14 - Maintaining Smooth Intercultural Relations

Summary

This chapter focuses on the proactive management of relations in terms of ‘rapport maintenance’; in other words, the use of language to minimise or prevent causing offence. The chapter takes a communication-style approach and argues that directness–indirectness is a particularly important facet to be managed. This is not only because it is a key feature of politeness theorising, but because research has revealed widespread intercultural differences in people’s preferences for a given level of directness in a given context, and because this in turn can give rise to a range of interactional challenges and misunderstandings. The chapter also argues that other aspects of language use are important; its pays particular attention to the participation domain – how far simultaneous talk is acceptable and patterns of turn-taking and backchannelling. Finally, the chapter argues that the various communication styles that have been identified in the literature should not be viewed as dichotomies, but rather as continua. The chapter draws on relational dialectic theory to underpin this perspective. For all facets of ‘rapport maintenance’, both mindfulness and (convergent/mutual) accommodation are important.