Alle Publikationen
2017
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(2017): Familiarity with Own Population's Appearance Influences Facial Preferences. In: Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) 28 (3), S. 344-354. DOI: 10.1007/s12110-017-9289-8
DOI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28516361 Abstract: Previous studies have found that individuals from rural areas in Malaysia and in El Salvador prefer heavier women than individuals from urban areas. Several explanations have been proposed to explain these differences in weight preferences but no study has explored familiarity as a possible explanation. We therefore sought to investigate participants' face preferences while also examining the facial characteristics of the actual participants. Our results showed that participants from rural areas preferred heavier-looking female faces than participants from urban areas. We also found that the female faces from the rural areas were rated as looking heavier than the female faces from the urban areas. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that familiarity may be contributing to the differences found in face preferences between rural and urban areas given that people from rural and urban areas are exposed to different faces.
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(2017): Are You Smiling, or Have I Seen You Before? Familiarity Makes Faces Look Happier. In: Psychological science 28 (8), S. 1087-1102. DOI: 10.1177/0956797617702003
DOI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28594281 Abstract: It is clear that unreinforced repetition (familiarization) influences affective responses to social stimuli, but its effects on the perception of facial emotion are unknown. Reporting the results of two experiments, we show for the first time that repeated exposure enhances the perceived happiness of facial expressions. In Experiment 1, using a paradigm in which subjects' responses were orthogonal to happiness in order to avoid response biases, we found that faces of individuals who had previously been shown were deemed happier than novel faces. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect with a rapid "happy or angry" categorization task. Using psychometric function fitting, we found that for subjects to classify a face as happy, they needed less actual happiness to be present in the face if the target was familiar than if it was novel. Critically, our results suggest that familiar faces appear happier than novel faces because familiarity selectively enhances the impact of positive stimulus features. zitiert von 3
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(2017): Asking simultaneously about truth and familiarity may disrupt truth effects. In: Análise Psicológica 35 (1), S. 61-71. DOI: 10.14417/ap.1121
Abstract: Tell me something that sounds familiar and I will believe it to be true. This is a statement that we should believe because it summarizes a well-documented and empirically supported effect: the illusion of truth effect (see Dechêne, Stahl, Hansen, & Wänke, 2010 for a review). The fact is we are more likely to believe in a statement if we have been previously exposed to it (e.g., Bacon, 1979; Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppino, 1977). Repetition increases truth-value, generating the illusion that repeated statements are more valid than information we never heard or read before. A general assumption of the explanations of the truth effect is that the subjective experience of processing a familiar statement is interpreted as informing about the validity of the statement (see Dechêne et al., 2010). This implies that a process of misattribution underlies repetition’s effect on judgments of truth (e.g., Bornstein & D’Agostino, 1994; Mandler, Nakamura, & Van Zandt, 1987; Schwarz & Clore, 1983). In this paper we present an experiment that tests such misattribution process by making more or less explicit the real source of the feeling of familiarity with the statements. In this way we test whether illusions of truth decrease when it is clear (vs. unclear) that familiarity is due to previous exposure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)
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(2017): Familiarity, Priming, and Perception in Similarity Judgments. In: Cognitive Science 41 (6), S. 1450-1484. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12418
DOI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27766669 Abstract: We present a novel way of accounting for similarity judgments. Our approach posits that similarity stems from three main sources-familiarity, priming, and inherent perceptual likeness. Here, we explore each of these constructs and demonstrate their individual and combined effectiveness in explaining similarity judgments. Using these three measures, our account of similarity explains ratings of simple, color-based perceptual stimuli that display asymmetry effects, as well as more complicated perceptual stimuli with structural properties; more traditional approaches to similarity solve one or the other and have difficulty accounting for both. Overall, our work demonstrates the importance of each of these components of similarity in explaining similarity judgments, both individually and together, and suggests important implications for other similarity approaches. zitiert von 6
2016
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(2016): Normality and Trust in Goffman's Theory of Interaction Order. In: Sociological Theory 19 (3), S. 312-324. DOI: 10.1111/0735-2751.00143
Abstract: The article asserts that Goffman's concept of normality comes close to the notion of trust as a protective mechanism that prevents chaos and disorder by providing us with feelings of safety, certainty, and familiarity. Arguing that to account for the tendency of social order to be seen as normal we need to conceptualize trust as the routine background of everyday interaction, the article analyzes Goffmans concepts of normal appearances, stigma, and frames as devices for endowing social order with predictability, reliability, and legibility. For Goffman, normality is a collective achievement, which is possible because of the orderliness of interactional activities, which is-in turn-predicated "on a large base of shared cognitive presuppositions, if not normative ones, and self-sustained restraints".
