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Part of
Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics
Edited by István Kecskés and Stavros Assimakopoulos
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 274] 2017
► pp. 207–227

Chapter 9
“It’s really insulting to say something like that to anyone”

An investigation of English and German native speakers’ impoliteness perceptions

| Universität Erfurt

This study investigates the (in)appropriateness and (im)politeness perceptions of young British and German adults. Data were collected with a questionnaire and individual post-hoc interviews. The questionnaire consisted of 20 authentic events that had been reported by informants of the cross-cultural impoliteness project (CCIP) by Culpeper et al. (2010, 2014) and 2 authentic events that had been witnessed by the researcher and included as neutral distractor items. The findings revealed differences and similarities in the perceptions and evaluations of the English and German native speakers: while their evaluation of whether an utterance was appropriate and/or polite or not tended to be rather similar, differences were found with regard to the severity ratings for inappropriateness scores and reasons given for the scoring.

Keywords: impoliteness, perception, cross-cultural pragmatics, English, German
Article outline
  • 1.Background
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Instruments
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1(In)appropriateness and (im)politeness perception: Responses to type A questions
    • 3.2Average severity rating: Responses to type B questions
    • 3.3Severity ratings of individual scenario: Responses to type B questions
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.274.10sch
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Cohen, Andrew D.
2020. Considerations in assessing pragmatic appropriateness in spoken language. Language Teaching 53:2 ► pp. 183 ff. DOI logo
Cohen, Andrew D.
2020. Issues in the assessment of L2 pragmatics. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 16:1 ► pp. 15 ff. DOI logo
Gesuato, Sara & Erik Castello
2020. Assessing pragmatic aspects of L2 communication: Why, how and what for. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 16:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gesuato, Sara & Victoriya Trubnikova
2022. Assessing Pragmatic Skills in Speech Act Production and Perception. In Handbook of Research on Policies and Practices for Assessing Inclusive Teaching and Learning [Advances in Educational Marketing, Administration, and Leadership, ], ► pp. 211 ff. DOI logo
Kecskes, Istvan
2018. Intercultural Pragmatics. In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 140 ff. DOI logo
Schauer, Gila A.
2024. Background. In Intercultural Competence and Pragmatics, ► pp. 7 ff. DOI logo
Schauer, Gila A.
2024. Results: Intercultural Competence and Gender-Neutral Language. In Intercultural Competence and Pragmatics, ► pp. 105 ff. DOI logo

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