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In the 19 th century, in the eastern half of Prussia's region of Upper Silesia, continental Europe's second largest industrial basin emerged. In the course of the accelerated urbanization that followed, an increasing number of German- and Germanic-speakers arrived in this overwhelmingly Slavophone area that historically skirted the Germanic dialect continuum to the west. The resultant dynamic interaction between Slavicand German/ic-speakers led to the emergence of an Upper Silesian Slavic-Germanic pidgin that, in the late 19 th century, became creolized. The 1922 partition of this region between Germany and Poland led to respective Germanization and Polonization of a population that was typically multiglossic in the creole, in the local Slavic dialect, in standard German, and in standard Polish. Successive dramatic reversals in these policies of Germanization and Polonization between 1939 and 1989 ensured the survival of a Polonized version of the creole, which the local population perceives either as a dialect of German, or a dialect of Polish, or their own (national) Silesian language.

Brown and Levinson's ([1978] Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987) politeness theory has been criticized as being ethnocentric by displaying a Western preoccupation with autonomy and individualism. Many non-western societies, it is argued, are better understood by appealing to cultural discernment or group face. Whether or not this is a fair criticism of Brown and Levinson, is it a fair understanding of Western politeness notions? This paper examines how people manage the face of a third party, one who is neither the speaker nor the hearer, in interactions through apology behavior in Korea and the United States. A Discourse Completion Task containing 6 situations was given to 163 participants. In each situation, a family member of the speaker commits a possible offense to another individual. If the speaker apologizes to that individual, it is taken as evidence that the speaker takes responsibility and feels regret for an action they themselves did not commit. A mixed-effects regression analysis was used to examine the factors of (1) the participant's country, (2) the participant's gender, (3) the relation's gender, (4) the intimacy of the situation, and (5) the presence of the speaker during the offense. Contrary to the typical collectivist/individualist distinction, both Koreans and Americans apologized, overall, in similar situations. The speaker's presence was the overriding factor predicting the chance of an apology. The factors did operate in different patterns within each nation, however. Rather than a simple collectivist/individualist distinction, both the qualitative and quantitative results suggest that people in both societies attempt to manage the face of groups to which they belong, though there are indeed differences concerning the specific situations and responsible players.

Whereas the speech act of refusal is universal across language, the politeness value and the types of linguistic forms used to perform it vary across language and culture. The majority of the comparative pragmatic research findings were derived from one single source of data (i.e., either production data or perception data). Few attempts have been made to collect different sources of data to triangulate the findings. This study attempts to fill this gap by examining the problems that Chinese learners of English encounter when performing refusal responses through the comparison of production and perception data between an NS group and a Chinese learners of English group. The results showed that one major problem found in Chinese EFL learners' production and perception regarding refusing in English involved their relying on the indirect L1 communication style manifested in the less frequent use of direct refusal strategies and frequent use of excuse/reason with specific and significant details in L2 refusals. The other major problem in Chinese EFL learners' refusal responses concerned the ungrammatical sentences and inaccurate word choice, which often caused confusion.

Extending Lee's (Pragmatics 15: 395–422, 2005) work, the researcher further investigates the requestive behaviour of a group of Cantonese learners of English (CLEs) in Hong Kong in terms of their strategy and linguistic preference. The data were collected from a discourse completion test (DCT). Their requestive behaviour is studied in three social and power hierarchical situations (low–high, equal–equal and high–low) in the university context and is compared with a group of native Cantonese speakers' (NCSs) and native English speakers' (NESs) requestive behaviour, respectively. The dual comparison results in three important findings. First, the evidence shows some L1 influence on the syntactic structure of the CLEs' query preparatory strategy. The equivalent interrogative form of (Nei 1 /Ngo5) ho2 ji5/h2 m ho2 ji5: (you/I) can/can-not-can in Cantonese and Can/Could/May you/I …? in English contributes to the frequent use of the CLEs' indirect requestive behaviour in English. Nevertheless, the difference in direct and indirect strategies between the two groups is significant ( p < 0.005). Second, there is cross-cultural agreement on indirect requestive behaviour in the three situations between the CLEs and the NESs. Both groups use the politeness marker of cing2 or please to mitigate imposition and increase politeness. However, the CLEs demonstrate limited pragmalinguistic resources to enhance the force and politeness of the speech act compared to the NESs. The strengths and weaknesses of CLEs' requestive behaviour, their limited pragmalinguistic resources and the limitations of the study are discussed.