Can Intercultural Pragmatics Bring Some New Insight into Pragmatic Theories?

Abstract

This chapter argues that the main difference between intracultural and intercultural communication is that the latter, to some extent, shifts the emphasis from the communal to the individual. What standard pragmatics assumes about how things work in communication depends on there being commonalities, conventions, standards, and norms between speakers and hearers. This, however, may not be exactly so in intercultural communication. Commonalities, conventions, common beliefs, norms, shared knowledge, and the like, all create a core common ground on which intention and cooperation-based pragmatics is built. (Of course, there are plenty of varieties within those commonalities.) However, when this core common ground appears to be limited, as is the case in intercultural communication, interlocutors cannot take it for granted; rather they need to co-construct it, at least temporarily. So what is happening here is a shift in emphasis from the communal to the individual. It is not that the individual becomes more important than the societal. Rather, since there is limited common ground, it should be created in the interactional context in which the interlocutors function as core common ground creators rather than just common ground seekers and activators as is the case in intracultural communication.

Consequently, there seems to be a reason to take up the question of how people go about formulating utterances and interpreting them when they cannot count on or have limited access to those commonalities and conventions, and in a sense, they are expected to create, co-construct them (at least a part of them) in the communicative process. What people depend on that makes pragmatic meaning reliable within a speech community—the focus of standard pragmatic theories—becomes more visible when we see the troubles and different routes to success that may arise when those commonalities and/or conventions are missing or limited cross-culturally. This means that we may be able to see and notice things assumed and taken for granted in standard theories by working on intercultural pragmatics.