Invitations and politeness in Greek: The age variable

Abstract

This paper investigates invitations and invitation refusals in Greek and their relationship to politeness within Brown and Levinson's (Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage, Cambridge University Press, 1987) framework. On the basis of data drawn from role plays corroborated with informants' verbal reports, it is argued that age is a determining factor for both the format of the speech event of inviting/refusing and the politeness strategies preferred for its realization. It is shown that the younger age group conceptualize invitations as face-enhancing acts for the addressee, thus, they insist more and prefer positive politeness strategies. By contrast, the older age group conceptualize invitations as addressee face-threatening acts, so they hardly ever insist and appear to favour negative politeness strategies. This latter observation seems to challenge earlier findings regarding the positive politeness orientation of Greek society. However, a closer look at the data reveals that the negative politeness strategies employed are intermingled with positive politeness ones or they function as such in the specific context. These findings bring to the fore a number of issues relating to Brown and Levinson's theory, including the difficulty of drawing a clear-cut distinction between positive and negative politeness strategies and the caution that should be exercised when attributing type of politeness to decontextualized utterances. The findings are further used to offer suggestions for foreign language teaching.