LINGUIST List 25.2986

Mon Jul 21 2014

Confs: Pragmatics/Belgium

Editor for this issue: Anna White <awhitelinguistlist.org>


Date: 19-Jul-2014
From: Lucía Fernández-Amaya <lferamaupo.es>
Subject: Understanding Traditional & Mediated Service Encounters
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Understanding Traditional & Mediated Service Encounters

Date: 26-Jul-2015 - 31-Jul-2015
Location: Antwerp, Belgium
Contact: Lucía Fernández-Amaya
Contact Email: < click here to access email >

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics

Meeting Description:

Service encounters are a pervasive and fundamental activity in everyday life whereby products, information, or commodities are traded between a service provider and a service seeker. Due to their preponderance, service encounters have been widely studied from a pragmatic point of view (see among many others Economidou-Kogetsidis 2005, Márquez Reiter 2004; Placencia and Manceda-Rueda 2011). These studies have shown that the interaction between customer and
service provider is essential for the success of the service encounter. Furthermore, in the case of intercultural service encounters, studies have found that differences in what is considered appropriate communicative behavior - i.e. what (non)verbal actions may be conducive to customer satisfaction - which may hinder the success of the encounter (Blue and Harun 2003,Callahan, 2006). Although research on service encounters has now a long standing tradition
(Merrit 1976), there is a pressing need for further research that focuses on the consequences of outsourcing and globalization on service encounters (Sifianou 2013) as well as on the impact that new technologies have had on this genre (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich forthcoming). In addition, more research is needed to ascertain the evolution - if any - of the norms regulating verbal interaction in different sub-types of the genre.

To further the understanding of verbal interaction in service encounters, we are proposing a specialist panel for practitioners of pragmatics and related fields to present work on their latest research. The panel topic can be approached from different angles such as, but not exclusively:

- Outsourcing, globalization and service encounters.
- Online service encounters.
- Telephone service encounters.
- Intercultural service encounters.
- (Im)politeness in service encounters.
- Conversational structure of service encounters.
- Negotiation in service encounters.
- Receptionist-guest interactions at hotels.
- Communication at information desks.
- Corner-shop interactions.
- Reception desks in medical consultations,academic contexts, companies, etc.




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