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had just been talked about, or using what House termed 'outcome checks' to
reiterate the details of the preceding talk. On the whole, German speakers were
shown to favour non-routinised ideational discourse over the formulaic
interpersonal exchanges found in the English data.
Yet more evidence for these salient differences in communicative style
was provided House's (1 982b) consideration of how German and English
speakers variously employed a range of conversational strategies
prophylactically to both achieve conversational goals and avoid threatening the
face of one's interlocutor. German speakers were demonstrated to prefer what
were classed as content-oriented to person-oriented conversational strategies,
tending to 'underscore', 'expand', and strategically focus on the propositional
contents of their utterances in pursuit of their conversational goals. Conversely,
as might be expected from House's previous studies, English speakers
employed more hearer-supportive and co-operative strategies to support their
particular central speech act. In addition, German speakers were also shown to
make more frequent and explicit reference to themselves (e. g. 'Can I_') as
opposed to fellow interlocutors (e. g. Would you like me to ... ? ).
Finally, similar communicative tendencies were shown to exist in the
realisation of conversational 'gambits' (House 1982c). Whereas German
speakers tended to use more utterances designed to show awareness and
understanding of a fellow conversationalist (e. g. 'ja', [yeah] 'hmm') and to call
for hearer's sign of agreement and understanding (e. g. 'nicht' [is it not]), English
speakers favoured what were termed 'clarifiers' (e. g. 'you see', e. g. 'to tell the
truth', 'the thing is'), the key function of which, according to House, was to
'dienen dazu, die Harmonie und Kooperation zwischen Sprecher und Hörer zu
etablieren, erhöhen oder wiederherzustellen') [ ... serve to establish, increase, or
re-establish harmony and cooperation between speaker and hearer.
] (11
982c,
129).
Additional more recent work by House has demonstrated such
differences not to be restricted to spoken discourse. For example, in more
recent work focusing on English-German / German-English translation of
various texts (e. g. film titles and subtitles), House (1 998a) has noted similarly
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