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Wanting to be wanted: a comparative study of incidence and severity in indirect complaint on the part of French and English language teaching assistants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2010

ROBERT CRAWSHAW ,
JONATHAN CULPEPER  and
JULIA HARRISON
ROBERT CRAWSHAW*
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
JONATHAN CULPEPER
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
JULIA HARRISON
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
*
Address for correspondence: Robert Crawshaw, Department of European Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University, Lancashire, LA1 4YN, UK[email protected]
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Abstract

Using data from the ESRC funded project Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication (PIC), this paper applies contrastive quantitative and qualitative analysis to data derived from oral statements, logbooks and retrospective reports by language teaching assistants in France and England. The data concerns their ‘rapport’ (Spencer-Oatey, 2003; 2005) with the members of staff responsible for their professional supervision and the paper assesses complaint behaviour across the two national groups. Basing our study on computer recorded discourse segments taxonomically codified as ‘negative assessment’, we show that the incidence of ‘indirect’ complaint (Boxer, 1993) is significantly higher among English assistants than among their French counterparts. A revised model for measuring ‘severity’ (House and Kasper, 1981; Olshtain and Weinbach, 1993) is applied to the data using corpus linguistic techniques. Its findings demonstrate that English assistants also complain more ‘severely’ than their French peers. Nevertheless, the difference in linguistic behaviour between individuals within each group is shown to be greater than that between the two national groups, implying that personality is a stronger determinant of cultural outlook than nationality.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 20 , Special Issue 1: Cross-cultural Pragmatics – Pragmatique comparée à la croisée des chemins: cadres du discours et perceptions culturelles , March 2010 , pp. 75 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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ELECTRONIC

Crawshaw, R. (2005). Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication: interim report on the PIC project to the British Council and the ESRC http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/pic/data/docs/Interim_ReportGoogle Scholar
Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication: the website of the PIC Project: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/pic/Google Scholar