37.2380, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Reciprocal (Im)politeness in and/or across Languages and Cultures (Finland)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2380. Thu Jul 16 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2380, Confs: Panel at IPC20: Reciprocal (Im)politeness in and/or across Languages and Cultures (Finland)

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Date: 14-Jul-2026
From: Chaoqun Xie [xiechaoqun at hotmail.com]
Subject: Panel at IPC20: Reciprocal (Im)politeness in and/or across Languages and Cultures


Panel at IPC20: Reciprocal (Im)politeness in and/or across Languages
and Cultures

Date: 27-Jun-2027 - 02-Jul-2027
Location: Helsinki, Finland
Contact: Chaoqun Xie
Contact Email: xiechaoqun at hotmail.com
Meeting URL: https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Clinical Linguistics;
Discourse Analysis; Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics

Submission Deadline: 15-Oct-2026

This panel is organized by Chaoqun Xie (Zhejiang International Studies
University, China) and will be held as part of the 20th International
Pragmatics Conference (IPrA2027) at the University of Helsinki,
Helsinki, Finland.
Call for Papers:
Recent developments in interpersonal pragmatics have reinforced the
interactional and relational nature of politeness and impoliteness
(Xie 2023). Correspondingly, a growing body of research has identified
reciprocity as a fundamental principle underlying interpersonal
communication. In particular, the Principle of (Im)politeness
Reciprocity (Culpeper and Tantucci 2021) highlights how interpersonal
behaviour is shaped by expectations of appropriate response, return,
mitigation, resistance, or escalation. Subsequent studies have
demonstrated how reciprocity operates in online impoliteness and
conflict (Culpeper, Tantucci and Field 2025), while recent work has
extended the discussion to human-AI interaction (Tantucci and Culpeper
2026). Together, these developments suggest that reciprocity is
emerging as a productive analytical lens for understanding the
dynamics of (im)politeness and interpersonal relations.
This panel aims to explore reciprocal (im)politeness within and across
languages and cultures. While reciprocal (im)politeness appears to be
a pervasive feature of social interaction, its manifestations, norms,
and evaluations may vary across linguistic communities, cultural
traditions, communicative settings, and interactional contexts.
Different languages and cultures may hold different expectations
concerning the appropriate reciprocation of politeness and
impoliteness and the moral meanings attached to such reciprocal
behaviour. Investigating such variation can contribute to broader
discussions of language, culture, morality, emotion, and interpersonal
relations.
Reciprocal (im)politeness encompasses a wide range of interactional
phenomena. Polite actions may invite reciprocal politeness and other
affiliative responses, whereas impolite actions may trigger
retaliation, resistance, face-restoration, or conflict escalation.
Reciprocity may be immediate or delayed, explicit or implicit, and
realised through verbal, embodied, multimodal, or technologically
mediated resources. Examining these processes can enhance our
understanding of how interactants negotiate relational expectations,
social identities, rights and obligations, and moral orders.
The panel welcomes contributions addressing, but not limited to, the
following topics:
 - the Principle of (Im)politeness Reciprocity;
 - reciprocal politeness and affiliative responses;
 - reciprocal impoliteness, retaliation, and escalation;
 - reciprocal facework: face-enhancement, face-aggravation, and
face-restoration;
 - morality and evaluation in reciprocal (im)politeness;
 - emotional dimensions of reciprocal (im)politeness;
 - cross-cultural variation in reciprocal (im)politeness;
 - reciprocal (im)politeness in intercultural and multilingual
interaction;
 - reciprocal (im)politeness in workplace, educational, family, and
institutional settings;
 - reciprocal (im)politeness in social media and digitally mediated
communication;
 - reciprocal (im)politeness in human-AI interaction;
 - multimodal and conversation-analytic approaches to reciprocal
(im)politeness.
The panel welcomes discourse-analytic, interactional-pragmatic,
conversation-analytic, ethnographic, corpus-based, multimodal,
experimental, and interdisciplinary approaches, particularly studies
grounded in naturally occurring interactional data.
References:
Culpeper, Jonathan, and Vittorio Tantucci. 2021. The principle of
(im)politeness reciprocity. Journal of Pragmatics 175: 146-164.
Culpeper, Jonathan, Vittorio Tantucci, and Eleanor Field. 2025.
Impoliteness reciprocity online. Journal of Pragmatics, 242, 216-236.
Tantucci, Vittorio, and Jonathan Culpeper. 2026. Can ChatGPT
reciprocate impoliteness? The AI moral dilemma. Journal of Pragmatics.
Xie, Chaoqun (ed.). 2023. Advancing (Im)politeness Studies: Cultural,
Digital and Emotional Aspects. Cham: Springer.
Abstracts should be submitted via the conference website:
https://pragmatics.international/page/CfP2027
Deadline: 15 October 2026
If you have any questions regarding the panel, please feel free to
contact Chaoqun Xie (xiechaoqun at hotmail.com).



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