This readable book presents a new general theoretical understanding of politeness. It offers an account of a wide range of politeness phenomena in English, illustrated by hundreds of examples of actual language use taken largely from authentic British and American sources. Building on his earlier pioneering work on politeness, Geoffrey Leech takes a pragmatic approach that is based on the controversial notion that politeness is communicative altruism. Leech’s 1983 book, Principles of Pragmatics, introduced the now widely-accepted distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of politeness; this book returns to the pragmalinguistic side, somewhat neglected in recent work. Drawing on neo-Gricean thinking, Leech rejects the prevalent view that it is impossible to apply the terms “polite” or “impolite” to linguistic phenomena.

Leech covers all major speech acts that are either positively or negatively associated with politeness, such as requests, apologies, compliments, offers, criticisms, good wishes, condolences, congratulations, agreement, and disagreement. Additional chapters deal with impoliteness and the related phenomena of irony (“mock politeness”) and banter (“mock impoliteness”), and with the role of politeness in the learning of English as a second language. A final chapter takes a fascinating look at more than a thousand years of history of politeness in the English language.

Geoffrey Leech is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at Lancaster University, where he has been a faculty member for over 40 years. He has published many books and articles in the fields of English grammar, stylistics, pragmatics, semantics and corpus linguistics. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1987.

This volume examines the complex processes and practices of multilingualism in a wide range of economically, culturally, politically, and geographically peripheral sites and spaces in different locations. Using approaches that draw on sociolinguistics, ethnography, and discourse studies, leading scholars investigate different peripheral minority language sites, ranging from Arctic territories to a busy airport in Wales. The volume brings together these different contexts and approaches in order to explore what possible commonalities and differences might arise from processes of peripheralizing and centralizing in multilingual minority language sites. The volume aims to open up new ways of thinking and theorizing about multilingualism, about centres and peripheries, and challenges existing notions of straightforward power relations (e.g. majority-minority; center-periphery etc.). All of the contributors question assumptions about peripheries as less fortunate counterparts to prosperous centres, and suggest instead that peripheries are diverse, multilingual spaces, constructed by but, crucially, constitutive to centres.

Sari Pietikäinen is Professor of Discourse Studies at the Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Helen Kelly-Holmes is Lecturer in Sociolinguistics and New Media at the University of Limerick, Ireland.

This volume responds to a growing interest in the language of legal settings by situating the study of language and law within contemporary theoretical debates in discourse studies, linguistic anthropology, and sociolinguistics. The chapters in the collection explore many of the common occasions when those acting on behalf of the legal system, such as the police, lawyers and judges, interact with those coming into contact with the legal system, such as suspects and witnesses. However, the chapters do this work through the conceptual lens of ‘textual travel’, or the way that texts move across space and time and are transformed along the way. Collectively, notions of textual travel shed new light on the ways in which texts can influence, and are influenced by, social and legal life.

With contributions from leading experts in language and law, Legal-Lay Communication explores such ‘textual travel’ themes as the mediating role of technologies in the investigatory stages of the legal process, the centrality of intertextuality in the legal construction of cases in court, the transformative effects of recontexualization in process of judicial decision-making, and the way that processes of textual travel disturb the apparent permanence of legal categorization. The book challenges both the notion of legal text as a static repository of meaning and the very idea of legal-lay or lay-legal communication.

Chris Heffer is a Senior Lecturer in Language and Communication at Cardiff University, Wales, and the author of The Language of Jury Trial.

Frances Rock is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University and the author of Communicating Rights: The Language of Arrest and Detention. She is one of the editors of the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law.

John Conleyis William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the co-author of Just Words: Law, Language, and Power and co-editor of Polar: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

“Stance covers every facet of the field, from variationist to interactionist to ethnographic sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, providing a unifying concept which allows for exciting new avenues of analysis. This is a major contribution toward untangling the web of relationships between agency and structuration, and toward understanding the complex processes of social change.”

—Monica Heller, University of Toronto

“The chapters in this volume anchor stance and stancetaking in the contemporary sociolinguistic landscape. Drawing on data as diverse as missionary letters and television commercials, everyday talk and lifestyle magazines, the authors demonstrate how stance is related in theory and analytical practice to concepts such as ideology, style, indexicality, identity, and power. Lucid and inspiring, this is likely to become a landmark collection in linguistic anthropology and postvariationist sociolinguistics.”

—Jannis Androutsopoulos, King’s College London

“This volume masterfully brings together recent work by scholars who are concerned with investigating the intersection of stancetaking and stylization (in everyday talk as well as media genres)—not only to address important sociolinguistic concerns such as the construction of multiple selves and social identities, notions of personhood, positionality, language ideology, and relations of power in new ways, but also to call for new sociolinguistic methodologies. The authors provide compelling arguments for abandoning static correlational studies of linguistic variables and social identities and embracing an approach that focuses explicitly on interactional practices and processes of indexicalization. The book provides a state-of-the-art examination of theory and empirical work on stance and style.”

