Metapragmatic comments, that is, comments that reflect the understandings of speakers or lay observers regarding the ways and aims for which the language is used, are one of the main means of access to native ideas on im/politeness in corpus languages. This chapter analyses the metapragmatic comments on im/politeness that can be identified in the comedies of Plautus and Terence, as a mean to understand the Roman conceptions of im/politeness (that is, the emic perspective of this phenomenon), and the social and moral order underlying those conceptions. This approach facilitates a more detailed and integrated analysis of the speaker’s intentions and/or the interpretation of a particular utterance as polite (or impolite or overpolite) by the addressee, whether or not there are linguistic markers to indicate this intention.

Historical politeness studies provide specific challenges for the researcher in terms of both methodologies and data. This chapter introduces a distinction between approaches that focus on the use of politeness (i.e. on linguistic elements that convey politeness) and those that focus on the mention of politeness (i.e. on elements that are used to talk about politeness, the metadiscourse of politeness). This distinction is set in relation to the distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches to politeness, and to the distinction between first-order and second-order approaches. The chapter also discusses the data problems of historical pragmatics in general and historical politeness research in particular, and it describes the shift in such research from apologetic uses of what is seen as imperfect data to an appreciation of the pragmatic potential of a large variety of sources including in particular fictional texts.

Politeness is an elusive concept, especially if it is traced diachronically across time. A distinction is made between first-order politeness (everyday conceptualisations) and second-order politeness (scholarly definitions), and this distinction is set in relation to emic (i.e. language specific) and etic (i.e. language independent, universal) approaches to politeness. The three waves of politeness research are briefly introduced. First, the traditional approach based mainly on the work by Brown and Levinson; second, the discursive approach, which largely rejected the traditional approach; and third, the frame-based and interactional approach, which led to a rapprochement of the earlier waves. Finally, an outline of the entire book is given.

Haugh’s chapter aims to further understandings of the metapragmatics of consideration by Australian and New Zealand English speakers. He examines what the term considerate is taken to mean, and the broader semantic field in which it is constituted. To tease out the metapragmatics of consideration, both quantitative, corpus-based and qualitative, interactional methods are used, laying the groundwork for a comparative study of evaluations of (in)consideration among Australian and New Zealand speakers of English in praising and criticising in online settings. The findings show that concepts are constituted within complex semantic fields; studying them in isolation risks a reductive understanding. Participants invoked different senses of an evaluative concept to varying degrees of granularity, degrees which must be taken into account in metapragmatic analysis. Shared commonalities in speakers’ conceptualisations of consideration do not preclude systematic differential tendencies emerging across groups of speakers. Haugh’s analysis shows the importance of systematic metapragmatic studies of the various emic concepts that underpin evaluations of im/politeness in different settings.

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.