pragmaticse Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics

The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics Intercultural pragmatics addresses one of the major issues of human communication in the globalized world: how do people interact with each other in a language other than their native tongue, and with native speakers of the language of interaction? Bringing together a globally representative team of scholars, this Handbook provides an authoritative overview to this fascinating field of study, as well as a theoretical framework. Chapters are grouped into five thematic areas: theoretical foundation, key issues in intercultural pragmatics research, the interface between intercultural pragmatics and related disciplines, intercultural pragmatics in different types of communication, and language learning. It addresses key concepts and research issues in intercultural pragmatics, and will trigger fresh lines of inquiry and generate new research questions. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading not only for scholars of pragmatics but also for scholars of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and second language teaching and learning. I S T V A N K E C S K E S is a Distinguished Professor of the State University of New York at Albany. He is the president of the American Pragmatics Association and the Chinese as a Second Language Research Association. Notable publications include Intercultural Pragmatics (Oxford University Press, 2014) and English as a Lingua Franca: The Pragmatic Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2019). He is the founding editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics, the Mouton Series in Pragmatics, and the bilingual journal Chinese as a Second Language Research. cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics Genuinely broad in scope, each handbook in this series provides a complete state-of-the-field overview of a major sub-discipline within language study and research. Grouped into broad thematic areas, the chapters in each volume encompass the most important issues and topics within each subject, offering a coherent picture of the latest theories and findings. Together, the volumes will build into an integrated overview of the discipline in its entirety. Published titles The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, edited by Paul de Lacy The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Code-switching, edited by Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language, Second Edition, edited by Edith L. 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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108839532 DOI: 10.1017/9781108884303 © Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kecskés, István, editor. Title: The Cambridge handbook of intercultural pragmatics / edited by Istvan Kecskes, State University of New York, Albany. Description: Cambridge ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2022. | Series: Cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022024954 | ISBN 9781108839532 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108813297 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108884303 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pragmatics. | Intercultural communication. | Language and culture. | BISAC: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Semantics | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P99.4.P72 C364 2022 | DDC 401/.45–dc23/eng/20220526 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024954 ISBN 978-1-108-83953-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgment List of Contributors Introduction: The Rise of Intercultural Pragmatics page x xiii xv xvi Istvan Kecskes 1 Part I Theoretical Foundation 1 Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication Kasia M. Jaszczolt 2 Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication Jacques Moeschler 3 Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics Rachel Giora 4 The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics Istvan Kecskes Part II Key Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics Research 5 The Cultural, Contextual, and Computational Dimensions of Common Ground Brian Nolan 6 Role of Context Anita Fetzer 7 (Mis/Non)Understanding in Intercultural Interactions Jagdish Kaur 9 11 40 63 83 105 107 139 164 8 Creativity and Idiomaticity in Intercultural Interactions Marie-Luise Pitzl 187 9 Metaphors in Intercultural Communication Marianna Bolognesi 216 10 Common Ground in Linguistic Theory and Internet Pragmatics: Forms of Dynamic Multicultural Interaction Elke Diedrichsen 245 viii Contents 11 Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective Grace Qiao Zhang 12 Humor in Intercultural Interactions 274 Kerry Mullan and Christine Béal 13 Emotion in Intercultural Interactions Laura Alba-Juez 14 Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics Monika Kirner-Ludwig Interface of Intercultural Pragmatics and Related Disciplines 15 Semiotics and Intercultural Pragmatics Marcel Danesi 16 Sociopragmatics and Intercultural Interaction Michael Haugh 301 334 361 Part III and Wei-Lin Melody Chang 17 Intercultural Pragmatics from the Perspective of English as a Lingua Franca Barbara Seidlhofer and Henry Widdowson 18 Intercultural Rhetoric Ulla Connor 19 Politeness and Rapport Management Helen Spencer-Oatey 20 Corpus Pragmatics: Corpus-Based Intercultural Pragmatic Research Jesús Romero-Trillo Intercultural Pragmatics in Different Types of Communication 21 Visual and Multimodal Communication across Cultures Charles Forceville 22 Intercultural Teamwork via Videoconferencing Technology: A Multimodal (Inter)action Analysis 395 397 420 445 469 484 510 Part IV Sigrid Norris and Jarret Geenen 23 Intercultural Communication in Computer-Mediated Discourse Carmen Maı́z-Arévalo 24 Intercultural Aspects of Business Communication Ping Liu 25 Intercultural Pragmatics in Healthcare Communication Maria Grazia Rossi and Fabrizio Macagno 26 Academic and Professional Discourse in Intercultural Pragmatics Marı́a Luisa Carrió-Pastor 27 The Dynamic Model of Meaning Approach: Analyzing the Interculturality of Conspiracy Theory in Far-Right Populist Discourses Fabienne Baider Part V Language Learning 28 Pragmatic Competence Elly Ifantidou 29 Pragmatic Awareness in Intercultural Language Learning Troy McConachy 525 527 552 588 612 652 683 711 739 741 766 30 Interculturality and the Study Abroad Experience: Pragmatic and Sociolinguistic Development Martin Howard and Rachel L. Shively 788 Contents 31 Intercultural Mediation in Language Learning Anthony J. Liddicoat 815 32 Interaction in the Multilingual Classroom Marie Källkvist, Erica Sandlund, Pia Sundqvist, and Henrik Gyllstad Index 836 869 ix Figures 5.1 Framework