(Im)politeness and developments in methodology

Abstract

This chapter offers a diachronic picture of research methods used in (im)politeness research. It starts by discussing the relative benefits and concomitant drawbacks, such as control, authenticity and investigative precision, of armchair, laboratory, and field approaches. It highlights various studies that have been conducted using these methods and it shows how the method of choice is related to the research questions and aims of each study. This is followed by a survey of the methods used in politeness and impoliteness research over the last thirty years, which shows that while the use of interactional and experimental methods has remained relatively stable, semantic field, metadiscourse, philological and corpus based methods are on the rise.