5 - Contextual Assessments and Culture

Summary

This chapter considers key aspects of the context that affect participants’ judgements of other people’s behaviour as well as their own. It starts by drawing an important distinction between context and the focal event and points out that while participants evaluate the focal event, that focal event is embedded in a context that frames interpretation and hence needs to be understood conceptually. The chapter explores it from two main angles: the scene and the participants, unpacking each of these angles in turn and considering how cultural factors may influence participants’ conceptualisation and interpretation of the various components of the context. The discussion not only emphasises that context is particularly important in intercultural encounters, but also that it cannot be limited to linguistic context, or even to aspects of contexts that can be studied with the conventional inventory of politeness research. Individuals bring a complex cluster of pre-existing extralinguistic and extra-contextual knowledge to interactions, and this cluster may underlie a striking variety of miscommunications in contexts where common ground is minimal. This, in turn, implies that any theory of context in intercultural politeness needs to be multidisciplinary in character. There are three main sections to the chapter: scene; participants; focal event.