The interplay of (im)politeness, conflict styles, rapport management, and metacommunication in Brazilian–German interaction

Abstract

Based on authentic homileic conversations between Brazilians and Germans in which critical incidents occur, I will set out the complexity of factors interplaying in the course of multi-personal interaction. The chosen situations are taken from a videotaped session of a two-hour discussion between four Brazilian and four German students at the University of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. After the video shoot, retrospective interviews were held with each participant in order to comprehend his/her extra-communicative, (self-)reflexive standpoint with respect to their actions. The following analysis brought out a subtle interplay between verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal contextualization cues in (im)politeness strategies and forms of rapport management, as well as metacommunicative strategies for the management of the gaps between one's "own" and "other culture" experience. It will be shown that the immediate context, as well as the participants' theories on communication and the other culture, have to be considered to understand that so-called "misunderstandings" may in fact often be ascribed to (un)intended face-threatening acts aiming at questioning or negotiating cultural values.

Face as an interactional construct in the context of connectedness and separateness

“…However, the embedding of the results in the broader context of the history of the whole interaction(s), as well as the history between the interactants themselves, next to the framing of the revealed data with regard to the cultural background, shows us that we have to face the issue that it would be reductive to not take background, as well as theoretical knowledge, into consideration. Nevertheless, as we have seen, although there is an undeniable connection to dualistic categories as established by intercultural communication studies (House 2010;Schröder 2014a;Hofstede 1983), such as German directness and explicitness in contrast to Brazilian indirectness and implicitness, those categories alone do not explain how participants orient themselves towards such concepts in concrete talk with regard to each other and the bystander behind the camera when face is negotiated, as well as how the emic cultural concept of face constitutes co-participant's attitudes displayed by connectedness and separation. short pause of 0.2-0.5 sec.…”

“…9 This preference for 'being opaque',, also called jeitinho, implies the idea of a certain cultural 'skill' or 'flexibility' developed in order to survive in a non-functional society where there is a necessity for a constant situational adaption and where the line between the private and public sphere is quite blurred. As a consequence, in Brazilian everyday communication direct disagreement is avoided and face saving strategies which show affiliation are preferred (Meireles 2001(Meireles , 2016; the phatic, poetic, and appellative speech styles are more salient (Schröder 2010); and as a result of the predominance of personal relationships, the 'kind-heartedness' (bondade) which has been condensed in the Brazilian narrative of the 'cordial man' (homem cordial; Buarque de Holanda 1995 [1936], 553-556) sustains the wish for harmonious relations, affiliation, as well as agreement, as can be shown even in today's Brazilian interaction and communication practices (Schröder 2014a;Schröder & Viterbo Lage 2014;Viterbo Lage 2013). This topic was objective of a study on face issues that compared the Argentinean and Brazilian version of Big Brother: Barbosa de Lima (2012) reveals two completely different tactics to get the audience's vote: While the Argentinean habitants of the public housing being filmed were oriented toward an image of being coherent personalities who defend their opinions and stand for their convictions, the Brazilians were more oriented toward an image of being nice and avoiding the expression of strong opinions or the defense of polemic attitudes.…”

“…DaMatta (1997DaMatta ( [1979) has shown the extent to which the Brazilian concept jeitinho incorporates a culture-specific technique of escaping from direct forms of talk, as we have discussed in the preceding section. By contrast, the cultural value of 'coherence', as well as the open expression of disagreement in German communication is frequently related to the wish to be able to count on one's counterpart's statements as empirical studies revealed especially in opposition to other speech communicties (House 2010;Philburn 2011;Schröder 2014aSchröder , 2014b. It might be instructive to take a brief look at the historical background that has favored such a focus on coherence since the beginnings of the functional differentiation of German society starting with the Renaissance: (a) the persistent repercussions of literary language as a kind of 'objectivation' of otherwise fugitive talk, (b) the interiorization process favored by the arising of Protestant values, as well as (c) the increasing dichotomy between public and private life (Elias 1997a, 110;1997b, 409-420;Luhmann 1989, 130-180;Weber 1991Weber [1904), to name just a few important factors.…”

Narrativas e reflexão epistêmica

“…Com a virada cognitiva dos estudos da metáfora, os trabalhos na área começaram a privilegiar situações comunicativas cotidianas, como a política (Lakoff 1991;Berber Sardinha 2008); a publicidade (Forceville 2002;Rocha;Feltes 2016); o esporte (Semino;Maschi 1996;Nascimento;Flister 2014); a música (Schröder 2012(Schröder , 2014; entre outros. Além de passar a focar a língua em uso (Cameron 2007;Vereza 2013), o fortalecimento da área ampliou as possibilidades metodológicas, incorporando a diversidade de modos semióticos (Forceville; Urios-Aparisi 2009; Sperandio 2012) e de tecnologias para análise de linguagens, por exemplo, as pesquisas com corpora (Deignan 2005;Berber Sardinha 2011.…”

A construção metafórica de palavras-chave para a descrição de experiências interculturais: Um estudo a partir da análise da conversa multimodal

“…house (2010, p. 571), por sua vez, resume seus estudos crossculturais sobre diferenças nos estilos britânico e alemão até o momento atual ao estabelecer quatro dimensões que correspondem ao estilo alemão, sendo elas: (1) 'Ser direto' (Directness); (2) 'Orientação para si mesmo' (Orientation toward Self); (3) 'Conteúdo' (Content); e (4) 'Explicitude' (Explicitness), ao passo que o estilo britânico é caracterizado por outras quatro dimensões: (1) 'Ser indireto' (Indirectness); (2) 'Orientação para o outro' (Orientation toward Other); (3) 'destinatários' (Addressees); e (4) 'implicitaude' (Implicitness). A respeito de uma comparação entre os estilos alemão e brasileiro, análises empíricas (MeireleS, 2001(MeireleS, , 2016CArVAlhO;trAViSAN, 2003;SChröder, 2003SChröder, , 2014aSChröder, , 2014b revelaram que, resumindo e adotando a terminologia de Spencer-Oatey (2008), o estilo brasileiro pode ser caracterizado por um 'realce da harmonia' (rapport enhancement) e 'orientação para manutenção da harmonia' (rapport maintenance orientation) mais alta, em oposição a uma 'orientação para negligenciamento da harmonia' (rapport neglect orientation) e 'orientação para desafiação da harmonia' (rapport challenge orientation) mais alta no caso alemão. Como este tópico é amplamente debatido no contexto da aprendizagem da língua estrangeira, não surpreende que estas orientações de valores culturais sejam mencionadas explicitamente durante a conversa entre os cinco intercambistas brasileiros, as quais podem prefigurar a experiência de 'alteridade' que, neste caso, ainda não se iniciou através de contatos pessoais.…”