If you are a member of the group and would like your research interests to be listed here, please contact Isabelle van der Bom at i.v.bom@shu.ac.uk.

Carolina Abritta
PUC-Rio (Brazil)
Email: carolabritta@terra.com.br
Research interests: (im)politeness in the context of mediation.

Bilal Al-Adaileh
Linguistics and Phonetics Dept. Leeds University ( U.K. )
Email: bilal.adaileh@gmail.com
Research interests: Linguistic Politeness, Politeness & Gender, Intercultural pragmatics, Intracultural pragmatics, and Sociolinguistics.

Nassier Abbas Ghubin Al-Zubaidi
Department of English, College of Arts, Baghdad University (Iraq)
Email: nassieralzubaidi@gmail.com
Research interests: linguistic politeness, interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, sociolinguistics, contrastive rhetoric, and (critical) discourse analysis.

Abdul Wahid Qasem Ghaleb Al-Zumor
Sanaa University ( Yemen Republic )
Email: wahed3@yahoo.com
Research interests: Politeness, interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, Arabic discourse, sociolinguistics.

Lucia Fernandez Amaya
Pablo de Olavide University (Spain)
Email:lferama@upo.es
Research Interests: pragmatics and translation, sociopragmatics (politeness), interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, discourse analysis and teaching pragmatics to ESL learners.

Jo Angouri
University of the West of England (UK)
Email: jo.angouri@uwe.ac.uk
Research interests: sociopragmatics and discourse analysis; language in the workplace, health care and online contexts (CMD).

Robert B. Arundale
Department of Communication, University of Alaska (USA)
Email: rbarundale@alaska.edu
Research interests: Issues in language pragmatics, such as face and facework, that relate to understanding language use in face-to-face interpersonal communication, with particular attention to developing theory that is informed by conversation analysis. Also intercultural communication and communication theory.

Anna Baczkowska
Kazimierz Wielki University, Bydgoszcz (Poland)
Email: ab@ukw.edu.pl
Research interests: im/politeness in face-to-face interaction, cross-cultural pragmatics, nonverbal communication, cognitive semantics, audiovisual translation, applied linguistics.

Francesca Bargiela
University of Warwick ( UK )
Email: francesca.bargiela@gmail.com
Research interests: Business discourse, politeness, intercultural communication, management and belief.

Ali Y. Al-Baroodi
Mosul University (Iraq)
Email: alialbaroodi2000@yahoo.com
Research interests: cross-cultural pragmatics, politeness, politeness and translation.

Luna Bergh
University of the Free State (South Africa)
Email: berghL.RD@ufs.ac.za
Research interests: Linguistic politeness; politeness and punctuation; politeness in academic writing; politeness in business, economic and management contexts; politeness in health care; cognitive linguistics; and cognitive blending.

Isabelle van der Bom
Sheffield Hallam University (UK) & Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany)
Email: i.v.bom@shu.ac.uk & isabelle.vanderbom@phil.tu-chemnitz.de
Research interests: linguistic politeness, language and discrimination, gender and language, cognitive poetics, cognitive stylistics, ontology, digital fiction, multilingualism.

Patricia Bou-Franch
University of Valencia ( Spain )
Email: patricia.bou@uv.es
http://www.uv.es/~boup/index.html
Research interests: I’m interested in the relationship between gender and politeness in Spanish, English and Catalan. I’m currently working on the study of computer-mediated communication in the academic setting. I’m also interested in politeness in relation to inter-language pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics and foreign language teaching.

Derek Bousfield
Huddersfield University ( UK )
Email: d.bousfield@hud.ac.uk
Research interests: The Pragmatics of Impoliteness. I’m conducting research into linguistic impoliteness, more specifically, into the dynamics of impolite discourse(s), that is, how impoliteness containing discourses are triggered, how they progress, and how they are ‘resolved’ by the interactants.

Susan Meredith Burt
English Department, Illinois State University (USA)
Email: smburt@ilstu.edu
Research interests: intercultural pragmatics, politeness in second language learning and use; changing patterns of politeness practices during language shift, particularly in the immigrant Hmong community in the US.

Clay Butler
Baylor University ; Waco , Texas ( USA )
Email: Clay_Butler@baylor.edu
Research interests: Discourse analysis, politeness, language in legal settings, apology speech act.

Marco Catrambone
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa (Italy)
E-mail: marco.catrambone@sns.it; marcocatrambone@hotmail.it
Research interests: linguistic politeness (especially historical politeness), sociolinguistics of Greek, politeness in Literature, pragmatics of verbal interaction, drama and dialogue genre.

