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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
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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

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