for a dynamic common ground page 118 5.2 Conceptual framework of the conversational software agent (Panesar 2017) 122 5.3 Computing utterance meaning from situation, context, and common ground 133 8.1 From multilingual creativity to idiomatic multilingualism 209 10.1 Awkward Look Monkey Puppet in the role of somebody experiencing and contemplating an embarrassing social situation 261 10.2 Awkward Look Monkey Puppet in the role of the self, realizing and contemplating that they had wished for the global fate of 2020 for low egoistic reasons (laziness and social avoidance) 261 10.3 Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme showing the movie character in the role of the user being amused by their own prank on the colleague 263 10.4 Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing Image Macro contrasted with Great Gatsby Reaction Image Macro, showing the same actor in scenes from different movies to illustrate the point the meme makes: the user accuses politicians of making generous promises only in order to get elected, but after the elections, voters feel betrayed as the promises are not kept. 263 10.5 The movie character from the Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme features in a photo edition mimicking a smirky laugh of a phone, carried in the jeans pocket, that does what vaccine opponents suspect of vaccines. 264 List of Figures 10.6 The movie character from the Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme features in a photo edition shared in Ireland, portraying “Culchies.” 14.1 Various interdependent layers woven into conventional research designs 18.1 Sample message sent to an Estonian supplier showing differences between general language level and use of terminology (Connor 1999: 123) 18.2 The use of the modal verb and polite lexical choices (Connor 1999: 126) 18.3 Code-switched with his Norwegian fish sellers (Connor 1999: 127) 21.1 Examples of pictograms and pictorial runes: a. Mandatory mouth mask pictogram, ubiquitous in Dutch railway stations; b. “Wild Atlantic Way” pictogram (Ireland); c. Two varieties of anger rune in Japanese manga; d. “Counter-dining” pictogram in Michelin Guide 21.2 Examples of type fonts: a. “Gothic” typeface © Microsoft Word; b. “Fusion” typeface by © David Cookle; c. Roman letters in “Indian” typeface 21.3 Cultural background knowledge may be indispensable to understand who/what is depicted: a. Rosa Parks (± 1955), photographer unknown; b. Grain silo. Photograph by © Rachel Nickerson; c. Beacon in Waddenzee, the Netherlands. Photograph by © Weefemwe, 28-10-20; d. A bowl with “sabze” 21.4 The general meaning of the persons/objects in Figure 21.3 become highly specific when they appear in context. a. Rosa Parks. Photograph by © Warren K. Leffler; b. Cartoon by © Steve Sack, The Minneapolis Star Tribune 23-10-19; c. IBM billboard, the Netherlands, 1990s. Discussed in Forceville (1996); d. Iranian advertisement for Ajilooneh nuts (thanks to Zahra Kashanizadeh) 21.5 Fokke & Sukke cartoon by Geleinse, Reid & Van Tol, NRC-Handelsblad 29-11-21 22.1 Image 1 reading path from left to right and top to bottom 22.2 Pretending versus real likes 22.3 Participant B producing air quotes, indicating they are pretending 22.4 Participant A gives a true response, i.e. she is not pretending 22.5 Participant A thinking of what kind of food she likes besides Italian: middle-distance gaze to the left 22.6 Participant B focusing on the task 264 366 474 474 475 534 535 537 540 542 558 561 561 562 562 563 xi xii List of Figures 22.7 Participant A producing her higher-level action 22.8 Participant A producing her higher-level action (continued) 22.9 Participant B producing her higher-level action 22.10 Participant B producing her higher-level action (continued) 22.11 Drawing on different practices: real likes versus pretending 22.12 Looking up reviews versus looking up the real thing 22.13 Searching for the hotel versus thinking about searching for a review of the hotel 22.14 Head-beat slightly up and to the side indicating thinking 22.15 I think I’ve got it 22.16 Like review? 22.17 I think I’ve got it here 22.18 Affirmation of ostensible common ground 22.19 Opening the hotel pictures 22.20 Participant A locating the hotel 22.21 Participant A locating the hotel (continued) 22.22 Participant B thinking about finding a review 22.23 Participant B thinking about finding a review (continued) 22.24 Drawing on divergent practices: looking up a review versus looking up a hotel 22.25 Participant B realizing that participant A did not find a review 22.26 Looking for a map on the hotel website versus on restaurants’ websites 22.27 Participant B realizes they are looking at different websites 22.28 Participant B trying to find a map 22.29 Participant A trying to find a map 22.30 Locating restaurants versus locating the hotel 25.1 Evidence of problematic understanding 26.1 Comparison of frequencies of boosters in Spanish and Chinese papers 26.2 Comparison of Spanish and Chinese frequencies of hedges in a dispersion graph 26.3 Occurrences of the most frequently used hedges by academic field 26.4 Occurrences of the most frequently used boosters in the sub-corpora by academic fields 32.1 Seating configuration in the word-card game 32.2 Excerpt 1a 32.3 Excerpt 1b 32.4 Excerpt 1c 564 565 566 567 568 570 571 571 572 572 573 573 574 575 576 577 578 579 579 580 580 581 582 583 661 696 698 702 704 853 854 856 857 Tables 3.1 Proportions of metaphorical interpretations of negative vs. affirmative utterances in English and results of z-ratio tests for the difference between them page 76 3.2 Proportions of metaphorical interpretations of negative vs. affirmative utterances in German and results of z-ratio tests for the difference between them 76 3.3 Proportions of metaphorical interpretations of negative vs. affirmative utterances in Russian and results of z-ratio tests for the difference between them 77 3.4 Distribution of different types of resonance in the environment of negative utterances in English and results of exact binominal probability test for the superiority of metaphoric resonance 77 3.5 Distribution of different types of resonance in the environment of negative utterances in German and results of exact binominal probability test for the superiority of metaphorical resonance 78 3.6 Distribution of different types of resonance in the environment of negative utterances in Russian and results of exact binominal probability test for the superiority of metaphorical resonance 78 5.1 The operations on common ground 124 5.2 Assertive: formalization of situation of utterance 127 5.3 Declarative: formalization of situation of utterance 131 10.1 Core and emergent common ground in Awkward Look Monkey Puppet 257 10.2 Core and emergent common ground in Leonardo DiCaprio laughing 