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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton December 4, 2007

Non-acceptances in context

  • Anita Fetzer

    Her research interests focus on the interdependence between natural language communication and context. She has had a series of articles published on the communicative act of rejection, context, political interviews, and intercultural communication. She is the author of Negative Interaktionen (1994) and Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness (2004), and the co-editor of Rethinking Sequentiality (2002), The Contexts of Social Action (2002), Pragmatic Aspects of Political Discourse in the Media (2006), and Lexical Markers of Common Grounds (2006).

From the journal Intercultural Pragmatics

Abstract

The communicative act of non-acceptance expresses the speaker's intention to deny, reject or disagree with a communicative act. Regarding its sequential status, a non-acceptance is a responsive act par excellence, and from an interpersonal perspective it can be assigned the status of a face-threatening act. While its responsive format does not seem to cause any severe communicative problems in intercultural communication, its face-threatening potential makes it a prime candidate for intercultural miscommunication.

The goal of this paper is to systematize the contextual constraints and requirements of a non-acceptance in a dialogue frame of reference based on the dialogue act of a plus/minus-validity claim (Fetzer 2002, 2004), which is anchored to the Gricean cooperative principle (Grice 1975), Habermas' theory of communicative action (Habermas 1987), and Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness (Brown & Levinson 1987). The pragmatic premises of intentionality, rationality, and cooperation are supplemented by the interactional-sociolinguistic universal of contextualization (Gumperz 1996). The dialogue framework allows for a comprehensive examination of culture-preferential modes for the realization and contextualization of nonacceptances and possible perlocutionary effects, illustrated by excerpts from German, British and intercultural German-British political discourse.

About the author

Anita Fetzer

Her research interests focus on the interdependence between natural language communication and context. She has had a series of articles published on the communicative act of rejection, context, political interviews, and intercultural communication. She is the author of Negative Interaktionen (1994) and Recontextualizing Context: Grammaticality Meets Appropriateness (2004), and the co-editor of Rethinking Sequentiality (2002), The Contexts of Social Action (2002), Pragmatic Aspects of Political Discourse in the Media (2006), and Lexical Markers of Common Grounds (2006).

Published Online: 2007-12-04
Published in Print: 2007-11-20

© Walter de Gruyter

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