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.

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.

Focusing on emic understandings in Japanese relational networks, Fukushima’s chapter scrutinizes from a metapragmatic perspective the relationships between attentiveness and four other concepts: consideration, empathy, altruism and helping behavior. Fukushima’s exploration is based on data elicited through a questionnaire based on a visual analog scale distributed to 132 Japanese participants and their written logs on what concepts or expressions best describe attentiveness. The extent to which these concepts differ is further investigated through focus group data. Findings obtained from the questionnaire show that all four concepts are related to attentiveness, with empathy being the most closely related. The written part of the questionnaire refers to stages of attentiveness and concepts such as self-sacrifice and help. The focus group data reveal nuanced differences among the concepts investigated, identifying differences between attentiveness and altruism or helping behavior that have not been discussed in previous research. Fukushima concludes that the concepts taken up in this chapter provide a ‘heart perspective’ on politeness and interpersonal relationships.