In this chapter, I adopt a sociolinguistic perspective to explore politenessand the other reasons explaining the use of indirect communication. I alsodiscuss how contextual variables, in particular interpersonal parameters,shape both the production of indirect utterances and theirinterpretation.

Pragmatic variability may be conceptualised on a vertical and horizontal axis, the former signifying diachronic pragmatic variation across time, the latter synchronic pragmatic variation at a particular point in time due to micro-social factors (e.g. social distance, social dominance, degree of imposition) and macro-social factors (e.g. region, gender, age, social class, ethnic identity). Both synchronic and diachronic variability share many theoretical concepts and methodological concerns. The present chapter sketches the concept of pragmatic variability and highlights the role played by situational context, stylistic constraints and macro-social parameters in pragmatic analyses. Following this, the research landscape on pragmatic variability is examined and research approaches to intralingual synchronic and diachronic pragmatic variation discussed, with particular reference made to variational pragmatics and historical pragmatics. The need for comparable data and the challenges this poses in pragmatic analyses, irrespective of research framework, is then taken up in the context of a case study on present day synchronic variation in offer realisations situated in variational pragmatics. There, data types and the possible applicability of the concept of the pragmatic variable for pragmatic work is discussed, as are the opportunities to be gained from combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The paper concludes with a critical summary identifying current trends and suggestions for future research on pragmatic variability.

Variational pragmatics is the study of pragmatic variation, specifically the systematic study of language use conventions across national, regional and social varieties of the same language, spoken (and written) natively and increasingly also spoken (and written) non-natively. Variational pragmatics is focused on the influence on communicative behaviour of such factors as region, social class, ethnicity, gender and age and also investigates the interplay of these factors and their interaction with situational parameters, such as power and distance relations and context and discourse genre. This chapter outlines the original framework of this field of inquiry and its development, introducing recent modifications and extensions of this framework. It also provides a discussion of theoretical issues – most notably pragmatic universals and pragmatic variables and their variants – and of methodological principles, data types and data collection procedures. Finally, an overview is given of work carried out in variational pragmatics, in particular on the formal, actional, interactional, topic, organizational, prosodic, stylistic, non-verbal and metapragmatic levels of examination analytically distinguished in its framework. Detailed reference is made to the languages and language varieties considered, the social factors focused on, the phenomena examined (e.g. the types discourse markers or speech acts) and the methods employed.

The early days of sociolinguistic research were dominated by theories of language variation as correlations between linguistic variables and sociolinguistic factors including age, gender, class, and ethnicity, among others. Years later, Milroy and Milroy questioned these categories’ explanatory power, proposing Social Network Theory as superior for the study of social groups and relational networks. The basic unit of analysis was thus transferred from social structures to individual and sociocultural identification. Subsequently, linguists studying identity in groups have resorted to a newer concept, that of Community of Practice (Lave & Wenger 1991; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992; 1999). This shift in focus opened the door to sociopragmatic analysis via the observation of interactions and the strategies by which interactants self-identified. In this chapter we overview the progression of these approaches, concentrating on the present-day view that social groups necessarily entail concepts of identity (personal, social and relational).In so doing, we explore current theories and research in sociopragmatics regarding the connection between social groupings, identity and relational networks.