Conceptualising politeness in Greece and Great Britain

This study contributes to cross-cultural politeness research by comparing British and Greek conceptualisations of politeness. It focuses on lay understandings of politeness by taking an emic, metapragmatic approach to the study of politeness. The study is based on questionnaire data from 100 British and 100 Greek participants and examines both concepts associated with politeness and situated examples of politeness.
While both groups consider helping behaviour to be a central aspect of politeness and refer primarily to non-verbal forms of politeness, the data also show some culture-specific differences. The British participants associate politeness primarily with public situations involving strangers. The Greek participants, in contrast, referred to both public and private contexts, involving family and friends, thus displaying an overall broader understanding of politeness. Service encounters, on the other hand, played a more central role in the British data, with many participants recognising the instrumental nature of politeness in these contexts.
The findings also raise some methodological issues, while a critical review of research on metapragmatic politeness conducted to date calls for a more systematic engagement with how metapragmatic politeness can be meaningfully linked with theoretical work on metapragmatics.