XLVI. StuTS 

Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft:

Relational Strategies in Intercultural Conversations between Friends

Abstract

This paper explores the theory of ‘Relational Work’ in the context of intercultural conversations. Watts and Locher (2005: 10) define relational work as “the ‘work’ individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others”. Hence, every individual will use relational strategies in order to negotiate a relationship in a conversation. Furthermore, Deborah Tannen (2005: 207) argues that “…speakers of different cultural backgrounds develop systematically different conventions for using and interpreting linguistic features”.  I argue, therefore, that speakers of different cultural backgrounds use different relational strategies. The question is which relational strategies a speaker uses when he/she speaks a second language. The speaker has a choice between three different relational strategies (the relational strategy of the speaker’s L1, the speaker’s and hearer’s L2, the hearer’s L1). The hypothesis of this study is that speakers (in this case a circle of friends) use relational strategies from all three languages, intentionally or unintentionally.

The data for the study consist of six casual conversations in English between two to three participants of different cultural backgrounds (South Korea, Brazil and Switzerland) and with different first languages (Korean, (Brazilian) Portuguese and Swiss-German). The data will be analyzed in a qualitative study by means of a conversational analysis to find relational strategies of the participants. Additional data consist of various comments, obtained through open questions, of all four participants on specific instances of conversations. These comments are important in order to include the intercultural aspect of the study in the interpretation of the data, as well.

References:

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Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts (2005): Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1, 9-33.

Tannen, Deborah (2005): Interactional Sociolinguistics as a resource for Intercultural Pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 2 (2), 205-208.