Daniela Cesiri
University of Salento (Italy)
Email: daniela.cesiri@unile.it
Research Interests: Historical politeness and face-threatening acts.

Thomas Chacko
Indian Institute of Science, Banglore ( India )
University College of Technology and Management (KUTPM) Kuala Lampur (Malaysia )
Research Interests: Intercultural Communication Skills for Professionals; ESP/ EST; Language and Power; Technical Style Editing and Editorial Consultancy.

Grace Chew Chye Lay
Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
Email: gclchew@yahoo.co.uk
Research interests: Vietnamese politeness; Vietnamese lexicography; and intercultural business communication involving Japanese and Vietnamese.

Krisda Chaemsaithong
University of Houston (USA)
Email: chaemsaithongk@uhd.edu
Research Interests: historical pragmatics, politeness between different social classes, and English Syntax. Current project: self-politeness and self-face in Salem Witch Trials.

David Ching
Victoria University of Wellington ( New Zealand )
Email: davching@hotmail.com
Research interests: I am currently doing a PhD in cross-cultural pragmatics. I am investigating face phenomena in New Zealand and Taiwanese public radio news interview by examining and contrasting disagreement strategies utilized by New Zealand and Taiwanese interviewers.

Marianna Chodorowska-Pilch
University of California , Los Angeles and University of Southern California (USA)
Email: chodorow@usc.edu
Research interests: linguistic politeness, pragmatics, cross-linguistic encoding of politeness, grammaticalization, discourse markers, constructions, metaphor and metonymy.

Chris Christie
Loughborough University ( UK )
Email: c.christie@lboro.ac.uk
Research interests: Gender and politeness; miscommunication; parliamentary discourse.

Jodie Clark
Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
Email: jodie.clark@shu.ac.uk
Research interests: the development of ethnographic, communities-of-practice oriented approaches to critical discourse analysis.

Jiyon Cook
University of Bristol (UK)
Email: jiyon.cook@bristol.ac.uk
Research interests: face, linguistic politeness, pragmatics, semantics.

Jonathan Culpeper
Lancaster University ( UK )
Email: j.culpeper@lancaster.ac.uk
Research interests: linguistic politeness (especially impoliteness and historical politeness); pragmatics (especially, sociopragmatics and historical pragmatics); stylistics (especially plays and Shakespeare); the history of English (especially Early Modern English); Corpus Linguistics (especially its deployment in pragmatics or stylistics research).

Erika Darics
University of Portsmouth (UK)
erika.darics@port.ac.uk
Research interests: relational work in text-based computed mediated discourse (CMD), communication in virtual work environments, computer-mediated business discourse.

Eleanor Dickey
University of Reading (UK)
Email: E.Dickey@reading.ac.uk
Research interests: Linguistic politeness, sociolinguistics of Greek and Latin, language contact in antiquity, forms of address.

Doris Dippold
University of Southampton ( UK )
Research Interests: Politeness, Interlanguage Pragmatics, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, Pragmatic Development, First and Second Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics. PhD dissertation: The L2 development of pragmatics: How English native speakers learn to disagree in German.

Klaartje Duijm
Email: k.duijm@xs4all.nl
Research interests: Testing of politeness in second language acquisition.

Enas El-Sadek
School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University (UK)
Enas.El-Sadek@ncl.ac.uk
Research interests: Intercultural Pragmatics, Cognitive Pragmatics, Relevance Theory, the impact of culture on intercultural communication and second language acquisition, Linguistic Politeness.

Zohreh R. Eslami
Texas A&M University ( US )
Email: zeslami@tamu.edu
http://www.coe.tamu.edu/~zeslami
Research interests: politeness, gender, and language use in Persian compared to other languages; politeness and intercultural communication and speech act studies; politeness and second language learning and use; politeness and computer-mediated communications.

Muhammad-Reza Fakhr-Rohani
University of Qom, Qom (Iran)
Email: fxr41@yahoo.co.uk and fakhr6rohani@yahoo.co.uk
Research interests: Modes of politeness and honorification in Persian Shiite religious literature, honorifics, politeness and honorification in Mazandarani (an Iranian Caspian dialect), pragmatics, sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking.

Milan Ferencik
University of Presov (Slovakia)
Email: milan.ferencik@unipo.sk
Research interests: Politeness strategies in mass media (radio phone-ins), politeness practices in the local linguistic landscape, politeness in e-scape, strategies of politeness in English as a Lingua Franca, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, multilingualism, geosemiotics.

