Politeness

Politeness is a notion that keeps surfacing in my research, with my work in contrastive pragmatics, in particular, having revealed culture-specific preferences for politeness strategies. To explore what lies behind these culture-specific aspects of politeness - following a recent trend in politeness research - I have conducted a number of metapragmatic studies, jointly with colleagues from Hungary, Greece and Russia. A study based on interviews with Polish and Hungarian citizens (2011) revealed that economic, political and societal changes following the fall of the Iron Curtain have led to a Westernisation of politeness norms in these countries, as well as to predominantly negative attitudes towards this process. Another, more recent interview study looks at intergenerational differences in conceptualisations of im/politeness in Greece, reflecting recent changes in the perception of specific cultural and social values leading to divergent attitudes towards politeness across generations (2019). The two most recent studies in this area use questionnaire data to compare conceptualisations of politeness in Britain and Greece (2020) and Britain and Russia (in preparation) respectively.