The epilogue chapter reviews the three key concepts proposed by the editors – evaluation, relationships, and morality – in light of the results of the chapters. It positions the findings within a discussion of mixed methodologies that take both showing and telling cues of emotion into account. The chapter finishes with an outlook on further research, which argues that there is still more scope to disentangle key concepts further.

In this chapter we turn our attention to the role that pragmatics plays in the study of social interaction. When we communicate, we do not simply exchange information. We also manage relationships. As speakers, we can choose to be more or less direct, more or less formal, and more or less attentive to our hearers. The decisions that speakers make are often motivated by concern for how their hearers will react to the utterance, and by the effect that this might then have on the relationship. Perhaps the most influential work in this area of pragmatics is Brown and Levinson’s model of politeness. The first half of this chapter provides an overview of their framework and the politeness strategies that they propose. In the second half of the chapter, we discuss some recent developments that have arisen in response to Brown and Levinson’s work. These include analyses of impoliteness, consideration of how cultural variation might be incorporated into the pragmatics of interaction, and a shift to focus less on politeness and more on a broader notion of the relational work that speakers perform.