THE BACKGROUND OF POLITENESS UNIVERSALS1 Stavros Assimakopoulos Institute of Linguistics, University of Malta Block A, Car Park 6, Msida, MSD 2080, MALTA Early accounts of politeness have been widely criticised for adopting a universalist stance while attempting to account for a phenomenon that is clearly culture-dependent. <...> In reaction to this criticism, Leech (2007/2014) has argued for the necessity of politeness universals, on condition that they allow for the investigation of the relevant cultural variation. <...> This paper sets out to provide additional support for Leech’s claim, by pursuing the argument that even though different societies have in principle different politeness values, all members of the same cultural and/or linguistic group typically accept very similar sets of such values. <...> This argument is theoretically supported by resort to Searle’s notion of the Background, as a body of preintentional mental capacities that safeguards the alignment of our intentional states with that of our peers. <...> Given then the systematicity with which we develop a culturally uniform understanding of politeness, the postulation of politeness universals, in Leech’s sense, cannot but be a useful analytical tool when theorising about politeness. <...> Introduction Alongside Lakoff (1973) and Brown and Levinson (1987), Leech’s pioneering work in his Principles of Pragmatics (1983) marked the establishment of politeness as a topic of central interest for the study of pragmatics. <...> Early attempts to tackle politeness, like the ones mentioned above, followed a broadly Gricean outlook, by stipulating universal principles and/or strategies that result in the communication of a polite attitude. <...> Arundale 1999, Haugh 2014), which view the evaluation of politeness as derivative of in situ interactional negotiation that is governed by culture-specific norms3. 1 I would like to thank Tatiana Larina for her kind invitation, sound advice and, above all, patience while I was preparing this paper. <...> Part of my argumentation here draws on research that was reported in Assimakopoulos (2008) and was partly funded by an AHRC Doctoral Award and a Doctoral Scholarship from the College of Humanities and Social Science of the University of Edinburgh. 2 Throughout this paper, I will only be using the term ‘politeness’ and its derivatives for the sake of convenience, but this should not be taken as a sign of neglect for the equally important area of impoliteness <...>