This volume covers the field of linguistic (im)politeness in a particular mediated, customer-oriented setting. It is the first book to do so across telephone, email and social media. It offers key insights into a unique customer service setting through authentic and spontaneous data analysis. The book looks at how customers and agents of a large public transport company engage in transactional services and impolite behaviour. This text is directed at scholars and practitioners working in communication, business discourse, (socio)pragmatics, interaction studies, and social media interactions. It is also of great value to students in applied linguistics and scholars of Slavic languages, particularly Slovenian. The cross-media study is also of value to public/private institutions to reflect on their work practices, helping them improve existing customer–service provider relationships. The diverse readership and appeal are essential features of this book. Examines mediated institutional talk and impoliteness in the Slovenian language Covers mediated service interactions, such as requests and complaints across three different media Provides in-depth insights into communication within a contemporary business environment

This volume examines the way participants orient to aspects of their interactions with others as interpersonally sensitive across an array of languages and contemporary institutional settings. The individual chapters address interactional episodes where the participants signal that elements of the exchanges they are engaged in are problematic in terms of the vulnerability of their own and/or each other’s face and the role-identities assumed throughout the interactions. The volume contributors examine a range of activities. In some of these, an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity is expected, such as citizens’ encounters with traffic police officers, negotiations with a line manager, political news interviews, or public inquiries. Other types of activity, such as service calls or guided tours, involve no such expectations in and of themselves. In some cases, the situated vulnerabilities studied here, whether expected or not, lead to deviation from the expected trajectory of the communicative event, with implications for goal achievement. The collection of papers draws on diverse analytic perspectives. These include interactional discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis. The diversity of languages and institutional environments examined will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in face-to-face interaction and serve to stimulate debate in the field of pragmatics and beyond. Originally published as special issue of Pragmatics and Society 7:4 (2016).

(Im)politeness and Moral Order in Online Interactions presents a timely response to the ‘moral turn’ in (im)politeness studies. This volume, presented by a roster of prominent figures in the field, documents and showcases the complexity of (im)politeness as social practice by focusing on the morality of (im)politeness in internet-mediated interactions. It includes, among others, studies on how the moral order is made explicit and salient in the production and perception of online impoliteness as social practice and how situated impoliteness can perform positive social and communicative functions. This volume confirms once again that (im)politeness can serve as a lens through which a variety of topics, genres, and contexts are intertwined together pointing to the very presence and existence of human beings, and is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of (im)politeness and internet pragmatics, but also to all those with a more general interest in the study of human (inter)actions in various situations and contexts. Originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 1:2 (2018).

Corpus linguistic methods provide new avenues for (im)politeness scholarship to reflexively evaluate its understanding of communication and language use on the theoretical contributions of corpus linguistics to the linguistic sciences. In this sense, this volume is a unique contribution to (im)politeness scholarship. It showcases studies in the field which employ specialized and general corpora, with methodologies that range from the speech act to the discourse-analytic and conversation-analytic traditions. The book brings into closer contact scholarship that has hitherto remained in relatively different streams of the scientific investigation of (im)politeness. A unifying theme of the chapters here is that (im)politeness phenomena are situated within the institutional and genre-specific expectations of participants in an interaction. Each of the chapters identifies the situatedness of (im)politeness from varying perspectives. The chapters in the volume are sequenced from specialized to general corpora, and simultaneously move from conversation – and discourse – analytic perspectives to contributions that address issues surrounding the identification and extraction of (im)politeness in general corpora. In collating the chapters of the volume, care was taken to focus attention on languages that have been studied extensively in (im)politeness scholarship (varieties of English – British English and Englishes in Hong Kong – and Greek), and languages that are only recently gaining more visibility in the field (Slovenian and Turkish).

This book explores what new light philosophical approaches shed on a deeper understanding of (im)politeness. There have been numerous studies on linguistic (im)politeness, however, little attention has been paid to its philosophical underpinnings. This book opens new avenues for both (im)politeness and philosophy. It contributes to a fruitful dialogue among philosophy, pragmatics, and sociology. This volume appeals to students and researchers in these fields.

Violence at work, ranging from bullying and mobbing, to threats by psychologically unstable co-workers, sexual harassment and homicide, is increasing worldwide and has reached epidemic levels in some countries. This updated and revised edition looks at the full range of aggressive acts, offers new information on their occurrence and identifies occupations and situations at particular risk. It is organised in three sections: understanding violence at work; responding to violence at work; future action.

Maps out historical sociopragmatics, a multidisciplinary field located within historical pragmatics, but overlapping with socially-oriented fields, such as sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis

This book re-constructs the evolution of the border conflict between Croatia and Slovenia. The aim is to reveal the processes at work, the historical and contemporary circumstances, and the strategies and motives of the actors involved. The book highlights the roles of the European Union and of judicial third parties in the management of the conflict. Further, it considers the precedent-setting value of the Slovenian-Croatian conflict, the attempts at its resolution, and what they mean for the ongoing and prospective EU enlargement in South East Europe. Internal documents and interviews are at the heart of this process-tracing analysis, which discusses the third-party roles of the European Commission and the EU Council Presidency in 2008/2009 as a mediator-facilitator in the drafting stages of the arbitration agreement, and the judicial work of the arbitration tribunal and the EU Court of Justice. Lastly, the book offers policy recommendations on how to strengthen dispute resolution and solve current bilateral issues in the EU accession process.

This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors’ negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages.

Internet-mediated communication is pervasive nowadays, in an age in which many people shy away from physical settings and often rely, instead, on social media and messaging apps for their everyday communicative needs. Since pragmatics deals with communication in context and how more gets communicated than is said (or typed), applications of this linguistic perspective to internet communication, under the umbrella label of internet pragmatics, are not only welcome, but necessary. The volume covers straightforward applications of pragmatic phenomena to internet interactions, as happens with speech acts and contextualization, and internet-specific kinds of communication such as the one taking place on WhatsApp, WeChat and Twitter. This collection also addresses the role of emoticons and emoji in typed-text dialogues and the importance of “physical place” in internet interactions (exhibiting an interplay of online-offline environments), as is the case in the role of place in locative media and in broader place-related communication, as in migration.