Politeness marking is one aspect of the broader issue of how language relates to power and status, which has been studied in the context of workplace discourse (Bramsen et al., ;Diehl et al., 2007;Peterson et al., 2011;Prabhakaran et al., 2012;Gilbert, 2012;McCallum et al., 2007) and social networking (Scholand et al., 2010).
this research focusses on domain-specific textual cues, whereas the present work seeks to leverage domain-independent politeness cues, building on the literature on how politeness affects worksplace social dynamics and power structures (Gyasi Obeng, 1997;Chilton, 1990;Andersson and Pearson, 1999;Rogers and Lee-Wong, 2003;Holmes and Stubbe, 2005).