The aim of this research was to examine the communication strategies used to build and maintain collaborative relations: to identify which strategies were perceived to be rapport-enhancing, which were perceived to be rapport-undermining, and how participants responded to the latter in order to maintain rapport. The data for the study were collected during a three-week visit to the USA by a delegation of senior Chinese government officials who wanted to enhance their links and positive rela-tions with their counterpart organisation in the USA. Various types of data were col-lected, the main ones being video/audio recordings of the official meetings and met-apragmatic comments made by the Chinese delegates at daily evening meetings when they discussed their daytime experiences. It was found that the delegates were ex-tremely conscious of any progress or undermining of their key goal for the visit, reg-ularly commenting on this. They were very appreciative of the US hosts’ relaxed in-teraction style and for the ways in which they built common ground. Their main complaints related to the interpreter’s behaviour. The findings are discussed in rela-tion to pragmatic research into (im)politeness, rapport management and the impact of context. Delegates seemed unaware of possible differences in interlocutors’ norma-tive expectations associated with communicative events, especially speaking proce-dures and role responsibilities. The article ends by making some professional devel-opment recommendations in relation to this.
Wang et al. (Mon,) studied this question.