This chapter explores the interconnections between sociopragmatics and morality. Notions of morality and the moral order have been recently incorporated into research on im/politeness and could potentially be of interest to other sub-fields of sociopragmatics. We review extant conceptualizations of the moral order and insights from moral psychology and propose ways of bringing the two traditions together by seeing morality as instantiated in the moral order and the latter as part and parcel of situated practice. Furthermore, we examine and elaborate on what we believe to be the fundamental links between im/politeness and moral evaluations and discuss how insights gained from research on in/civility and morality can be useful to im/politeness scholarship. In our case study, we briefly illustrate the application of moral psychology models to the analysis of im/politeness by drawing from Rai and Fiske’s Relationship Regulation Theory and conclude the chapter offering suggestions for new avenues of research that could be explored not only by im/politeness scholars but also by researchers working in other sub-fields of sociopragmatics.

Despite the centrality of the notion of identity to human communication and within discourse studies and sociolinguistics, a critical mass of identity-related work within different sub-fields of pragmatics is still lagging behind. As a result, this chapter is partly a review of existing work and partly programmatic. We specifically argue that the notion of identity is crucial to the postulates of some of the major approaches that have constituted the bases of sociopragmatics, namely speech act and politeness theories as well as some of their most common applications, interlanguage and inter/cross-cultural pragmatics and, more recently, the pragmatics of social media. However, as these theories and their applications have developed mostly in a top-down fashion (i.e. based on categorizations and taxonomies) and as they have largely been non-discursive (utterance based) in orientation, identity has more often than not been treated as a given, as structurally pre-allocated properties rather than as co-constructed and discursively achieved.As sociopragmatics is embracing discursive and interactional perspectives on its mainstay concerns (esp. politeness), we show the need for identity construction -- always at the heart of discourse(s) -- to take centre stage along with associated processes of agency in the study of situated practices.

Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch’s chapter aims to throw light on emic understandings of face1 and imagen1 in Peninsular Spanish, and to compare such understandings with etic approaches to imagen and identity. A three-pronged methodology is used to tease out lay meanings of imagen from different first-order sources, and includes the examination of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, the analysis of a corpus of Spanish newspapers, and the analysis of data from focus groups discussing situated experiences of imagen1. The results show that imagen1 and face1 are not related in a straightforward manner. Whereas imagen2 draws on Goffman’s and Brown and Levinson’s seminal definitions of the construct, imagen1 does not always evoke imagen2; when it does, it is more closely related to Goffman’s than to Brown and Levinson’s conception.Microanalysis of naturally-occurring discourse focusing on experiences of imagen1 shows how uses of imagen1 pointed to the centrality of identity and its relationship with face1. The author’s findings thus give credence to that fact that face and identity co-constitute each other and are hard to separate theoretically and analytically.

This volume is dedicated to Maria Sifianou, whose diverse contributions to the study of politeness over the last 30 years have had a significant impact on the development of the field. Her numerous publications have not only helped refine and deepen our understanding of a wide range of politeness phenomena, but have also provided alternative interpretations, enabling us to view politeness through a cultural lens. The volume reflects the remarkable breadth of her scholarship by providing a coherent treatment of politeness as well as a broad multilinguistic perspective, with its 12 chapters examining a wide range of languages and language varieties.

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.