Politeness in Irish English

This chapter presents a concise overview of trends in the study of politeness, in order to contextualize selected key findings from studies that focus on (or at least include) considerations of politeness phenomena in Irish English. It considers how (im)politeness is conceptualized and explored in Irish English contexts, focusing on the 'Irishness' of language use in a variety of studies. These range from those situated in highly intimate domains of discourse such as the family to those which harvest language data from interaction amongst virtual strangers in Irish-based computer-mediated communication. The pragmatic turn in the study of Irish English coincided with the compilation of corpora representing the variety, and has resulted in corpus pragmatic research that illuminates the nature of (im)politeness across diverse interactional contexts in Irish English.