Politeness

The notion of linguistic politeness was brought to center-stage with the politeness model proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987). However, its definition and the claims for universality have received increased attention since Brown and Levinson proposed their framework (e.g. Hill et al. 1987; Matsumoto 1988; Ide 1989; Meier 1995). For the most part, research on linguistic politeness has been carried out in the area of pragmatic and cross-linguistic studies, as evidenced by the publication of numerous books (see e.g. the references in Watts et al. 2005), as well as journal articles. More recently researchers have begun to integrate pragmatic research methods with corpus-based methods in politeness research (e.g. Kohnen 2000; Deutschmann 2003; Jucker et al. 2008). This article aims to take stock of developments in this area. I will review the main directions of recent literature in this field and discuss the suitability of corpus-based methods in relation to research. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, this paper will explore the mitigation devices used to soften criticism in Italian and English book review articles. While valuable analyses have already been carried out on the pragmatics of politeness in review genres from a discourse perspective (e.g. Johnson and Yang 1990; Gea Valor 2000–2001; Hyland 2000; Salager-Meyer 2001), corpus-based analyses are still relative rare. From a methodological point of view, the present study adopts a position which shows the need to integrate corpus and discourse perspectives in the analysis of textual data. This allows for an integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, of text and corpus work, as well as of co-text and context analysis.