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in potential or actual conflict situations where complaints were being realised.
House and Kasper attributed these salient variations to differing social norms
associated with the act of complaining in each culture, noting that'... attacking
one's interlocutor's identity seems to be a taboo in the British cultural context,
while it seems perfectly appropriate behavior for Germans under specific
interactional conditions' (House and Kasper 1981,183).
In the realisation of requests (another potentially face-threatening action),
German speakers were shown to be similarly more direct than their English
counterparts. In making requests, German speakers were shown to employ
significantly more direct forms than English speakers, an observation
corroborated in later work by House (1989) and Blum-Kulka and House (1989).
Again, rather than concluding that the English were simply'more polite' than
their German counterparts (in their apparent heightened orientation to their
interlocutors face needs), these differences were attributed more to differing
social norms which could be seen to guide the realisation of speech acts across
cultures. Specifically, Blum-Kulka and House noted that:
... though directness is usually associated... with impoliteness, its exact
social meaning may also be a cross-cultural variant ... if other norms,
such as clarity in expressing intentions and a show of sincerity are
preferred over a display of non-imposition , then directness will not
necessarily be associated with impoliteness. (Blum-Kulka and House
1989,138)
Moving away from specific speech acts to focus on general
communicative behaviour within particular discourse phases of conversational
encounters, House (1 982a) identified further salient differences between the
two discourse communities, again in terms of their varying orientations to
interpersonal and ideational aspects of talk. For example, in 'opening phases' of
conversational encounters, English speakers reciprocatively employed more
formulaic phatic utterances (Malinowski 1934), such as engaging in'how are
you? ' type interchanges which House argued encode interpersonal concerns.
Similarly, in 'closing phases' of encounters English speakers were observed to
focus more on the interpersonal aspects of talk. Conversely, Germans
concentrated more on ideational aspects, for example by 'summing up' what
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