistency and that are highlighted precisely by their recurrence across strings. Moreover, in the quantitative analysis of the number of words in units of analysis per email they note the brevity of messages, which can imply both an assumption of commonality and/or an informative brevity. The recurrence of certain speech acts (such as greetings, questions, and compliments) or solidarity markers (such as, mate), hedges and modals, function as membership signals which are specific to this community. Such signals are rapid in aggregating members through politeness choices that are not common among strangers outside the community. This efficiency is related to the specificity of the illegal community, in which it is necessary to balance the risk of being caught with the need to establish contacts with like-minded people. Clark (2013) investigates a university field hockey team as a community of practice, using a purely semantic approach which highlights the values and tensions between homophobic attitudes and teammate inclusiveness. This tension is precisely the source of politeness strategies designed to produce a system that maintains the community’s values and its ideological stability. Clark uses ethnographic data, i.e. a corpus of 18 h of conversations collected as a researcher participant during the meals of the team members. She identifies negative evaluations through semantic

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metalinguistic labelling of judgements and selects the most recurrent in her corpus. The most recurrent evaluations are then focused on, in order to identify possible evaluative schemes used as repair work to avoid contradictions of homophobic attitudes, i.e. with a gate-keeping function. Clark (2013: 236) highlights that this method “[…] enables an understanding of how politeness2 work emerges from local practices and local priorities, and shows how these local priorities affect the production and selection of resources used to do this work.” Finally, we mention Holmes et al. (2012) because they give an example of “embedded” communities of practice, i.e. how a community of practice reveals a unique blend of politeness interactionally achieved by two communities of practice (the Maori and Pakeha communities) sharing the same work space (New Zealand workplaces speaking New Zealand English). 2000 workplace business talks and social talks were recorded over ten years in different workplaces (government departments, factories, small businesses, semi-public or non-government organisations, etc.) with participants from different hierarchy levels. The volunteers had direct control over the data collection in the workplace switching the recorder on and off during the workday. Data were integrated with field notes, interviews and focus groups, which the researchers considered necessary to assist in the interpretation of the recordings. This study aims at achieving what is ostensibly a linguistic goal (namely, to describe distinctive features of the New Zealand variety of English), but it reveals that the interaction of the two communities’ norms and values is actually the key to higher level socio-pragmatic practices (e.g. egalitarianism is a shared value with different roots in Maori and Pakeha communities).

References Chaudron, C. (2000). Métodos actuales de investigación en el aula de segundas lenguas. In C. Muñoz (Ed.), Segundas lenguas. Adquisición en el aula (pp. 127–161). Ariel Lingüística. Clark, J. (2013). ‘Maybe she just hasn’t matured yet’: Politeness, gate-keeping and the maintenance of status quo in a community of practice. Journal of Politeness Research, 9, 211–237. Coghlan, D., & Brydon-Miller, M. (Eds.). (2014). The Sage Encyclopedia of action research. Sage. Elden, M., & Levin, M. (1991). Cogenerative learning: Bringing participation into action research. In W. Foote Whyte (Ed.), Participatory action research (pp. 127–142). Sage. Fals-Borda, O., & Rahman, M. A. (1991). Part I Introduction. In O. Fals-Borda & M. A. Rahman (Eds.), Action and knowledge. Breaking the monopoly with participatory action-research (pp. 3– 34). The Apex Press—IT Publications. Freire, P. (1982). Creating alternative research methods: Learning to do it by doing it. In B. Hall, A. Gilette, & R. Tandon (Eds.), Creating knowledge: A monopoly? Participatory research in development (pp. 29–37). SPRA. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P., & Sifianou, M. (2019). Im/politeness and discursive pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 91–101. Graham, S. (2007). Disagreeing to agree: Conflict, (im)politeness and identity in a computermediated community. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(4), 742–759. Holmes, J., Marra, M., & Vine, B. (2012). Politeness and impoliteness in New Zealand English workplace discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 44, 1063–1076.

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Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner. Doing critical participatory action research. Springer. Kindon, S., Pain, R, & Kesby, M. (2007). Participatory action research: Origins, approaches and methods. In S. Kindon, R. Pain, & M. Kesby (Eds.), Participatory action research approaches and methods. Connecting people, participation and place (pp. 7–18). Routledge. Koshy, V. (2005). Action research for improving practice. A practical guide. PCP. Lacorte, M., & Calab Krastel, T. (2002). ¿Zapatero a tus zapatos? Action Research in the Spanish language classroom. Hispania, 85, 907–917. Leavy, P. (2017). Research design. Quantitavie, qualitative, mixed-methods, art-based and community-based participatory research approaches. The Guilford Press. Liebman-Kleine, J. (1987). Teaching and researching invention: Using ethnography in ESL writing classes. ELT Journal, 41(2), 104–111. Locher, M. (2013). Relational work and interpersonal pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 145– 151. Luchjenbroers, J., & Akdridge-Waddon, M. (2011). Paedophiles and politeness in email communications: Community of practice needs that define face-threat. Journal of Politeness Research, 7, 21–42. Marra, M., & Lazzaro-Salazar, M. (2018). Ethnographic methods in pragmatics. In A. H. Jucker, K. P. Schneider, & W. Bublitz (Eds.), Methods in pragmatics (pp. 343–366). Mouton De Gruyter. McNiff, J., & Whitehead, J. (2006). All you need to know about action research. Sage. Mills, S. (2011). Communities of practice and politeness. In B. Davies, M. Haugh, & A. Merrison (Eds.), Situated politeness (pp. 85–94). Continuum. Nunan, D. (1992). Research methods in language learning. Cambridge University Press. Perkins, M. (2016). Politeness without routines: A case study in Hobongan and implications for typology. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 12(1), 3–21. Rowell L. et al. (Eds.). (2017). The Palgrave international handbook of action research. Palgrave Macmillan. Somekh, B. (2006). Action research a methodology for change and development. McGraw Hill Education, OUP. Vanderstoep, S., & Deirdre, J. (2009). Research methods for everyday life. Blending qualitative and quantitative approaches. Jossey-Bass. Žegarac, V., Caley, J., & Bhatti, J. (2015). Communication and core conditions in rapport building: A case study. International Review of Pragmatics, 7, 216–243.

