Relational Strategies in Intercultural Conversations between Friends
Franziska Thurnherr
University of Berne, Switzerland
Gloriweidstrasse 14, 6403 Kuessnacht, Switzerland
franziska.t@students.unibe.ch
This paper explores the theory of 'Relational Work' in the context of intercultural
conversations. Watts and Locher (2005: 10) define relational work as “the ‘work’
individuals invest in negotiating relationships with others”. Hence, every individual will
use relational strategies in order to negotiate a relationship in a conversation.
Furthermore, Deborah Tannen (2005: 207) argues that “...speakers of different
cultural backgrounds develop systematically different conventions for using and
interpreting linguistic features”. I argue, therefore, that speakers of different cultural
backgrounds use different relational strategies. The question is which relational
strategies a speaker uses when he/she speaks a second language. The speaker has
a choice between three different relational strategies (the speaker's L1, the speaker's
and hearer's L2, the hearer's L1). The hypothesis of this study is that speakers (in
this case a circle of friends) use relational strategies from all three languages,
intentionally or unintentionally.
The data for the study consist of six casual conversations in English between
two to three participants of different cultural backgrounds and with different first
languages. The data will be analyzed in a qualitative study by means of a
conversational analysis to find relational strategies of the participants. Additional data
consist of various comments, obtained through open interviews, of all four
participants on specific instances of conversations. These comments are important in
order to include the intercultural aspect of the study in the interpretation of the data,
as well.
Therefore, the aim of this study is to combine interactional sociolinguistics with
intercultural pragmatics. To be more precise, the concept of relational work will be
applied to an intercultural context, with specific attention paid to the genre of
conversations between friends.
References:
Locher, Miriam A., and Richard J. Watts
2005 Politeness theory and relational work. Journal of Politeness Research 1,
9-33.
Tannen, Deborah
2005 Interactional Sociolinguistics as a resource for Intercultural Pragmatics.
Intercultural Pragmatics 2 (2), 205-208.