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Article published In: Intercultural Pragmatics and Cultural Linguistics
Edited by Ulrike Schröder, Milene Mendes de Oliveira and Hans-Georg Wolf
[International Journal of Language and Culture 7:1] 2020
► pp. 63–83

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Face and cultural conceptualizations in German-Brazilian business exchanges

 | University of Potsdam
Published online: 8 July 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.00027.men
Abstract
Following up on recent calls for studies dealing with first-order understandings of face (Arundale, R. B. (2013). Face as a research focus in interpersonal pragmatics: Relational and emic perspectives. Journal of Pragmatics 581, 108–120. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Haugh, M. (2013). Disentangling face, facework and im/politeness. Sociocultural Pragmatics, 1(1), 46–73.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), this paper presents arguments in favor of an empirical investigation of cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language: Theoretical framework and applications (Vol. 11). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) underlying these first-order (or emic) models. The arguments are based on the findings of a study on business communication in international contexts (Mendes de Oliveira. (2020). Business negotiations in ELF from a cultural linguistic perspective. [Applications of Cognitive Linguistics 43]. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The study comprises the analysis of (a) interviews with business people from different sectors and (b) a compilation of e-mails exchanged by Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company. I focus specifically on conceptualizations of ‘respect in business negotiations’ (Mendes de Oliveira, M. (2017). Conceptualizations of respect in business negotiations: A research note. International Journal of Language and Culture 4(2), 254–272. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) as well as on their pragmatic instantiations in e-mails. For instance, the recurrent image schema vertical splitting in the Brazilian interview excerpts on the topic of respect in business negotiations is shown to be pragmatically instantiated in terms of how participants acknowledge ‘hierarchy’ in their construals of face in e-mail interactions. The image schema horizontal splitting is shown to be related to how German participants construe ‘face’ as a transactional phenomenon in the e-mail exchanges. I conclude that cultural conceptualizations play an important role in the Brazilian and German emic models of face. Future studies can take the reflections presented in this paper into consideration in order to strengthen the arguments that favor the inclusion of culturally-based views on face into an overarching theoretical model of face (Arundale, R. B. (2013). Face as a research focus in interpersonal pragmatics: Relational and emic perspectives. Journal of Pragmatics 581, 108–120. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar).
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Face
  • 3.E-mail sequences
  • 4.Cultural conceptualizations
  • 5.Methodological procedures
  • 6.Cultural conceptualizations of respect in business negotiations for Brazilian and German business people
  • 7.The interplay of cultural conceptualizations, sequence choice, and face strategies in business e-mails
  • 8.Concluding remarks
  • Endnotes
  • References
References (40)
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