Chapter 22

Scientific Empiricism in Politeness Studies

So far politeness has been broadly outlined as a sort of socio- and psycho-cognitive universal that conditions human communicative manifestations (linguistic or not) in relational matters. We have outlined different theoretical views of politeness and approached different perspectives on how to investigate it. Politeness is pervasive in our daily lives, and thus reveals its domain in both everyday matters and in academic investigations. Both scholars and lay-speakers are part of complex social practices. This awareness emerges in this book and implies the need to study politeness following flexible and dynamic conceptions of scientificity and empiricism. The aim of this final chapter is to recapitulate the methodological critical issues commented on in the previous pages and to offer some routes for dealing with them. Recent praxis in politeness investigation shows that the traditional view of what an empiric scientific research should be is coming under pressure from the complexity of the politeness system and the depths of the human being. As we will argue in the course of this chapter, such pressure requires new types of data, creativity in mixing methods, integration of perspectives of analysis, and flexibility in accepting different criterion of scientificity of a study. The examples in Part II show that recent research in politeness is exploring these orientations. This approach is groundbreaking: using mixed methods to gain orthogonal perspectives and to integrate their analysis within different theoretical approaches evidently imposes complex and integrated research design, the availability of many resources, a large amount of time and vast competence on the part of the researchers in managing tools and theories in a team. For those who do not have this scaffolding, a viable route seems to be to reduce the academic ambitions of a study in terms of scientificity or to improve its purpose in terms of applying the results, as we comment on in the next section.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 E. Landone, Methodology in Politeness Research, Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09161-2_22

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22.1 Scientificity Whether a researcher can really get to know reality in a scientific way is a wellknown question. This section looks at how the concept of scientificity might be reviewed in contemporary politeness approaches, starting from a more flexible and integrated view of the realism-interpretativism polarization. Subsequently, the points of scientific significance, rigour and visibility are commented on. Research in the field of human sciences—to which politeness studies belong—is located in a continuum where the researcher has a philosophical position with respect to reality that can range from realism to interpretativism. It is not our intention to delve deeply into this well-known issue, so we shall just recall that in the extreme of realism the researcher thinks that she can come to know reality as an external object with varying degrees of perfection. At the extreme interpretative pole, the researcher considers that reality is a historical and social construction that exists on the basis of the perception and mental construction of meanings that the researcher makes. In politeness, the realist will tend to think she can arrive at general laws and models or regular trends and principles that are unquestionably influenced by the cultural assumptions and theoretical paradigms of the researcher. On the other hand, the interpreter will see reality as a construction of the observer, so she will devote herself to interpreting the empirical evidence in order to understand the meanings that the actors attribute to events in context. Realism will mainly lead to the use of experimental methods, objective observation and induction to the identification of the laws of reality or the confirmation or rejection of hypotheses based on theoretical models. For example, in Part II, we saw that the researcher submits the data to different decoders to verify the objectivity of the coding and tends to expand the amount of data to be able to observe any emerging patterns. Interpretivism will prefer interaction with the context for an understanding from within the subjects in action. In this case, to maintain the previous example, the researcher will submit data to the metacomments of the subjects themselves through interviews after the data collection. Thus, the methodological technical consequences are preference mainly regarding quantitative choices aimed at variables and measuring or qualitative techniques aimed more at the psychology of the subjects. Present research in politeness studies seems to overcome this polarization. Indeed, research paradigms in politeness have shifted from traditional theories seeking a priori norms and models with a semblance of realism to a strong impulse from interpretivism. Nonetheless, they are compatible. Haugh and Watanabe (2017) propose an example of comparison between the above perspectives in politeness: they apply a traditional ontology (Brown & Levinson, 1978–1987) and an interpretative perspective to the same data (Haugh, 2013, 2015). Different interpretations emerge, but both are plausible. The first approach is appropriate for the survey of emerging trends on a broad and comparable database; as a consequence, it enables the definition, for example, of a strategy of politeness or of contrastive cultural models. The second approach asks why that now?, that is: why does a particular practice

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emerge in a specific sequence (and, therefore, it offers emic-grounded and nongeneralizable fine grain analyses). In short, the two instances of realism and interpretativism divided politeness research, but studies such as Haugh and Watanabe (2017) demonstrate that they offer different but plausible ontologies, according to the research demand selected. The comparability of studies, methods and tools and the development of what is contradictory, as this example soundly shows, is a basic necessity of scientificity. In particular, following the complexity of politeness that we have been describing in this book, the multiplication of perspectives is a basic methodological principle. A second point to review in the concept of scientificity in politeness is what is considered significant. By scientific we usually mean a systematic process aimed at understanding phenomena of the world through their observation and analysis in a perspective of significance, that is, of criticism and improvement of the state of the art. In politeness, scientificity goes beyond what is considered scientific in the hard sciences and evidently embraces the full range of approaches of the natural sciences and the human sciences, as a methodological continuum without epistemological barriers. However, in this flexibility of methodological choices, the results of politeness research has a significance that is specific to the humanities. In other words, what is considered a significant objective of investigation is related to the interests of politeness. The significant objectives of scientific research, in general, address cognitive needs and are aimed at identifying a solution that is generally applicable. In politeness, the scientific objectives are understanding actions and developing theoretical systems and traditionally refer to understanding phenomena, validating hypotheses, working out or modifying theoretical models, describing analytical categories, solving applied problems, making intercultural comparisons, defining categories and validating research methods (López Morales, 1994; Chaudron, 2000; Eelen, 2001; Trinchero, 2002; Escandell-Vidal, 2003). Part I of this book, however, has highlighted many critical issues regarding these significant objectives, which means that research in the politeness agenda has either to improve the scientific process or to change the concept of what is significant and for whom. In other words, the complex systems of politeness seem to need a more situated conception of scientific significance. Approaches such as Action Research (see Chap. 21) for example, relativises what is significant to identifiable contexts of application and, consequently, relies on a paradigm of scientificity different from the academic one. Action Research is situated in a compact approachable subsystem (i.e. a community) and thus can reach all the perspectives of the constituents of the system. Most of all, the value of the analysis is related to the specific community, which recognizes it as valid because results are verifiable in real life. In any case, a general principle on which there may be consensus is that research is significant if it increases our understanding of phenomena; therefore, its objective is not limited to description but should achieve interpretation through a process of analysis. It should therefore lead to the transformation of raw data into knowledge, either on a numerical basis (in the case of quantitative methods) and/or by intuitive and hermeneutic penetration (in the case of qualitative methods). Scientificity is

