Impoliteness in Germany: Intercultural encounters in everyday and institutional talk
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Juliane House
Abstract
In this paper, I first look at how the notions of “politeness” and “impoliteness” have been discussed in the literature including my own ideas of relating universal levels of impoliteness to culture and language-specific levels. Given this framework and my earlier postulation of a set of dimensions along which German speakers were found to prefer expressions that are more direct than indirect, more explicit than implicit, and generally more content-oriented than addressee-oriented, I provide several examples of German speakers interacting with members of other cultures in everyday talk and academic advising sessions. In interpreting the results of the analyses of these interactions, I attempt to relate them to the concept of impoliteness, to German speakers' communicative preferences and to the distinction between an emic and an etic perspective.
© 2010 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: The status-quo and quo vadis of impoliteness research
- Impoliteness in Germany: Intercultural encounters in everyday and institutional talk
- Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey
- Face and impoliteness at the intersection with emotions: A corpus-based study in Turkish
- Conceptualizations of politeness and impoliteness in Greek
- A genre approach to impoliteness1 in a Spanish television talk show: Evidence from corpus-based analysis, questionnaires and focus groups
- Contributors to this issue
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: The status-quo and quo vadis of impoliteness research
- Impoliteness in Germany: Intercultural encounters in everyday and institutional talk
- Cross-cultural variation in the perception of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by students in England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey
- Face and impoliteness at the intersection with emotions: A corpus-based study in Turkish
- Conceptualizations of politeness and impoliteness in Greek
- A genre approach to impoliteness1 in a Spanish television talk show: Evidence from corpus-based analysis, questionnaires and focus groups
- Contributors to this issue
