Conversational Constraints Theory

Genesis of Culture-Based Conversational Constraints

As people pursue interaction goals such as gaining compliance, seeking information, or altering relationships, they generate messages within a variety of constraints. In conversation, actors face constraints on how they speak. This is the backdrop against which people pursue their conversational goals. These higher-level constraints have been named supergoals, cross-situational goals, super-maxims, metastrategies, metagoals, metaplans, ritual-constraints, and sociopragmatic interactional principles. The main implication is that, regardless of one's interaction goal(s), there exist higher-level concerns regarding how one will achieve the goal(s).

Researchers from communication, artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, and other related fields have suggested two major dimensions that may serve as global constraints in conversational and planning situations—appropriateness and effectiveness. In the past, several authors have suggested similar dualities that are motivating forces in communication: being clear and being polite, concern for clarity and concern with support, directness and politeness, and efficiency and social appropriateness. Grice put forward the maxim of manner in the use of language (e.g., be clear, be brief, try to avoid obscurity), which can be seen as offering guidelines for direct communication. Brown and Levinson also posit such wants as (a) the want to be efficient or indicate urgency and (b) the want to maintain the hearer's face to some degree.

Based on the above literature, most theorists in interpersonal communication seem to have accepted, either implicitly or explicitly, the importance of appropriateness and effectiveness (or efficiency) in defining communication competence. The notion of social appropriateness as a communication constraint, however, presupposes some accepted standards of what constitutes appropriate communication performance. It inherently requires a culturally homogeneous community. Thus, appropriateness runs the risk of being meaningless in cross-cultural comparisons. When people do not share social conventions, their notions of appropriateness are different. For instance, a use of a request strategy by a person from one culture, where the choice would be appropriate, may be considered inappropriate when used with a person from another culture.

...