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therefore related to some cognitive operations that determine its rigour. They are mainly: ● Description: the construction of a detailed representation of a reality helps to produce assertions that are relevant (in the opinion of the researcher) and compatible with the empirical data collected (i.e. reports of observation of facts, classification and construction of taxonomies and typologies, synthesis in tables or graphs of factors and characteristics, etc.). ● Explanation: this aims at finding cause-effect relationships, which although imperfect, may represent a structural trend of reality. ● Understanding: understanding the rational reasons for the actions of the subjects studied leads to a reconstruction of the sense that the actors give to their actions. ● Interpretation: this refers to giving meaning to the data collected in the field, transforming them into knowledge of a reality. The researcher perceives and interprets the data in the light of her own cultural socialization (which may or not be the same as the subjects studied). ● Forecasting: this projects the knowledge obtained towards hypotheses of future behaviour. ● Comparison: this refers to finding regularity in different contexts and deducing a link between common factors ● Arguing: defending a result in order to obtain the epistemic consensus of the scientific community (Trinchero, 2002; Pons Bordería, 2020). Nonetheless, when faced with a complex, multilayered and multiperspective system such as politeness, the researcher may feel constantly dissatisfied despite being cognitively rigorous: descriptions are always incomplete, explanations are not sufficiently related to causes, the emic evaluations are profound but difficult to access and understand, the interpretation is always culturally biased, forecasting the highly subjective variety is impossible, comparison cannot rely on homogenous categories, etc. For this reason, to defend results, new approaches are needed. For example, Wegener, Meier and Maslo (2018: 3) defend “the creative potential of detours in academic work and in life: on the potential of not always following a recipe, of giving up what we think we should be doing or of realizing retrospectively that what looked like a detour or even procrastination might be just the path we came to value”. In other words, they see the potential in sharing the practices of others, no matter how messy and unfinished they may be. This is a spirit that allows us not to give up research in the face of the complexity of politeness. They support “the ‘accountable’ research methodologies [which] involve adventurousness and not-being-so-sure” (Wegener et al., 2018: 5) and release researchers from the following paradigm: To follow the traditional format for presenting method and analysis, scholars may feel they have to create a certain type of narrative about the research process in which some things are included and others left out. A tidy, edited account feels safer because the story of what ‘really’ happened may seem too intuitive, messy or serendipitous and thus at risk of being discarded as unscientific or irrelevant, or too personal. (Wegener et al., 2018: 2)

Such an approach also addresses the visibility of the investigation process, which, again, is challenged by approaches to contemporary politeness. The basic premise

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of scientific methodology is that a study should be well described and documented, making the following points clear: ● Theoretical framework: the theoretical model tries to explain a part of the empirical world in an organized way and gives direction to the research hypotheses. The theoretical framework is necessary to clarify the relevance of the research question and to define the terminology and categories of analysis. It is also possible to consider the theoretical framework as a point of arrival: the researcher approaches the data without an explicit model (although she will probably have an implicit one) in order to make a new model emerge from them. ● Research question: the research hypotheses are converted into research questions that are significant for improving knowledge of reality and eventually filling gaps in a theoretical framework. They determine the type of data and the method of collection. ● Variables: if the study involves variables, they articulate the passage from reality (subject or object studied) to concepts (subject/object properties and relative states) and symbols (variables and relative admissible values in quantitative analysis). When it is necessary to proceed to the indirect detection of a property that is not empirically detectable, it is also necessary to explain any indicators chosen. ● Types of subject: the subjects investigated can be single cases or groups of various sizes, selected in a non-statistical way (convenience sampling, accidental choice, through a network of friends, paradigmatic cases) or statistically (random, systematic, stratified, etc.). For the sake of a valid interpretation, it must always be demonstrated exactly how representative or significant the subjects involved are. Being representative is not a question of quantity, in fact there is no basic consensus on the number of cases that we have to produce to prove a phenomenon in pragmatics. Instead, it is a question of careful selection. If it is not clear how representative or significant the subject sample is, we will have an anecdotal narrative of limited interest. ● Methods of data collection: these can be highly diversified, involving interviews, conversations, questionnaires, tests, checklists, evaluation scales, coding systems, systematic observation, field notes, document collection, etc. Each method provides specific types of data, and its selection is conditioned by the research questions, but also by the restrictions of the context and the personal “style” of the researcher (experience, personality, etc.). ● Method of data selection: in a scientific process, the facts observed in a coherent and rigorous way must be translated and organized into data (i.e. a symbolic and abstract descriptive level), on which an analysis of uniformity, contrast, regularity, conspicuousness, exceptions, etc. is carried out. ● Analysis of data: standard research will make use of data matrixes, while interpretative (qualitative) research will make use of empathic techniques or inductive intuition, which tends to be global. Experimental research will focus on the variations of one factor, depending on other independent factors (Hatch & Lazaraton, 1991; López Morales, 1994; Turchetta, 2000; Trinchero, 2002; Escandell-Vidal, 2003; Dörnyei, 2007; Pons Bordería, 2008, 2020; Jucker, 2018).