258 22.1 Assumptions and how we know 585 xiv List of Tables 26.1 26.2 26.3 26.4 26.5 26.6 26.7 26.8 32.1 Data extracted from the four sub-corpora Total occurrences found in the corpus Occurrences in Chinese and Spanish papers Boosters used with different frequencies in academic English Hedges used with different frequencies in academic English Results of hedges and boosters by linguistic background and discipline Results of the different categories of hedges Results of the different categories of boosters Studies involving intercultural pragmatics data 691 693 695 697 699 701 702 703 841 Acknowledgment First and foremost, I would like to thank my doctoral student, Hanh Dinh, for the excellent job she did as my editorial assistant. She worked very hard for the success of this book. Without her arduous work and meticulous editing this book would not look as it does now. It was a great pleasure for me to work with Hanh who understood the importance of this Handbook and worked for its success with me every step of the way. My thanks also go to all the reviewers of the chapters in this book. They helped authors a lot to improve the contents of their contribution. Contributors Laura Alba-Juez, UNED, Madrid, Spain Fabienne Baider, University of Cyprus, Cyprus Christine Béal, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier, France Marianna Bolognesi, University of Bologna, Italy Marı́a Luisa Carrió Pastor, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain Wei-Lin Melody Chang, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Ulla Connor, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, USA Marcel Danesi, University of Torino, Italy Elke Diedrichsen, Technological University Dublin, Ireland Anita Fetzer, University of Augsburg, Germany Charles Forceville, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Jarret Geenen, Radbound University, Netherlands Rachel Giora, Tel-Aviv University, Israel Henrik Gyllstad, Lund University, Sweden Michael Haugh, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Martin Howard, University College, Cork, Ireland Elly Ifantidou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Kasia M. Jaszczolt, University of Cambridge, UK Marie Källkvist, Lund University and Linnaeus University, Sweden Jagdish Kaur, University of Malaya, Malaysia Istvan Kecskes, State University of New York, Albany, USA Monika Kirner-Ludwig, University of Innsbruck, Austria Anthony J. Liddicoat, University of Warwick, UK Fabricio Macagno, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal List of Contributors Carmen Maiz-Arevalo, Complutense University, Madrid, Spain Troy McConachy, University of Warwick, UK Jacques Moeschler, University of Geneva, Switzerland Kerry Mullan, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Brian Nolan, Technological University Dublin, Ireland Sigrid Norris, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand Ping Liu, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China Marie-Luise Pitzl, University of Vienna, Austria Jesus Romero-Trillo, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain Maria Grazia Rossi, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Erica Sandlund, Karlstad University, Sweden Barbara Seidlhofer, University of Vienna, Austria Rachel Shiverly, Illinois State University, Normal, USA Helen Spencer-Oatey, University of Warwick, UK Pia Sundqvist, University of Oslo, Sweden Henry Widdowson, University of Vienna, Austria Grace Qiao Zhang, Curtin University, Australia xvii Introduction The Rise of Intercultural Pragmatics Istvan Kecskes 1 What Is Intercultural Pragmatics? Intercultural pragmatics is a relatively new field of inquiry that is concerned with the way in which the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages but communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures (see Kecskes 2004, 2013). The main focus of research in this field is on intercultural interactions. In these encounters, the communicative process is synergistic, in the sense that existing pragmatic norms and emerging co-constructed features are present to a varying degree. The innovative feature of the field is that it provides an alternative way of thinking about interaction by shifting the attention of researchers from first language (L1) communication to intercultural communication. In Gricean pragmatics everything is about native speakers (mainly native speakers of English) of a language who are members of the same, although diverse and relatively definable, speech community, who have preferred ways of saying things and preferred ways of organizing thoughts, who share core common ground, conventions, norms, and distributed collective salience. This gives them a relatively firm basis for understanding each other. However, when the language is used by not only native speakers but also by second language (L2) or Lx speakers, and lingua franca speakers, access to communalities, common ground, and collective salience may be limited and cannot be taken for granted, and as a result, interlocutors need to co-construct them synchronically, at least temporarily. Consequently, the questions are to what extent interlocutors will stick to the original rules of the game, and how much will they rely on those communalities, conventions, standards and norms that the target language offers them? How will the main tenets of pragmatic theorizing change? Will the basic notions such as implicatures, presuppositions, context, common ground remain unchanged, or will modifications be needed? Intercultural 2 ISTVAN KECSKES pragmatics research seeks answers to these questions. Some of them will be addressed directly or indirectly in the chapters of the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics (CHIP) from different perspectives. 2 Intercultural Pragmatics and Other Pragmatic Subfields The rise of intercultural pragmatics as a new field of inquiry was essential with globalization that has created an era in which multilingualism rather than monolingualism is the norm. Scholars have always been interested in how non-native speakers use a new language. However, existing paradigms such as interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, and L2 pragmatics have not always been able to answer the rapidly growing number of questions raised by intercultural interactions. The main reason is that their primary concern is not actual interaction. They investigate and highlight aspects of language behavior in which speakers from various cultures have differences and similarities. According to Kasper and Schmidt (1996), the cross-cultural pragmatics approach is comparative, focusing on cross-cultural similarity and difference in linguistic realization and sociopragmatic judgment in contexts. The other popular research paradigm dealing with L2, interlanguage pragmatics, is interested in the acquisition and use of pragmatic norms in L2: how L2 learners produce and comprehend speech acts, and how their L2 pragmatic competence develops over time (e.g. Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Kasper 1998). Intercultural pragmatics is not about creating a new paradigm for understanding and investigating L2 pragmatic competence as separate from L1 pragmatic competence. It has always been underlined in intercultural pragmatics that people have only one pragmatic competence that is flexible enough to accommodate the use of any number of languages. Language users do not switch from one pragmatic competence to another when they switch languages. They use the same pragmatic competence with adjustments and modifications as required by the language that is actually used. This is why intercultural pragmatics research has never tried to break up the Gricean paradigm; rather, it has attempted to apply it to explain intercultural interactions while making the necessary adjustments and changes on the way. Gricean pragmatics is about human communication in general, so the categories such as cooperation, intention, implicatures, presuppositions, common ground, etc. do not need to be changed for other categories when we analyze intercultural interactions. The real issue is how they have to be modified to explain not only L1 but also L2 and Lx communication. The socio-cognitive approach that serves as the theoretical frame for intercultural pragmatics (see Chapter 4) is both about L1 communication and intercultural communication. It is an alternative view on pragmatics in general and on intercultural pragmatics in particular (see Horn and Kecskes 2013). The field of intercultural pragmatics has been shaped by Introduction: The Rise of Intercultural Pragmatics the contribution of scholars from all over the world for more than a decade (e.g. Kecskes 2004, 2013; Mey 2004; Moeschler 2004; Haugh 2008; House 2008; Spencer-Oatey and Wang 2017). Research has tried to fill in the gap between L1 pragmatics and L2 pragmatics and focus on intercultural interactions and also examine how L1-based pragmatic theories could explain what happens in intercultural interactions. 3 Factors Affecting Research Agenda in Intercultural Pragmatics Intercultural pragmatics embodies a “multilingual, intercultural, sociocognitive, and discourse-segment (rather than just utterance) perspective” on interactions (Kecskes 2013:1). There are some unique features of intercultural communication that may differentiate it, to some extent, from L1 communication. The investigation of these features may lead to the revision of some basic concepts in pragmatics, such as cooperation, common ground, implicature, context-sensitivity, salience, and others. Here is a short list of some of these features: • Limited role of target language cultural norms, conventions, frames, and beliefs. More importance may be given to co-constructed and emergent elements in intercultural encounters. It is not that interlocutors in intercultural interactions do not need norms, conventions, beliefs, etc. for smooth communication. They do, but since they do not share those as they usually do in L1 they need to co-construct them temporarily. • Limited role of core common ground of target language, and more reliance on emergent common ground in the course of communication. Emergent common ground dominates the relationship between interlocutors and their language use. Core common ground is what makes L1 communication cooperation-like. Interactants share core common grounds and relatively common cultural frames that help their encounters. In intercultural interactions participants cannot assume that they share core common ground that is based on their target language knowledge because their proficiency level varies. • Cooperation gains a new sense in intercultural communication. Interlocutors cooperate not just because this is what human beings are expected to do in communication (as Gricean pragmatics claims), but because they generally do that consciously and eagerly to create understanding, common ground, community and to avoid communicative problems. • Egocentrism, i.e. subconscious, automatic reliance on prior experience of individuals is just as part of human rationality as cooperation. The two are not antagonistic factors in the communication process. In fact, both cooperation and egocentrism are present in any interaction in 3 4 ISTVAN KECSKES • • • • a varying degree. Cooperation is tied to relevance, while egocentrism is connected with salience. Growing role of individual factors. Social frames do not affect interlocutors top-down as it happens in L1 communication. Intercultural interlocutors will need to build up most of those frames bottom-up in the interaction. So intersubjectivity is less a matter of common sense than of intensive common ground building. Context-sensitivity works differently in intercultural communication than in L1 communication because actual situational context may be understood differently by interactants as they have limited prior experience in the target language and culture. In intercultural pragmatics we talk about the two sides of context: prior context and actual situation context. Prior context refers to the individuals’ prior experience with linguistic signs, cultural frames, and situations. Meaning is the result of the interplay of these two sides of context. The balance between the use of formulaic language and ad hoc generated language is different in intercultural communication from L1 communication. Interlocutors generate more ad hoc language and there is less reliance on prefabricated target language. However, this does not mean that the idiom principle does not work in intercultural communication. It does because interlocutors create their own formulas and/or metaphors in the course of interaction. Although those units may not exist in the target language, they still function as temporary formulas. They are interpreted the same way, just like L1 formulas, and thus they support smooth communication (see Kecskes 2013, 2019). There is a strong emphasis on certain communicative strategies such as explicit negotiation of meaning, backchanneling, and development and use of trouble anticipating and avoidance strategies. 