Wang, Jiayi, and Charlotte Taylor. "The conventionalisation of mock politeness in Chinese and British online forums." Journal of Pragmatics 142 (2019): 270-280.

This study examines similarities in the pragmatic use of polite forms for impolite functions across British and Chinese online forum communities, focusing on "hehe" in Chinese and "HTH" (hope that helps) in British English. Through corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the research reveals how these forms have evolved to express mock politeness in specific contexts while remaining unaffected in others. The study identifies both diachronic and synchronic variations in the conventionalization of these expressions, highlighting how users adapt their interpretation of politeness based on the context of interaction, despite low frequency.