Kádár and Ran’s chapter examines one of the key areas in which Sifianou has enriched politeness research and pragmatics: the relationship between globalisation and politeness. They demonstrate clear differences between academic and lay understandings of the effect of globalisation on politeness, in particular when this issue is examined across cultures. The authors explore the relationship between politeness and globalisation from a Chinese perspective, focusing on popular metadiscursive tendencies that surround politeness and globalisation in Chinese cultural contexts. The metapragmatic phenomena they target are (i) metalexicon/metalanguage: words/expressions that interactants use about im/politeness and ‘globalisation’ and (ii) metadiscourse: discourses on im/politeness and globalisation. Their dataset consists of Chinese online texts, mostly informal news articles and blogs written by Chinese authors. Kádár and Ran provide historical contextualisation for the development of Chinese perceptions of guojihua (‘internationalisation’, a term that is used instead of ‘globalisation’ in the Chinese context) as a beneficial factor for the development of politeness.

Culpeper, O’Driscoll and Hardaker’s chapter probes into British people’s understandings of politeness and contrasts them with the understandings of people in North America. Such overarching generalisations, the authors argue, are commonly found in lay persons’ assessments of politeness and thus constitute fertile ground for studies of metapragmatic politeness. Furthermore, the results of a survey of studies focusing on either British culture or North American culture as reified entities indicated a scarcity of emic studies of these cultures in the field of politeness. The authors’ study aims to fill this gap. To that end, they apply corpus linguistic tools to the Oxford English Corpus and subject to scrutiny the lexeme ‘polite’ and the associated clusters of collocates. The results are then triangulated with geolocated Twitter data. Findings partly support both the British and the North American politeness stereotypes, but also show that, contrary to expectations, friendliness and involvement are an important feature of understandings of politeness in both the UK and the USA.