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Frequently, studies of politeness lack transparency as to the procedure followed and the data used, and this makes it impossible to verify the research, raising doubts about internal and external validity. An incomplete description of the methodology does not allow us to check for errors in procedure and, consequently, properly assess whether it can be generalized or transferred to wider contexts (Murillo Medrano, 2008; Leech, 2014). But even when the investigation process is transparent, data returned by studies in politeness are still very opaque. Traditionally, the types of data that pragmatics is interested in range from micro units of analysis (e.g. discourse markers) to macro units (e.g. a conversation or a speech event). As we have seen throughout this book, however, politeness requires particular attention to other types of data, mainly related to perception and evaluation and, consequently related to the moral nature of politeness. Ordinary speakers judge what is adequate or not; scientific theory, however, aims to arrive at concepts that are not moral, but descriptive, explanatory and predictive. Nevertheless, real life conversation involves politeness as an active background in a context that has specific local conditions. In other words, politeness is not an object that can be described autonomously as a principle, model or system, but it is rather related to the individual. As Eelen (2001: 183) states: “(Im)politeness is inherently a matter of moral evaluation, so whenever anyone (everyday speaker or scientist alike) uses those terms to describe someone else’s behaviour, morality inevitably rears its head”. Data on how the individual evaluation is made and related to the moral debate of social life have no transparency: for whom is a social action polite? On what grounds is a social action evaluated as polite? What discursive resources are used to evaluate a social action as polite? (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 253). Such questions present the politeness agenda with the need for new types of data, obtained from, for example, neurolinguistics and psychology.

22.2 Empiricism Considering that there is no research without data (Jucker, 2018: 3), this section presents a brief reflection on empiricism in politeness. Jucker and Staley (2017) provide an overview of the methodological preferences of politeness studies through the analysis of two leading specialized publications in the field, the Journal of Pragmatics and the Journal of Politeness Research over the past thirty years. The nonempirical approach (philosophical approach) and the use of intuitive research data, as well as of diary field notes, is in decline. The methodologies that have been used more extensively and constantly in the past three decades are the interactional and experimental. In general, empirical and qualitative methods prevail (see also Culpeper & Gillings, 2019). Some more quantitative methods are growing (such as corpus-based methods and philological methods, as well as metadiscourse data analysis), although they are still in a minority, compared to the earlier ones. As it is well known, at the origins of Pragmatics there is the philosophy of language, which is not empirical in the traditional sense. The researcher relies on her own experience as a native speaker, conceptualizes and generalizes it, and finally demonstrates her insights with invented examples (see Sect. 9.2). Following

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the issues posed in the previous section, politeness studies have experienced what De Beaugrande (1996) notes about formalism and functionalism. He observes that formalism has introduced the idea that scientificity in linguistics is ensured by the fact that language is to be understood as a system of formal units and rules of structuring: it would therefore be highly scientific because of its rigorous, abstract and general nature. Functionalism, on the other hand, in entering the messy contexts of human interaction, would be somewhat unscientific. This has exempted many formalists from specifying the relevance of their studies, i.e. explaining how the results achieved contribute to the general understanding of the human situation. And, above all, formalism has done without field work: thanks to the consistency of formal systems, it has considered it sufficient to invent data. The analysis of the discourse and, above all, the anthropological and social dimension of communication, has brought the data of reality “external” to the researcher to the attention of pragmatics. Therefore, in the current state of the art, the specific difficulties of politeness studies are “[…] how we can quantify something as complex as politeness without generating analytical artefacts that make little sense to participants themselves […]” (Kádár & Haugh, 2013: 257). In other words, the studies of recent years suggest giving more attention to lay people’s way of experiencing politeness and this has prompted studies of politeness to work on authentic data and on emic and functional principles of adequacy, instead of etic and formal principles of well-formedness. The focus is the language in the negotiation of situated interactions. Empiricism implies following the facts and gathering data from people other than the researcher (López Morales, 1994; Schneider, 2018: 41). The latest epistemological developments of politeness outlined in this book gauge the effect of its impact. López Serena (2011) observes that the empiricism of the humanities is not the empiricism of the natural sciences—as some common interpretations may suggest—mainly because natural laws are necessary, while the “laws” of politeness are social and can be strategically manipulated. In the natural sciences data admit falsification: the litmus test of the empirical fact is not a repeated confirmation, but the impossibility of it being refuted. However, falsification in politeness is not possible: counter-data is possibly a strategic variant and not a falsification. This determines the specific empiricism of the studies of politeness. Indeed, empirical data are positively evaluated in the current state of politeness studies, although as we discussed in Part I, it is not always scientifically feasible for in-depth data to be gathered from human beings over time, in a synergy of loci, etc. In fact, empiricism in politeness is far more complex that before: it no longer works on a linguistic item to understand its use; it captures the elements of a complex system with multiple perspectives and tools to gather data with a potentially wide range of natures. Two examples of new types of empirical data that this involves in politeness are intuitive data and unconscious data. The context of polite dynamics is the arena common to lay speakers and analysts, the locus where they both sift through the clues. The instruments that the lay speakers use are, supposedly, a mixture of automatism and intuition. Usually speakers are able to comment on their choices metapragmatically, but seldom are they able to explain what intuitive path they have followed to get to an interpretation and to an

