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The study compares how native speakers of German from the area of Innsbruck (Austria) and native speakers of Italian from the area of Rome (Italy) perceive the communicative act of backing out of an invitation for dinner at the last minute, in a situation of low social distance. The purpose of the study is twofold: to shed light on the orientation of Austrian German and Italian languages/cultures in terms of linguistic politeness, and to expand empirical cross-cultural research to a less-commonly investigated speech act. Data collected by means of a discourse completion task (DCT) are triangulated with responses to an assessment question and metapragmatic comments, and analyzed following a quantitative approach. The analysis of the DCT findings shows some cross-group differences in the choice of speech act realization strategies and internal modifiers. However, the overall results reveal more similarities than differences between the two populations regarding the informants’ perception of face threat in last-minute cancellations. This seems to disprove the idea that the two groups belong to different cultural frameworks in terms of politeness orientation, at least as far as it concerns the specific speech act under investigation.

Twitter is nowadays a powerful means of political propaganda. Its effectiveness can be easily appreciated in the large amounts of messages exchanged by politicians every day. This wealth of data, together with the interactive nature of the social medium, provides an ideal basis for the analysis of a striking feature of political messages, i.e., their implicitness, often achieved using presuppositions, among other strategies. The present work proposes a comparative analysis of British and Italian politicians' use of Twitter by focusing on implicit communication (notably, presuppositions) and the pragmatic functions of tweets. Based on a sample of about 400 tweets, our analysis shows that some of these functions tend to associate either with presuppositional or non-presuppositional communicative devices. Moreover, a critical methodological discussion is offered in order to address the main challenges of quantitative corpus-based pragmatics.