This edited book focuses on speech etiquette, examining the rules that
govern communication in various online communities: professional,
female, and ethnospecific. The contributors analyze online communication
in the Slavic languages Russian, Slovak, Polish, and Belarusian, showing
how the concept of speech etiquette differs from the concept of
politeness, although both reflect the relationship between people in
interaction. Online communities are united on the basis of common
informative or phatic illocutions among their participants, and their
speech etiquette is manifested in stable forms of conducting
discussions - stimulating and responding. Each group has its own ideas
of unacceptable speech behavior and approaches to sanitation, and the
rules of speech etiquette in each group determine the degree of rapport
and distancing between the participants in discourse. The chapters in
this book explore how rapport and distance are established through acts
such as showing attention to the addressee and increasing his or her
communicative status; reducing or increasing the illocutionary power of
evaluations and motivations; and evaluating one's own or someone else's
speech. The volume will be of interest to researchers studying online
communication in such diverse fields as linguistics, sociology,
anthropology, programming, and media studies.
