On rituals and routines in the opening and closing of service encounters in tourism offices in the Netherlands and FlandersThis paper brings a cross-cultural analysis of opening and closing rituals and routines in Dutch and Flemish tourist offices, from
a Politeness Theory perspective. On the basis of a corpus of 200 interactions it reveals, apart from some general comparable tendencies, quite different communicative habits in both neighbouring regions. The differences point in the direction of more formal institutional interactions in the
Flemish tourist offices in comparison with the Dutch interactions. More specifically, Dutch interactions appear to be less formal, show a higher level of freedom with respect to the organisation of the opening and closing sequences and attach more importance to the relational work between
the speech participants.
This paper offers a corpus study of two reflexive (semi-)copular verbs, viz. se trouver and se retrouver, which at first sight appear to be mere morphological variants. In a first stage, the study is devoted to the comparison of the reflexive copular construction with the object complement construction of trouver and retrouver. We show the observed differences between both constructions may be explained by a process of grammaticalization, which has attained a further stage in the case of the reflexive constructions which even admit semi-auxiliary uses. Next, we conduct a contrastive analysis of the syntax and the semantics (partially based on a collostructional analysis) of the copular constructions of se trouver and se retrouver. The analysis not only allows to describe the different meaning effects produced by the verbs, it also shows the close links with the locative uses. Moreover, it accounts for the role the morpheme « re- » plays in the reinforcement of the nuance of unexpectedness, and hence, of the detrimental inference.
This paper deals with openings and closings in 400 service encounters in tourist offices situated in Belgium’s two main language communities, Flanders and Wallonia, in the north of France and the south of the Netherlands. On the basis of a detailed, bottom-up quantitative analysis of the structural properties of the openings and closings, we draw part of the interactional profiles of the tourist office encounters. Differences between the four regions are shown to be related to the degree of volubility and involvement of the interactants and to the degree of ritualisation and efficiency of the opening and the closing section.
This paper focuses on minimizing strategies in present-day Netherlandic Dutch. The minimizing construction under investigation consists of (1) an element of negation (geen); (2) a predicate and (3) a minimizer, a noun that denotes a small quantity and that is used to reinforce sentential negation (e.g. geen woord begrijpen ‘to understand not a word’). First, we situate the minimizing construction in relation to other, pragmatic minimizing strategies. Then, we provide a semantic typology of the minimizers in our dataset. Moreover, we give an overview of the different strategies that are available to extend the slot of the minimizer, such as analogical and context-based extensions. This shows the productivity (in terms of lexical scope) of the minimizing construction.
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