Keywords: Anerkennung und kollektive Intentionalität, Disziplin, Erwartungen, erwartungen und Erwartungserwartungen, familiarity, Frame theory, Frameanalysis Rahmenanalyse Framing, Goffman, Interaktion, kollektive Intentionalität, Natur & Genese von Normen, Soziale Ordnung, Soziologie, Theorie der Normen und Kollektive Repräsentationen (Durkheim), Theory of interaction (Goffman), Vertrauen -
(2016): Teaching Wedding Rules. In: Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31 (1), S. 33-67. DOI: 10.1177/0891241602031001002
Abstract: Salespeople must educate their customers and teach them to be good consumers of products. To maximize sales and minimize potential problems, salespeople must also develop strategies to control their customer's behavior. To examine the "generic social process" of gaining control over customers, the author focuses on the bridal shop to show how workers attempt to establish themselves as professionals. In the world of bridal wear, workers and brides must maintain extensive contact over many months. Bridal workers strive to gain control over their brides behavior by presenting a professional self. By establishing familiarity with their clients and demonstrating their expertise, bridal workers can give orders to their customers and chastise them when they deviate from appropriate behavior without fear that the customer will not return.
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(2016): Address practices in academic interactions in a pluricentric language. In: Pragmatics 26 (4), S. 631-652. DOI: 10.1075/prag.26.4.05for
Abstract: Following the recent development of address research in pluricentric languages (Clyne et al. 2006), the present study describes address practices in English-speaking academic settings and pursues two main objectives: (a) to provide a profile of address patterns in academic interactions in Australian English; and (b) to compare address practices in higher education across the three dominant varieties of English, namely American English, Australian English, and British English. The data on Australian English are drawn from 235 questionnaires completed by students, who reported on the address strategies adopted by students and teaching staff in classroom interactions in an Australian university. Data on American and British academic settings were retrieved from the research literature on the topic. The findings show a high degree of informality and familiarity in student-teacher relations in Australia, where reciprocal first names are the default pattern of address at all levels. By contrast, in American academia the hierarchical organization of roles and the different professional positions are foregrounded and reinforced through an asymmetrical use of titles, honorifics and first names. Finally, the British university setting displays a non-reciprocal usage of first names and titles between lecturer and students, which gradually evolves into a more generalised reciprocal use of first names, usually after extended contact and collaboration. We argue that the distinctive patterns of address observed in the three varieties of English reflect diverse social and cultural values systems at work in different speech communities.
