‘Its all in the asking’

A perspective on problems of cross-cultural communication between native speakers of French and native speakers of Australian English in the workplace

Christine Béal | La Trobe University

When people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds have to work together, this often leads to negative stereotyping, as the result of clashing rules of interaction. This article, based on ‘on the job’ recorded data, looks at the particular case of French people living and working in Australia, in relation to one specific type of exchange: the request. It isolates three major types of causes of tension and misunderstandings between them and native speakers of Australian English: differences in politeness strategies, differences in the assessment of what constitutes a ‘face-threatening act’ and clashes between ‘face wants’ and other wants.

Published online: 01 January 1990
https://doi.org/10.1075/aralss.7.02bea

Cited by

Cited by 10 other publications

Bowe, Heather, Kylie Martin & Howard Manns

2014. In Communication across Cultures,

Béal, Christine

1992. Did you have a good week-end? or why there is no such thing as a simple question in cross-cultural encounters. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 15:1 ► pp. 23 ff.

Cowley, Peter & Barbara E. Hanna

2005. Cross-cultural skills – crossing the disciplinary divide. Language & Communication 25:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Grieve, Averil

2010. “Aber ganz ehrlich”: Differences in episodic structure, apologies and truth-orientation in German and Australian workplace telephone discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 42:1 ► pp. 190 ff.

Hanna, Barbara E. & Juliana de Nooy

2004. Negotiating cross-cultural difference in electronic discussion. Multilingua - Journal of Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Communication 23:3 ► pp. 257 ff.

Hassall, Tim

2003. Requests by Australian learners of Indonesian. Journal of Pragmatics 35:12 ► pp. 1903 ff.

Hassall, Timothy

1999. Request strategies in Indonesian. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 9:4 ► pp. 585 ff.

Lipovsky, Caroline

2008. Constructing affiliation and solidarity in job interviews. Discourse & Communication 2:4 ► pp. 411 ff.

Mrowa-Hopkins, Colette & Antonelle Strambi

2014. In Linguistic Approaches to Emotions in Context [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 241], ► pp. 279 ff.

Waters, Sophia

2017. In Cultural Keywords in Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 277], ► pp. 25 ff.

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