Maria Sifianou

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens | uoa · Faculty of English Language and Literature

The rise of influencers, as power-players in the social media landscape, is a defining feature of the digital era, one that has received much attention from a variety of social science disciplines. But despite the key role that language, along with other semiotic modes, plays in the construction and communication of influencer selves, discourse ana...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Recent discursive approaches to im/politeness have emphasised the significance of exploring non-academic understandings of im/politeness. Pursuing this line of research, the data for this paper come from a questionnaire distributed to 100 undergraduate female university students. The informants were asked to provide some attributes of a polite pers...

What (im)politeness means changes over time. As these changes are usually gradual, we tend to be relatively unaware of them. However, when changes are abrupt, people not only notice but are also concerned with them. The COVID-19 pandemic entailed such abrupt changes involving new rules most of which are at odds with the rather automatic conventions...

Sociopragmatics is a rapidly growing field and this is the first ever handbook dedicated to this exciting area of study. Bringing together an international team of leading editors and contributors, it provides a comprehensive, cutting-edge overview of the key concepts, topics, settings and methodologies involved in sociopragmatic research. The chap...

Interest in non-academic ways of understanding of im/politeness has so far been evident primarily in analyses of the sequential development of real-life interactions. However, understandings of im/politeness can be found in other sources such as related articles in on-line newspapers and their ensuing comments. The main aim of this paper is to cont...

This study aims at investigating vocatives in Greek face-to-face service encounters. Creating intimacy and solidarity seems to be an important aspect of such encounters: interactants do not focus solely on the transaction involved, but also attempt to establish a friendly atmosphere, despite the short duration of the interaction. On the other hand,...

Recent approaches to im/politeness have emphasised the importance of lay understandings of politeness and suggested that they should constitute the locus of attention in politeness research. Pursuing this direction of research, the data for this paper come from an on-line article entitled “Greek impoliteness: 10 things that kill you in this city” a...

The aim of the study is to investigate the use of vocatives in face-to-face interactions in Greek shops. In particular, we concentrate on the types of vocatives attested, their position and function within the exchange, and their association with politeness. The analysis of an extensive corpus of service encounters (SEs) reveals that vocatives are...

The aim of this paper is to explore how the analysis of im/politeness can be tackled from a discursive pragmatics perspective. Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated disciplines as they are both concerned with language use. However, they differ mostly in terms of the units of analysis traditionally associated with them: pragmatics is ty...

Responding to the recent call by politeness researchers for the need to study lay understandings of politeness, Sifianou and Bella explore the potential value of Twitter data as a source for studying lay people’s understandings of politeness. Focusing on public text data in Greek drawn from Twitter’s huge repository, they isolated 195 tweets which...

The aim of this paper is to explore how the analysis of im/politeness can be tackled from a discursive pragmatics perspective. Pragmatics and discourse analysis are interrelated disciplines as they are both concerned with language use. However, they differ mostly in terms of the units of analysis traditionally associated with them: pragmatics is ty...

Abstract In the era of globalisation, service industries dominate economies, and “service” to a great extent is accomplished through interacting with people (Cameron, 2000a:16). Nowadays, such interactions tend to be friendly and informal, the assumption being that this will influence perceptions of high service quality to the advantage of both pa...

Globalisation tends to be perceived as one of the most powerful forces shaping today’s world. In its simplest sense, globalisation refers to the acceleration of processes of interconnectedness in every aspect of social life. It is assumed that this will lead to the homogenisation of the world under the influence of the omnipresent American culture....

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how Japanese and Greek female students conceptualize politeness and then compare the findings in order to tease out any cross-cultural similarities and differences. The data is drawn from a questionnaire filled in by two hundred female undergraduates (one hundred from each group). The results show that t...

This chapter explores the issues of universality and cultural variation of politeness norms and practices. Early approaches to politeness have been criticised for seeing them as applicable to societies as wholes. In contrast, recent discursive approaches focus instead on lay understandings and subjective evaluations of politeness in situated real-l...

This chapter argues that face and identity are difficult to tease apart theoretically and even more so empirically, because they co-constitute each other and are intrinsically related. Its contention is grounded both in a theoretical review of the implicit/explicit relationship between identity and (Im)politeness (as viewed by politeness scholars),...

Teaching politeness? Spyridoula Bella, Maria Sifianou, Angeliki Tzanne National and Kapodistrian University of Athens Abstract Despite the tremendous expansion of research on politeness over the last thirty-five years and impoliteness more recently, comparatively little has been done on the teaching of politeness. This state of affairs raises a...

Revised version of a paper presented at the First International Symposium “Communication across Cultures: Face and Interaction” (CC2013FACE), 26-27 April 2013, Institute of English, University of Silesia, Poland.

One of the tenets of the discursive (or postmodern) turn in politeness research is the importance of distinguishing between lay understandings of politeness and politeness as a theoretical construct. In this context, it has been argued that research should focus on lay people's understandings of politeness and impoliteness as they emerge in their e...

Despite the tremendous expansion of research on politeness over the last thirty-five years and impoliteness more recently, comparatively little has been done on the teaching of politeness. This state of affairs raises a number of issues including the possibility and the ways of teaching politeness. The main assumption of this chapter is that polite...

Globalisation tends to be perceived as one of the most powerful forces shaping today's world. In its simplest sense, globalisation refers to the acceleration of processes of interconnectedness in every aspect of social life. It is assumed that this will lead to the homogenisation of the world under the influence of the omnipresent American culture....

