This chapter outlines pertinent work on stance and evaluation that has emerged over the past two decades or so, with a specific focus on studies that have both catalysed and contributed to the discursive turn in sociopragmatics. Such studies share an understanding of stance taking and evaluation as intersubjective, dialogic processes that are collaboratively constructed and negotiated in and through interaction in various contexts. The role of stance and stance taking has been examined as local sequentiallyorganized phenomena in everyday and institutional interactions and in a larger sociolinguistic framework. The study of evaluation has similarly branched out to a discursive direction, adopting various methods that facilitate the analysis of evaluative practices in various discursive contexts. The body of work pertaining to this turn has facilitated a pivotal shift in understanding stance and evaluation as intersubjective rather than subjective phenomena, at the same time putting forward the notion that stance taking and evaluative practices take much more complex and multidimensional forms in face-to-face and mediated interpersonal communication than previously thought. Furthermore, this work has demonstrated the involvement of such practices in a great number of local and global linguistic and social processes to do with issues ranging, for example, from epistemic authority to social distribution of power.

Emancipatory pragmatics (EP) is an emerging approach to sociopragmatics that aims to develop research frameworks based on languages that have rarely been considered within mainstream Western academia. After first describing some of the events that led to the advancement of the EP approach, we present findings from Thai and ǀGui, an African language, that challenge existing theories of language usage in two areas of pragmatics, politeness and turn-taking. Discussion then focuses on the proposal that the concepts of ba and basho can serve as the basis of a more inclusive framework for understanding social interaction. Following presentation of the foundational basis of ba-theory, we offer examples of language data to demonstrate its application to Japanese, to Hawaiian and also to English, thereby suggesting the potential of ba-theory to understand interaction across a diverse set of languages. Finally, we discuss the need for work that will not only investigate how ba-theory may apply to a wider range of languages but also explore other inclusive frameworks that will push the field of pragmatics to attain a richer understanding of the linguistic and interactional potential of people throughout the world.

Language use in the workplace setting has become an increasingly popular area of research within sociolinguistics. The original focus of analysis was conversations between professionals and laypeople (institutional talk), quickly extending to interactions between colleagues in their everyday workplace talk (workplace discourse). The major interest throughout this expansion can be summed up as the intersection between power and politeness. In line with wider developments in pragmatics, analyses adopting a (revised) Brown and Levinsonian approach are now outnumbered by interactional and discursive approaches to politeness and, more recently, impoliteness. In parallel with theoretical advances, the research agenda has moved from the enactment of speech acts at the level of utterance (notably directives, disagreements and aspects of meeting management) to the impact of interactional context/s (especially the workplace Community of Practice) and the role of wider discourses in the negotiation of meaning making between interactants. A focus on metapragmatics and ideologies extends these concepts even further, offering the opportunity for more nuanced reflections on sociopragmatic issues. The discussion is illustrated by analyses from workplace discourse scholars, including examples from our own research carried out over the past twenty years.

Politeness and sociopragmatics have long been aligned since they were first proposed as areas for serious scholarly research but have since also grown into large, diffuse areas of research in their own right. The aim of this chapter is to consider synergies between these two areas of research. The chapter begins by reviewing the roots of connections between sociopragmatics and (im)politeness before briefly overviewing (im)politeness theories and the role that the first/second-order distinction can play in distinguishing between different approaches in the field. We then discuss some key sociopragmatic concepts that have come to play an important role in (im)politeness research, including context, strategies, indirectness and norms. This leads into a case study of offence-taking that illustrates how sociopragmatics and (im)politeness research now have a much broader scope, both methodological and theoretically, than earlier analyses that tended to focus on the politeness values of single utterances. We conclude by considering some of the key issues that will likely shape ongoing development of (im)politeness research, including the role of interdisciplinarity, the use of a greater range of data types and methods and the increasing need for systematic meta-theorization in the field.

The concept of ‘face’ has received considerable attention in im/politeness research given the powerful influence of Goffman and Brown and Levinson, in particular. In recent years, mostly due to the discursive turn, researchers have questioned the tight yoking between face and im/politeness and have sought different ways to better understand these concepts. This chapter offers a brief critical exploration of the concept of ‘face’ and its derivative concepts of ‘face-threatening acts’ and ‘facework’. Furthermore, it discusses some of the developments in the area such as the needs for finer distinctions and alternative ways of conceptualizing ‘face’, the appeal to return to the broader Goffmanian concept and the needs for distinguishing between lay and scientific constructs of face and disentangling face from im/politeness. ‘Face’ is a term which is located in sociology, as it relates to the person, to the self and to identity, whereas the derivative ‘face-threatening act’ draws heavily on pragmatics and, more specifically, on speech act theory. The related term ‘facework’ may provide a kind of link between the two. This chapter offers an overview of these interconnections and suggests possible directions in the study of ‘face’.

