Rita de Mendonça Freire Nogueira Faria is Assistant Professor at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, where she teaches a number of language and discourse-related BA and MA courses (Contrastive Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Media Discourse Analysis, etc.) She completed the PhD in Contrastive Linguistics in 2010 at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, the M.Phil in Linguistics in 2002 at the University of Cambridge and the BA in Portuguese and English Studies at the University of Lisbon, in 2001. She is a researcher at CECC - Research Centre for Communication and Culture and her research interests include: im/politeness; forms of address; im/politeness and fiction; language and gender; pragmatics, hate speech; verbal aggression; computer-mediated communication; sociolinguistics; corpus linguistics.