Non-acceptances in context
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Anita Fetzer
Her research interests focus on the interdependence between natural language communication and context. She has had a series of articles published on the communicative act of rejection, context, political interviews, and intercultural communication. She is the author of
Negative Interaktionen (1994) andRecontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness (2004), and the co-editor ofRethinking Sequentiality (2002),The Contexts of Social Action (2002),Pragmatic Aspects of Political Discourse in the Media (2006), andLexical Markers of Common Grounds (2006).
Abstract
The communicative act of non-acceptance expresses the speaker's intention to deny, reject or disagree with a communicative act. Regarding its sequential status, a non-acceptance is a responsive act par excellence, and from an interpersonal perspective it can be assigned the status of a face-threatening act. While its responsive format does not seem to cause any severe communicative problems in intercultural communication, its face-threatening potential makes it a prime candidate for intercultural miscommunication.
The goal of this paper is to systematize the contextual constraints and requirements of a non-acceptance in a dialogue frame of reference based on the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim (Fetzer 2002, 2004), which is anchored to the Gricean cooperative principle (Grice 1975), Habermas' theory of communicative action (Habermas 1987), and Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987). The pragmatic premises of intentionality, rationality, and cooperation are supplemented by the interactional-sociolinguistic universal of contextualization (Gumperz 1996). The dialogue framework allows for a comprehensive examination of culture-preferential modes for the realization and contextualization of nonacceptances and possible perlocutionary effects, illustrated by excerpts from German, British and intercultural German-British political discourse.
About the author
Her research interests focus on the interdependence between natural language communication and context. She has had a series of articles published on the communicative act of rejection, context, political interviews, and intercultural communication. She is the author of Negative Interaktionen (1994) and Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness (2004), and the co-editor of Rethinking Sequentiality (2002), The Contexts of Social Action (2002), Pragmatic Aspects of Political Discourse in the Media (2006), and Lexical Markers of Common Grounds (2006).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts
- Brown & Levinson's face: How it can—and can't—help us to understand interaction across cultures
- Non-acceptances in context
- NSM Semantics versus Conceptual Semantics: Goals and standards (A response to Jackendoff)
- A response to N. J. Enfield's review of Ethnopragmatics (Goddard, ed. 2006)
- Book review
- Contributors to this issue
Articles in the same Issue
- The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts
- Brown & Levinson's face: How it can—and can't—help us to understand interaction across cultures
- Non-acceptances in context
- NSM Semantics versus Conceptual Semantics: Goals and standards (A response to Jackendoff)
- A response to N. J. Enfield's review of Ethnopragmatics (Goddard, ed. 2006)
- Book review
- Contributors to this issue
