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.

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Abrams 1988) call social identification. Since previous research has shown that the use of person reference in Present-Day English is biased towards group distinction, linking positive characteristics to members of one's in-group and distancing people in the out-group with negative reference, it is probable that this was the case in historical language use as well.The study shows that most of the referents in the letter writers', and in many cases also in the recipients', in-group are indexed with positive descriptions and reference terms in positive contexts, whereas identifiable out-group referents mostly receive negative descriptions. The negatively, positively and neutrally evaluative functions were found to be central during both centuries. The neutral function is more prevalent than the others in the seventeenth century, but the negative and positive gain more emphasis in the eighteenth century. This shows that when both pronouns increasingly started to appear as connotative demonstrative determiners, their use as mere indexicals decreased. Overall, we can conclude that although the historical use of demonstrative pronouns as determiners in reference did not show a similar bias towards negative foregrounding to their Present-Day English equivalents, there is some indication that a change towards a more specialised use was on the way from the eighteenth century onwards.