This volume, edited by Marina Terkourafi, an active and productive scholar in the field, is a very welcome and original contribution to opening up new avenues of (im)politeness studies. In the introduction, she briefs us on how (im)politeness theory and practice can be integrated.

Part 1 is devoted to self-reporting methodologies. Tatiana Luchkina presents a good account of how, with reference to the social deictic ‘comrade’, the address behavior of contemporary speakers of Russian and Mandarin Chinese has changed to become ‘a highly generic, reflex-like pragmatic proxy of a relational deictic’ (35). Nikos Vergis & Marina Terkourafi investigate how, when, and why the Greek collocation re malaka, ‘construed as either solidary (dude) or insulting (asshole)’ (41), is evaluated differently by native speakers when no contextual consideration is involved, showing that ‘the solidary sense of re malaka is prevalent’ (62). Susan Meredith Burt shows that complexities in the choice of address terms in an English department are mainly due to preferred relationship types and attitudes towards hierarchy.

Part 2 is devoted to observational studies. Adopting a social-constructivist perspective, Sang-Seok Yoon investigates the use of Korean honorifics by speakers in TV shows and finds that speech-style shifting may turn out to be a change of footing Korean native speakers employ strategically to construct their social identities or to make an ongoing conversation fun and dynamic. Drawing upon a data set of ‘short message emails between four friends and follow-up interviews’ (127), Nathaniel Mitchell examines impolite and nonimpolite evaluations of goading sequences, confirming that linguistically impolite utterances in interaction are not necessarily evaluated as impolite and that evaluations may vary among participants depending on ‘frames, norms, and perceptions of intention’ (144). Renee Perelmutter's contribution, which addresses confessional and shaming practices in a Russian virtual community ‘frequented by both mistresses and cheated-upon wives’ (149), demonstrates that individual and group face concerns, impoliteness, and identity construction are interrelated and that politeness and impoliteness are vital to the process of identity negotiation.

Part 3 concerns experimental methodologies. Robert Patrick Baxter contributes to second language pragmatics by employing ‘experimentally controlled stimuli and multi-factor statistical analyses’ to examine native and non-native perceptions of collaborative conversation in Spanish. He explains that ‘both groups perceived different levels of appropriateness for overlapping and delayed responses in collaborative talk’ (206). Adina Raizen, Nikos Vergis, & Kiel Christianson use eye-tracking to examine how speakers process English texts containing taboo words, showing that impoliteness evaluations may start before ‘the threshold of conscious understanding’ is reached. One may, at this point, wonder if prior understanding intrudes into interpretation. Part 3 ends with Xiaoming Jiang & Xiaolin Zhou's exploration, which uses experiments on event-related potentials to find that semantic-pragmatic mechanisms underlie speakers’ successful handling of disrespectful address. Finally, Jonathan Culpeper contributes a good epilogue, commenting on methods for (im)politeness research and notions of (im)politeness as discussed in the volume.

Serving as a fascinating eye-opener for digging out the intricacies hidden behind the everyday and ubiquitous social practice of (im)politeness, this collection will appeal to students and scholars of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics.