The challenges.

Spencer-Oatey’s and Jiang’s paper focuses on culture as an exploratory variable in cross-cultural pragmatic studies. To circumvent the shortcomings of Leech’s (1983) politeness maxims, the authors propose their reconcepttualization as Sociopragmatic Interactional Principles (SIPs). SIPs are “socioculturally-based principles, scalar in nature, that guide or in¶uence people’s productive and interpretive use of language” (p.1635). A key diŸerence between these and politeness maxims is that, depending on the circumstances, diŸerent points in the scales of the value-linked principles might be preferred. Spencer-Oatey’s and Jiang’s study replicated to a large extent Kim’s investigation (1994) of ave conversation constraints in relation to requests, but it innovated by having each of the participants (university students) rate the diŸerent principles involved in six ‘request’ scenarios (instead of one). Those principles were: concern to avoid hurting the hearer’s feelings, concern to avoid imposition, concern to avoid negative evaluation by the hearer, concern for clarity, and concern for eŸectiveness. A total of 150 completed Chinese questionnaires and 94 British questionnaires were subjected to a factor analysis. The authors claim that the results oŸer tentative support for the notion of SIPs despite the limits of the study. The fact that each data set showed three clear factors, diŸerent for the Chinese and British data, would suggest that people hold a limited number of principles of language use, and that national culture can be a relevant in¶uencing factor. Moreover, the relative importance of SIPs according to the type of situation seems to indicate that SIPs operate at a more fundamental level than do participant relations. In conclusion, the authors underline the need for empirical studies to explore and check their claims.