Between tradition and modernity: The bargaining genre in women's clothing stores in Jordan Muhammad A. Badarneh * , Kawakib Al-Momani, Fathi Migdadi Department of English Language and Linguistics, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan Received 17 October 2015; received in revised form 12 June 2016; accepted 13 June 2016 Available online 28 June 2016 Abstract This article investigates bargaining exchanges between salesmen and female customers in modern urban women's clothing stores in northern Jordan. Thirty-five audio-recorded interactions of bargaining exchanges were analyzed, informed by a theoretical view of genre as culturally conventionalized discursive ways of achieving communicative ends within a community. In addition to identifying their generic structure, the analysis reveals that these encounters are discursively characterized by three features: ‘stylized’ or ‘mock’ conflict talk, sociability talk, and flirtation talk. The latter discursive aspect suggests how this traditional genre has evolved in a modern setting, which locates this genre somewhere between tradition and modernity and shows how members of a community play an active role in shaping, interpreting, and developing a genre over time. The bargaining encounters involve participants’ particular manipulations of interactional resources: the salesmen used extensive bargaining strategies to gain bargaining power and finalize the sales transaction, such as displaying exaggerated hospitality and generosity and praising the goods’ quality, while women customers used counter- strategies such as justifying why they deserve a lowered price and downplaying or criticizing the design or quality of the goods. The study relates these interactions to increased female agency and participation in public discourse in Jordanian society. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Bargaining; Service encounters; Genre; Gender; Mock conflict talk; Flirtation 1. Introduction Service encounters have been a major area of investigation in discourse studies, as attested by the two most recent volumes on the subject (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015; Hernández-Lo ´ pez and Fernández-Amaya, 2015 and studies therein). This interest mainly stems from the ubiquity of service encounters in social interaction and the transactional and relational vendor--customer talk these encounters involve, which is essential for accomplishing the goals of both parties. The present study explores a particular discursive aspect of service encounters, namely, marketplace bargaining, which is a traditional social practice that forms ‘‘one characteristic of market service encounters in which the buyer begins the process of reducing the price of the product after it has been presented’’ (Félix-Brasdefer, 2015:143). Specifically, this article investigates bargaining exchanges between salesmen and female customers in modern urban women's clothing stores in two major cities in northern Jordan. Drawing from a dataset of naturally occurring audio-recorded encounters among native speakers of Jordanian Arabic, four cross-gender encounters resulting in customer purchase are presented in detail. The analysis provides English translation and notes the role and connotations of Arabic formulaic expressions and the sociocultural values communicated by them in Jordanian bargaining encounters. We focus on the discursive, www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics 101 (2016) 118--137 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: mbadarn@just.edu.jo (M.A. Badarneh), kmomani@just.edu.jo (K. Al-Momani), fhmigdadi@just.edu.jo (F. Migdadi). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2016.06.005 0378-2166/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.