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(2016): Dirty secrets and being ‘strange’. Using ethnomethodology to move beyond familiarity. In: Qualitative Research 16 (5), S. 526-540. DOI: 10.1177/1468794115598194
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794115598194 Abstract: The paper is a discussion of my attempt to move beyond familiarity by using ethnomethodology—and the emotional impact of doing so; namely, the feeling of having a ‘dirty secret’. As a social work group member interviewing social workers, the process of fieldwork was all too familiar. However, during transcription and analysis, what I had considered to be ‘business as usual’ was revealed as something more complex. The paper describes how the ethnomethodological notions of being a member, the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and breaching worked to make the familiar strange and became key to my understanding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved) zitiert von 9
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(2016): Recollection reduces unitised familiarity effect. In: Memory (Hove, England) 24 (4), S. 535-547. DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1021258
DOI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25793354 Abstract: Two types of encoding tasks have been employed in previous research to investigate the beneficial effect of unitisation on familiarity-based associative recognition (unitised familiarity effect), namely the compound task and the interactive imagery task. Here we show how these two tasks could differentially engage subsequent recollection-based associative recognition and consequently lead to the turn-on or turn-off of the unitised familiarity effect. In the compound task, participants studied unrelated word pairs as newly learned compounds. In the interactive imagery task, participants studied the same word pairs as interactive images. An associative recognition task was used in combination with the Remember/Know procedure to measure recollection-based and familiarity-based associative recognition. The results showed that the unitised familiarity effect was present in the compound task but was absent in the interactive imagery task. A comparison of the compound and the interactive imagery task revealed a dramatic increase in recollection-based associative recognition for the interactive imagery task. These results suggest that unitisation could benefit familiarity-based associative recognition; however, this effect will be eliminated when the memory trace formed is easily accessed by strong recollection without the need for a familiarity assessment. zitiert von 5
2015
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(2015): "Lo siento, pero me parecen horribles!!!": Pragmalinguistic analysis of impoliteness in the Facebook social network. In: REVISTA DE FILOLOGIA DE LA UNIVERSIDAD DE LA LAGUNA 33, S. 217-236
Abstract: This paper focuses on analyzing the strategies of impoliteness displayed on two corpora of publications extracted from the social network Facebook. To this purpose, theoretical models about impoliteness designed by Culpeper (1996, 2005) and Culpeper, Bousfield and Wichmann (2003), Kientpointner (1997, 2008), Kaul (2005, 2008) and Ridao (2009) have been studied. From this analysis, two main conclusions were obtained. On one hand, the absence of hurtful impoliteness in private profiles examined, in contrast to the presence of strategies of direct impoliteness in public profiles. On the other hand, the need to analyze impoliteness in social networks taking into account these variables: direction or indirection, intentional or not intentional, membership of the damaged image (sender or receiver), low or high group connection, degree of hierarchy and familiarity
2014
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(2014): Inference or Familiarity? The Embodied Roots of Social Cognition. In: SYNTHESIS PHILOSOPHICA 29 (2), S. 253-272
Abstract: I consider two distinct deflationary theories in social cognition that aim to explain action understanding without demanding meta-representational or mindreading processes: the first one is the 'teleological stance hypothesis' (TSH), claiming that we infer the intended goal of a certain observed action based on the mere perception of its effects and of its situational constraints; I decided to dub the second one 'the embodied familiarity hypothesis' (EFH) to comprise all the theories claiming that we recognize the intended goal of a certain action based on the perceptual or motoric expertise developed within the sensorimotor contingencies associated to that action's context. TSH's main requirement is that the observer could ascribe efficiency, and therefore rationality, to the observed agent's movement, while EFH's main requirement is that the observer were somehow exposed to the perceptual or motoric details of the observed agent's action. I argue that EFH describes a more primitive and fundamental form of action understanding, i.e. one that is necessarily presupposed by TSH: in fact, while recognizing efficiency is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for detecting goal-relatedness, some kind of perceptual or motoric familiarity with the details of the observed action's context is always necessary for any ascription of efficiency, and therefore of rationality, to the observed agent. I conclude that, while TSH might certainly be effective in describing certain rational forms of action understanding, it implicitly requires EFH to be true, as its inferential system would be groundless without an assumed familiar background of embodied expertise.
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(2014): OCCASIONAL POLITENESS AND GENTLEMEN'S LAUGHTER IN 18th C ENGLAND. In: The Historical Journal 57 (04), S. 921-945. DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X14000302
Abstract: This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called 'intimate bawdiness', which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was - and was not - a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.
