Over-politeness in Persian professional interactions

•Examines over-politeness as social practice.•Demonstrates how over-politeness is interactionally achieved.•Demonstrates how over-politeness constitutes professional discourse.

Over-politeness is an under-represented topic in interpersonal pragmatics, compared with politeness and impoliteness. Drawing upon Conversation Analysis and theory of im/politeness as social practice (Haugh, 2013 and Kádár and Haugh, 2013), this paper examines the ways over-politeness is interactionally achieved in two types of academic professional discourses. Analyses reveal the instances that participants in the professional interactions afford their evaluations of over-politeness to the social practices that are conventionally subject to evaluations of politeness. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the context of professional interaction is co-created by the participants’ evaluative practices, including over-politeness, along with their joint accomplishment of meaning and action.