Pragmatic variability may be conceptualised on a vertical and horizontal axis, the former signifying diachronic pragmatic variation across time, the latter synchronic pragmatic variation at a particular point in time due to micro-social factors (e.g. social distance, social dominance, degree of imposition) and macro-social factors (e.g. region, gender, age, social class, ethnic identity). Both synchronic and diachronic variability share many theoretical concepts and methodological concerns. The present chapter sketches the concept of pragmatic variability and highlights the role played by situational context, stylistic constraints and macro-social parameters in pragmatic analyses. Following this, the research landscape on pragmatic variability is examined and research approaches to intralingual synchronic and diachronic pragmatic variation discussed, with particular reference made to variational pragmatics and historical pragmatics. The need for comparable data and the challenges this poses in pragmatic analyses, irrespective of research framework, is then taken up in the context of a case study on present day synchronic variation in offer realisations situated in variational pragmatics. There, data types and the possible applicability of the concept of the pragmatic variable for pragmatic work is discussed, as are the opportunities to be gained from combining synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The paper concludes with a critical summary identifying current trends and suggestions for future research on pragmatic variability.

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social dimensions of language use. This chapter discusses directions in the rapidly growing field of sociopragmatics. It begins by first introducing the rationale for producing the first handbook of sociopragmatics, before briefly discussing the different, albeit complementary, ways in which the scope of sociopragmatics has been framed in the field. In the course of this discussion we draw particular attention to three key anchors of sociopragmatic research: social, interactional and normative dimensions of language use. We then offer an overview of the contents of the handbook, explaining how we have brought together a range of different research areas, topics and approaches under the umbrella of sociopragmatics. We conclude with thoughts on the place of sociopragmatics with respect to the broader field of pragmatics.

Whereas sociopragmatics as a field has been dominated by the analysis of verbal elements, this chapter adopts the perspective that sociopragmatic meanings are communicated in a multimodal fashion that encompasses prosody, gesture and other forms of nonverbal expression. We provide an overview of how prosodic and gestural means are employed for signalling information status, for marking the internal organization of speech and for communicating epistemic stance, (im)politeness, irony and speaker identity. This overview shows that prosody is closely integrated with gesture both at the temporal level and in the kinds of pragmatic meanings that these two systems are used to encode. We thus adopt the position, following the tenets of audiovisual prosody, that prosody and gesture can be considered as sister systems in the marking of sociopragmatic meanings in human communication.

This chapter examines cross-cultural and intercultural approaches to sociopragmatic dimensions of language use. After an initial introduction, the first main section clarifies and discusses some key concepts and issues, including ‘culture’ and ‘context’, as they have been conceptualized within cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics; the distinctions between cross-cultural and intercultural research perspectives; and context and the interconnections between context and culture.It then proceeds to review some of the main research findings deriving from cross-cultural work on speech acts and cultural scripts, as well as cognitive and sociocultural perspectives on sociopragmatic aspects of intercultural communication. It includes authentic samples of data that illustrate a number of the above issues. Finally, the chapter reflects on the main theoretical challenges and opportunities associated with addressing the sociopragmatic aspects of language use from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, providing a critical summary and identifying promising areas for future research.

Despite the centrality of the notion of identity to human communication and within discourse studies and sociolinguistics, a critical mass of identity-related work within different sub-fields of pragmatics is still lagging behind. As a result, this chapter is partly a review of existing work and partly programmatic. We specifically argue that the notion of identity is crucial to the postulates of some of the major approaches that have constituted the bases of sociopragmatics, namely speech act and politeness theories as well as some of their most common applications, interlanguage and inter/cross-cultural pragmatics and, more recently, the pragmatics of social media. However, as these theories and their applications have developed mostly in a top-down fashion (i.e. based on categorizations and taxonomies) and as they have largely been non-discursive (utterance based) in orientation, identity has more often than not been treated as a given, as structurally pre-allocated properties rather than as co-constructed and discursively achieved.As sociopragmatics is embracing discursive and interactional perspectives on its mainstay concerns (esp. politeness), we show the need for identity construction -- always at the heart of discourse(s) -- to take centre stage along with associated processes of agency in the study of situated practices.

