Mitigation tools and politeness strategies in invitation refusals: American and Russian communicative cultures

The performance of speech acts varies widely across cultures due to differences in values, communicative norms and traditions as well as politeness strategies. This can cause problems in communication and lead to sociopragmatic failures. This paper aims to discover potential linguistic and sociocult...

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Main Authors: Angela V. Litvinova (Author), Tatiana V. Larina (Author)
Format: Book
Published: Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University), 2023-03-01T00:00:00Z.
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100 1 0 |a Angela V. Litvinova  |e author 
700 1 0 |a Tatiana V. Larina  |e author 
245 0 0 |a Mitigation tools and politeness strategies in invitation refusals: American and Russian communicative cultures 
260 |b Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University),   |c 2023-03-01T00:00:00Z. 
500 |a 2520-2073 
500 |a 2521-442X 
500 |a 10.22363/2521-442X-2023-7-1-116-130 
520 |a The performance of speech acts varies widely across cultures due to differences in values, communicative norms and traditions as well as politeness strategies. This can cause problems in communication and lead to sociopragmatic failures. This paper aims to discover potential linguistic and sociocultural differences in refusal to invitations performed by Americans and Russians in interpersonal interaction. It explores the variations in the performance of refusal in terms of form (direct vs. indirect), length, face-saving moves/semantic formulas and politeness strategies in the contexts differed in social and power distance. The data were obtained through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) with 120 participants (50 Americans and 70 Russians) and analysed drawing on Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, Speech Act Theory, Theory of Politeness and Cultural Studies with the implementation of contrastive qualitative and quantitative analysis. The findings revealed some differences in the role of social factors in the realisation of refusals, while the most salient factor appears to be that of cultural context. Despite some obvious similarities in the performance of refusal in its form, miti- gation moves and politeness strategies, American refusal demonstrated a tendency to be more indirect and verbose, conventionally accompanied by a positive emotive adjunct aimed at enhancing the positive face of interlocutors. The findings showed that Americans use Positive and Negative politeness strategies with more regularity and thus do more facework aimed at mitigating the possible negative effect of this dispreferred act. The Russians, by contrast, used politeness strategies with less regularity, in some cases resorted to directness and were more focused on the clarity of their response to invitation rather than considerations of face. The findings are consistent with communicative values and politeness in the two cultures. They can contribute to the systematisation of culture-specific features of interpersonal interaction in American and Russian contexts and the description of communicative ethno-styles. 
546 |a EN 
690 |a speech act 
690 |a refusal 
690 |a mitigation 
690 |a politeness strategies 
690 |a communicative ethno-style 
690 |a american communicative culture 
690 |a russian communicative culture 
690 |a Education 
690 |a L 
690 |a Philology. Linguistics 
690 |a P1-1091 
655 7 |a article  |2 local 
786 0 |n Training, Language and Culture, Vol 7, Iss 1, Pp 116-130 (2023) 
787 0 |n https://rudn.tlcjournal.org/archive/7(1)/7(1)-08.pdf 
787 0 |n https://doaj.org/toc/2520-2073 
787 0 |n https://doaj.org/toc/2521-442X 
856 4 1 |u https://doaj.org/article/1c4965bda12b42da9d2c7b44dab24c2f  |z Connect to this object online.