Strictly language-anchored approaches to politeness in Chinese – An introduction

This position paper provides an introduction for the present Special Issue dedicated to strictly language-anchored approaches to politeness in Chinese. We first define exactly what we mean by the term ‘strictly language-anchored’ by outlining the principles of the field. Here we also highlight the reasons why strictly language-anchored approaches are particularly useful for studying politeness in Chinese in a rigorous and replicable way. We then present a typology of areas of inquiry in research on politeness in Chinese, arguing that strictly language-anchored approaches have a strong capacity to supplement sociological, anthropological and sociopragmatic research on politeness in Chinese. Following this introductory section, we overview the contents of the Special Issue, with particular focus on the multiple perspectives that the contributions bring to the study of politeness in Chinese. Finally, we conclude this study and propose future research directions where we expect strictly language-anchored approaches to politeness in Chinese (and other languages) to become particularly important.