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evaluation. Nevertheless, if communication works sufficiently well, such paths do exist and interlocutors subtly perceive signs that guide them. At the state of the art, such signs are largely invisible to the researcher, empirically speaking, but this does not mean that they are not empirical. In fact, they make communication a possible reality. This leads us to mention those domains of politeness research that are not yet scientific objects circularly, because they are not empirically tested; and they are not empirically tested because they have not yet been conceived of as worthy of scientificity. Examples are the instances of the implicit that lodge in the unconscious or those signs that do not pass through verbal or extra-verbal codes (such as lay concepts of intuition, reading in thought, presenting, telepathy, harmony, good smell, good/bad vibrations, having a bad/good energy, resonance, etc.). These topics are almost considered as para-scientific, yet they are also present in the lay speaker’s conception of relationships and communication. Therefore, a researcher should not disdain investigating them with a scientific attitude and should not abandon the effort to obtain their empirical evidence. Indeed, as Eelen (2001) points out, politeness studies inherit a conceptual bias from linguistics. In linguistics the object of study is language, therefore legitimate data are considered text, speech, conversation, etc., that is, the tangible and visible product of language. Politeness has therefore been approached as a characteristic of texts, discourse, etc. and not, for example, as a psychological (or sociological) process. In other words, it has been seen as residing in isolated objects and not as part of a dynamic process, such as a communicative exchange between human beings. This point elicits a final consideration on the real empirical locus of politeness. Eelen (2001) points out that the traditional theories of politeness have relegated the individual to the passive role of a socialized subject who adapts to norms and roles. As illustrated in Part I, however, one of the peculiarities of politeness is the high variability of empirical data, that is, subjects always offer very different visions, judgments and interpretations of the same communicative interaction. For this reason, the individual is the real empirical locus of research in politeness, that is, she is the subject who “produces” evaluations, interpretations, behaviours, etc. On the other hand, constructs such as “culture” or “society” are not so empirical in this sense; they are theoretical constructions. The concept of practice seems promising for working scientifically on the empirical variability that characterizes politeness. As Eelen (2001: 240) sums up, empiricism in politeness should focus more on the processes of polite behaviour (e.g. the connection between individuals and society) rather than on its product (e.g. the norms, the principles, the linguistic models, etc.). The Bourdieusian vision that Eelen proposes is that society is the result of the practices of individuals, and such practices are the observable everyday-life events. Accordingly, politeness is a group of practices, and these are an active bidirectional process of influence between the individual and society/culture. Through this process, individuals’ active evaluations converge and diverge dynamically, and this creates and maintains a community over time. Briefly, the individuals and their use of language in everyday life is the locus of data, since they are fairly easily recognisable and retrievable. Their practices are the object of empiricism and their success in everyday communication presupposes their systematic nature.

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22.3 Ethics We finally add a reflection on ethics in politeness methodology, because it affects— and often restricts—the type of data available to the researcher. Additionally, it is increasingly common that the researcher needs the approval of her institution’s ethical committee before starting an empirical investigation. This procedure improves the credibility of the study, so that it is particularly appreciated by publishers, referees and scientific boards. The aims of the ethics process is to verify that the research design is valid, the researcher is morally correct and above all respectful of the people being studied (their body, identity, will, behaviour, etc.). In accordance with the specificities of politeness that have emerged in this volume, we focus here on the ethics related to the persons involved (Stewart, 2011). There are some general issues which affect all areas of empirical research in the Humanities, while others are more specific to linguistics and pragmatics. Finally, some of the issues have a specific impact on research in the field of politeness, as we will focus concluding this section. The general issues of ethics in research concern the protection of the physical, legal, social and psychological safety of the subjects. They also deal with how to ensure that subjects are volunteers, that they are free to withdraw at any point, and that they are informed about all aspects of the research in detail (i.e. purpose, risks, time commitment, modalities, funds, etc.). An ethic research design must also ensure the protection of the identity of subjects in terms of anonymity or confidentiality, i.e. the personal data processed is in anonymised, or is in a form not intelligible to anyone other than the researcher. These issues are handled through the informed consent, which is the specific written or oral permission of the subject to be involved in the research. Compared with other fields, linguistics and pragmatics may present seemingly negligible ethical risks (e.i. there is never a risk of causing physical harm), nevertheless several issues have an impact on empirical data and, consequently, on the research questions that it is actually possible to address (Márquez Reiter & Placencia 2005; Schneider, 2018; Locher & Bolander, 2019). The Ethics Statement of the Linguistic Society of America (2009) proposes to focus responsibility as a stimulus for reflection to make ethical choices: responsibility to individual research participants, to communities, to students and colleagues, to scholarship, and to the public. An accurate reflection on responsibility is a starting point for the researcher because, in the field, ethical issues often arise which are not covered by institutional protocols or scientific guidelines, and in respect of which the researcher has to make an individual decision regarding what could be harmful for persons and collectivity in a specific situation. General principles that can guide ethical decisions are: ● The greater the vulnerability, the greater the obligation of the researcher to protect ● Harm is defined contextually ● Researchers must balance the rights of subjects with the social benefits of research and researchers’ rights to conduct research

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● The research aims at a goal which is good and desirable (Recommendations from the AoIR ethics working committee, 2012: 4) This ethical-decision making is a process that informs all the research phases because ethical issues may arise from planning, research conduct, publication, and dissemination. Different ethical frameworks can be involved, so that the researcher can benefit from consulting case studies and discussing with colleagues; dilemmas or conflicting frameworks may emerge (De Costa et al., 2019; Locher & Bolander, 2019; Recommendations from the AoIR ethics working committee, 2002). For example, the fact that the participants must be given the choice to participate or not in the research and to be informed about it implies that their consent must be formally required. In studies that involve subjects such as children or sick people the consent of the family is required. The problem is the option available to participants to withdraw from the study, which can create complications especially if the research involves financial compensation for the family. Another example is that surreptitious recordings with a request for postauthorization are not recommended and are even illegal in some countries. The principle of privacy, in fact, is violated by the hidden registration and, in any case, all audio and video data generally require complex practices for guaranteeing anonymity. As DuBois and Lisi (2020: § 7) state, “overt research on public behaviors in public settings is generally considered acceptable (e.g., friends taking their dogs on a walk in a public park); covert research on private behavior in private settings is generally forbidden (e.g., a couple’s dinner in their home); other forms of covert research (such as research on social media, […]) tend to generate the bulk of controversy”. This implies that, in general, comparison between different set of data, in the case of intercultural projects, is complicated by different national laws regarding the data that can be collected and rendered public. This makes it difficult to access comparable data, as the source is subject to various types of legislation. Indeed, it should be highlighted that ethical codes of conduct are cultural projections, underpinning values such as individual will, collective good, priority of science, private/public, etc.; that is how cultures formulate their understanding of people’s rights and the way to respect those rights (Ameka & Terkourafi, 2019; Fozdar & Israel, 2020; Millum & Bromwich, 2020). Also of interest are issues of cross-cultural rhetoric—e.g. of register, simplification or completeness of text—that arise when writing consent information in different languages, which may affect the participants’ trust and willingness to participate (Brelsford, 2019). A specific reflection should be made for digital data and, in general, for the recruitment of subjects via the internet and social media (via different media, such as PC, mobile device, etc.) because many questions are not addressed in the current guidelines and the great variety of digital data involves disciplines beyond the human subjects’ research (Recommendations from the AoIR ethics working committee, 2002). According to the Recommendations from the AoIR (2012: 3) this field includes any inquiry that: ● utilizes the internet to collect data or information, e.g., through online interviews, surveys, archiving, or automated means of data scraping

