Communication Styles – An Overview

This paper constitutes an attempt to define the communication style as a cluster of discursive elements, both formal or technical, such as turn taking patterns, overlap or backchannelling, and those based on pragmatic usage, such as emotionally loaded language, politeness patterns, gender differences, metaphors, neologisms, humour or laughter, as well as other elements of discourse culture such as culture-specific values. Following the discussion of relevant intercultural studies, the paper moves on to analyse two corpora of Polish face-to-face conversations and draws some tentative conclusions about Polish communication style, which is broadly cooperative, expressive, uses positive politeness, although it abounds in open disagreement as well as linguistic creativity.