Saeko Fukushima
Tsuru University (Japan)
Email: saeko@tsuru.ac.jp
Research interests: cross-cultural pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, sociopragmatics and Japanese politeness.

Christophe Gagne
Université Lyon II (GRIC) (France)
University of Cambridge ( UK )
Email: cg238@cam.ac.uk
Research Interests: intercultural communication, conversation analysis, interaction between French and British nationals.

Juan Antonio Garrido Ardila
Dept of Spanish. University of Malta
Email: juan-antonio.garrido-ardila@um.edu.mt
Research interests: intercultural politeness, politeness in Peninsular Spanish

Karen Grainger
Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
Email: k.p.grainger@shu.ac.uk
Research Interests: interactional sociolinguistics, politeness theory, institutional talk (especially medical contexts), intercultural communication, computer mediated interaction.

Abdurahman Ahamd Hamza
Sheffield Hallam University ( UK )
Email: A.R.Hamza@shu.ac.uk
Research interests: Applied Linguistic, Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics, Phonology , Arabic literature, and Translation. My PhD research is investigating how the notion of politeness works in different cultures. Its title is ‘Cross-cultural Linguistic Politeness: Misunderstanding in Interaction between native and non-native speakers of English’. It examines politeness in relation to context and culture and the role that they play in cross-cultural interaction.

Elizabeth Hanson
California State University (US)
Email: elizabeth.hanson@csun.edu
Research interests: English as a second language.

Claire Hardaker
Lancaster University (UK)
Research interests: (Im)politeness, conflict, trolling, cyber-bullying, CMC (computer-mediated communication), HCI (human-computer interaction) and corpus linguistics. PhD thesis: Impoliteness and conflict in CMC.

Sandra Harrison
Coventry University (UK)
Email: sandra.harrison@coventry.ac.uk
Research interests: Computer-mediated communication, including use of email in the workplace, the application of conversation analysis and discourse analysis to the discourse of email discussions, development of discourse maps to summarise the interaction of multi-party, multi-topic discussions, investigation of the use of politeness strategies to maintain community in email discussions, use of and subversion of repair in email discussions, negotiation of email discussion topics through
metadiscussion.

Ciler Hatipoglu
Middle East Technical University (METU), (Turkey)
Email: ciler2@yahoo.com, ciler@metu.edu.tr
Research interests: Cross-gender and cross-cultural communication, speech acts, interlanguage pragmatics, electronic languages (e.g., language in emails), language in the media, second language acquisition.

Michael Haugh
Griffith University (Australia)
Email: m.haugh@griffith.edu.au
http://www.griffith.edu.au/arts-languages-criminology/school-languages-linguistics/staff/dr-michael-haugh
Research Interests: Face, intercultural politeness, intention(ality) and politeness.

Chris Heffer
Nottingham Trent University (UK)
Email: chris.heffer@ntu.ac.uk
Research interests: The language of legal professionals; linguistic strategies in jury instruction and witness examination; narrative and paradigmatic modes of discourse; the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ standard; linguistic and semiotic strategies in advertising; hate speech; strategies in ‘419’ scams.

Janet Holmes
Victoria University of Wellington ( New Zealand )
Research interests: language and gender, language in the workplace, sociolinguistics, pragmatics.

Jin-ok Hong
Email: redstargo@googlemail.com
Research interests: discursive identities and intentionality, strategic politeness, institutional discourse, culturally specific ideologies, cross-cultural linguistic forms.

Hua Xiang (Catherine)
Open University (UK)
Email: h.xiang@open.ac.uk
Research interests: Currently I am doing my PhD at the OU. I am looking at the apology strategies produced by Chinese and British native speakers as well as advanced language learners of both languages. I am interested in testing the existing politeness theory with Chinese data. I am also interested in exploring language learners’ perceptions towards self/others, politeness in terms of their second/foreign language learning (particularly in the case of learning English as a second/foreign language and learning Chinese as a second/foreign language). By investigating apology strategies, I hope the findings could also contribute to self politeness proposed by Chen (2001).

Noriko Inagaki
School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS ( UK )
Email: ni2@soas.ac.uk or 113311@soas.ac.uk
Research interests: Alternative approach to politeness applying a broader version of the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis as opposed to the current universal approach.

