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This paper investigates cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness. It is based on 500 impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey. The main analytical framework adopted is Spencer-Oatey's (e.g. 2000) "rapport management", covering various types of face as well as sociality rights. We offer some clarifications of this framework, and explain and demonstrate how it can be operationalised for quantitative analysis. In general, it offers a good account of our data, though accommodating ambiguous cases proved to be a major challenge. Our quantitative analysis suggests that three of the five categories of Spencer-Oatey's framework are key ones, namely, quality face, equity rights and association rights. Furthermore, differences between our geographically separated datasets emerge. For example, the England-based data has a preponderance of impoliteness events in which quality face is violated, whereas the Chinabased data has a preponderance where equity rights are violated. We offer some explanations for these differences, relating them where possible to broader cultural issues.

This study involved a corpus-based textual analysis of authorial presence markers in the argumentative essays of Turkish and American students. Utilising Hyland's interactional metadiscourse model (2005a) as the analysis framework, it aimed to compare the features of stance in L1 and L2 essays by Turkish learners of English with those in essays by monolingual American students. Also, discourse-based interviews with ten students contributed to an understanding of the use of markers in their L1 and L2 writing. The results indicate that the use of authorial presence markers in English essays by Turkish students was more similar to the use of these markers in writing by novice native English-speaking students than to the use of markers in the Turkish students' own writing in Turkish. The textual and interview data are discussed in relation to writing instruction, L1 writing conventions, and the institutional context.

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