ABSTRACT
Interactional sociolinguistics is an approach to analysing discourse which is associated with John Gumperz, another of those who has made a large contribution to the development of the field of sociolinguistics. Pragmatics is concerned with the analysis of meaning in interaction. Robin Lakoff, an American pragmatics researcher who has been called 'the mother of modern politeness theory', introduced several rules of politeness. Very often the reasons why people do not follow the conversational maxims relate to considerations of politeness, and this is one place where pragmatics overlaps with sociolinguistics. Sociolinguists and anthropological linguists were typically outsiders in the cultures they researched and described. The ethnography of speaking approach is particularly valuable when describing communicative events for a group whose cultural or social norms are not those of the majority group. Contextualisation cues thus allow participants to infer the most likely interpretation of an utterance.