Hale Isik-Guler
University of Warwick (UK) and Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
Email: hisik@metu.edu.tr
Research interests: cross-cultural and intercultural communication; metapragmatics of (im)politeness in Turkish; intentionality, historicity and (im)politeness; rapport management; (im)politeness research methodology (i.e. using evaluative comments, cultural lexemes and specialized corpora).

Johanna Isosävi
University of Helsinki (Finland)
Research interests: intercultural (im)politeness, politeness in Finland and France

Ewa Jakubowska
Institute of English, University of Silesia , Katowice ( Poland )
Email: ewajakub@wp.pl
Research interests: Cross-cultural pragmatics, contrastive pragmatics, face-to-face communication, politeness, interaction rituals.

Daniel Z. Kadar
English Language and Linguistics, University of Huddersfield (UK)
Email: D.Z.Kadar@hud.ac.uk
Research interests: politeness, relational rituals, intercultural and cross-cultural communication (with special focus on China and the East Asia region in general), and historical politeness.

Ruba Khamam
University of Leeds (UK)
Email: rubakhamam@gmail.com
Research interests: Linguistic politeness and impoliteness, Intercultural and Cross-cultural pragmatics, Discourse analysis, the relationship between gender and politeness, Forms of address, Speech acts, Politeness and second language learning and use, Semantics, and applied linguistics.
Hassen Khammari
Currently unaffiliated (Tunisia)
Email: hassenkh99@yahoo.fr
Research interests: Tunisian politeness; speech acts; psycholinguistics and pragmatics.

Dr. Abdennour Kharraki
Mohamed 1st University (Morocco)
Research interests: Linguistic Politeness in Arabic Speaking Countries, Intercultural Communication (East and West).

Alan Kim
Southern Illinois University (USA)
Email: alanhkin@siu.edu
Research interests: The following areas of Korean and Japanese: Comparative Grammar; Etymological Analysis; Grammaticalization in the System of Scalar Modals; Quantifier-Floating, Negation, Word Order and Linguistic Typology; Internally Headed Relative Clause Construction; Verb morphology; Politeness and Honorifics. I am also interested in ancient migrations of Korean people to the Japanese archipelago.

Tatiana Larina
Peoples’ Friendship University (Moscow)
Email: larinat@list.ru
http://www.tvlarina.narod.ru
Research interests: Intercultural communication, Crosscultural Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Anthropological Linguistics, Linguistic Politeness. Doctoral thesis: Politeness in Intercultural Communication. The author of the book “Politeness in English and Russian Communicative Cultures”.

Li Li
University of Leeds ( UK )
Email: jaslily@msn.com
Research interests: Politeness.

Miriam Locher
University of Basel (Switzerland)
Email: miriam.locher@unibas.ch
http://engsem.unibas.ch/department/people/staff/profile/profile/person/locher/
Research Interests: Discourse analysis, especially power in language, verbal politeness, the realization of disagreement and conflict talk; cross-cultural communication; the use of computer-mediated communication (CMC); medical and institutional counselling; health discourse; Internet advice columns.

Sabrina Mallon-Gerland
University of Surrey
Email: sabrina@cltmallon-gerland.com
Research interests: Interlanguage pragmatics.

Rachel Mapson
Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
Email: RMapson@qmu.ac.uk
Research interests: politeness in signed language, translation and interpreting, the interpretation of politeness, cross-cultural and intercultural pragmatics, gender and politeness.

Marlyna Maros
University Kebangsaan (Malaysia)
Email: mmarlyna@gmail.com; marlyna@ukm.my
Research interests: Sociopragmatics, specifically speech acts, politeness and cultural values. Discussions on cultural values sometimes bring my reseach into other sociolinguistics topics such as language contact, maintenance, and change; and Linguistics in Education.

Chisa Matsukawa
University of Central Lancashire (UK)
Email: cmatsukawa@uclan.ac.uk
Research interests: Cross-cultural pragmatics, intercultural pragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, politeness in Japanese language learning and Japanese politeness.

Sara Mills

Sara Mills
Sheffield Hallam University ( UK )
Email: s.l.mills@shu.ac.uk
Research interests: gender and politeness; class and politeness.

Mostafa Morady Moghaddam
University of Tabriz (Iran)
Email: mostafa_morady@yahoo.com
Research interests: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and syllabus design.

Maxine Morrin
Bergen Community College and Passaic County Community College ( US )
Email: maxinemorrin@hotmail.com
Research interests: applied linguistics, cross-cultural communication, giving and receiving directions; English as a Second Language.

