Conceptualising Politeness in Advice Messages

This chapter illuminates the ways support providers offer advice in relation to the notion of politeness. While previous studies on advice and politeness tend to equate certain mitigation strategies as means to achieve politeness in interactions, this chapter argues that it is significant to take into account the socio-cultural contexts of interactions to understand the politeness of advice messages in online self-help groups for anxiety and depression (OSGADs). Using the lens of relational work (Watts, 2003) and the notion of contextualization (Gumperz, 1992), this chapter conceptualizes the politeness of advice messages. The chapter employed text analysis to reveal the discursive moves and relational strategies in the advice messages and then conducted interaction analysis to examine the relational work of advice exchanges.