This chapter explores the interconnections between sociopragmatics and morality. Notions of morality and the moral order have been recently incorporated into research on im/politeness and could potentially be of interest to other sub-fields of sociopragmatics. We review extant conceptualizations of the moral order and insights from moral psychology and propose ways of bringing the two traditions together by seeing morality as instantiated in the moral order and the latter as part and parcel of situated practice. Furthermore, we examine and elaborate on what we believe to be the fundamental links between im/politeness and moral evaluations and discuss how insights gained from research on in/civility and morality can be useful to im/politeness scholarship. In our case study, we briefly illustrate the application of moral psychology models to the analysis of im/politeness by drawing from Rai and Fiske’s Relationship Regulation Theory and conclude the chapter offering suggestions for new avenues of research that could be explored not only by im/politeness scholars but also by researchers working in other sub-fields of sociopragmatics.

Whereas sociopragmatics as a field has been dominated by the analysis of verbal elements, this chapter adopts the perspective that sociopragmatic meanings are communicated in a multimodal fashion that encompasses prosody, gesture and other forms of nonverbal expression. We provide an overview of how prosodic and gestural means are employed for signalling information status, for marking the internal organization of speech and for communicating epistemic stance, (im)politeness, irony and speaker identity. This overview shows that prosody is closely integrated with gesture both at the temporal level and in the kinds of pragmatic meanings that these two systems are used to encode. We thus adopt the position, following the tenets of audiovisual prosody, that prosody and gesture can be considered as sister systems in the marking of sociopragmatic meanings in human communication.

Despite the centrality of the notion of identity to human communication and within discourse studies and sociolinguistics, a critical mass of identity-related work within different sub-fields of pragmatics is still lagging behind. As a result, this chapter is partly a review of existing work and partly programmatic. We specifically argue that the notion of identity is crucial to the postulates of some of the major approaches that have constituted the bases of sociopragmatics, namely speech act and politeness theories as well as some of their most common applications, interlanguage and inter/cross-cultural pragmatics and, more recently, the pragmatics of social media. However, as these theories and their applications have developed mostly in a top-down fashion (i.e. based on categorizations and taxonomies) and as they have largely been non-discursive (utterance based) in orientation, identity has more often than not been treated as a given, as structurally pre-allocated properties rather than as co-constructed and discursively achieved.As sociopragmatics is embracing discursive and interactional perspectives on its mainstay concerns (esp. politeness), we show the need for identity construction -- always at the heart of discourse(s) -- to take centre stage along with associated processes of agency in the study of situated practices.

Since the 2010s, a number of scholars have explicitly worked with the term ‘interpersonal pragmatics’ in order to zoom in on the relational and interpersonal side of communication. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate how the research interest on the interpersonal and relational is inspired by (im)politeness, identity construction and communication studies in order to tackle questions about pragmatic variation and interpersonal effects. Interpersonal pragmatics does not propagate a particular methodology nor only one theory but is conceptualized as a perspective on the interpersonal side of language and communication. The chapter draws on and points to a number of earlier chapters dealing with key concepts for this field, such as (im)politeness, relational work, face, identity construction, roles and the social and historical embeddedness of communication. Key themes within interpersonal pragmatics are, among others, negotiations of agreement and disagreement, negotiations of (clashes of) norms and understandings of self and other in particular social contexts.

In this chapter, we consider what methods and research in conversation analysis (CA), which examines the systematic accomplishment of action in its natural ecological contexts, can bring to sociopragmatics. While CA shares some of its methods with some other approaches in pragmatics – including its data-driven focus – we begin by first focusing on two aspects of the CA method that make it distinct from other approaches to language use: transcription and collections. We then go on to illustrate through two case studies how CA methods and research can help us leverage open areas of ongoing interest in sociopragmatics. The first case study focuses on (im)politeness and speech acts, while the second focuses on inference, identity and relationships. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the intersection between CA and sociopragmatics and possible directions for future research.

