Im/politeness and discursive pragmatics

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore how the analysis of im/politeness can be tackled from a discursive pragmatics perspective. Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated disciplines as they are both concerned with language use. However, they differ mostly in terms of the units of analysis traditionally associated with them: pragmatics is typically concerned with the utterance whereas discourse analysis with what is beyond the utterance. Im/politeness research has drawn from both as it was initially based mostly on pragmatic notions and later, reacting to these and embracing the pragmatic turn, it turned primarily to big D discourse for additional or more useful tools. Thus, researchers abandoned isolated utterances as their data and gravitated towards longer stretches of discourse in context. However, context was mostly explored through aspects of the micro- and macro-levels leaving rather underexplored the meso level. Our contention in this paper is that\xa0for a truly discursive approach to pragmatics in general and to im/politeness in particular, we need to develop methods and tools that will facilitate the analysis of politeness phenomena also at the mesolevel and reveal the dynamic interaction among these three levels.