Blurb:

Xueyu Wang explores, within the framework of Leech’s (2014) GSP, how speakers “do” politeness in guest introducing and responding acts at Chinese dinner table. The results show that Chinese dinner table talk is a very complex social interaction involving different participant roles. In most guest introducing and responding acts, both Approbation Maxim and Modesty Maxim are used and realised linguistically with the use of typical address terms, adjectives, verbs, and nouns carrying positive semantic load and some syntactic structures like rhetorical questions and exclamatory sentences. In addition, in both guest introductions and responses at dinner tables, powers, social status, and interpersonal relations among participants are found to influence the use of politeness strategies and language choice.