Proceeding from the conviction that the concept of power remains seriously undertheorized, this chapter explores the notions of power implicit or explicit in a number of currently dominant paradigms in pragmatics, and in sociopragmatics more specifically, and suggests some alternatives and possible further lines of development. First, after an overview of different concepts of power (as presented by, among others, Bourdieu and Foucault), it argues the linguistic and the social are more deeply mutually implicated than is often realized and that, hence, the study of language use may benefit from a closer attention to questions of power. Next, it addresses questions concerning power and legitimacy in Speech Act Theory as developed by Austin and Searle; these questions are posed anew and answered in a rather different way in the study of pornography as a kind of speech act. Finally, it discusses the conceptions of power employed in the study of polite and impolite language use, arguing that some of the currently dominant frameworks in Politeness Theory rest on a number of language-ideological assumptions that appear to elide, neutralize or naturalize power relations.

Historical sociopragmatics studies the social dimension of language use from a historical perspective. Like historical pragmatics in general, it must rely on written data (except for the very recent past), which poses some specific analytical challenges. In this contribution, we show how approaches to these challenges have developed in recent years. The research focus in historical sociopragmatics has followed the trend in sociopragmatics, where the earlier focus on a mapping between specific linguistic forms and specific pragmatic functions is increasingly extended to a wider consideration of the discursive nature of pragmatic entities whose function only emerges in the interaction between conversational partners. We illustrate such a discursive approach with an analysis of a sequence of letters from the Breadalbane Collection, 1548--83, in which leading members of a Scottish Highland clan negotiate their relationships, their respective roles and the wider impact of events that led to growing tensions between them.

A shout of “Come here, boy” treats its target as both male and inferior. An adult man brought into a linguistic exchange by that direct address (vocative) is thereby shoved beneath the shouter, positioned below them. ‘Racial etiquette’ once made boy a common address from white people to black men, who were expected/required to return deferential or respectful forms of address like sir or ma’am. Work on European languages with grammatically singular and plural second-person pronouns that now function mainly to position those being addressed (called T/V, as in French tu and vous) has explored two distinct axes of social position influencing address, power and solidarity. Power is nonreciprocal, solidarity goes in both directions. English now has only grammatically plural you as a direct address pronoun, but it has other address resources people use to position one another: given and family names, endearments, mock insults, professional titles, kinship terms, and more. Nicknaming asserts power, which may be affectionate (e.g., a fond parent’s pet name for their child) or coercive. Addressing is part of a larger system of linguistic (im)politeness involved in interactions. Large data studies found police (no matter what their own racial identity) speaking more politely to white than to black motorists during traffic stops.

Culpeper, O’Driscoll and Hardaker’s chapter probes into British people’s understandings of politeness and contrasts them with the understandings of people in North America. Such overarching generalisations, the authors argue, are commonly found in lay persons’ assessments of politeness and thus constitute fertile ground for studies of metapragmatic politeness. Furthermore, the results of a survey of studies focusing on either British culture or North American culture as reified entities indicated a scarcity of emic studies of these cultures in the field of politeness. The authors’ study aims to fill this gap. To that end, they apply corpus linguistic tools to the Oxford English Corpus and subject to scrutiny the lexeme ‘polite’ and the associated clusters of collocates. The results are then triangulated with geolocated Twitter data. Findings partly support both the British and the North American politeness stereotypes, but also show that, contrary to expectations, friendliness and involvement are an important feature of understandings of politeness in both the UK and the USA.

Locher and Luginbühl’s chapter takes a discursive approach to politeness, analyzing how im/polite behavior of Germans and Swiss is discussed in recent online commentaries on national differences. The study draws on newspaper coverage claiming that most Swiss people do not like German immigrants because of, among other reasons, what they consider their impolite behavior. The data (written in standard German) focus on a discussion of what the German-speaking population considers as politeness in a Swiss context and how this differs from politeness norms in Germany. A content analysis of the comments is followed by a linguistic analysis of selected codes. The results show a number of interesting clashes of language ideologies as societal/cultural politeness ideologies interlace with general language ideologies; language and culture were often equated. This entails that Swiss German dialects and German standard German are constructed as being two separate languages.Furthermore, not only is ‘Swiss German’ depicted as a homogeneous entity and as a different language than German; the behavior that comes with it, a Swiss politeness, is also construed as a unified construct.