Same setting, different norms: Phone call beginnings in France and the United States

Abstract

French native speakers' reactions to phone calls in the United States are an indication of a difference in the norms of interaction between the two countries. This difference, in turn, is understood when one realizes that the phone call, constituting a speech event, is open to different cultural interpretations, in spite of a similarity in the physical conditions of the interaction between the caller and the answerer. (Sequencing conventional opening; cultural variability; telephone calls; France and United States.)