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(2014): Expressing disagreement in English as a lingua franca. Whose pragmatic rules?. In: Intercultural Pragmatics 11 (2). DOI: 10.1515/ip-2014-0009
Abstract: Multicultural classrooms provide the intercultural pragmatist with a breeding ground to get firsthand information on intercultural communication. In such a context, if English is used as a lingua franca, these classrooms also become an ideal setting to observe the pragmatics of this relatively unknown variety. The present article aims to analyze qualitatively a sample of data produced by a multicultural group of masters students in which English is used as the lingua franca. More specifically, I intend to answer the following research question: In a multicultural class where English is the medium of instruction and students' peer to peer communication, whose pragmatic "rules" are followed? In other words, do these speakers stick to their own cultural pragmatic rules or follow nativelike ones? More specifically, I focus on the speech act of disagreement given its face-threatening nature and its disruptive potential if carried out in what interlocutors might perceive as the "wrong" way. Disagreement was also chosen given the relative paucity of studies on this speech act - as opposed, for example, others like requests or compliments. For this purpose, the 10 students -from very different cultural backgrounds -were asked to carry out a group assignment. Their negotiation and discussion process, however, was computer-mediated via the use of forums rather than face-to-face. This allowed the researcher to collect -naturally occurring, spontaneous data in a relatively easy way (without the need for transcription). It also gave the students the opportunity to interact in a more democratic way. In fact, by being an asynchronous discussion online, they did not have to fight for the conversational turn, but all of them had the chance to contribute to the discussion at their own pace. The sample so collected consists of 15,598 words. The limitation of the sample calls for a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach but is valuable insofar as it represents naturally occurring data. Disagreement expressions were classified according to two main categories: strong and mitigated disagreement (following Kreutel 2007; Pomerantz 1984 and Rees-Miller 2000). Inspection of the data reveals that students on the whole show a tendency to avoid strong disagreement whilst favoring mitigated disagreement of different sorts (e.g., use of hedges, asking for clarification, giving explanations, etc.). Moreover, students with high linguistic proficiency displayed a wider range of strategies, following a more nativelike pattern -specifically; they seemed to follow the pragmatic rules of British English. On the other hand, students whose linguistic proficiency was lower also showed a tendency to avoid strong disagreement but were much more limited with regard to their mitigating strategies, favoring the nonnative overuse of expressions of regret and hedges. Other variables, such as familiarity with their partners and their linguistic proficiency, as well as the nature of the task at hand, also played a central role in the students' choice of the common rules of a native variety.
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(2014): Evidence that accent is a dimension of social categorization, not a byproduct of perceptual salience, familiarity, or ease-of-processing. In: Evolution and Human Behavior 35 (1), S. 43-50. DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.09.006
Abstract: Certain features of language, such as accent, are acquired from the local social environment during an acquisition period starting at infancy and ending roughly at puberty. If the scale of social interaction expands after puberty, humans will encounter variance in these linguistic features, and the linguistic similarity between people will indicate the degree to which they share a common early social history. There is reason to believe that such a dynamic is not a modern phenomenon, but has likely occurred throughout our species' evolutionary history since the advent of language. Consequently, the human mind may contain systems for categorizing others according to their linguistic repertoires, including their accents. Four studies demonstrate that (i) accent differences-both native versus non-native accents and also two different non-native accents, are the basis of spontaneous and implicit social categorization, and (ii) this is not driven by general acoustic-differences, low level sound differences, or differences in familiarity or ease-of-processing. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that human mind contains systems for categorizing others according to their accents.
2013
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(2013): The influence of familiarity, trust and norms of reciprocity on an experienced sense of community. An empirical analysis based on social online services. In: Behaviour & Information Technology 34 (4), S. 392-412. DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2014.959455
Abstract: The growing use of social online services raises the question of what encourages members to participate actively and maintain accumulated social capital. Our research has particularly become aware of the relevance of familiarity, trust and reciprocity in understanding the members' sense of a virtual community (VC). Familiarity and trust are efficient criteria to assess and determine the extent to which one should engage in a virtual relationship. Furthermore, the effort of sharing experiences and knowledge must be based on the expectation of receiving certain returns. A structural equation modelling, specifically partial least squares, is proposed to assess the relationships between the constructs. Overall, the empirical results provided strong support for the hypotheses. Familiarity and trust lead the member to develop a growing perceived community support (PCS) and significantly influence the sense of a VC. Norms of reciprocity directly influence affective trust and PCS. Higher familiarity does not moderate the impact of affective trust on PCS, however. The results of this study could thus help social online service providers to create a successful business model and to determine the main drivers of the members' sense of a VC.
