{"id":381,"date":"2010-04-12T10:00:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T08:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=381"},"modified":"2010-02-11T12:12:19","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T10:12:19","slug":"culturally-speaking-culture-communication-and-politeness-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=381","title":{"rendered":"Culturally speaking, culture, communication and politeness theory"},"content":{"rendered":"
Culturally speaking, culture, communication and politeness theory.<\/strong> 2nd edn. Ed. by Helen Spencer-Oatey<\/strong>. New York: Continuum, 2008. Pp. xii, 372 ISBN 9780826493101<\/a>. $39.95.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Carol Myers-Scotton<\/strong><\/a>, Michigan State University<\/em><\/p>\n

This edited volume contains sixteen chapters that discuss how cultural differences can affect the management of social relations in conversation. Five chapters are authored or coauthored by the editor, Helen Spencer-Oatey. Most chapters deal with what she calls intercultural communication\u2014that is, \u2018data obtained when members of two different cultural groups interact with each other\u2019 (6); however, some authors refer to cross-cultural data, or \u2018data obtained independently from two different cultural groups\u2019 (6). Five of the chapters provide different theoretical frameworks.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 2, \u2018Face, (im)politeness and rapport\u2019 (11\u201347), Spencer-Oatey outlines her revision of politeness theory (Brown & Levinson 1987) to emphasize that rapport management should involve not only face sensitivities but also \u2018fundamental social entitlements<\/em> that a person claims […] in his\/her interactions with others\u2019 (13).<\/p>\n

In Ch. 3, \u2018Culture and communication\u2019 (48\u201372), Vladimir \u017degarac<\/strong> stresses the cognitive aspects of communication that figure into \u2018the systematic dependence of meaning on context (where the context is the set of assumptions used in interpreting a communicative act)\u2019 (56). Among other approaches, \u017degarac discusses relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986\/1995) and \u2018the orientation of human cognition and communication towards relevant information\u2019 (48).<\/p>\n

In Ch. 7, \u2018Pragmatic transfer\u2019 (141\u201363), Vladimir \u017degarac and Martha Pennington<\/strong> present another cognitive-based framework relevant to intercultural communication. They suggest that misunderstandings may arise in intercultural communication because of pragmatic transfer; in other words, the tendency to apply to new situations an existing mental set that has been determined by culture-specific knowledge. The problem is that \u2018if interactants from different cultural backgrounds are unaware of the differences in their respective mental sets, misunderstandings are likely to occur\u2019 (142).<\/p>\n

In Ch. 8, \u2018Communication accommodation theory\u2019 (164\u201386), Virpi Yl\u00e4nne<\/strong> suggests that communication accommodation theory (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland 1991) might be modified to reflect such recent arguments as that \u2018social realities are only fixed through discourse\u2019 and that\u00a0 \u2018the old, structured certainties of class and ethnic self-definition have lapsed\u2019 (179).<\/p>\n

In Ch. 9, \u2018Adaptation and identity\u2019 (187\u2013203), Martin Foug\u00e8re<\/strong> explores the idea of place\u2014that is, how living in a different culture can affect a person\u2019s sense of identity.<\/p>\n

This volume is designed as a textbook, concluding with two chapters on data gathering, and another chapter that contains ideas for projects. Each chapter (except for the introduction) contains lists of key points for study purposes, questions for discussion, and references for further reading. However, there is much that makes this volume more than just a textbook, notably the depth of discussion in the theoretical chapters. My only real complaint is that most of the authors of the seven more data-based chapters do not noticeably make use of the frameworks discussed. The range of communities considered is great, but most authors simply point out evidence of cultural differences in conversational style in the communities discussed.<\/p>\n

REFERENCES<\/p>\n

Brown, Penelope, and STEPHEN C. LEVINSON. 1987. Politeness: <\/em>Some<\/em><\/p>\n

universals in language usage<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Giles, Howard; justine coupland; and NIKOLAS COUPLAND. 1991. Contexts of accommodation: Developments in applied sociolinguistics<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986\/1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition<\/em>. 2nd edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Culturally speaking, culture, communication and politeness theory. 2nd edn. Ed. by Helen Spencer-Oatey. New York: Continuum, 2008. Pp. xii, 372 ISBN 9780826493101. $39.95. Reviewed by Carol Myers-Scotton, Michigan State University This edited volume contains sixteen chapters that discuss how cultural differences can affect the management of social relations in conversation. Five chapters are authored or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}