This book explores the issue of politeness phenomena and socially appropriate behavior in two societies, Mexico and the United States, in three different contexts: refusing invitations, requests, and suggestions. In addition to a state-of-the-art review of the speech act of refusals in numerous languages, the book provides a rigorous analysis of data collection methods utilized to examine speech act behavior at the production and perception levels. Many examples of native speaker interactions illustrate the similarities and differences observed in the realization patterns and the perception of refusals by Mexicans and Americans in formal and informal situations. The data are analyzed in terms of refusal sequences and pragmatic strategies which are strategically used to carry out relational work during the negotiation of face. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses are interpreted in light of the notions of face, politeness, and relational work in Mexico and the United States. This publication will be of interest to researchers and students in pragmatics and discourse analysis, cross-cultural communication, and sociology.

This book studies the principles for constructing polite speeches, based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures.

One of the main contributions of this important book is that it offers a thorough survey of the theoretical and empirical developments that have occurred in the area of (im)politeness in the different regions of the Spanish-speaking world, gathering together overviews by distinguished scholars. Additionally, the book advances the field with new empirical research on linguistic (im)politeness, and silence and (im)politeness, in a range of (non)institutional contexts, as well as new perspectives for the study of (im)politeness. A closing chapter by the editors provides an assessment of salient trends in the area and directions for future research. Research on Politeness in the Spanish-Speaking World is essential reading for students in Spanish pragmatics and Spanish linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. The volume is also very useful to English-speaking scholars in the general field of pragmatics who are not proficient in Spanish but require access to these empirical studies.

Pt. 1. International negotiations. -- Pt. 2. Negotiation techniques used around the world. -- Pt. 3. Negotiate right in any of 50 countries.

This book investigates how speakers of English, Polish and Russian deal with offensive situations. It reveals culture-specific perceptions of what counts as an apology and what constitutes politeness. It offers a critical discussion of Brown and Levinson's theory and provides counterevidence to the correlation between indirectness and politeness underlying their theory. Their theory is applied to two languages that rely less heavily on indirectness in conveying politeness than does English, and to a speech act that does not become more polite through indirectness. An analysis of the face considerations involved in apologising shows that in contrast to disarming apologies, remedial apologies are mainly directed towards positive face needs, which are crucial for the restoration of social equilibrium and maintenance of relationships. The data show that while English apologies are characterised by a relatively strong focus on both interlocutors negative face, Polish apologies display a particular concern for positive face. For Russian speakers, in contrast, apologies seem to involve a lower degree of face threat than they do in the other two languages."

A comprehensive account of face-to-face interactions in commercial and non-commercial service encounter settings.