Book review: J. Cesar Felix-Brasdefer, The Language of Service Encounters: A Pragmatic-discursive Approach

Book review. Service encounters are a fundamental activity in everyday life whereby commodities and/or information are exchanged between a service provider and a customer. A service encounter is by nature a goal-oriented speech event. Goals in service encounters, however, are not simply limited to achieving business transactions; on the contrary, they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. This book engages the reader with a new methodological framework for the study of service encounters, utilizing the tools, methods, and theories of discourse analysis and pragmatics, and applies it to face-to-face interactions in the US and Mexico in commercial and noncommercial settings. It consists of nine chapters with a brief introduction.