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impolite. However, I soon came to realise (following a number of conversational
'de-briefings' with my wife Elke) that, to'fit Was I was hoping, as an
unobtrusive, natural, and essentially functional conversational component, I had
to adapt to this new conversational milieu. Quite literally, on top of learning how
to speak the language, I also had to learn how to do the conversation in a
culturally appropriate manner. This entailed, not only improving my linguistic
skills (vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction), but equally as importantly,
my conversational skills, which I had assumed until that point were long since
mastered. These encounters both informed my understanding of what it meant
to 'learn a foreign language' and in turn re-directed my focus on learning, and
spawned an interest in English - German differences in conversational
interaction that would ultimately lead to the current study some six years later.
This study is firmly rooted then in my own personal experience,
observations, and set of questions arising first in the form of layman's musings,
but later to become formal concerns in the form of research questions.
However, my own subjective experience is not the only basis for assuming
differences in communicative style. Several texts have highlighted salient
differences across a range of discourse types, and it is these that I want now to
briefly address.
2.2 German - English Comparative Research'
Comparative research of English and German discourse has focused on a
range of language usage in everyday settings. Studies have for example have
focused on textual materials, such as directives displayed on public signs
(Snell-Hornby 1984), magazine articles (Evans 1998), academic text (Clyne
1937), computer software manuals (Luchtenberg 1994; Krenn 1991), letters
sent to the editors of magazines (Kienpointer and Kindt 1997), and the structure
of television news reports (Pufahl 1992). A second body of work has focused
more closely on spoken interaction (e. g. Blum-Kulka and House 1989; Byrnes
1986; Fetzer 1996,1997; Friday 1994; Hellweg, Samovar, and Skow 1994;
House 1979,1982a, 1982b, 1982c, 1989; House and Kasper 1981; Kotthoff
1989,1991,1993,1994; Straehle 1997; and Watts 1989). These studies have
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