Politeness metadiscourses in the practice of Hungarian language consulting

Abstract

The paper presents how problems of linguistic politeness are reflected in the practice of institutional language consulting. The research analyses questions and answers on linguistic politeness in the database of emails from the Language Consulting Service of the HUN-REN Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics. Through an in-depth analysis of a selected e-mail, the paper shows that uncertainties about linguistic politeness (forms of address, greetings) are typically formulated as issues requiring normative guidance. The analysis of the consultant’s answer also shows that in the case of politeness questions the language consulting strategy requires, in addition to knowledge of scientific findings, an awareness of the community’s politeness, an understanding of the socio-cultural situation and environment of the inquirer, and an identification of his/her linguistic and social attitudes.