4 How Does the Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics Differ from Other Similar Publications? Given the nature and novelty of intercultural pragmatics this handbook has some unique features. First, it is very inclusive because the chapters focus not only on intercultural pragmatics proper but also on theories and applications that are closely related to the field and help readers better understand the foundation of the paradigm and its relationship to other branches of pragmatics. Second, the chapters do not follow a particular pattern. They have the same structure but how the contents are presented is at the authors’ discretion. Although there are references to other chapters in the handbook, building contents on each other’s work was not a particular goal of the contributors. The common core in the chapters is the intercultural perspective and focus on actual language use and Introduction: The Rise of Intercultural Pragmatics interaction. Third, the chapters relate to intercultural pragmatics in a variety of ways. Some of them give an overview of particular research issues, others discuss the relationship of another field to intercultural pragmatics, and a few chapters direct the readers’ attention to some innovative approaches and methodology related to intercultural pragmatics. CHIP emphasizes that intercultural pragmatics is not a homogenous field. It is a typical interdisciplinary paradigm that brings together views from several fields of language-oriented inquiry. Fourth, the handbook also reflects the “turbulent times” of language-oriented research. Gone are the days when monolingual, L1-based research ruled the fields. With globalization, the spread of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), and the development of technology, new subfields have emerged. If we just look at the field of pragmatics and the list of new journals, we see the results of this rapid development: Intercultural Pragmatics, Corpus Pragmatics, Internet Pragmatics, Applied Pragmatics, Contrastive Pragmatics, International Review of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, East Asian Pragmatics, and Lodz Papers in Pragmatics. If we add the Journal of Pragmatics and Historical Pragmatics the list will be full, reflecting the incredible variety of approaches in the field of pragmatics. 5 Overview The book begins with four chapters on the theoretical foundation of intercultural pragmatics. They summarize what scholars engaged in research in the field presently or in the future are expected to know to get a firm grip of the main tenets of the paradigm. The first two chapters explain post-Gricean pragmatics (Kasia M. Jaszczolt) and the Relevance Theory (Jacques Moeschler), as related to intercultural pragmatics, highlighting those features of the two approaches that are especially relevant to intercultural pragmatics. Chapter 3 on cognitive psychology by Rachel Giora seemingly does not have much to do with intercultural pragmatics. However, the information in the chapter is necessary for anyone in the field because it explains defaultness in L1. In intercultural interactions the literal meanings of lexical units serve as default meanings, as core common ground for interlocutors with different L1 backgrounds when they communicate in English. To understand how default interpretation works in intercultural interactions, first we need to get to know how defaultness works in L1. Giora’s chapter helps us with that. My chapter on the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) describes the theoretical frame for intercultural pragmatics, partly relying on some ideas presented in the previous chapters. SCA brings together the individual with the social and emphasizes that egocentrism of individuals1 is as important as cooperation in interaction. In L1, social frames affect individuals top-down, while in intercultural communication individuals are expected to build up those 1 See explanation of egocentrism in Chapter 4. 5 6 ISTVAN KECSKES social frames bottom-up, developing emergent common ground. The process is explained in Chapter 4. Part II includes chapters that address key issues in intercultural pragmatics research. Some of the chapters directly focus on intercultural interactions, while others deal with questions that are relevant to the discipline, but the author’s perspective is not necessarily intercultural, such as the chapter on the role of context by Anita Fetzer or Elke Diedrichsen’s chapter and Brian Nolan’s chapter on common ground. The rest of the chapters discuss issues that represent major challenges for intercultural pragmatics research, such as idiomaticity (Marie-Luise Pitzl), metaphors (Marianna Bolognesi), humor (Kerry Mullan and Christine Béal), vague language (Grace Zhang), and emotions (Laura Alba). Part II ends with a chapter on research methods in intercultural pragmatics by Monika Kirner-Ludwig. This chapter is especially important for anybody who is interested in the field. The author gives a very detailed and well-presented summary of what can be considered research in intercultural pragmatics. In the introduction to the chapter Kirner-Ludwig says the following: “this chapter on research methods essentially represents a hub amongst the here-assembled contributions: it intertwines with or at least closes contingent spaces between topics and issues discussed across the five strands this handbook is divided into.” Part III contains chapters on the interface of intercultural pragmatics and related disciplines. Each author has made an attempt to make a reasonable connection between their field and intercultural pragmatics. These chapters will help further research in the paradigm to a great extent because reading them will generate several research questions. Out of the disciplines represented in this chapter, semiotics seems to be the furthest from intercultural pragmatics. Marcel Danesi discusses what semiotics can offer to intercultural pragmatics. The chapter focuses on the notion of semiotic code, which provides a specific theoretical framework for describing the negotiation of meaning in intercultural communication. The rest of the chapters in this part have overlapping areas of research with intercultural pragmatics. Discussing the similarities and differences between sociopragmatics and intercultural pragmatics, Michael Haugh and Wei-Lin Melody Chang highlight that sociopragmatics has tended to rely, for the most part, on data from intracultural settings (i.e. where users share the same L1), while intercultural pragmatics focuses more on data from intercultural interactions. Barbara Seidlhofer and Henry Widdowson contributed with a chapter that has an ELF perspective on intercultural pragmatics. Their writing is especially interesting because ELF is one type of intercultural communication that intercultural pragmatics focuses on and which has recently emerged as an independent field of inquiry. Helen Spencer-Oatey’s chapter on politeness and rapport management demonstrates the unique feature of intercultural politeness through concrete performance examples. Ulla Connor summarized the common features Introduction: The Rise of Intercultural Pragmatics of intercultural rhetoric and intercultural pragmatics and the influence of the former