What is it about?
Using case study data involving Chinese officials visiting their counterparts in the USA, the paper first examines what the Chinese delegates reacted positively to and what they reacted negatively to. It then explores why different parties (the US hosts, the Chinese delegates, and the interpreter) all reacted differently to the certain events.
Featured Image
Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash
Why is it important?
When people from different nationalities are involved, it's easy to explain any reaction/evaluation differences in terms of different cultural backgrounds. This paper shows that the explanation is more nuanced than this. Norms play a role, but so do people's personal interactional concerns (PICs). This is important because otherwise there is a risk of inappropriate stereotyping.
Perspectives
Relationships are so important in life - personally, professionally and internationally. I was pleased to be able to apply my TRIPS rapport management framework to this wonderful dataset, with a particular focus on the factors that trigger a rapport reaction. If you'd like to know more about TRIPS, see our book 'Making Working Relationships Work' (with Domna Lazidou), 2024, Castledown. There's a free download of chapter 1 here: https://globalpeopleconsulting.com/books
Helen Spencer-Oatey
University of Warwick
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Relating to others and (not) getting along: What triggers evaluative reactions?, Journal of Pragmatics, July 2025, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2025.05.002.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
