Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Bou-Franch’s chapter aims to throw light on emic understandings of face1 and imagen1 in Peninsular Spanish, and to compare such understandings with etic approaches to imagen and identity. A three-pronged methodology is used to tease out lay meanings of imagen from different first-order sources, and includes the examination of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, the analysis of a corpus of Spanish newspapers, and the analysis of data from focus groups discussing situated experiences of imagen1. The results show that imagen1 and face1 are not related in a straightforward manner. Whereas imagen2 draws on Goffman’s and Brown and Levinson’s seminal definitions of the construct, imagen1 does not always evoke imagen2; when it does, it is more closely related to Goffman’s than to Brown and Levinson’s conception.Microanalysis of naturally-occurring discourse focusing on experiences of imagen1 shows how uses of imagen1 pointed to the centrality of identity and its relationship with face1. The author’s findings thus give credence to that fact that face and identity co-constitute each other and are hard to separate theoretically and analytically.

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.

Armostis and Terkourafi’s chapter focuses on aspects of politeness underrepresented in politeness research: prosody and the (competing) functions of borrowed and inherited linguistic items expressing politeness. Their first experiment looks at different phonological variants of thank you and the intonation patterns with which it is used, and establishes the contexts in which it is likely to be interpreted as a sincere form of thanking by speakers of Cypriot Greek. It shows that the decisive phonetic dimension is intonation; non-rising intonation is interpreted as sincere, especially in women’s speech. In the second experiment, participants listened to stimuli varying in choice of thanking item, intonation and address terms, and evaluated them on 14 dimensions expressing positive and negative attitudes. The results show that borrowed thank you is more likely to be evaluated as off-putting, curt, and arrogant than inherited efxariˈsto when used in high-imposition contexts, though the addition of address forms has a uniformly positive effect on both forms. The authors use these results to tease apart the effects of intonation and lexis on the evaluation of an utterance as im/polite.

In her study of Greek offers, Bella uses experimental data collection methods to compare the use of politeness in offers directed at friends and offers made by students to their professors. Bella uses open role plays to establish the formulations her participants deem appropriate in the two situations, and retrospective verbal interviews to provide information about the motivations for their choice of politeness strategies. In the Greek context, offers have been defined as positive politeness devices, enhancing solidarity and reaffirming relationships, in line with the classification of Greece as a positive politeness culture. Bella’s study, however, illustrates that offers vary significantly according to the relationship between the interlocutors, with offers in asymmetrical situations characterised by a preference for negative politeness. These differences are reflected not only in the amount of directness expressed, but also through the degree of insistence. This sequential feature of offers is further illustrated on the basis of a naturally occurring interaction that validates the experimental data, while showing that politeness is an interactional phenomenon.