The paper deals with tonal and pragmatic characteristics of politeness and anti-politeness expressing benevolent or unfriendly, serious or non-serious attitude to the communicative partner in personal or status discourse. The paper is based on the assumption that there is a genre specificity of politeness expression. An important indicator of the ethno-cultural specificity of politeness is the priority of respectful attitude towards in-group and out-group members. Politeness is a graded communicative phenomenon.