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(2013): ‘Do You Think I’m Stupid?. ’: Urban Encounters between People with and without Intellectual Disability. In: Urban Studies 50 (12), S. 2391-2406. DOI: 10.1177/0042098012474521
Abstract: Being amongst strangers is a definitive aspect of life in the modern city. To understand social inclusion in cities, it is necessary to consider not only the strength and extent of social networks of familiarity, but also the role of interactions with strangers in the public realm. People with intellectual disability are considered one of the most marginalised groups in society and the study applies the concept of encounter to offer a new perspective on their inclusion/exclusion, informed by contemporary urban theory rather than more nostalgic notions of community. The paper discusses encounters between people with and without intellectual disability in one suburb in Melbourne, Australia. The study is based, primarily, on field observations in a variety of settings in the public realm. Through analysis of these data, a typology of urban encounters is proposed that involves people with and without intellectual disability.
2012
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(2012): A practitioner's guide to interpersonal communication theory. An overview and exploration of selected theories. In: Patient education and counseling 87 (3), S. 261-267. DOI: 10.1016/j.pec.2011.10.006
DOI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22112396 Abstract: OBJECTIVE To provide a brief overview of selected interpersonal theories and models, and to present examples of their use in healthcare communication research. RESULTS Nine interpersonal communication theories and their application to healthcare communication are discussed. CONCLUSION As healthcare communication interactions often occur at an interpersonal level, familiarity with theories of interpersonal communication may reinforce existing best practices and lead to the development of novel communication approaches with patients. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS This article serves as an introductory primer to theories of interpersonal communication that have been or could be applied to healthcare communication research. Understanding key constructs and general formulations of these theories may provide practitioners with additional theoretical frameworks to use when interacting with patients.
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(2012): Inequity in the pursuit of intimacy. An analysis of British pick-up artist interactions. In: Journal of Pragmatics 44 (9), S. 1115-1127. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2012.04.008
Abstract: The data presented here come from a collection of surreptitious audio recordings of naturally occurring talk-in-interaction between previously unacquainted women and male 'Pick-Up Artists' (PUAs) in the UK. Our approach draws on close observations of these interactional data to demonstrate how PUAs move from a state of unacquaintedness towards more 'intimate' forms of interactional involvement. A prototypical PUA is a male who seeks to be successful at 'seducing' women. 'PUA is not a category label given to the individual, but is one that he claims for himself within an existing PUA Community of Practice. A common community belief is that the means of seduction are not rooted in physical attractiveness, social status or wealth, but in the interaction. The claimed 'art' in pick-up artistry may be seen in the relative speed with which the protagonist may gain INTIMACY with their fellow interlocutor. The PUA operates, as Goffman (1967b) describes it, "where the action is"; they are every bit the gambler in a high-stakes game where risky plays - which include issues of im/politeness and IN/EQUITY - can have high payoffs. The focus of this paper is how PUAs actually play the game.
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(2012): Infants prefer the faces of strangers or mothers to morphed faces. An uncanny valley between social novelty and familiarity. In: Biology letters 8 (5), S. 725-728. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0346
DOI: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22696289 Abstract: The 'uncanny valley' response is a phenomenon involving the elicitation of a negative feeling and subsequent avoidant behaviour in human adults and infants as a result of viewing very realistic human-like robots or computer avatars. It is hypothesized that this uncanny feeling occurs because the realistic synthetic characters elicit the concept of 'human' but fail to satisfy it. Such violations of our normal expectations regarding social signals generate a feeling of unease. This conflict-induced uncanny valley between mutually exclusive categories (human and synthetic agent) raises a new question: could an uncanny feeling be elicited by other mutually exclusive categories, such as familiarity and novelty? Given that infants prefer both familiarity and novelty in social objects, we address this question as well as the associated developmental profile. Using the morphing technique and a preferential-looking paradigm, we demonstrated uncanny valley responses of infants to faces of mothers (i.e. familiarity) and strangers (i.e. novelty). Furthermore, this effect strengthened with the infant's age. We excluded the possibility that infants detect and avoid traces of morphing. This conclusion follows from our finding that the infants equally preferred strangers' faces and the morphed faces of two strangers. These results indicate that an uncanny valley between familiarity and novelty may accentuate the categorical perception of familiar and novel objects.
