Appropriateness in interpersonal communication

The paper investigates a variety of communicative moves in which interlocutors negotiate appropriateness of an utterance. Two types of such moves are analysed: prospective (the speaker prepares the ground for her future speech act by checking on the utterance’s appropriateness) and retrospective (the hearer signals that the speaker’s previous utterance is viewed as inappropriate). Four types of appropriateness explication are discussed: role, interpersonal, temporal and locative. The study shows that there exist correlations between different types of prospective and retrospective communicative moves, and that they demonstrate both universal and culture-specific features. The article builds on the author’s PhD dissertation and is the first in a series of papers aimed at investigating the phenomenon of appropriateness in various discursive spheres.