Volume 14, Issue 2 -

In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of compliments and other evaluative comments in French and Lebanese Arabic. The analysis is based on naturally-occurring interactions, video-recorded during dinner invitations among friends and relatives. The analysis focuses on two specific types of compliments related to being offered and savoring food. The description takes into account not only the linguistic forms of assessments and compliments (on the syntactic and lexical levels), but also vocal productions like “hm”, as well as gestures, mimics, gaze and other multimodal resources. In the first part of the paper, we discuss the main aspects of previous studies on compliments that will be used as reference points for our own study. We then present the corpora we used and our methodology. The last part of the paper is devoted to the interactional multimodal analysis of specific types of compliments related to being offered food in the two corpora.

Partial bilinguals who were born and raised in diaspora communities sometimes experience pragmatic failure when interacting with native speakers of their heritage language. This paper explores encounters among heritage and native speakers of Greek, focusing specifically on how the former conceptualize politeness, and how expectations may differ. Differences have been identified between Modern Greek and English: for example, the negotiation of the communication norms of a positive politeness society, – the management and mitigation of face threatening acts, the use of diminutives and terms of endearment, and the use of politeness markers and formulae. The present research explores how Greek and English politeness norms are conceptualized, experienced and managed by Australian-born heritage speakers of Greek. In semi-structured interviews of 1–1.5 hours’ duration, eliciting both general beliefs and small narratives of lived experience, Greek Australian participants were asked to reflect on their experiences communicating in Greek in a range of interpersonal contexts, including visits to Greece. The key concepts to emerge were directness, consideration and generosity, and respect, manifest in both behavior and language. Findings suggest that politeness expectations are at least partly shaped by experiences of communication with other members of the diaspora and with local and/or native speakers encountered during visits to Greece. A model is proposed for a range of situated interactions emerging from the data, which it is suggested can impact on politeness behavior and belief.

Previous research on politeness tends to examine the inadequacy of non-native speakers’ pragmatic knowledge. In this study, we broaden our focus to the influence of different lingua-cultural values on politeness in simulated workplace e-mail requests of Korean and American corporate employees. By exploring differential perceptions towards power-asymmetry, this study investigates how and why politeness strategies are realized similarly and/or differently in and around the speech acts of requests in English. By quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the elicited data, the study suggests that lingua-cultural values influenced perception and production in power-asymmetrical situations. Findings reveal that power is a more prominent factor than familiarity for Korean employees, but to a lesser extent for American employees when doing politeness in e-mail requests. Results showed that the underlying reasons for formulating requests differed not only between Korean and American employees but also between two Korean employee groups that differed according to depth of intercultural experience. This study contributes to recent research strands in intercultural pragmatics and communication by arguing that pragmatic strategies to express politeness in relation to power are culture specific with existing and newly reconstructed lingua-cultural values coming into play.

Placement interviews have become an important discourse genre at universities as they decide about access to social, monetary, or cultural resources. Despite their importance, hardly any linguistic studies deal with this particular discourse genre in academic communication. Using a conversation-analytic approach, we analyze a corpus of placement interviews in which representatives of a German university interview Chinese students applying for a study year at the German university. We examine how Chinese applicants present their second-hand knowledge about Germany and German universities in a conversation with university representatives who have first-hand knowledge about these spaces, i. e., we investigate how interviewers and interviewees deal with epistemic asymmetry when they construct and talk about academic spaces in China and Germany. While some aspects of German academia are situated in imagined spaces of which Chinese students cannot have direct knowledge, students are expected to know about other aspects of German academia that are situated in knowable spaces. Moreover, applicants and interviewers take varying evaluative and affective stances toward the different academic spaces and thus construct cultural difference. Interviewers treat German academia as a different or a foreign space. As part of a “hidden academic agenda” of university placement interviews, students construct German academia as a desired space with many opportunities and they present Chinese academia as an unsatisfying space they would like to leave behind. The paper contributes to recent studies of interactional sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, and epistemics in interaction by expanding their scope to the practices of affective and epistemic stance taking in intercultural communication.

This paper wishes to challenge the proposition that the word “rights” is a universal and innate concept in human societies. It provides an analysis of the absence and presence of the word “rights” in the Chinese language and culture in traditional and contemporary China. It presents a linguistic and cultural explanation for the fact that classical Chinese language and culture did not have an equivalent word or concept for the English word “rights.” After the word and concept of “rights” were introduced to China from the West in the second half of the nineteenth century, the new word quanli (rights) has since taken on Chinese shades of meaning, not entirely the same as its English counterpart. The paper proposes that the claim of the universal and innate nature of the word “rights” is not tenable.