Interactional dimension deals with so called politeness phenomena - see (Brown and
Levinson 1987) which involve presentation of self, distribution of talk, and Face Threatening
Acts with numerous politeness strategies to mitigate them. A special point of interest in crosscultural studies is presence in certain cultures of Face Satisfying Acts (Yu-hwei 1994).
2. Handling-information dimension embraces various strategies ranging in scope from the level
of the clause to larger discourse units. It deals with fore- and backgrounding and availability
of information reflected in the information structure of a clause/sentence and content
organization beyond the sentence. The former, being in many languages part of the grammar,
has little to do with cultural schemas and free choice of linguistic form for their speakers. But
structuring of discourse at the paragraph (stanza, episode, scene, etc.) level and beyond that is
very much culturally bound. Indeed, it often allows to speak of cultures and (sub)cultural
groups as of representatives of a certain type of discourse - see (Scollon and Scollon 2001).
1
This fieldwork in the village of Nikolai, Alaska was part of my Fulbright Research Fellowship in May- December
2001.
2
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