Disagreement can be defined as the expression of a view that differs from that expressed by another speaker. Yet, in the relevant literature, disagreement is mostly seen as confrontational and should thus be mitigated or avoided. In CA terms, it is a “dispreferred” second. Similarly, in earlier politeness theories, disagreement is seen to verge on...

Early work on "politeness" and more recent work on "impoliteness" have provided a wealth of insight into the kinds of strategies used to either protect and save the "face" of interactants, or disregard and attack it, respectively. Even though, at a theoretical level, recent interactional and relational approaches to communication clearly show that...

IntroductionIntercultural CommunicationTheoretical Background DiscussionConcluding RemarksBibliography

Face is a notion that is intuitively meaningful to many people but one that is highly complex and hard to define. Broadly speaking, it can be seen as a positive social image akin to identity. In recent years, research and debate on the concept of ‘face’ have grown exponentially, so that Watts (2005: xxviii) is right in contending that it “has becom...

1. Εισαγωγή Ο όρος 'επικοινωνία' φαίνεται να παίζει σημαντικό ρόλο στην καθημερινότητα όλων μας. Συχνά ακούμε για 'επικοινωνιακές στρατηγικές' αλλά και 'επικοινωνιακά τεχνάσματα'. Οι χώρες, τα κόμματα και μεγάλες εταιρείες προσπαθούν να σχεδιάσουν και να υλοποιήσουν 'μακροχρόνια προγράμματα επικοινωνίας'. Οι πολιτικοί αλλά και οι κάθε λογής αστέρε...

In recent years, researchers have explored politeness and impoliteness extensively and have attempted to construct theoretical frameworks that would account for both phenomena. Research on im-politeness focuses almost exclusively on linguistic performance and investigates the phenomena in relation to the behavior of individuals in verbal interactio...

This article explores the parallel English and Greek announcements heard in the Athens Metro stations. It argued that these announcements constitute a new genre, characterized by a specific format including three stages (opening, main body, closing) and manifesting the interplay between global and local linguacultural influences. The way English is...

Linguistic politeness: Laying the foundations Maria Sifianou Abstract Brown and Levinson’s ([1978] 1987) theory has undoubtedly been the most influential treatment of politeness phenomena. Along with Lakoff (1973) and Leech (1983), Brown and Levinson have contributed to the immense expansion of related research both within and outside linguistics...

Off-record utterances are polite ways of requesting, but encode their politeness in situationally and culturally specific ways. Off-record requests have been largely seen as devices deriving their politeness force from minimizing impositions by leaving the options open for the addressee to interpret them. This paper presents some preliminary observ...

This paper attempts to investigate the relationship between silence and politeness. More specifically, it focuses on Brown and Levinson's ([1978] 1987) superstrategy don't do the FTA (face-threatening act) - remain silent. It explores the nature of this superstrategy and the extent to which silence can realise the other major strategies for dealing...

The aim of this paper is to investigate humorous exchanges in Greek telephone conversation openings in the light of Raskin’s (Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. D. Reidel, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster) and Attardo’s (Attardo, Salvatore, 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin; Attardo, Salvatore, 2001. Humorous...

Telephone conversation is one of the most common forms of communication in contemporary society. For the first time in human history, some people are spending as much time, if not more, talking on the telephone as they are on face-to-face conversations. The aims of this book are: to bring together in one volume research on telephone conversations i...

This volume includes 14 papers investigating politeness phenomena in Greece and Turkey, the cultural cross-roads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It reflects current research and provides observations of and findings in patterns of linguistic politeness in a geographical area other than the much studied English speaking ones. The book appeals t...

Politeness phenomena in England and Greece: A cross-cultural perspective Despite the great significance of ‘politeness’, it is only in the 1970s that this concept has become a major issue in linguistics. This is evidenced in the vast array of publications which followed Brown and Levinson’s (1978) original extended essay on politeness phenomena, in...

The paper deals with silence that comes in the stead of a contribution which is not expected by the other party/ies, and consequently, absence of this contribution does not constitute a face-threat for any of the participants. This kind of silence - we are going to argue - ‘does good’ in communication, since it is used as a face-saving device, atte...

The view that politeness is the major motivation for indirectness has been very influential. Such accounts based on British English view politeness primarily as formality and a means of expressing distance. The distinction drawn between on-record and off-record indirectness seems useful in clarifying some of the problems stemming from such views. T...

This is a first attempt to consider weather forecasting on television as a type of discourse characteristic of the society and culture where it is produced and consumed. Weather forecasts on television may not be of the importance and import of current affairs programmes, news or even chat shows. Nevertheless, they carry their own significance both...

Edited volume including the papers from the First International Conference on Greek Linguistics which was held in Reading, UK in September 1993

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

Politeness is crucial to successful communication and is consequently of great interest to those who study language and its social context. This book presents the first application of Brown and Levinson's ground-breaking theoretical work in a full-length comparative case-study. Maria Sifianou draws her data from a variety of sources, including lite...

This paper investigates the function of diminutives in English and in Greek. It is pointed out that Greek, as compared to English, shows greater flexibility in the formation of diminutives and higher frequency of occurence. Although the prototypical function of diminutives is to indicate smallness, they are used extensively to indicate endearment a...

This article investigates differences in telephone behaviour in England and Greece in the light of Brown and Levinson's model of interaction. It focusses upon differences both in verbal telephone call behaviour and in the attitudes and values attached to telephone usage. Explanations are placed within a broad framework of cultural differences in th...