在这本书中，Elena Landone深入探讨了礼貌研究的各种方法论，从多个角度揭示了礼貌的复杂性和多样性。她通过细致入微的论述，引导我们思考在不同文化和社会背景下，人们如何运用礼貌来构建和谐的人际关系。书中不仅介绍了传统的礼貌研究方法，还结合现代社会的发展趋势，探讨了新兴的研究技术和手段。Elena Landone以其敏锐的洞察力和扎实的学术功底，为我们呈现了一个全面而深入的礼貌研究画卷。通过阅读这本书，我们可以更加深入地理解礼貌的本质和作用，学习到如何运用科学的方法来研究礼貌现象。这对于我们提升人际交往能力、促进社会和谐具有重要意义。总之，这是一本值得我们深入阅读和学习的优秀著作。无论你是从事相关研究的学者，还是对人际交往感兴趣的普通读者，都能从中获得启发和收获。Chapter 1 advocates an open conception of politeness, contemplating the context,the relations and the mind as interconnected perspectives that entail method- ological challenges for traditional research designs. Chapter2 focuses ons peech acts and their theoretical evolution toward discursive practices that involve the research problem of understanding the speakers’ perceptions and evaluations of politeness. Chapter3 explores different magnitudes of variation:the macro-and the micro dimensions of the variations in politeness pose challenges in terms of the relevance and the generalization of politeness studies. Many constructs need to be redefined (e.g., the concept of culture), and intermediate units of analysis are required. These emerging dynamic, multilayered relationships between the individual and society are also thtopic of Chap. 4, which presents a more detailed discussion of pivotal concepts for politeness(such as values,moral order,face and identity) in the light of the collaborative construction of the speakers.This perspective opens the way to an understanding of politeness as an adaptive system emerging from below in a self-regulating and unpredictable process of interactions between speakers.Chapter5 is devoted to some methodological implications of complexity concerning variables in research, specifically space and time in politeness research. The methodological lesson deriving from a complexity paradigm suggests identifying the connections between the levels of the system and reporting both its stability and variations: Chaps. 6–8 explore the consequences of this. Chapter 6 discusses the dynamic conception of rapport management to point out its deeper levels and its emotional dimension. Chapter 7 underlines the need to account for the speakers’ subjective evaluation and the high variability that such evaluations presuppose. It challenges the researcher to embrace integrated methodologies revealing various points of view, with particular attention to the speakers’ perspective. Finally, Chap. 8 shows that cognitive frameworks have specific pertinence in explaining how speakers interpret politeness. They provide conventionalised, communicative, action-reaction schemes that are the background to evaluations, but also take into account the agency of the speakers to bypass them. Chapters 9–11 introduce Part II with an overview of three data collection strate- gies: introspective intuition, experimentation and observation (of language and of language users). These chapters present a few general considerations to highlight the fact that, in politeness research, the way data is collected affects the data itself to a great extent, because politeness is inherently context-sensitive. Since the data thatintrospective intuition,experimentation and observation retrieve arevaried, they resort to the multiple tools described in Chaps. 12–21. These show in detail how different ways of obtaining data affect the kind of analysis that can be conducted in politeness. Chapters 12 (Discourse Completion Test), 13 (Role Playing), 14 (Ques- tionnaires)and15(Interviews)illustratetoolsusedtoelicitdata,usuallyincontrolled settings. Chapters 16–18, instead, are devoted to Recording and Transcription, Field Notes, and Shadowing, which are tools for natural data collection. Finally, Chap. 19 on Corpus Analysis, Chap. 20 on Tools for Online Politeness, and Chap. 21 on Community Studies and Action Research deal with more transversal tools concerning specific contexts or specific processes. As will be evident in many reported expe- riences of investigation, an integrated methodology may be particularly advisable in politeness studies in order to gather different types of data, put the analysis into multiple perspectives and underpin the complexity of the politeness scenario. Chapters 18 and 21 are probably the most unusual in a monograph on polite- ness. Chapter 18 presents shadowing, a dynamic field technique which has had little application in politeness research so far, despite having great potential, as argued through the presentation of a specific method based on sensitive incidents, bisocia- tion effect,emotional signals and the reconstruction of the implicits of communicative frames. Chapter 21 focuses on communities of practice as places where politeness is co-constructed locally, hence they are candidates for being manageable units of analysis. The aim of this chapter is also to describe the Action Research approach, which has rarely been applied in politeness studies. It will be argued that it is, instead, a promising technique both in terms of results and of the methodological tools that the community perspective requires. In a deeper sense, it supports the social return of the results of scientific research. Chapter22 closes the book by recapitulating the methodological agenda for politeness research, through a final discussion on scientificity and empiricism related to complex systems like politeness, both in everyday life and in researchers’ minds. Although scientificity provides a solid basis to refer to, contemporary approaches in politeness research show that when facing complex systems, fluidity and indetermi- nacy affect systematicity in an unpredictable way. Recent praxis in the study of politeness shows that the traditional view of what is considered significant, rigorous, trans- parent and empirical is coming under pressure due to the complexity of the human being. Such pressure requires new types of data, creativity in mixing methods, more perspectives of analysis and flexibility in accepting different criteria of scientificity in a study