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favour of a strong orientation to consensus over the episode of talk.
Participants' images and faces were not put in a position of potential threat,
but rather mutually and reciprocatively protected.
Again, however, rather than being counter-productive to the relationship
between the interlocutors and damaging to the faces of the participants, Kotthoff
(199 1) noted that German interlocutors routinely perceive such encounters as
SpaR [fun], as intellectually stimulating and enjoyable for the participants
involved, indeed as sociable events9. Such 'Wettkampf [competition]
encounters were posited then as signalling a positive relationship between the
interactants rather than outright aggression or feelings of ill will.
Kotthoff's work then has not only corroborated earlier findings, but
identified salient differences in the way talk is sequentially organised as a
collaborative practice as participants move in and out of consensus and dissent
phases of conversational episodes.
Over the preceding pages issues of communicative style have been
addressed ranging from speech acts to more general conversational style.
Importantly, although this range of discourse phenomena has been treated by
individual scholars in isolation, a reading of the extant research points to certain
underlying and fundamental differences between the two cultures in terms of
their orientation to conversational as an activity in itself and to one's self and
interlocutors' face needs in talk.
I now want to briefly and more specifically consider the possible
communicative underpinnings for such variations in style before moving on to
consider the question of systematically addressing these differences in the
context of the current study.
A4