—Marjorie Harness Goodwin, University of California-Los Angeles

Alexandra Jaffe is Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology, CSU Long Beach. She is the author of Ideologies in Action: Language Politics in Corsica.

Language Myths and the History of English aims to deconstruct the myths that are traditionally reproduced as factual accounts of the historical development of English. Using concepts and interpretive sensibilities developed in the field of socio-linguistics over the past 40 years, Richard J. Watts unearths these myths and exposes their ideological roots. His goal is not to construct an alternative discourse, but to offer alternative readings of the historical data. Watts raises the question of what we mean by a linguistic ideology, and whether any discourse­—a hegemonic discourse, an alternative discourse, or even a deconstructive discourse—can ever be free of it. The book argues that a naturalized discourse is always built on a foundation of myths, which are all too easily taken as true accounts.

Richard J. Watts is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Bern.

Digital Discourse offers a distinctly sociolinguistic perspective on the nature of language in digital technologies. It starts by simply bringing new media sociolinguistics up to date, addressing current technologies such as instant messaging, text messaging, blogging, photo sharing, mobile phones gaming, social network sites, and video sharing. Chapters cover a range of communicative contexts(journalism tourism, leisure, performance, public debate), communicators (professional and lay young people and adults, intimates and groups), and languages (Irish, Hebrew, Chinese, Finnish Japanese, German, Greek, Arabic, French, and English). The volume is organized around topics of primary interest to sociolinguists, including genre, style, stance, and language ideology, With commentary from Naomi Baron and Susan Herring and essays by both well-established scholars and new voices in sociolinguistics, Digital Discourse is more current, more diverse, and more thematically unified than any other collection on the topic.

Crispin Thurlow is Associate Professor of Communication at University of Washington.

Kristine Mroczek is a doctoral candidate in Communication at University of Washington.

Linguistic variation has been studied primarily in communities with the dominant social organization of our time: ethnic diversity, socioeconomic stratification, and a population size that precludes community-wide face-to-face interaction. In such communities variation correlates with ethnicity and class. Investigating Variation explores a different kind of social structure: small size, dense kinship ties, common occupation, and absence of social stratification. In the community investigated here, social homogeneity and constant face-to-face interaction made accommodation unnecessary, and extremely weak extra-community norming for the local minority language permitted a very high level of individual variation.

Nancy C. Dorian's examination of the fisherfolk Gaelic spoken in a Highland Scottish village offers a number of explanations for delayed recognition of a linguistic variation unrelated to social class or other social subgroupings. Reports of similar variation phenomena in locations with similar features (contemporary minority-language pockets in Ireland, Russia, Norway, Canada, and Cameroon) make it possible to identify a particular set of factors that contribute to the emergence and persistence of socially neutral inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation. Facets of language use related to social structure remain to be investigated in communities with still other forms of social organization before the few communities that represent them disappear altogether.

Nancy C. Dorian is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics in German and Anthropology at Bryn Mawr College.

In Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis, van Leeuwen brings together his methodological work on discourse analysis of the last fifteen years. Discourses, van Leeuwen argues, are resources for representing aspects of reality that can be drawn upon in the construction of texts that represent these aspects of reality. Different discourses make sense of the same aspect of reality in different ways and serve different interests.

However abstract some discourses are, they ultimately always represent doings, van Leeuwen argues. Doing is the foundation of knowing, and social practices are the foundation of discourses. Studying children's books, newspaper reports, brochures, and other texts, as well as photographs and children's toys, van Leeuwen investigates what can happen when practices are transformed into discourses, and he provides analytical tools for reconstructing discourses from texts.

Throughout the book, van Leeuwen makes connections between sociological and linguistic or semiotic concepts and methods to ensure the social and critical rele- vance of his analytical categories. Van Leeuwen's work has already been widely used by critical discourse analysts across the world. This volume will be a welcome guide for anyone looking for a form of discourse analysis that is explicit and methodical, as well as critically incisive.

Theo van Leeuwen is professor of media and communication and dean of the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has worked as a film and television producer and scriptwriter in Holland and Australia. He then studied linguistics and combined the methods of linguistic analysis with his knowledge of visual communication in developing his approach to social semiotics.

The chapters cover a wide range of core issues, but within this diversity is a common theme the critique of conventional wisdom in the sociolinguistic study of variation and the extension of important concepts in variationist research to new areas. This volume is the kind of work that engages the reader in dialogue, challenges assumptions, and unveils new perspectives.

The four main parts of the book provide different perspectives from which particular topics in sociolinguistic research are reappraised and explored. Taken together, the chapters in Sociolinguistic Variation are a kind of road map of the field where we have been and where we hope to go. The conference from which these chapters emerged brought out the authors voices in an unusually intimate and direct way. They speak to issues in the field critically and contemplatively looking back at the established practices of the variationist tradition and looking forward into how the future of this relatively young field may develop.

Carmen Fought is Professor of Linguistics at Pitzer College.