Keywords: Adult, Bekanntheitsgrad, Biologie, Emotions, Entwicklungspsychologie, Erwartungen, erwartungen und Erwartungserwartungen, Eye Movements, Face, familiarity, Female, Humans, Infant, Learning, Male, Mothers, Pattern Recognition, Visual, PERCEPTION, Psychologie, p-zombies, Recognition (Psychology)/physiology, Uncanny Valley Effekt, Visual Perception/physiology -
(2012): Effects of self-disclosure role on liking, closeness, and other impressions in get-acquainted interactions. In: Journal of Social and Personal Relationships 30 (4), S. 497-514. DOI: 10.1177/0265407512459033
Abstract: We experimentally examined whether giving or receiving self-disclosure leads to greater liking and other positive impressions (e.g., closeness) in initial interactions. We also contributed to a recent debate about the familiarity-attraction link by examining whether knowledge about another leads to greater (or lesser) degrees of liking and perceived similarity. Pairs of unacquainted undergraduates completed a structured self-disclosure task. We randomly assigned one participant to disclose while the other listened in a first interaction; participants switched roles for a second interaction. After the first interaction, listeners (vs. disclosers) reported more liking and other positive interpersonal impressions. These differences disappeared after participants switched roles in the second interaction. Furthermore, listening was associated with greater degrees of perceived similarity
2011
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(2011): Race Differences in Tipping. Testing the Role of Norm Familiarity. In: Cornell Hospitality Quarterly 52 (1), S. 73-80. DOI: 10.1177/1938965510389297
Abstract: On average, blacks tip less than whites in the United States. As a result, many servers dislike waiting on black tables and deliver inferior service to those blacks seated in their sections. Furthermore, this race difference makes it difficult to attract and retain waitstaff in predominately black neighborhoods, which makes such neighborhoods less attractive places for corporations to locate full-service restaurants. To address these issues, race differences in tipping need to be sizably reduced, which requires an understanding of their underlying causes. This study tests and supports the role of norm familiarity in producing race differences in tipping by demonstrating that norm awareness mediates those differences in tipping and that race does not moderate the effects of norm awareness on tipping. These results support the idea that race differences in tipping can be sizably reduced by educating blacks about appropriate tipping norms, so restaurant managers as well as major industry organizations are encouraged to engage in such educational campaigns.
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(2011): Organizational Norm Congruency and Interpersonal Familiarity in E-Mail. Examining Messages From Two Different Status Perspectives. In: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 16 (2), S. 228-249. DOI: 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01537.x
Abstract: Relying on SIDE theory, this 2 x 2 experimental design tested the effects of adherence to organizational norms and interpersonal familiarity in e-mail messages from both superior and subordinate perspectives. Results reveal that using norm-congruent e-mail messages account for over 50% of the variance in both superior and subordinate attitudes toward the message and between 30% and 56% of the variance in perceptions of source credibility. Data from the superiors indicate that norm congruent e-mail messages account for 14.4% of the variance in message compliance. Results from subordinates reveal an interaction effect that is consistent with SIDE-based predictions. Subordinates believe superiors are most likely to comply with e-mail requests from unfamiliar subordinates that are crafted in a manner congruent with organizational norms.
