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Article published In: Cultural Linguistic Contributions to World Englishes
Edited by Hans-Georg Wolf, Frank Polzenhagen and Arne Peters
[International Journal of Language and Culture 4:2] 2017
► pp. 254–272

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Conceptualizations of respect in business negotiations

A research note

 | University of Potsdam
Published online: 14 December 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijolc.4.2.07oli
Abstract
International business negotiations are prone to several difficulties, one of the most fundamental of which being differences in cultural conceptualizations (Sharifian, F. (2011). Cultural conceptualisations and language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). In order to explore how Brazilians and Germans conceptualize respect in business negotiations, interviews in English with business negotiators were conducted and cultural conceptualizations analyzed. Following an ‘organic’ ( (2005). How to reconstruct schemas people share. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Finding culture in talk: A collection of methods (pp. 33–81). New York: Palgrave Miller. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and (mainly) qualitative approach to data, this paper presents: (a) the main conceptualizations found for both groups; (b) a cognitive-linguistic analysis of collocations of ‘respect’ found in the interviews; and (c) a preliminary sketch of group-level conceptualizations of respect in business negotiations for both groups. For Brazilians, the source domains location and vertical splitting were salient, which points to the relevance of hierarchy. For Germans, the source domain horizontal splitting and the sphere separation cultural schema were recurrent, which signals appreciation for the public-private sphere separation. These conceptual differences might have practical consequences in international negotiation scenarios.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Respect in business negotiations
  • 3.Cultural conceptualizations and ‘conceptual scripts’
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Common cultural conceptualizations in Brazilian and German responses
    • 5.2Cultural conceptualizations in Brazilian responses
    • 5.3Cultural conceptualizations in German responses
    • 5.4Collocations of ‘respect’
    • 5.5A conceptual script of a holistic scene
    • 5.6Group-level conceptualizations of respect in business negotiations
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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