Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-19T09:51:56.748Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

19 - Politeness and Rapport Management

from Part III - Interface of Intercultural Pragmatics and Related Disciplines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

By
Helen Spencer-Oatey
Edited by
Istvan Kecskes
Istvan Kecskes
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Albany
Get access

Summary

This chapter reviews work on politeness and rapport management from an intercultural pragmatics perspective. After an initial introduction, the first main section considers conceptual and methodological challenges and explores three key issues: the various ways in which culture has been conceptualized within politeness theory, the challenge of integrating micro and macro perspectives on intercultural interaction, and first-order and second-order perspectives on politeness and culture. The second main section of the chapter turns to the performance of intercultural politeness. It starts by reporting on the many intercultural studies that have analyzed the impact of different speech and behavioral practices on interpersonal relations. It then reviews the much smaller number of intercultural politeness studies that have examined interlocutors’ potentially different interpretations of the context. After this, it turns to the possible impact of differing cultural values on intercultural politeness. The third main section focuses on intercultural politeness from an evaluation perspective. It presents recent theorizing on the evaluation process and considers methodological challenges in obtaining and interpreting relevant data. The chapter ends by proposing some areas for future research.

Keywords

politenessintercultural interpretationsrapport managementconfrontationcultural values
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics , pp. 484 - 509
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J. R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M. D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., and Qin, Y. (2004). An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review, 111(4), 1037–1049.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bailey, B. (1997). Communication of respect in interethnic service encounters. Language in Society, 26, 327–356.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, B. (2000). Communicative behavior and conflict between African-American customers and Korean immigrant retailers in Los Angeles. Discourse and Society, 11(1), 86–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, J. (1991). How much culture is there in intercultural communication? In Blommaert, J. and Verschueren, J., eds., The Pragmatics of International and Intercultural Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 13–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bond, M. H., Žegarac, V., and Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000). Culture as an explanatory variable: Problems and possibilities. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, pp. 47–71.Google Scholar
Bouchara, A. (2015). The role of religion in shaping politeness in Moroccan Arabic: The case of the speech act of greeting and its place in intercultural understanding and misunderstanding. Journal of Politeness Research, 11(1), 71–98.Google Scholar
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development. Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chang, W.-L. M. and Haugh, M. (2011). Evaluations of im/politeness of an intercultural apology. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8(3), 411–442. doi: 410.1515/IPRG.2011.1019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, R. (1993). Responding to compliments: A contrastive study of politeness strategies between American English and Chinese speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, 20, 49–75.Google Scholar
Culpeper, J. (2011). Politeness and impoliteness. In Aijmer, K. and Andersen, G., eds., Handbooks of Pragmatics, Vol. V: Pragmatics of Society (General editors Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 391–436.Google Scholar
Davies, B. L. (2018). Evaluating evaluations: What different types of metapragmatic behaviour can tell us about participants’ understandings of the moral order. Journal of Politeness Research, 14(1), 121–151. https://doi.org/110.1515/pr-2017-0037.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, B. L., Haugh, M., and Merrison, A. J. (eds.) (2011). Situated Politeness. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Eades, D. (2003). The politics of misunderstanding in the legal system. Aboriginal English speakers in Queensland. In House, J., Kasper, G., and Ross, S., eds., Misunderstanding in Social Life: Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk. London: Longman, pp. 199–226.Google Scholar
Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2016). Variation in evaluations of the (im)politeness of emails from L2 learners and perceptions of the personality of their senders. Journal of Pragmatics, 106, 1–19. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2016.1010.1001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eelen, G. (2001). A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St Jerome.Google Scholar
Fiksdal, S. (1990). The Right Time and Pace: A Microanalysis of Cross-Cultural Gatekeeping Interviews. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Fischer, R. and Schwartz, S. H. (2011). Whence differences in value priorities?: Individual, cultural, or artifactual sources. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(7), 1127–1144. doi: 1110.1177/0022022110381429.Google Scholar
