Politeness in Belgium: Face,Distance and Sincerity in Service-exchange Rituals

Examining the Impact of Perceived Cultural Distance on the Pragmatic Choices of Saudi Customers in Service Encounters

“…However, in service encounters the case is different. This is due to the fact that when making a request in service encounters there is no real imposition involved so speakers need to mitigate it (Bataller, 2015;Danblon, de Clerck & van Noppen, 2005). Requests in service encounters can be considered as a special type of request that does not pose any threat to the requestee's face as "the receiver has more to gain than the person making the request in this economic system of open competition" (Kerbrat-Orecchioni, 2005, p. 36).…”

Openings and closings in tourist offices in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

“…The data related to thankings, both by visitors and clerks, hence seem to confirm the Neuphilologische MitteiluNgeN -i-ii cXXii 2021 Els Tobback and Margot Van den Heede • Openings and closings in tourist offices in Belgium, France and the Netherlands: A relational analysis of their structural properties. • https://doi.org/10.51814/nm.111537 observation made by Danblon et al (2005) with regard to the strikingly high use of thankings in, at least, the Flemish part of Belgium.…”

“…With respect to Belgian and Dutch service encounters, hardly any systematic research on service encounters has been undertaken yet (see Tobback & Van den Heede 2019). Danblon et al (2005), however, refer to the impression voiced by foreign visitors that politeness markers and, especially, expressions such as 'please' and 'thank you' are used very frequently in Belgian service encounters. The exploratory study conducted by these authors in 300 Belgian service encounters (100 in each administrative Region: Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia) revealed, furthermore, that service providers overall use more politeness markers than service seekers and that 'farewells' (comprising several types of elements such as greetings and wishes) are almost omnipresent.…”

4. Pragmatics in multilingual language situations

“…Rehbein and Fienemann 2004 on introductions in multilingual settings; see also House, this volume) or in native/non-native speaker communication, a familiarity of the patterns relevant to the situation can be assumed in multilingual situations, and transfer as well as interference 1 (e.g. Danblon et al 2005), are not uncommon. Diverging values (e.g.…”

“…(Hickey and Stewart 2005: 2) Hence, some contributions in Hickey and Stewart's collection that deal with multilingual countries in Europe, for instance, Switzerland (Manno 2005), Luxemburg (Kramer 2005) and Belgium (Danblon, de Clerck and van Noppen 2005), do consider varied politeness behaviour with regard to the language groups within the country.…”