2010
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(2010): Cross-cultural and situational variation in requesting behaviour. Perceptions of social situations and strategic usage of request patterns. In: Journal of Pragmatics 42 (8), S. 2262-2281. DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.02.001
Abstract: Brown and Levinson (1978) and Brown and Levinson (1987) is that social distance, power and imposition are the most important factors influencing speakers' linguistic choices and that there is a positive correlation between these social variables and the degree of indirectness employed. The present study investigates the relationship between social/situational and cultural factors and native and non-native speakers' requesting behaviour. It examines whether the requestive strategies of English native speakers and of Greek ESL learners follow a similar trend across different social situations. It additionally tests whether the same social situations are perceived and rated similarly by the two groups and the extent to which the speakers' directness is influenced by familiarity, power and imposition. Results have shown that there are high levels of cross-cultural agreement between the two groups for trends of situational variation but also some cross-cultural disagreement on the specific directness levels employed for given situations. Even though significant differences in the speakers' assessment of social reality seems to explain the differences in their linguistic choices to some extent, this study argues that power, familiarity and imposition alone do not always decide speakers' directness. A number of intervening situational and cultural factors need to be taken into account when interpreting speakers' linguistic choices.
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(2010): Addressing non-acquaintances in Tunisian Arabic. A cognitive-pragmatic account. In: Intercultural Pragmatics 7 (1). DOI: 10.1515/iprg.2010.007
Abstract: The literature on terms of address (TofA) abounds in both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Mostly, sociolinguistics explains them with rank and age (Trudgill 1983; Wardhaugh 1986; Fasold 1990; Holmes 1992; Romaine 1994) and pragmatics with politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). Furthermore, TofA are mostly studied as occurring between acquaintances that know about the social rank and age of each other to produce the address that is most coherent with the context of situation. The present study focuses on TofA used in addressing non-acquaintances, i.e., people who have never met one another before. Evidence from Tunisian Arabic (TA) shows that TofA as used with non-acquaintances are not motivated by rank and politeness as much as by the addresser's drive to create familiarity and minimize distance with the addressee. Such a pragmatic minimization of distance is not noticed when TofA are used with acquaintances. Speakers of TA inject kinship-related terms in their address to non-acquaintances in view of creating rapprochement between the speaker as a deictic center and the addressee in the periphery Such a rapprochement is made possible through the manipulation by the speaker of the FAR-NEAR schema (Johnson 1987) related to the CENTER-PERIPHERY image schema. The paper intends to show this taming of addressees by studying TofA in TA through Lakoff's (1982, 1987) theory of categorization known as Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs).
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(2010): Eestlaste ja venelaste suhtluskäitumine. Sina, teie ja keegi veel. In: Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat. Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics 6, S. 207-224. DOI: 10.5128/ERYa6.13
Abstract: This paper examines linguistic politeness among Estonians and Russians in Estonia. We raise the question of how groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different politeness norms and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal second person pronoun (the T/V phenomenon), but we also investigate other aspects of interaction (such as respondents' metalinguistic awareness of forms of address and reference to an absent third person). The analysis is based on university students' responses to a sociolinguistic questionnaire. Data from native Russian speakers in St. Petersburg are used for comparison with data from Russian speakers in Estonia. On the basis of the findings from this study, we conclude that the communicative culture of Russians and Estonians is not greatly different, although certain particularities exist which differentiate them. Both Russians and Estonians use the formal V pronoun when addressing strangers older than themselves. The most notable difference in making the choice between forms of address is that Russians choose the formal V form primarily on the basis of age difference, addressing even close acquaintances with V if they are older. This behavior is explained by the speakers with the concept of uvazenie, or "respect". For Estonians, age differences are less significant than familiarity, and close acquaintances or relatives are usually addressed with T, even if they are much older. There is no clear, unified stereotypical explanation among the Estonian respondents of why one should use V with anyone (for instance, a lecturer). Explanations tend to appeal to the context of discourse (e.g. it is habitual to use V in the context of academic discussion). Because the norms for using V are clearer amongst Russian speakers, Russians seem to have fewer dilemmas than Estonians regarding which form to use.