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● studies how people use and access the internet, e.g., through collecting and observing activities or participating on social network sites, listservs, web sites, blogs, games, virtual worlds, or other online environments or contexts; ● utilizes or engages in data processing, analysis, or storage of datasets, databanks, and/or repositories available via the [sic] ● studies software, code, and internet technologies ● examines the design or structures of systems, interfaces, pages, and elements ● employs visual and textual analysis, semiotic analysis, content analysis, or other methods of analysis to study the web and/or internet-facilitated images, writings, and media forms ● studies large scale production, use, and regulation of the internet by governments, industries, corporations, and military forces. In particular, the spread of digital texts makes privacy a slippery terrain, because one cannot take for granted that if the data are a publicly accessible source it is not necessary to ask for consent for their use for research purposes. In the event of deciding to obtain consent, the multiplicity of authors (for example, of a forum or a blog) nevertheless makes this unfeasible. In general, in an online public context is not clear what is private and what is public and who is the human subject. For example, an online newspaper is fully public, but its link to an individual social page may be not considered public by its owner. And the owner might not be a person, but an association. Moreover, not all those who publish online are really conscious of the level of public access the information can get (e.g. younger people), so in a way publicity does not imply consent to use data for research on the base of an implicit consent (Bolander & Locher, 2014; Elgesem, 2015; Ess, 2015; Lüders, 2015; Fozdar & Israel, 2020). The Recommendations from the AoIR ethics working committee (2002–2012) are useful to highlight the focal points of ethics in Internet research: ● How is the context defined and conceptualized? For example: What ethical expectations are established by the venue? Is there is a posted site policy that establishes specific expectations? ● What are the initial ethical expectations/assumptions of the authors/subjects being studied? For example: Do participants in this environment assume/believe that their communication is private? ● How is the context (venue/participants/data) being accessed? For example: If access to an online context is publicly available, do members/participants/authors perceive the context to be public? ● Who is involved in the study? For example: Who are the subjects/posters/authors/creators of the material and/or inter/actions under study? Does the object of analysis include persons or texts beyond the immediate parameters outlined by the study? What particular issues might arise around the issue of minors or vulnerable persons? ● When, how, from whom to obtain the informed consent? For example: in studying groups with a high turnover rate, is obtaining permission from the moderator/facilitator/list owner, etc., sufficient?

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● How are data being managed, stored, and represented? For example: What method is being used to secure and manage potentially sensitive data? What protections might be put in place to anticipate changing perceptions? (e.g. while a participant might not think his or her information is sensitive now, this might change in five years). ● How are texts/persons/data being studied and then presented? For example: does one’s method of analysis require exact quoting and if so, what might be the ethical consequence of this in the immediate or long term? ● How far do extant legal requirements and ethical guidelines in the countries implicated in the research apply? E.g. European Union citizens have stronger privacy rights than U.S. citizens. ● What ethically significant risks does the research entail for the subject(s)? For example: if the content of a subject’s communication were to become known beyond the confines of the venue being studied—would harm likely result? Would a mismatch between researcher and community/participant/author definitions of ‘harm’ or ‘vulnerability’ create an ethical dilemma? ● What are the ethical traditions of researchers and subjects’ culture and country? E.g. in the United States there may be a greater reliance on utilitarian approaches in “risk/benefit” analyses as compared with other countries and cultures. Regarding the specific issues of ethics in politeness research, it is apparent that the complexity and variation of politeness that we have outlined in this book leads to the fact that there cannot be an ethical guideline valid for all research desing. So, it is always necessary a process of reflection, evaluation and decision of the researcher, depending both on the institutional context of her research and on the empirical situation she studies. As said, ethical issues may change in the course of the research, and addressing them requires human sensitivity and not just the requirement to comply with an institutional duty. As a matter of fact, politeness often implies issues of psychological and social harm, so, for example, an interview can trigger impacting emotions or dissemination can involve social and legal risks for the subjects. It can also imply dealing with possible situations in which non-harm to one subject results in harm to another and the reason is that politeness investigates complex aptitudes, values, behaviors, and social dynamics, often with an intercultural approach (Locher & Bolander, 2019). In general, politeness studies in specific communities or with vulnerable subjects involve the need for strong ethical precautions. For example, many studies engage academic students, who present a certain ethical vulnerability if their involvement is a course requirement or an opportunity for extra credits (DuBois & Lisi, 2020: § 7). A second general point of reflection is how to obtain a valid informed consent from specific subjects, such as adults with diminished capacity, prisoners, ethnic communities, children, people with health and mind disorders or socially stigmatized behaviours. In these cases, it is particularly necessary—but at the same time particularly difficult—to get consensus, that is to endorse “micro-ethical practices, that is, practices that are customized to manage ethical dilemmas in an emergent

