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24 - Service Encounter Discourse

from Part II - Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2021

By
J. César Félix-Brasdefer  and
Rosina Márquez Reiter
Edited by
Michael Haugh ,
Dániel Z. Kádár  and
Marina Terkourafi
Michael Haugh
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Dániel Z. Kádár
Affiliation:
Hungarian Research Institute for Linguistics, and Dalian University of Foreign Languages
Marina Terkourafi
Affiliation:
Leiden University
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Summary

Commercial service encounters are broadly defined as everyday interactions in which some kind of commodity, be it goods, information or both, is exchanged between a service provider (e.g. clerk, vendor) and a service seeker (e.g. customer). Previous work has focused primarily on transactional and interpersonal aspects of service encounters, including issues of politeness and intracultural variation in face-to-face, telephone and online contexts. In this chapter, we examine current issues in service encounter discourse. After presenting some key concepts and predominant contexts of service encounters, we provide a critical review of theoretical models used to examine service encounter interaction, explain the distinction between interpersonal and transactional talk and describe some aspects of sociopragmatic variation in service encounter contexts. We end the chapter with a discussion of methodological issues and future directions.

Keywords

service encounterinstitutional talkmodes of communicationvariation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics , pp. 496 - 519
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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