Commissive speech act use in intercultural business meetings

Abstract

This paper focuses on the use of commissive speech acts (CSAs) in in a range of business meetings involving participants from different cultural groups, recorded at a large multinational airline corporation in Hong Kong. After a description of a simple framework for classifying commissive speech acts, the paper presents an analysis of the lexico-grammatical realization of commissive speech acts in the corpus. The paper concludes that two factors (participants' cultural predispositions and meeting-type) appear to significantly affect how and when commissive speech acts are used in business meetings in the corpus by different groups. The paper then briefly discusses the possible impact of differences between cultural groups in their patterns of commissive speech act use in multicultural group contexts.Department of Englis