Since the 2010s, a number of scholars have explicitly worked with the term ‘interpersonal pragmatics’ in order to zoom in on the relational and interpersonal side of communication. The purpose of the chapter is to demonstrate how the research interest on the interpersonal and relational is inspired by (im)politeness, identity construction and communication studies in order to tackle questions about pragmatic variation and interpersonal effects. Interpersonal pragmatics does not propagate a particular methodology nor only one theory but is conceptualized as a perspective on the interpersonal side of language and communication. The chapter draws on and points to a number of earlier chapters dealing with key concepts for this field, such as (im)politeness, relational work, face, identity construction, roles and the social and historical embeddedness of communication. Key themes within interpersonal pragmatics are, among others, negotiations of agreement and disagreement, negotiations of (clashes of) norms and understandings of self and other in particular social contexts.

In this chapter, we consider what methods and research in conversation analysis (CA), which examines the systematic accomplishment of action in its natural ecological contexts, can bring to sociopragmatics. While CA shares some of its methods with some other approaches in pragmatics – including its data-driven focus – we begin by first focusing on two aspects of the CA method that make it distinct from other approaches to language use: transcription and collections. We then go on to illustrate through two case studies how CA methods and research can help us leverage open areas of ongoing interest in sociopragmatics. The first case study focuses on (im)politeness and speech acts, while the second focuses on inference, identity and relationships. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the intersection between CA and sociopragmatics and possible directions for future research.

Proceeding from the conviction that the concept of power remains seriously undertheorized, this chapter explores the notions of power implicit or explicit in a number of currently dominant paradigms in pragmatics, and in sociopragmatics more specifically, and suggests some alternatives and possible further lines of development. First, after an overview of different concepts of power (as presented by, among others, Bourdieu and Foucault), it argues the linguistic and the social are more deeply mutually implicated than is often realized and that, hence, the study of language use may benefit from a closer attention to questions of power. Next, it addresses questions concerning power and legitimacy in Speech Act Theory as developed by Austin and Searle; these questions are posed anew and answered in a rather different way in the study of pornography as a kind of speech act. Finally, it discusses the conceptions of power employed in the study of polite and impolite language use, arguing that some of the currently dominant frameworks in Politeness Theory rest on a number of language-ideological assumptions that appear to elide, neutralize or naturalize power relations.

This chapter deals with the status of meaning-generating processes, taking place in language use, in relation to human cognition. A basic assumption is that reflexive or metalinguistic awareness is one of the original evolutionary prerequisites for the development of human language, and that it plays a central role in all instances of producing and interpreting utterances. The chapter reviews the ways in which metalinguistic activity types and indicators of reflexive awareness have been accounted for in the past. It explores the relevance of the topic for a pragmatic understanding of social interaction, with special attention for cross-linguistic variability (and hence with implications for intercultural communication). Finally, it reflects on methodological problems involved in the study of the phenomena at hand, and perspectives for future research are briefly sketched.

This chapter addresses the notion of participation by examining it at four different angles of view which we label, in order of roughly widening scope, utterance, talk, event and interaction. We start with the narrowest scope, involving the simplest possible notions of participant role – that of a producer and a receiver. Then, employing and stretching Goffman's notions of footing, production format and participation framework, we gradually widen the scope, putting an ever-increasing amount of flesh on, breaking down into various constituent parts and even questioning the integrity of these bare bones. At the widest scope, there comes a point when the bare bones seem to dissolve, and yet participation with interpersonal and interactive consequences can still be discerned. After proceeding to some considerations of participation in technology-mediated communication, we conclude with some suggestions concerning approaches to the identification of participant roles in the analysis of interaction.

