Russian journal of linguistics: Vestnik RUDN (Dec 2013)
Ambiguous invitations in the American communicative culture
Abstract
This paper deals with those features of the speech act of Invitation in the American communicative culture that often cause misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication. Based on an empirical research, it examines the use of the so-called «ambiguous» or «phony» invitations and discusses the criteria which can be used to distinguish ambiguous invitations from unambiguous ones.