Louise Mullany
University of Nottingham ( UK )
Email: Louise.mullany@nottingham.ac.uk
Research interests: language, gender and politeness, particularly in institutional settings.

Gerry Mugford
Universidad de Guadalajara (Mexico)
Email: g_mugford@yahoo.com
Research Interests: Second language learning and (im)politeness.

Carol Myers-Scotton
Michigan State University ( US )
Email: myerssc@msu.edu
Research Interests: Socio-pragmatics, especially in regard to bilingual interactions.

Golnaz Nanbakhsh
University of Edinburgh ( UK )
Email: G.Nanbakhsh@ling.ed.ac.uk
Research Interests: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics of (im)politeness, indexicality, stance-taking and Persian politeness.

Onuigbo Gregory Nwoye
Sultan Qaboos University (Sultanate of Oman )
University of Benin ( Nigeria )
Email: ognwoye@yahoo.com
Research Interests: Discourse/conversational analysis, politeness studies, gender linguistics and cross-cultural communication.

Akin Odebunmi, PhD
Professor of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis,
University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
Email: papaabnm2@gmail.com

Eva Ogiermann
University of Portsmouth ( UK )
Email: eva.ogiermann@port.ac.uk
Research interests: pragmatics, sociolinguistics, politeness theories, language and gender, and conversation analysis – contrastive approaches centring on the question of the culture-specificity of language use.

Ana Cristina Ostermann
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Lingüística Aplicada Unisinos (Brazil)
Email: aco3@terra.com.br or aco@icaro.unisinos.br
Research interests: language and gender, workplace discourse and
conversation analysis.

Annick Paternoster
Email: annick.paternoster@lu.unisi.ch
Istituto di Studi italiani, Università della Svizzera italiana, Lugano (Switzerland)
Department of Italian, University of Leeds, UK
Research interests: politeness and impoliteness, historical pragmatics, rhetorics and stylistics, behavioural treatises, courtly literature, dialogue genre and drama in 16th century Italy, conversation in 19th century Italian novel.

Shamala Paramasivam
Email: shamala@putra.upm.edu.my
Universiti Putra Malaysia
Research interests: linguistic politeness, teaching and learning of politeness, pragmatic development of politeness, business discourse, aviation discourse, workplace communication, intercultural pragmatics.

Barbara Pizziconi
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (UK)
Email: bp3@soas.ac.uk
Research interests: Japanese politeness, politeness in language learning and intercultural pragmatics.

Laurel D. Reinking
Purdue University ( USA )
Email: dreinki@purdue.edu
Research interests: Silence as a form of (im)politeness; Cross-cultural pragmatic failure resulting from violations of politeness norms: Motivation or lack of it resulting from adherence to or violations of politeness norms.

Daniel Roush
Eastern Kentucky University ( USA )
Email: daniel.roush@eku.edu
http://www.interpreting.eku.edu/
Research interests: politeness in signed languages; the relationship of
politeness and conceptual metaphor and metonymy; discourse analysis of signed languages; second language learning; cross-cultural pragmatics.

Nobuo Ignacio Lopez Sako
University of Granada (Spain)
Email: nilsako@ugr.es
Research interests: Linguistic (im)politeness in interaction bringing together insights from speech act research and conversation analysis, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, teaching pragmatics/politeness in EFL from a multimodal perspective.

José Santaemilia
Universitat de Valencia ( Spain )
Email: jose.santaemilia@uv.es
Research interests: gender and language, sexual language, translation.

Carmen Santamaría-García
Alcalá University (Spain)
Email: carmen.santamaria@uah.es
Research Interests: pragmatics and translation, sociopragmatics, (im)politeness, inter and cross-cultural pragmatics, discourse analysis and teaching pragmatics to ESL learners.

Krishna Seunarinesingh
University of the West Indies (St. Augustine, Trinidad &Tobago)
Email: krishna.seunarinesingh@sta.uwi.edu
Research interests: the strategic use of impoliteness in educational settings, focusing on excluded and marginalised students’ use of impoliteness to resist institutional discourses.

Mohsen Shahrokhi
Faculty of Language, Shahreza Islamic Azad University, Isfahan (Iran)
Email: shahrokhi1651@yahoo.com
Research interests: linguistic politeness, discourse analysis, Persian culture-specific politeness patterns, gender and linguistic politeness, and ESP.

Suin Shin
UC Berkeley (USA)
Email: shin77@berkeley.edu
Research interests: Grammaticalization of Politeness in German, English and Korean.