Fraser, B. and Nolan, W. (1981). The association of deference with linguistic form. In Walters, J., ed., The Sociolinguistics of Deference and Politeness. [Special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language 128]. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 93–111.Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2010). A genre approach to the study of im-politeness. International Review of Pragmatics, 2, 46–94.Google Scholar
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Motyl, M., Meindl, P., Iskiwitch, C., and Mooijman, M. (2018). Moral foundations theory. In Gray, K. and Graham, J., eds., Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 211–222.Google Scholar
Grazia Guido, M. (2004). Cross-cultural miscommunication in welfare officers’ interrogations. In Candlin, C. N. and Gotti, M., eds., Intercultural Aspects of Specialized Communication. Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 127–145.Google Scholar
Grieve, A. (2010). “Aber ganz ehrlich”: Differences in episodic structure, apologies and truth- orientation in German and Australian workplace telephone discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 190–219.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Günthner, S. (2008). Negotiating rapport in German-Chinese conversation. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 207–226.Google Scholar
Haidt, J., and Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In Fiske, S., Gilbert, D., and Lindzey, G., eds., Handbook of Social Psychology. 5th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, pp. 797–852.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. (2010). Intercultural (im)politeness and the micro-macro issue. In Trosborg, A. ed., Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 139–166.Google Scholar
Haugh, M. and Chang, W.-l. M. (2019). “The apology seemed (in)sincere”: Variations in the perceptions of (im)politeness. Journal of Pragmatics, 142, 207–222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.11.022CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haugh, M., and Kádár, D. Z. (2017). Intercultural (im)politeness. In Culpeper, J., Haugh, M., and Kádár, D. Z., eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)Politeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 601–632.Google Scholar
Hill, B., Ide, S., Ikuta, S., Kawasaki, A., and Ogino, T. (1986). Universals of linguistic politeness: Quantitative evidence from Japanese and American English. Journal of Pragmatics, 10, 347–371.Google Scholar
Holmes, J. (2018). Negotiating the cultural order in New Zealand workplaces. Language in Society, 47(1), 33–56.Google Scholar
Holmes, J., Marra, M., and Vine, B. (2011). Leadership, Discourse, and Ethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
House, J. (2000). Understanding misunderstanding: A pragmatic-discourseapproach to analysing mismanaged rapport in talk across cultures. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, pp. 145–164.Google Scholar
House, J. (2003). Misunderstanding in intercultural university encounters. In House, J., Kasper, G., and Ross, S., eds., Misunderstanding in Social Life: Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk. London: Pearson Education, pp. 22–56.Google Scholar
Janoff-Bulman, R. and Carnes, N. C. (2018). The model of moral motives: A map of the moral domain. In Gray, K. and Graham, J., eds., Atlas of Moral Psychology. New York: The Guilford Press, pp. 223–230.Google Scholar
Kádár, D. Z. and Haugh, M. (2013). Understanding Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kecskes, I. (2014). Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kim, K. H. and Spencer-Oatey, H. (2021). Metapragmatic comments on relating across cultures: Korean students’ uncertainties over relating to UK academics. Pragmatics, 31(2), 198–224.Google Scholar
Laird, J. E., Lebiere, C., and Rosenbloom, P. S. (2017). A standard model of the mind: Toward a common computational framework across artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics. AI Magazine, 38(4), 13–26. doi: 10.1609/aimag.v38i4.2744.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness;or, minding your p’s and q’s. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 292–305.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1989). The limits of politeness: Therapeutic and courtroom discourse. Multilingua, 8(2–3), 101–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Leech, G. (2014). The Pragmatics of Politeness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lefringhausen, K., Spencer-Oatey, H., and Debray, C. (2019). Culture, norms and the assessment of communication contexts: Multidisciplinary perspectives. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 50(10), 1098–1111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locher, M. A. and Watts, R. J. (2005). Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research, 1(1), 9–33.Google Scholar
Malle, B. F., Giuglielmo, S. and Monroe, A. E. (2014). A theory of blame. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 147–186. doi: 110.1080/1047840X.1042014.1877340.Google Scholar
Marriott, H. E. (1990). Intercultural business negotiations: the problem of norm discrepancy. ARAL Series S, 7, 33–65.Google Scholar
Miller, L. (1995). Two aspects of Japanese and American co-worker interaction: Giving instructions and creating rapport. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 31(2), 141–161.Google Scholar
Miller, L. (2008). Negative assessments in Japanese–American workplace interaction. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory, 2nd ed. (Vol. 31). London: Continuum, pp. 227–240.Google Scholar