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manner, as opposed to subscribing to a one-size-fits-for-all approach to ensuring that ethical practices adhered to” (De Costa et al., 2019: 123). Other critical points concerning informed consent in politeness research arise when unreachable third parties are involved in the research (e.g. the mention of a person in an interview or the appearance of a person passing by in a video recording), when subjects cannot fully understand the consent they are giving (e.g. children), when collective third parties are involved and it is not clear who is entitled to give the consent (e.g. an institution, an ethnic group, etc.), or when institutions of power are involved and consent would not be given if the instituistion is fully informed that the research might mine its image (Fozdar & Israel, 2020). In addition, a very relevant issue is that full informed consent could anticipate the research content, and thus direct or change subjects’ responses, thus invalidating the data: especially if the consent is detailed, prior consent can spoil the data (Millum & Bromwich, 2020). Finally, we refer to two specific cases, related to the technique of shadowing (Chap. 18) and to community action research (Chap. 21). During a shadowing, the relation between the shadower-researcher and the shadowee-subject entails specific power and social distance dynamics and the extensive and intensive interfacing between them involves important ethical issues. One of the biases that Johnson (2014) reports having to deal with for shadowing is informed consent, which obviously concerns the shadowee, but more problematically also concerns third parties with whom the shadowee comes into contact. From a practical standpoint, this issue becomes difficult to manage, especially if there is rapid contact with third parties or if they are strangers, or if the shadowee does not give notice of the shadowing practice taking place to third parties. In addition, the consent of third parties may not be feasible (e. g. if children are involved as occasional third parties) or can be conditioned (e.g. the shadowee puts pressure on others). It is interesting to note that, in these cases, the informed consent of third parties is likely to become even more unethical than covert research because it creates intrusion and causes stress in the lives of the participants. A second ethical problem is that the consent normally has to specify the shadowee’s time commitment, which is not always predictable because a shadowing session can be linked to extemporaneous occasions or impediments, and has to be agreed upon each time. Fozdar and Israel (2020: Conclusion) point out that the big underlying ethical question is Foucauldian: [i]n conducting research into the lives of people, to what extent are sociologists contributing to the surveillance and control of the populations they study, revealing their innermost secrets? Even where sociologists conduct their work in a manner that maintains ethical standards, to what extent are we complicit in this governance project?

This reflection invokes an ethical principle of indebtedness and stresses that researchers should be more concerned about setting up research aimed at the benefit they offer to the community. Too often the benefits of research are intended as a benefit to science in general, or to the researcher in particular. The researcher should feel responsible for returning to the community the insights of her data analysis, following the spirit of the Action Research perspective (DuBois & Lisi, 2020). As a matter

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of fact, “[…] pragmatics research could empower individuals and social groups to more consciously manage interpersonal relations and use language according to their needs and desires” (Schneider, 2018: 80); applied research on politeness actually has a strong potential to empower members of a community in their practices: active observation, cognitive use of emotions, reflection on frameworks to get higher implicit premises of observable behaviours, etc. are some of the methodological tools proposed in this book that can help people in everyday life. Hence, researchers in this field should proceed more towards socially meaningful results, such as raising awareness of manipulative discourse, power dominance, politeness in mediation conflicts, improvement of language teaching and evaluation, etc. Ethically speaking, however, this approach requires that community members, in their double role of subjects and researchers, are also prepared to deal with the fact that data and analysis may create a negative image for the community. Finally, the approach is often problematized by universities’ research ethics committees, both with respect to the individual subjects involved, and to the community as a research subject separate from the researcher (Yanar et al., 2016) In summary, the researcher must carefully assess psychological threats (e.g. anxiety, embarrassment), legal consequences (e.g. fines), social effects (e.g. stigmatisation, harm to reputation, or divorce), and economic aspects (e.g. lost time at work, loss of employment, fees). This evaluation is a continuous, flexible, and situated process, that needs awareness and collaboration of all the parties involved. It sometimes generates unsolvable dilemma or reduces the aims of the research design, but often it also improves the researcher’s insights into the system she is studying.

22.4 Methodological Recapitulation This final chapter has outlined the main issues in politeness research that emerge in this book, proceeding to broader considerations on how they impact the traditional view of a scientific study. Although the basis of scientificity is a solid point of reference, contemporary politeness approaches call for a relativisation of what is considered significant, rigorous, transparent and empirical in research. The reason is that, when facing complex systems, fluidity and indeterminacy affect their systematic aspects in an unpredictable way. To conclude the chapter, we propose a recapitulation of the methodological issues that may affect research designs along with some suggestions for dealing with these critical points (Table 22.1). In many cases, they are more aids to raise awareness, rather than concrete advice. No recipes are in fact possible, and often methodological solutions are still far from forthcoming. Hence, the “What the researcher can do” column in the following table is to be intended as “What scholars have done so far to overcome critical issues without throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Hopefully, the detours of the community of scholar committed to politeness research may foster creative exploration to find new routes.

What the researcher can do • Use a metatheory approach, integrating coherent constructs of different theories of politeness • Use a multi-theory approach, integrating coherent constructs of theories of different fields • Focus on the locally inherent dynamics of long stretches of discourse • Focus on patterns of acts (e.g. adjacent pairs, routines, etc.) • Relate data to the frames that background what is appropriate (“normal”) or dissonant • Contemplate the relation of forms and functions on a continuum from fixity to free combination • Shift the attention from the locutive and illocutive force of the act to its perlocutive effects • Integrate linguistic data with data on the speakers’ relationships and their community networks • Focus on the psychological and cognitive cues observable in discourse • Use emotions as a methodological tool (both those of the speakers and those of the analyst) • Use perceptions and evaluations as methodological tools (both those of the speakers and those of the analyst) • Identify the background frameworks that interlocutors refer to evaluative processes • Localize cerebral area of activation in politeness and their interaction with other cognitive activities • Find implicit premises of frameworks by contrasting different systems • Observe frequency of combination to identify fixed units that form a framework (conventions, routines, formulas, rituals) (continued)

Methodological critical issues in politeness

Weakness of theory of reference

Attention only to isolated linguistic structures (e.g. a single speech act)

Lack of attention to the mental processes of the subjects

Table 22.1 Recapitulation of the methodological issues

22.4 Methodological Recapitulation 263

What the researcher can do • Focus on the psychological and cognitive cues observable in discourse • Use perceptions and evaluations as methodological tools (both those of the speakers and those of the analyst) • Be aware that what people do is mediated by selective perceptions (this affects both the researcher and the subjects) • Triangulate the source perceptions (emissor, receiver, non participants observers, etc.) • Focus on speaker awareness of the recipient’s perception (e.g. does what is said coincide with what is understood?) • Find clue in the discourse that relate perceptions to cognitive framework • Use emotions as a methodological tool (both those of the speakers and those of the analyst) • Adopt a multimodal approach • Detect in the discourse the signs of semiotized bodies • Identify recurring patterns of embodied activity (e.g. perceptions, non verbal communication, emotive communication) • Use fears, desires, needs, ideologies and values as methodological tools (both those of the speakers and those of the analyst) • Admit the bias that neither the speaker nor the analyst have access to the deeper motives for action • Be aware that what people do situationally is different from what they think they do • Soundly operationalize the constructs and the categories • Delimit a magnitude of comparison on the axis from the single element to whole systems • Relativize comparison to situations • Emically validate the categories • Use contrast as a hermeneutic tool to highlight assonance or dissonance between entities (and not to describe entities) (continued)

