List of contributors

Jonathan Culpeper is Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Lancaster University, UK. His publications in pragmatics include Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence (2011), Pragmatics and the English Language (2014; with Michael Haugh), The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness (2017; co-editor) and Second Language Pragmatics: From Theory to Research (2018; co-authored with Alison Mackey and Naoko Taguchi). A particular focus of his work is the social dynamics of language, and especially the notions of “politeness” and “impoliteness”. For five years was co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Pragmatics (2009–14), a leading journal in linguistics.

Martin Gill has been Associate Professor / Akademilektor in the English Department at Åbo Akademi, specializing in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and British society. His interests include authenticity, news media, populist discourse, and online interaction. His most recent publication is: “Vernacular Voices in the Public Sphere: Marginality, Conflict and Authenticity in ‘Below the Line’ Comments to a Pro-Brexit British Tabloid” forthcoming in Martin Gill, Aino Malmivirta and Brita Wårvik (eds) Structures in Discourse: Interaction, Adaptability, and Pragmatic Functions, to be published by John Benjamins. He retired in 2022.

Mathew Gillings is an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Before moving to Vienna, he completed his PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University. His recent research has used corpus-assisted methods to study the discourse of corporate wrongdoing, deception, and politeness variation. He is a co-author of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CUP, 2023) and the author of Corpus Linguistic Approaches to Deception Detection (Routledge, 2024).

Helena Halmari is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, where she teaches linguistics and the history and development of the English language. Halmari, whose research interests include language contact phenomena, pragmatics, and political rhetoric, is the author of Government and Codeswitching: Explaining American Finnish (John Benjamins, 1997) and the co-editor (with Tuija Virtanen) of Persuasion across Genres: A Linguistic Approach (John Benjamins, 2005). Halmari’s PhD is from the University of Southern California. Between 2011 and 2021, she served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Finnish Studies.

Michael Haugh is Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland. His research interests lie primarily in the fields of pragmatics and conversation analysis, with a particular focus on the role of language in social interaction. He has published extensively on (im)politeness, including Understanding Politeness (2013, Cambridge University Press, with Dániel Kádár), Im/politeness Implicatures (2015, Mouton de Gruyter), and the Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic Politeness (2017, Palgrave Macmillan, co-edited with Jonathan Culpeper and Dániel Kádár), as well as on social action, including most recently, Action Ascription in Interaction (2022, Cambridge University Press, co-edited with Arnulf Deppermann).

Jim O’Driscoll (BA Cambridge 1974, MA Essex 1986, PhD Ghent 1999) has held posts in six different countries, mostly recently at the Universities of Huddersfield, Sheffield and Leeds in England. His research interests straddle several aspects of language-in-situated-use. His articles have appeared in Functions of Language, Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Politeness Research, Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua and Pragmatics and Society. His book on Offensive Language was published in 2020. He is editor of the Journal of Politeness Research.

Sandrine Sorlin is Professor of English linguistics at University Paul-Valéry – Montpellier 3. Specialized in stylistics and pragmatics, she is the co-editor of The Pragmatics of Personal Pronouns (John Benjamins, 2015) and The Pragmatics of Irony and Banter (John Benjamins, 2018). She edited Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury) in 2020. Her 2016 book on the American political TV series (Language and Manipulation in House of Cards: A Pragma-Stylistic Perspective, Palgrave) received an award from the European Society for the Study of English. Her latest monograph entitled The Stylistics of ‘You’. Second-Person Pronoun and its Pragmatic Effects was published in 2022 by Cambridge University Press. She is assistant editor of Language and Literature.

Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen is Professor in Applied English Linguistics in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests encompass discourse studies and pragmatics. Her recent publications deal with digital discourse and internet pragmatics and include Analyzing Digital Discourses: Between Convergence and Controversy (Johansson, Tanskanen & Chovanec, eds., Palgrave Macmillan 2021), and Explorations in Internet Pragmatics: Intentionality, Identity, and Interpersonal Interaction (Tanskanen, Lehti, Lexander, Virtanen & Xie, eds., Brill 2024). She is a member of the editorial board of Pragmatics & Beyond New Series and Discourse, Context & Media, and review editor of Internet Pragmatics.

Tuija Virtanen is Professor Emerita of English Linguistics at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her publications deal with discourse strategies and types, genre dynamics, persuasion, and the pragmatics of digitally mediated discourse. She (co-)edited and contributed to the Pragmatics of Computer-Mediated Communication (de Gruyter, 2013) and the Journal of Pragmatics Special Issues on Adaptability in New Media (2017) and Face-work in Online Discourse (2021). She has served as a member of the IPrA (International Pragmatics Association) Consultation Board, of the editorial board of Language@Internet, and she is an affiliate of the Center for Computer-Mediated Communication Research, Indiana University at Bloomington.