on several other disciplines such as second language teaching and English for specific purposes. Jesus Romero-Trillo’s chapter deals with corpus-based research in intercultural pragmatics, which has become very popular in recent years. In Part IV contributions focus on different types of communications from an intercultural perspective. In recent years technology infiltrated and conquered communication. The first three chapters demonstrate the results of this process. Charles Foreceville’s chapter on visual and multimodal communication discusses how interaction works when the process relies on semiotic resources other than just spoken language. Sigrid Norris and Jarret Geenen demonstrate how intercultural teamwork takes place via videoconferencing technology. Carmen Maiz-Arevalo’s chapter focuses on the intercultural aspects of computer-mediated communication. Business communication and healthcare communication have received special attention in recent years. Liu Ping’s chapter highlights how ELF works in business interactions. Maria Grazia Rossi and Fabricio Macagno provide an overview of healthcare-oriented studies to describe differences and commonalities between pragmatic strategies used in interactions of different types and levels of “interculturality.” In her chapter Marı́a Luisa Carrió Pastor focus on academic writing, particularly on Spanish and Chinese writers, in order to identify intercultural traits that display cultural and linguistic characteristics which differentiate the way academic English is used by non-native speakers. Fabienne Baider’s contribution analyzes the interculturality of conspiracy theory in far-right populist discourses in the frame of the Dynamic Model of Meaning. Language learning is at the center of attention in the chapters of Part V. In the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, interlanguage pragmatics served as the basis for language learning. Gradually, this role has been taken over by intercultural pragmatics. In the opening chapter Elly Ifantidou examines pragmatics competence from different perspectives. In his chapter Troy McConachy analyzes the role of pragmatic awareness in intercultural language learning. Study abroad has always been an important angle of L2 pragmatics research because it provides direct access to the sociocultural background of the target language. In their chapter Martin Howard and Rachel Shiverly discuss the relationship of interculturality and study abroad experience. Intercultural mediation is a recent topic of interest in language teaching. In his contribution Anthony Liddicoat proposed the idea that language learners do not simply need to develop communicative abilities in a language but also need to be able to mediate between languages and cultures. The handbook ends with an exciting new development in education and language research: the multilingual classroom. A team of scholars from Sweden, Marie Källkvist, Erica Sandlund, Pia Sundqvist, and Henrik Gyllstad, give an overview of multilingual classroom research and translanguaging pedagogy. 7 8 ISTVAN KECSKES CHIP addresses many issues in the field of intercultural pragmatics but not all. But that has not been the goal anyway. What we wanted to do is to show where the field is now and in what directions it is going. A number of different views have been presented, but there is still room for new ideas and new approaches within the paradigm. I would say that the field has grown into its “adolescence” with many more promising years to come. References Haugh, M. (2008). Intention in pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 5, 99 110. Horn, L. and Istvan, K. (2013). Pragmatics, discourse and cognition. In Stephen R. Anderson, Jacques Moeschler, and Fabienne Reboul, eds., The Language-Cognition Interface. Geneva/Paris: Librairie Droz, pp. 353 375. House, J. (2008). (Im)politeness in English as a Lingua Franca Discourse. In Miriam A. Locher and Jurg Strassler, eds., Standards and Norms in the English Language. Berlin/New York: Degruyter Mouton, pp. 351 366. Kasper, G. (1998). Interlanguage pragmatics. In Heidi Byrnes, ed., Learning and Teaching Foreign Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, pp. 183 208. Kasper, G. and Blum-Kulka, S. (1993). Interlanguage Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3 17. Kasper, G. and Schmidt, R. (1996). Developmental issues in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 149 169. Kecskes, I. (2004). Lexical merging, conceptual blending and cultural crossing. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1, 1 21. Kecskes, I. (2013). Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kecskes, I. (2019). Impoverished pragmatics? The semantics-pragmatics interface from an intercultural perspective. Intercultural Pragmatics, 16 (5), 489 517. Mey, Jacob L. (2004). Between culture and pragmatics: Scylla and Charybdis? The precarious condition of intercultural pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics, 1, 27 48. Moeschler, Jacques (2004). Intercultural pragmatics: A cognitive approach. Intercultural Pragmatics,1, 49 70. Spencer-Oatey, Helen (2000) Rapport management: A framework for analysis. In H. Spencer-Oatey, ed., Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures. London: Continuum, pp. 11 46. Spencer-Oatey, Helen, and Wang, Jiayi (2017). Intercultural pragmatics. In R. Sybesma, ed., Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, Vol. II. Leiden: Brill, pp. 441 445. Part I Theoretical Foundation 1 Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication Kasia M. Jaszczolt 1.1 Philosophical Pragmatics at the Service of Intercultural Communication Traditional methods of argumentation and conceptual analysis are sometimes shunned in pragmatics circles these days: they rely on introspection, seemingly make little recourse to empirical data, and as such may appear “unscientific.” But this assessment cannot be further from the truth. Every discipline of scientific inquiry relies on constructing theories that describe and explain empirical facts, have predictive power, well-defined theoretical terms and concepts, and rely on answers to foundational questions. Philosophical pragmatics comprises all these tasks. While empirical investigations, such as experimental and corpus pragmatics, provide the necessary database of facts of conversation to test theories, philosophical pragmatics launches the theories that explain human conversational behavior in the context of human rationality and the relation human mind and actions bear to the world in which they are immersed.1 It is in this context that I address the relation between post-Gricean pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics as the relation between theories of meaning in discourse that are firmly based in philosophical pragmatics on the one hand and, on the other, approaches that explain patterns in conversational behaviour, or pragmatic competence, in L2 learners. This chapter is devoted to various approaches within one dominant orientation in pragmatic theorizing, namely post-Gricean pragmatics, and as such addresses meaning in relation to intentions and inferences as its explanantia (i.e. tools used to answer questions and explain phenomena). The chapter provides a brief overview of the main developments in this tradition and places them in the context of the utility they have for 1 The term “philosophical pragmatics” is used in a variety of ways in the literature. See Jaszczolt (2018) for a discussion. 