Directives in Young Peer Groups is a corpus study analysing contrastively the production of directive utterances in young peer groups in British English, German, and Polish. The corpus under study comes from the reality TV series Big Brother, produced according to the same scenario in all three languages. It includes program editions broadcast between 2011 and 2004, two for each language. The subject of the analysis is the differences in the interaction styles manifested in directive activities of British, Polish, and German speakers in their respective in-groups.
Data comparison consists of a statistical comparison of tendencies concerning linguistic forms of directives as well as factors that influence them, followed by a qualitative in-depth analysis of language-specific tendencies uncovered in the statistical part. The methods and concepts used in the qualitative study come from the study of politeness, spoken language analysis, interpretative sociolinguistics, and stylistics.
The analysis is guided by the notion of linguistic politeness but also includes other aspects of interactional rhetoric. It shows how tendencies towards displaying negative and positive politeness, or consideration and involvement, correlate with a culture´s collectivist versus individualist orientation; and how group aspects of interaction, generally neglected in studies of speech acts and interpersonal rhetoric, affect the production and form of directive speech.