Roberts, C., Davies, E., and Jupp, T. (1992). Language and Discrimination. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Ryoo, H.-K. (2005). Achieving friendly interactions: A study of service encounters between Korean shopkeepers and African-American customers. Discourse and Society, 16(1), 79–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schnurr, S. and Zayts, O. (2017). Language and Culture at Work. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schwartz, S. H. (2007). Universalism values and the inclusiveness of our moral universe. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 38(6), 711–728.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, S. H. (2011). Values: Cultural and individual. In Van de Vijver, F. J. R., Chasiotis, A., and Breugelmans, S. M., eds., Fundamental Questions in Cross-Cultural Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 463–493.Google Scholar
Schwartz, S. H. and Bardi, A. (2001). Value hierarchies across cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32(3), 268–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022101032003002.Google Scholar
Schwartz, S. H., Cieciuch, J., Vecchione, M., Davidov, E., Fischer, R., Beierlein, C., and Konty, M. (2012). Refining the theory of basic individual values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 663–688. https://doi.org/610.1037/a0029393.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sharifian, F. (2017). Cultural Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008a). Face, (im)politeness and rapport. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 11–47.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2008b). Introduction. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 1–8.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Franklin, P. (2009). Intercultural Interaction: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Intercultural Communication. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Kádár, D. Z. (2016). The bases of (im)politeness evaluations: Culture, the moral order and the East-West debate. East Asian Pragmatics, 1(1), 73–106. https://doi.org/110.1558/eap.v1551i1551.29084.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Kádár, D. Z. (2021). Intercultural Politeness: Managing Relations across Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H., Lefringhausen, K., and Debray, C. (2019). Culture, norms, and the assessment of communication contexts: Discussion and pointers for the future. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 50(10), 1216–1220.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H., Ng, P., and Dong, L. (2008). British and Chinese reactions to compliment responses. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 95–117.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Wang, J. (2019). Culture, context, and concerns about face: Synergistic insights from pragmatics and social psychology Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 38(4), 423–440.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Wang, J. (2020). Establishing professional intercultural relations: Chinese perceptions of behavioural success in a Sino-American exchange visit. Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 49(6), 499–519. doi:10.1080/17475759.2020.1788119.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Xing, J. (2005). Managing talk and non-talk in intercultural interactions: Insights from two Chinese-British business meetings. Multilingua, 24, 55–74.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H. and Xing, J. (2008). Issues of face in a Chinese business visit to Britain. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 258–273.Google Scholar
Spencer-Oatey, H., and Xing, J. (2019). Interdisciplinary perspectives on interpersonal relations and the evaluation process: Culture, norms and the moral order. Journal of Pragmatics, 151, 141–154. doi: 110.1016/j.pragma.2019.1002.1015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terkourafi, M. (2005). Beyond the micro-level in politeness research. Journal of Politeness Research, 1, 237–262.Google Scholar
Ting-Toomey, S. and Oetzel, J. G. (2013). Culture-based situational conflict model: An update and expansion. In Oetzel, J. G. and Ting-Toomey, S., eds., The Sage Handbook of Conflict Communication, 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 763–790.Google Scholar
Tyler, A. (1995). The coconstruction of cross-cultural miscommunication. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17(2), 129–152.Google Scholar
Wang, J. and Spencer-Oatey, H. (2015). The gains and losses of face in ongoing intercultural interaction: A case study of Chinese participant perspectives. Journal of Pragmatics, 89, 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2015.09.007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, R. J. (2003). Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, R. J. (2005). Linguistic politeness research. Quo vadis? In Watts, R. J., Ide, S., and Ehlich, K., eds., Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, 2nd ed. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. xi–xlvii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, R. J., Ide, S., and Ehlich, K. (1992). Introduction. In Watts, R. J., Ide, S., and Ehlich, K., eds., Politeness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 1–17.Google Scholar
Xing, J. (2002). Relational management in British-Chinese business interactions. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Luton (now University of Bedfordshire).Google Scholar
Žegarac, V. and Pennington, M. C. (2008). Pragmatic transfer. In Spencer-Oatey, H., ed., Culturally Speaking: Culture, Communication and Politeness Theory. London: Continuum, pp. 141–163.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×