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identified a range of differences in language usage between the two speech
communities. It is however this second body of work that is of most relevance to
the current study, primarily on two grounds: First, these studies have largely
addressed face to face verbal interaction; and second, although invoked often
only in passing, a common thread connecting many of these works is the
degree and nature of facework as part of everyday language use.
Perhaps the most substantial contribution to comparative research of
German and British-English discourse came from work conducted as part of
and subsequent to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project
(CCSARP) (see Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper 1989) and Bochum Project
(see Edmonson et al 1982). Grounded in a concern with contrastive pragmatics
(see Edmonson 1981) and speech acts (Austin 1962, Searle 1969), this work
sought to focus specifically on cross-cultural similarities and variation in the
realisation of intrinsically face-threatening (Brown and Levinson 1987) speech
acts, such as requests and apologies. From this work, clear indications of
differing socials norms informing German and English discourse have emerged
(see e. g. House 1979; 1982a; 1982b; 1982c; 1989; Blum-Kulka and House
1989; House and Kasper 1981), none more so than an apparent markedly
differing orientation displayed by English and German speakers to
'interpersonal' and 'ideational' aspects of discourse, with the English orienting
more to interpersonal aspects of talk (for example by employing more
'facework'), and the Germans orienting more to the ideational aspects (i. e., the
content of a particular utterancef
For example, House and Kasper's (1981) study -which was grounded
the observation that Germans are often perceived by English speakers as
impolite - revealed how German and English speakers routinely employ a
variety of discourse components in the construction of their utterances geared
variously at face concerns. In terms of for example the intrinsically face-
threatening acts of complaints and requests (see Brown and Levinson 1989),
German speakers were shown to display a significant preference for the direct
realisation of complaints. This was compared to English speakers, who
favoured more mitigated versions of the same speech act. Further, German
speakers displayed a notable tendency to intensify the force of their utterances
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