Beleefdheid en Sociale Afstand in Onderhandelingsgesprekken

Negotiators mostly face a double task: on the one hand they must achieve a good result, and on the other hand they must establish or maintain a good relationship with their counterpart. This paper focusses on the latter part of the negotiator's task and, in particular on how this relational management is reflected in their language behaviour. A corpus of 28 simulated negotiations was studied within the framework of Brown and Levinson's theory of politeness. As predicted by this theory, negotiators who are not familiar with each other use more politeness strategies than negotiators who know each other well. This difference is particularly relevant for strategies of deference politeness. The paper concludes with a discussion of the unidimensionality of solidarity politeness and deference politeness, and the relation between different substrategies.