1 Forthcoming in Eva Ogiermann and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (eds.), From Speech Acts to Lay Understandings of Politeness. Multilingual and Multicultural Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. The metapragmatics of consideration in (Australian and New Zealand) English Michael Haugh The University of Queensland 1. Introduction A key ongoing debate amongst politeness researchers that remains yet to be resolved is how we should go about defining politeness. It is now well accepted that we may define politeness from either the perspective of the scientific analyst or that of the ordinary, lay speaker of a language. It is also increasingly clear that what counts as polite is not something about which ordinary speakers necessarily agree; and as, it turns out, nor do researchers either. Politeness is a fundamentally discursive concept, that is, one which does not have an objective existence outside of the discourses in which it is oriented to or talked about by users and observers of (different varieties of) a language (Eelen, 2001; Mills, 2003). For that reason, its very nature may be disputed by users and observers for material, real world reasons. However, despite its inherent argumentativity, it is nevertheless also apparent that there must be an object for those users and observers to discursively co-construct, negotiate or dispute in the first place. The question, then, is just how fuzzy are the boundaries of politeness? Is there more than one sense of it involved? And, most importantly perhaps, to what extent do understandings of politeness vary not only across users and observers of (different varieties of) a particular language, but across different languages? The contribution of Maria Sifianou to such ongoing debates has been seminal. Throughout her work she has consistently drawn our attention to the importance of studying how politeness is conceptualised across different languages, and these different understandings impact on the practices by which politeness arises in interaction across cultures. One key analytical theme running through Sifianou’s work is the emphasis she places on studying conceptualisations of politeness amongst ordinary users (Sifianou, 1992, 2011, 2015; Sifianou & Tzanne 2010). Such work generally comes under the broader umbrella of metapragmatics, that is, the study of reflexive awareness on the part of language users about their use of language (Verschueren, 2000). An important finding from Sifianou’s work is that consideration lies at the heart of understandings of politeness amongst both (British) speakers of English and speakers of Greek. Sifianou, for instance, suggests that “at its most basic level, politeness is seen as consideration for the other person, according to expected norms” (1992: 83, emphasis added). She goes on to elaborate that “politeness lies not just in showing consideration for others, but in conveying what the specific addressee will perceive as considerateness in a specific context” (1992: 93, emphasis added). 1 1 In this chapter, a mention of a word is indicated through italics (e.g. consideration), while in cases where a term is being used more broadly, it is left unmarked. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that while the meaning of a word is determined by its use, the meaning of a named concept is not limited to the use of a word, nor are concepts limited to those that can be named (see Haugh [2016: 45-46] for further discussion).