12 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T understanding cross-cultural communication, and specifically, in the context of this book, the acquisition of pragmatic competence. The structure of the chapter is as follows. In Section 1.2, I introduce the concept of pragmatic universals and move on to discuss how Grice’s account of cooperative conversational behavior and the associated concept of meaning based on speaker intentions can be viewed as such pragmatic universal principles. Having pointed out some problems with Grice’s original account as it is seen from the perspective of several decades, in Section 1.3 I proceed to post-Gricean approaches to linguistic communication, focusing not so much on the traditional debates concerning the number and scope of the necessary maxims or principles (covered briefly in Section 1.3.1) but rather on the semantics/pragmatics boundary and the related question of the truth-conditional content that opened up interesting contextualist pursuits (Section 1.3.2). In Section 1.4 I address different versions of contextualism and place it in the context of the debates between minimalists and contextualists. Section 1.5 concludes with closing comments on the utility of post-Gricean pragmatics for intercultural communication, stressing the significance of pragmatic universals. 1.2 Pragmatic Universals: Universal Expressibility and Universal Principles of Communicative Interaction Linguistic interaction displays a formidable diversity of means that its speakers use to communicate information or display attitudes, feelings, and emotions. This variation exists within each natural language as well as across languages. When speakers from two different cultures communicate, both types of variation are involved. In order to understand the principles that govern this interaction, one must search for generalizations. Some of them pertain to universal characteristics of human rational communicative behavior; others are conventions that interlocutors bring to the situation of discourse from their own cultures, where culture is understood as anthropological culture, that is, social organization and practices specific to a group of people.2 We will be interested here in the first kind of regularities captured by principles that are the domain of philosophical pragmatics. A typical novice to language study begins by observing the differences between the ways speakers of different languages communicate. After all, it can appear intriguing to speakers of English that there are languages without grammatical tenses or, say, languages without words for sentential connectives such as conjunction, disjunction, or conditionality. Yukatek Maya, Mandarin Chinese, Paraguayan Guaranı́, Burmese, Dyirbal, Kalaallisut 2 See, e.g., Sperber (1996); for a discussion see Jaszczolt (2002: chapter 16). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication (West-Greenlandic), or Hopi, among others, have no grammatical tenses.3 Maricopa, a Yuman language spoken by the Native American Maricopa people in Arizona, has no word for and; Wari’, a Chapacura-Wanham language of the Amazon, and Tzeltal, a Mayan language spoken in Mexico, have no words for or; Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian aboriginal language, has no word for if.4 And yet, the expressive power of these languages is not diminished. One can communicate conjunction by a simple juxtaposition of phrases, disjunction by conditional or modal markers, and conditionality by irrealis mood markers. Likewise, temporal reference can be communicated by aspect and mood markers, or even left entirely to pragmatic inference: what a language may “lack” in lexical means, it may leave to grammar or pragmatics; likewise, what it “lacks” in grammatical distinctions, it may leave to the lexicon or pragmatics. While it is indeed true that what is grammaticalized or lexicalized in a language may emphasize certain aspects of reality, and as such may affect the way the speakers of the language view the world, lexicon and grammar do not impose limits on communication or cognition: sociocultural conventions and pragmatic inference complete the pool of resources. This ability of languages to utilize the combination of resources indicates that in pursuing a theory of meaning in discourse, we ought to search for universals of communication that is, not lexical or grammatical universals but, more importantly, pragmatic and, as such, cognitive universals.5 So, our first assumed universal will be that although languages give rise to problems with translatability, they all have the same expressive power.6 For our current purposes, crosslinguistic variation in the lexicon and grammar can, therefore, be put aside and we can move one level up, so to speak, to the level where lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic resources (such as inferences from context or conventional, default interpretations) interact that is, to the level of universals of communication, or pragmatic (in the broad sense) universals. In other words, a pragmatic universal in the broad sense will pertain to principles of human communication that are aimed at normativity and as such predictive power, as well as delimiting universal units of such conversational contribution that can be subjected to a theoretical analysis. These are, needless to say, of great utility for more sociopragmatics-oriented projects such as those on intercultural communication. To compare, a pragmatic universal in the narrow sense will pertain to a phenomenon that is proposed as having universal status. Von Fintel and Matthewson (2008), for example, point out that all languages have 3 See, e.g., Bohnemeyer (2002) on Yukatek Maya and Tonhauser (2011) on Paraguayan Guaraní. 4 See Mauri and van der Auwera (2012). 5 For a comprehensive defense of universals on the level of conceptual structure, see Evans and Levinson (2009). For “lexicon grammar pragmatics trade offs,” see Jaszczolt (2012a). 