Thus, researchers abandoned isolated utterances as their data and gravitated towards longer stretches of discourse in context. Im/politeness research has drawn from both as it was initially based typically on pragmatic notions and later, reacting to these and embracing the pragmatic turn, it turned mostly to big D discourse for additional or more useful tools. However, they differ mostly in terms of the units of analysis traditionally associated with them: pragmatics is typically concerned with the utterance whereas discourse analysis with what is beyond the utterance. Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated disciplines as they are both concerned with language use. The aim of this paper is to explore how the analysis of im/politeness can be tackled from a discursive pragmatics perspective. The chapter concludes with a call for further corpus-based metapragmatic studies across different languages. just kidding, only joking) can be studied from a corpus-based perspective, that studies in corpus-based metapragmatics necessarily involve carefully interweaving horizontal and vertical methods of analysis. It is then argued, building on a case study illustrating how claims of non-serious intent (e.g. The different ways in which corpora have been used to study metapragmatic labels with respect to the broader metacommunicative lexicon of which they form a part are discussed, alongside studies of metapragmatics in use, that is, the use of these metapragmatic labels in situated contexts. In this chapter, it is argued that corpus-based approaches to metapragmatics are uniquely positioned to advance such studies, as it allows for interpretive (horizontal) and statistical (vertical) methods of analysis to be successively applied to the analysis of metapragmatic data. Metapragmatics encompasses the study of displays of awareness on the part of users and observers of language about their use of language. In Östman, Jan-Ola and Jef Verschueren, Eds. 2018 Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This essay is an attempt to begin an exploratory discussion of the many pragmatic issues raised by the concept of Imagined Communities as laid out in Anderson’s important work.

Even rarer are discussions of the implications of Anderson’s work from the perspective of pragmatics. It is therefore paradoxical that few linguists have addressed Anderson’s work.

Much of Anderson’s formulation depends on observations about the importance of linguistics, communication, and standardization of language in community formation and identities. His work has had an enormous impact throughout the social sciences. Benedict Anderson’s great work, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson 1983 hereafter IC) has been hailed as the “best known single work in nationalism studies” (Breuilly 2016: 625).

Imagined communities