ABSTRACT
This chapter explores pragmatics, politeness, and interpersonal relationship building in the language teacher education corpus. Firstly, affect and evaluation are examined in the corpus in terms of social sharing and relationship building. Conventional politeness (please, thanks and sorry) and pragmatic politeness (smilies and laughter and hedging—you know, I think, kind of/sort of and a bit) are examined using corpus-based discourse analytical techniques in the online (blogs, chat and discussion forums) and spoken corpora. The issues of politeness, hedging and affect within the corpus demonstrate the establishment and maintenance of relationships in the student teacher community of practice. The student teachers and the peer tutor are interested in maintaining relationships, and are therefore abiding by the norms of effective engagement within their community of practice. Interview analyses are also drawn on to support the corpus-based findings on affective engagement and relationship building, within the pragmatic framework of politeness.