Methodological critical issues in politeness

Lack of attention to perceptual processes of the subjects

Lack of attention to the embodiment

Lack of attention to the deep levels of the unconscious

Inconsistent comparison due to incongruent categories

Table 22.1 (continued)

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What the researcher can do • Integrate the speakers’ and the analysts’ perspectives • Stick to localized communities or contexts • Be aware of the frameworks of the observed and observer • Integrate quantitative and qualitative analysis • Use narration as metapragmatic scaffolding (both for the speakers and the analyst) • Use critical incidents as a tools • Use deviant data to deepen the analysis • Contrast perspectives (e.g., emic–etic, poliphony, lay-scholar, participant–observer, emissor and receivers, etc.) • Detect clues to subjects’ perspectives directly in the discourse (e.g. explicit signals of participants, metapragmatic comments of the speakers, etc.) • Use the perlocutive effects to validate data with the hearer’s uptake of politeness (e.g., follow-up politeness behaviours) • Be aware of the elements of the relationship between the observed and observer (different backgrounds, cognitive frameworks, perspectives, etc.) • Contemplate emic and etic as synergistic perspectives • Use narration as metapragmatic scaffolding (both for the speakers and the analyst) • Use triangulation of data collection, of methods, of researchers • Be aware that in order to rely on the speakers’ evaluation, it is also necessary to be aware of the normality that constitutes a point of reference for evaluation (i.e. to know the local moral order of reference) • Explicitly justify the different standards of validity when integrating different methodological tools (continued)

Methodological critical issues in politeness

The research presents a weak operationalization of categories

The analysis presents impressionistic interpretations

The analysis lacks multiple perspectives

Table 22.1 (continued)

22.4 Methodological Recapitulation 265

What the researcher can do

• Accept the dispersion of data • Avoid flattening data with media calculation • Accept the variability of empirical data and use it as a source of comparison for contrastive insights • Be aware that aggregating single data does not offer the synergetic side of the phenomena

Limited interest of the study because it produces data that are too localized

Justify the local utility of the study Justify the applied aim of the investigation Involve subjects in the investigation in a framework of Action Research Subsume the individual empirical variability of situated politeness to common trends or units, even of limited entity • Identify possible systematic recurrences in data (e.g. patterns and regularity of behaviour) (continued)

• • • •

The analysis presents generalization starting from too few or poor a variety of • Justify the significance (and not necessarily the representability) of the subjects subjects • Document the subjects’ participation in community networks • Use the subjects for the hermeneutic potential of their individuality in comparison with other individuals • Choose atypical subjects for the hermeneutic potential of their deviation from normality

The analysis presents generic quantifications

The analyst imposes herself on the data, either in data recollection or in their • Account for the subjective evaluation of speakers • Use the identity traits of the speakers to gain an emic embankment analysis • Use data on the speakers’ relational history to gain an emic embankment • Access the interpretations and evaluations of the speakers (e.g. spontaneous verbalisation in interactions) • Be aware of the elements of the relationship of the observed and observer (different backgrounds, cognitive frameworks, perspectives, etc.) • Validate the categories emically • Involve subjects as co-researchers

Methodological critical issues in politeness

Table 22.1 (continued)

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267

What the researcher can do • Justify the way the model is related to backgrounds that are the measure of what is socially shared • Contemplate individual agency in frameworks, habits, conventions, and rituals • Prove that the model has implicit premises of wide relevance (e.g. values, cognitive constraints, etc.) • Test if the model admits high situational variations • Demonstrate the frequency and the regularity of co-occurrences that sustain the principle or the model • Resize the ambitions of the model to suit smaller communities

Methodological critical issues in politeness

Limited interest of the study because it produces models and principles that are too general

Limited interest of the study because it underestimates the interconnection of • Conceive of the speakers as part of communities and networks • Focus on the communicative event as an interpersonal relationship levels of politeness as a complex system • Conceive of the speaker’s identity as a semiotic construction (and not, for example, as biological) • Be aware that aggregating single data does not reveal the synergetic side of the phenomena • Admit that the socio-cultural and the idiosyncratic nature of behaviour is not easily distinguishable • Be aware that what is relevant in a system is constant change for its adaptation • Be aware that systems have internal covariant patterns and that they change their configurations • Be aware that, when compared, systems only admit relative (and not absolute) positions • Remember that the relations between the levels of a systems (e.g. macro and micro dimensions, social and individual, aggregates and single, etc.) is not linear but multilayered and multidimensional • Select the part of the complex system that seems the most pertinent to the research goal (continued)

Table 22.1 (continued)

22.4 Methodological Recapitulation

What the researcher can do • Acknowledge the cumulative flow of the internal time of the discourse • Pay attention to the emergence of a phenomena in the flux of the discourse and to how it is negotiated • Pay attention to the adaptation and self-regulation of the interlocutors during the discourse • Acknowledge the history of the interlocutors’ relationship • Undertake longitudinal studies to take into account ongoing relationships over a long period of time • Conceive of social and cultural constructs as historical sedimentation that impacts on the individual • Acknowledge the situated nature of the data and not synchronize them in the analysis • Acknowledge that metapragmatic a posteriori comments are different from in situ data • Pay attention to the semiotic possibilities and restrictions of the space where the communicative event takes place • Conceive of space as a social construction (for example, as a space for power struggle) • Pay attention to the individual’s social spaces and the relevance she gives them (i.e. group identification, recognized affiliations, etc.)

Methodological critical issues in politeness

Data recollection and analysis ignore time impact

The analysis ignores the space as a semiotic entity

Table 22.1 (continued)

268 22 Scientific Empiricism in Politeness Studies

References

269

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