Reciprocity and epistemicity: On the (proto)social and cross-cultural ‘value’ of information transmission

Reciprocity is a (proto)social mechanism that involves (im)politeness as balance of positive and negative actions among individuals: doing something good to someone expected be reciprocated in kind (cf. Culpeper & Tantucci 2021). The same applies for negatively charged behaviour (Culpeper present study advances the theory reciprocity both empirically theoretically, it extends model contexts information transmission, i.e. cases where some news being communicated from one interlocutor another. What we found way people react ‘being informed something’ remarkably mediated by two maxims epistemic reciprocity: Engagement E (be interested) maxim Knowledge exchange Ke interesting return). Our case centred on Chinese telephone conversations family members shows costs benefits realised an giver are matched receiver when propositional contribution current flow produced return. Conversely, responses occur via bare backchanneling or absence informative on-going interaction, then not properly maintained, perceptions impoliteness more likely arise. Despite context-dependent nature our data, will further argue this finding has cross-cultural significance. methods triangulate between Likert-scale judgments, large scale corpus-based analysis multivariate conditional inference tree modelling (Levshina 2015;