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the self in each culture as construal might provide analytical import to
understating facework in the two speech communities. I shall argue below that
this corpus of conceptual language can be systematically brought to bear on
both English and German communicative style as facework. To conclude my
discussion of German - English differences however, I want to mention the
nature of the data and data sites as exploited in extant studies, before moving
on to consider these issues in the context of the current study.
2.4 Methodological, Analytic and Procedural Considerations
Before moving on to further explore these conceptual and analytical
issues in the following chapters, I want to briefly review some of the empirical
and methodological aspects of the extant research drawn upon here. As I stated
at the outset of this chapter, from the extant studies focusing on English
German differences in communicative norms, of most relevance here are those
focusing on spoken interaction (e. g. Blum-Kulka and House 1989; Byrnes 1986;
Fetzer 1996,1997; Friday 1994; Hellweg, Samovar, and Skow 1994; House
1979,1982a, 1982b, 1982c, 1989; House and Kasper 1931; Kofthoff 1989,
1991,1993,1994; Straehle 1997; and Watts 1989). The studies cited here all
draw on instances of spoken interaction. However, these data provide a rather
disparate corpus, having been drawn from a range of contexts and settings and
elicited using various techniques. Although this constitutes spoken data
therefore, the data itself cannot be treated as one and the same.
A common source of data drawn upon in many of these studies is that
derived from various 'role-play' scenarios. This usually involves recruiting native
speakers from each speech community (frequently drawn from university
student cohorts to whom the researchers have immediate access), and asking
them to enact certain scenarios whereby they are engaging in potentially face-
threatening activity such as asking request or complaining. Commonly, socio-
pragmatic variables such as status differences and age are manipulated. Such
a technique allows for the controlled elicitation of spoken data - for instance
requests, complaints, or conversational behaviour in specific types of conflict
episodes. However, although this technique allows for a focused inspection of
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