Klaus P. Schneider
University of Bonn (Germany)
Email: k.schneider@uni-bonn.de
Research interests: (Im)politeness and appropriateness, language use conventions, cultural models, small talk, pragmatic competence, empirical pragmatics, variational pragmatics.

Mohamed Shawky Mohamed Sweify
Dept of English, Sadat Academy for management Sciences, Assiut, (Egypt)
Email: Saghdah@hotmail.com
Research interests: Applied Linguistics, Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, the strategic use of linguistic (im)politeness strategies in dramatic discourse. The title of my unpublished MA thesis is :”Politeness Strategies in Edward Albee’s (1928 – ) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? : A Study in Discourse Analysis”.

Maria Sifianou
University of Athens (Greece)
Email: msifian@enl.uoa.gr
Research interests: politeness phenomena, discourse analysis in an intercultural perspective.

Malgorzata Suszczynska
Department of English, Institute of English and American Studies University of Szeged (Hungary)
Email: suszczynska@lit.u-szeged.hu
Research interests: apologies across languages and cultures, theories of politeness and impoliteness, (im)politeness and gender, and (im)politeness in the time of communist regime in Poland and Hungary.

Hidemitsu Takahashi
Hokkaido University (Japan)
Email: htaka@let.hokudai.ac.jp
Research interests: imperatives, directive speech acts, politeness, and discourse anaphors.

Ahmed Awad Mohamed Tayel
University of Alexandria ( Egypt )
Email: ahmed_tayel@yahoo.com
Research interests: Applied linguistics, pragmatics, politeness strategies and culture, reading poetry and aesthetic response.

Marina Terkourafi
Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US)
Email: mt217@uiuc.edu
Research interests: Post-Gricean pragmatics, sociolinguistics, historical
linguistics, cognitive linguistics, construction grammar.

Denise Troutman
Department of Linguistics, Michigan State University (US)
Email: denise.troutman@gmail.com
Research interests: women and im/politeness, especially African American women; unconventionalized im/politeness (social constituted im/politeness); gender and language; Ebonics.

Lik Hang Tsui
The Oriental Institute, University of Oxford (UK)
Email: likhang.tsui@ox.ac.uk
Research interests: Historical politeness, rhetorics and Chinese epistolary communication, literati culture in imperial China, historical social networks.

Monir Md. Uddin
Department of Japanese, Institute of Modern Languages, University of Dhaka (Bangladesh)
Email: mrimmoyee2001@yahoo.com
Research Interests: Contrastive studies on Japanese and Bengali Politeness

Escor E. Udosen
Department of Linguistics and Communication Studies, University of Calabar (Nigeria)
Email: escoreudosen@yahoo.com
Research interests: research on politeness especially in Ibibio a lower cross language of the south-south geopolitical zone of Nigeria, West Africa.

Mayumi Usami
Graduate School of Area and Culture Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies ( Japan )
Email: usamima@tufs.ac.jp
Research interests: Discourse politeness, politeness and gender, language and gender, interpersonal communication, intercultural pragmatics, social psychology of language, natural conversation analysis.

Caiwen Wang
Loughborough University ( UK )
Email: c.wang@lboro.ac.uk
Research interests: cross-cultural linguistic politeness; language acquisition; applications of Relevance Theory.

Ian Walkinshaw
Griffith University (Australia)
Email: i.walkinshaw@griffith.edu.au
Research interests: intercultural im/politeness, particularly among speakers of English as a lingua franca in East and Southeast Asia, rapport management, teasing and managing disagreement; second language politeness strategies of Japanese learners of English studying in New Zealand.

Helena Guerra Vicente
University of Brasilia (Brazil)
E-mail: helenagv@terra.com.br
Research interests: classroom politeness; the grammatical expression of
politeness in Tapirapé (Brazilian indigenous language); syntax/pragmatics.

Dengshan Xia
School of Languages and Communication Studies, Beijing Jiaotong University (China)
Email: xiadengshan@gmail.com
Research interests: pragmatics, sociolinguistics and politeness research.

Peixin Xian.
Zhejiang International Studies Universtity (China)
Email: xianpeixin@126.com
Research interests: Chinese and German Politeness, cross-cultural Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics and Corpus linguistics

Feng Xiao
Pomona College (USA)
Email: feng.xiao@pomona.edu
Research interests: interlanguage pragmatics, linguistic politeness, and statistical language learning.

Chaoqun Xie
National Key Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou (China)
chaoqunxie@yahoo.com.cn
Research interests: Interactional pragmatics, sociology of politeness.