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 30 years, which shows that while the use of interactional and experimental methods has remained relatively stable, semantic field, meta-discourse, philological and corpus based methods are on the rise.
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Acknowledgements
Our thanks for a lot of help with the coding of the data for our case study go to Andreas Gerster, and for a careful reading and critique of a draft version of this paper to Magdalena Leitner and the editors. The usual disclaimers apply.
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Jucker, A.H., Staley, L. (2017). (Im)politeness and Developments in Methodology. In: Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., Kádár, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-37508-7_16
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