This paper investigates invitations and invitation refusals in Greek and their relationship to politeness within Brown and Levinson's (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.
This study explores the pragmatic awareness of instructed L2 learners of Greek (economic migrants) by examining the extent to which these learners display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical violations. Methodologically, the study is largely based on the Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei (1998) study on pragmatic awareness. However, unlike the former, it does not compare SL and FL learners, but two groups of SL learners with different length of residence in Greece. Hence, it attempts to reach conclusions with respect to the impact of residence on the development of pragmatic awareness. It is shown that both learner groups consistently recognise grammatical violations with greater frequency than pragmatic ones and rate the former as more severe than the latter. It is concluded that for this particular learner sample, length of residence alone is not a sufficient condition for the development of pragmatic awareness. The suggestion is made that this is due at least partly to the special circumstances of the participants, which do not allow for sufficient opportunities for social contact with native speakers. The conclusions have important implications both for the role of the L2 setting in pragmatic development and for language instruction.
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