Elena Landone

University of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Language Studies and Compared Literature

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.

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.

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 pl...

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.

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?

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 i...

This chapter presents a field technique which has had little application in politeness research so far, although it has great potentiality. Czarniawska (Shadowing and other techniques for doing fieldwork in modern societies, 2007) defines shadowing as “fieldwork on the move” and it is a method widely used in organisation studies (e.g. education, nu...

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 structur...

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,...

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 part...

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 an...

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 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 opini...

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 (Methods in Pragmatics. Mouton De Gruyter, 2018) points out, this does no...

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 re...

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.

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.

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 l...

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.

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 displ...

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 suc...

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.

Las evidencias científicas sobre la adquisición de los marcadores del discurso apuntan a la necesidad de un enfoque en los procesos cognitivos para abordar los retos específicos (como, por ejemplo, la versatilidad funcional) que se plantean en su enseñanza/aprendizaje. Proponemos, para ello, un enfoque funcional y una pedagogía de reflexión dialéct...

Resumen El objetivo de este estudio es investigar si los marcadores del discurso (MD) (como hombre, bueno , etc.) pueden aportar información verbal que despierte las inferencias de los hablantes sobre la relación emotiva que surge en una conversación. Se adopta una metodología émica, que consiste en obtener la percepción de la emoción de los sujeto...

In this paper I focus on the polylinguistic and polycultural landscape of Milan on the theoretical basis of daily life studies, the sociolinguistics of globalization, and intercultural pragmatics. The relevance of this field is determined by the need for urban anthropology to semiotize the urban spaces as an interpretative bridge between the micros...

ElENA lANDONE lA mODAliDAD limiNAr EN lA NOrmAtivA tErritOriAl DE lAs cOmuNiDADEs AutóNOmAs EspAñOlAs università degli studi di milano Resumen En el presente estudio indagamos la modalidad liminar en el lenguaje jurídico-administrativo con el objetivo de identificar sus efectos en la enunciación y sugerir la pertinencia de los rasgos pragmáticos en...

This study aims to conduct a pragmalinguistic analysis of the use of interpersonal discourse markers (DMs) to regulate politeness in a Spanish language digital forum. The study is based on the premise that relation-oriented particles are imported from oral conversation into the forum's written exchanges and that these particles maintain their proto...

Las reflexiones que aquí se ofrecen parten de la concepción del lenguaje como acción e interacción, en el sentido de que la existencia de la lengua se fundamenta en sus funciones de sociabilidad. Desde esta perspectiva, abordamos el papel de la cortesía verbal en el aula de ELE (Español como Lengua Extranjera) y, con la ayuda de las indicaciones de...

The digital European Language Portfolio (ELP) is part of a Minerva project funded by the EU with main goal to adapt the ELP in an electronic format. Recent EU policies promote the language teaching and learning as a key element for European integration and mobility. EU underlines the necessity of a sort of language passport, called European Languag...

This chapter will discuss the rationale behind the development of the electronic versionof the European Language Portfolio (ELP), its technological and pedagogical aspects,and its advantages over print-based counterparts. The electronic European LanguagePortfolio (e-ELP) has been developed following a user-centered design (UCD)framework. This frame...

This chapter describes how new technologies are challenging the traditional concept of literacy and redefining its meaning. New genres of texts change conceptualizations of literacy development and present new challenges for reading and writing. Important consequences for instruction, especially how teachers and students exploit new forms of litera...

This chapter describes how new technologies are challenging the traditional concept of literacy and redefining its meaning. New genres of texts change conceptualizations of literacy development and present new challenges for reading and writing. Important consequences for instruction, especially how teachers and students exploit new forms of litera...

This chapter will discuss the rationale behind the development of the electronic version of the European Language Portfolio (ELP), its technological and pedagogical aspects, and its advantages over print-based counterparts. The electronic European Language Portfolio (e-ELP) has been developed following a user-centered design (UCD) framework. This f...

Después de esbozar los rasgos destacados del aprendizaje cooperativo, se profundizará en el principio de la formación de las destrezas colaborativas, para evidenciar su adhesión a la visión pragmalingüística que subyace a la corriente comunicativa. De ahí nace esta propuesta de integrar la enseñanza de las destrezas colaborativas en el currículo de...