Professor Dániel Z. Kádár, Director of Centre for Intercultural Politeness Research at the University of Huddersfield, U.K., gave a talk entitled(Im)Politeness and Cultureon December 4^th,2014 inthe lecture room of theNationalKeyResearchCenterfor Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.

This talk aimed totease out the delicate relationship between linguistic (im)politeness and culture. In consistence with his new monograph,Understanding Politeness, ProfessorKádár pointed out that the topic of “politeness” encompasses not only theconventional acts of linguistic etiquette but all types of interpersonal behaviour as well. Across cultures, to be specific, in different social and interpersonal situations, “politeness” means different things. He first illustrated with vivid examples the complicated relations between culture and politeness. Then he examined the role that cultural difference plays in the production of politeness. In fact, it is not easy to capture cultural differences in terms of politeness because people are often “accommodative” in real life and achieve the goals of association and dissociation by being polite. Generally speaking, culture can be utilized as a kind of “resource” in terms of politeness for the management of interpersonal relations. Politeness and culture are important to understand each other. Last, ProfessorKádárproposed a micro and macro combined analytic approach to culturally situated politeness, highlighting the need to consider both micro and macro issues.

In this talk, ProfessorKádár demonstrated a framework for the research into linguistic (im)politeness, which evoked the audience’s interest in research topics related to culture and politeness.