'Directives in Young Peer Groups is a research monograph'-- a corpus study analysing contrastively the linguistic realisation of directive speech acts in Polish, German and British English in young peer groups. It was completed as a Habilitationsschrift in General and Comparative Linguistics with Focus on English Language, and revised afterwards by adding a review of newer literature. It has also been abbreviated by leaving aside some methodological considerations, two chapters and about 80 statistical tables.

The corpus under study comes from the reality T.V. series Big Brother, produced according to the same scenario in all three languages under study: British English, Polish and German. It includes program editions produced between 2001 and 2004, two for each language. The subject of the analysis are contrasts in the interactional styles in directive activities of Polish, British English and German speakers in their respective in-groups. The analysis was based on videotaped and transcribed material comprising complete sequence of from 12, 14 and 22 hours of recorded interaction for Polish, German and English respectively, and additional scenes selected from 90, 60 and 90 hours respectively of the recorded programme.

The analysis is guided by the notion of linguistic politeness, but it is not limited to it. Data comparison consists of:

A statistical comparison of tendencies, comparing interlingually the linguistic forms of directives, as well as their dependence on the type of directive and the type of participants;

A qualitative in-depth analysis of language-specific tendencies uncovered by the statistical comparison, using methods and concepts from the study of politeness, spoken language analysis, interpretative sociolinguistics, and stylistics.