Acknowledgements

I would like to thank members of the Linguistic Politeness Research Group, particularly the management group: Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Christine Christie, Jodie Clark, Jonathan Culpeper, Bethan Davis, Karen Grainger, Daniel Kadar, Andrew Merrison and Louise Mullany, for providing a productive environment in which to discuss ideas about politeness and impoliteness. Sandra Harris's work on institutional discourse has been a great influence on so many politeness theorists' work and she will be greatly missed. I am very privileged to work in a Linguistics group which consists of such supportive and motivated colleagues, who have created a very vibrant research culture, with reading groups and research projects: David Peplow, Karen Grainger, Peter Jones, Alice Bell, Jodie Clark, Sam Browse, Alison Gibbons, Isabelle van der Bom and Dave Sayers. Thanks are also due to Lucy Jones, Laura Paterson, Georgina Turner and Laura Coffey-Glover in the Discourses of Marriage research group and the Language and Gender Reading group.

Research students Zainab Kerkam, Ann Coady and Fathia Mansor have kept me on my toes, as have undergraduates at Sheffield Hallam who have taken the Politeness module (especially the 2016 students who kindly completed a questionnaire for me on self-deprecation). Sunny (Guang) Hu has given me great insights into generalisations about Chinese politeness, and Francis and Gabriel Mills Brown, and their friends, have helped me to find ways of discussing some young people's views of what counts as polite and impolite. Thanks also to the Harcourters, particularly Yonatan Shemmer and Sarah Durling for discussions about Hebrew and American English, Laure Astill in relation to French, Siavash Moshiri on Farsi, and Gillian Santander-Crow for her general wonderfulness. Thanks are due to Kate Wilkinson and Vanessa Fox. I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to Raslan Alzuebi, a wonderful Arabic teacher. The Language and Class reading group, Language and Gender reading group, Discourses of Marriage research group, Blurred Lines research group and Benefits Street research group have provided very productive contexts for the discussion of politeness in relation to class and gender. Some of these research groups had projects funded by Sheffield Hallam University for which I would like to acknowledge my thanks. Thanks also to Ursula.