Conceptualizing politeness in Greek: Evidence from Twitter corpora

•Twitter as a source of naturally occurring data.•The influence of the medium in the conceptualization of politeness.•Politeness is not restricted to verbal behaviour.

One of the tenets of the discursive (or postmodern) turn in politeness research is the importance of distinguishing between lay understandings of politeness and politeness as a theoretical construct. In this context, it has been argued that research should focus on lay people's understandings of politeness and impoliteness as they emerge in their everyday interactions. This emphasis has been implemented primarily with examples from the sequential development of real-life interactions and from assessments made by participants. However, in this way, more general conventions may be missed.Discursive researchers have also emphasized the merits of authentic data and various kinds of tailor-made and classic reference corpora have been used thus offering a broader basis to test theoretical issues. This paper attempts to contribute to this direction and investigate how politeness is conceptualized in Greek using a corpus consisting of short messages (19,500 tweets).