Historical (Im)politeness

«‘Historical (Im)politeness’ will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in pragmatics, accessible to scholars already working on historical politeness and to those who wish to learn more about this lesser known discipline. Each author painstakingly sets the scene for the analysis of his or her corpus with a careful review of other sources, both modern ones as well as some that were concurrent with the works examined. In addition, editors Culpeper and Kádár call for researchers to create new approaches to politeness or to develop existing theories, and the papers in this volume attest to the authors’ success in meeting that challenge.» (Laura Callahan, The Linguist List)
«It is one of the strengths of this volume that the authors refrain from generalising statements in order to give credit to the situated practices that they study. In this way they acknowledge that the texts are historically removed as well as culturally embedded and the cultural situatedness of the practices discussed is thus nicely highlighted. Furthermore, it is refreshing that the chapters present work on different languages (...). This breadth allows the reader to appreciate the complexity of how relational effects are created through language use. [...] This collection continues the general tendency of opening the scope of research on politeness phenomena to research that includes impoliteness. It is up to date with respect to the current discussions in politeness research which centre around emic and etic distinctions and the problem of judging relational work. It is thus relevant for all researchers interested in interpersonal pragmatics - no matter whether they work with historical or present-day data.» (Miriam A. Locher, Journal of Historical Pragmatics)