Sociologist Georg Simmel (1950) argued that human relationships are “inseparable from the immediacy of interaction.” That is, regardless of much one may cogitate about them, relationships happen between persons, forming, thriving, surviving, and dying as those persons communicate with one another. A relationship is a dynamic, on-going process of relating. Relationships and relating are thus key sociopragmatic phenomena. This chapter characterizes current conceptualizations of, and research on, relationships and relating in the sociopragmatic literature, but does so in view of a wide range of metaphors for and sociopsychological theories of relationships, and against the backdrop of the broader research literature on relating in interpersonal communication. Many of these metaphors, theories, and studies treat relationships as relatively static phenomena, existing apart from interaction, perhaps as a mental template for behavior, as a mini-culture of norms and patterns of action, or as rooted in individual identity. The chapter poses an alternative conceptualization of relating as endogenous to and as emerging in the dynamics of everyday interacting with one another.

The sociocognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics initiated by Kecskes integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and emphasizes that both cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents. While cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience. In the SCA, communication is considered a dynamic process, in which individuals are not only constrained by societal conditions but also shape them at the same time. Interlocutors are considered as social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a sociocultural collectivity. As a consequence, the communicative process is characterized by the interplay of two sets of traits that are inseparable, mutually supportive and interactive. Individual traits (prior experience > salience > egocentrism > attention) interact with societal traits (actual situational experience > relevance > cooperation > intention). Each trait is the consequence of the other.Prior experience results in salience, which leads to egocentrism that drives attention. Intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance, which (partly) depends on actual situational experience.

This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used within the field of pragmatics. Both concepts are broadly concerned with the way in which we categorize our experiences, and develop thereby expectations about communicative behaviour within a given context. In spite of these similarities, they have very different conceptual histories. Activity types were introduced into pragmatics by Levinson (1979), having been inspired by Wittgenstein’s (1958) notion of language games. Genres can be traced back to ancient Greek literature, and have since been applied within multiple disciplines, including art and art criticism, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, linguistics and, more specifically, pragmatics (Bazerman, 1997; Mayes, 2003). The focus of the chapter is on mapping the development and usage of these terms within the pragmatics (or a concomitant) discipline. We also comment upon concepts that seem to share "a considerable family resemblance" (Linell, 2010: 42) with activity types and/or genres. They include footing, frames (and framing), speech events, speech activities, schemas, scripts, and prototypes.

Variational pragmatics is the study of pragmatic variation, specifically the systematic study of language use conventions across national, regional and social varieties of the same language, spoken (and written) natively and increasingly also spoken (and written) non-natively. Variational pragmatics is focused on the influence on communicative behaviour of such factors as region, social class, ethnicity, gender and age and also investigates the interplay of these factors and their interaction with situational parameters, such as power and distance relations and context and discourse genre. This chapter outlines the original framework of this field of inquiry and its development, introducing recent modifications and extensions of this framework. It also provides a discussion of theoretical issues – most notably pragmatic universals and pragmatic variables and their variants – and of methodological principles, data types and data collection procedures. Finally, an overview is given of work carried out in variational pragmatics, in particular on the formal, actional, interactional, topic, organizational, prosodic, stylistic, non-verbal and metapragmatic levels of examination analytically distinguished in its framework. Detailed reference is made to the languages and language varieties considered, the social factors focused on, the phenomena examined (e.g. the types discourse markers or speech acts) and the methods employed.

This chapter presents a sociopragmatic approach to the study of affect and emotion, taking into account the fact that human emotions are conceptualized and linguistically expressed by means of speech acts within different and various affective practices. Key theories addressing the topic from a linguistic and discourse-pragmatic perspective are outlined and critically discussed, arguing for the need to broaden the scope of research towards a more complex, multidisciplinary and multidimensional analysis of emotion. Thus, the main findings of approaches such as those of functional linguistics, cognitive linguistics, social and cultural theories, and sensory pragmatics are also outlined. The relationship between emotion and other discursive phenomena such as stance taking, (im)politeness, swearing, humor or irony is highlighted, as is the relationship between emotion and evaluation. Finally, an analysis of a videotaped narrative of personal experience is presented, emphasizing the importance of both deconstructing the different elements of discursive emotion and formulating appropriate research questions, in order to shed light on the crucial sociopragmatic aspects of affective relational practices.