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Cultural values can be important determinants of academic authors' rhetorical behavior. In particular, cultural characteristics such as uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and individualism/collectivism may a¤ect the ways authors express their certainty and commitment to their claims and appeal to group solidarity and communal opinion with a view to soliciting readers' acceptance of claims and community consensus.This paper aims to illustrate the ways such cultural characteristics differentiate the degree of certainty and conviction to claims expressed by native speakers of English (NSE) and native speakers of Greek (NSG) in research articles from the fields of electronic and electrical, and chemical engineering. Three sets of data are analyzed: research articles written by NSE, NSG in English and NSG in Greek, a total of 49, published in journals and conference proceedings.The findings indicate that Greek authors appear a great deal more certain and committed to their claims than native English speaking authors. This is shown to be a result of the high uncertainty avoidance, high power distance, and collective values that characterize Greek society.

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While the speech act of apology has been investigated in a number of languages and cultures, there has been little research into apologies inGreek. Apology studies have tended to identify apology strategies, without taking into account the effect of the wider cultural context on apologies motivation and strategies, and have also tended not to include apology responses in their analyses. Remedial work, however, involves both apologies and replies to them (Goffman 1971). Based on data from a recent Greek TV reality game show, this paper looks at apologies and apology responses ("remedial interchanges", Goffman 1971), analyzing in detail the context in which they occurred and the relationship between interactants.The main aims are to identify: (1) the constituent elements of an offence and the factors that determine its weightiness; (2) the degree to which face, social distance and power determine the weightiness of an offence, the recipients' responses, and the strategies and language used in the remedial interchanges, and (3) the degree to which these are culturally determined. This involves an investigation of the components of face and relations of power and solidarity in Greek society as well as of the ways the game show manipulates interpersonal relations and foregrounds Greek traditions and cultural values by explicitly attempting to contravene them.