6 See von Fintel and Matthewson (2008), who propose a different view on semantic universals: universals have to exist on the level of the logical form and as such be demonstrable through principles of formal (linguistic) semantics. So, for example, they are hesitant about accepting compositionality as a semantic universal, while conceptual semantics would readily accept it. 13 14 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T presuppositions, that is, meanings that are taken for granted, so to speak, and as such need not be explicitly expressed. What is presupposed can differ from language to language, for example, they point out that St’át’imcets, or Lilloet Salish, spoken in southern British Columbia, does not have presupposition triggers for familiarity or uniqueness analogous to the English definite article. But while languages can employ different conventions concerning what is assumed to be already known and what is only to be accommodated, the very fact of leaving things out to be assumed as communicated appears to be a universal of human linguistic interaction. This universal status of presuppositions and, likewise, arguably Gricean implicatures, is intimately related to our universals in the broad sense in that they are subsumed, as contributors, under the universal model of human communication. All in all, the term “pragmatic universal” can mean different things. It can mean the kinds of concepts that pragmatics is universally capable of expressing, such as presupposition or the structure of information. It can also mean the power of pragmatics to fill in the gaps, so to speak, in the grammar and lexicon to guarantee the language’s unimpeded expressive power. More generally still, it can mean the principles that interlocutors use in the process of linguistic interaction in conveying intended meaning on the one hand and recovering it on the other. Since speakers can “leave things out” to be assumed as communicated or even as already shared in the common ground, then there must be a mechanism that accounts for this tacit agreement. Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle provides this mechanism and the relevant universal that lays the foundation for the search for the actual universal descriptors of communicative interaction that I attend to in what follows. The principle of rational behavior that governs our formulation of utterances on one end and the recovery of their meaning on the other amounts to making one’s “conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which [one is] engaged.”7 The principle has been widely accepted as the foundation stone for most of modern pragmatics in that it allows for modeling meaning on the assumption that what is communicated (Grice’s meaningNN, nonnatural meaning) can be recovered from the uttered proposition not only by decoding the meaning of the sentence as dictated by the lexicon and grammar of the particular language system but also by filling in what is said with pragmatically conveyed aspects such as lexical and structural disambiguation or reference assignment to indexical terms (see Grice 1978), as well as meanings communicated implicitly (implicata, or more commonly these days, “implicatures”).8 These implicit meanings can take the form of 7 I have attempted in this mixed quotation to get away from the false impression of a prescriptive rule given by Grice’s original formulation. See Grice (1975: 26). 8 Grice’s implicata (plural form of implicatum), are nowadays commonly referred to as “implicatures.” The original distinction between implicatum and “implicature” pertained to the distinction between the unit of meaning and the phenomenon or process. Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication context-dependent implicatures (particularized conversational implicatures) as well as context-free, generalized ones. The account relies on conceptualizing meaning in terms of speaker intention and the recognition of this intention by the addressee: “A meantNN something by x” is explained as “A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention” (Grice 1957: 219). In more detail, it is true that a speaker meant something by x only if the speaker intended (i) the audience to produce a particular response; (ii) the audience to realize that the speaker had that intention; and (iii) the audience to produce this response because of that realization (see Grice 1969: 92). In other words, since humans conceptualize behavior in terms of its underlying intentions, we use these intentions to define their conversational behavior. The principle of cooperation is further spelled out in terms of particular maxims of conversation that summarize the presumptions that the speaker says what s/he believes to be true and supported by sufficient evidence (the maxims of Quality); that the speaker’s contribution is sufficiently but not overly informative (the maxims of Quantity); that the contribution is relevant (the maxim of Relation); and that the contribution is formulated in such a way as to be perspicuous, that is, not unclear, ambiguous, excessively long, or presenting events in the wrong order (the maxims of Manner). These principles of rational conversational behavior are said to govern the production as well as the recovery of meaning in conversation. From the perspective of several decades, however, one has to be critical. First, the maxims display substantial overlap and redundancy. Moreover, they were devised as a means to generalize over patterns of behavior rather than provide an insight into the psychology of communication and cognition, and as such, they have inadvertently suffered on this count. Also, they yield themselves to further extensions in the direction of sociopragmatics in that interlocutors’ rational conversational behavior has to include considerations of, say, politeness, tact, or the wish to sound witty.9 Next, speakers cannot be assumed to be literally truthful, that is, the maxim of truthfulness (Quality) has been questioned when applied to literal content.10 Concerning metaphors, it would be difficult to argue that the obvious meaning of, say, “Anna is a rising star” arises as an implicature out of flouting the Quality maxim. “Anna is a celestial body beginning to be visible above the horizon” is not what is said a problem that Grice himself noticed but did not adequately solve.11 Going even further, one has to remember that not all communication is “Gricean”: there are contexts in which the interlocutors are expected from the start to be “strategic” for example, in a courtroom hearing when the defendant uses evasive answers or in bartering over the price of goods where the 9 For an early attempt to supplement Grice’s maxims with seven maxims of politeness, see Leech (1983). For a model of politeness as a strategy and an implicature, based on Gricean assumptions, see Brown and Levinson (1987). 10 On the problems with the maxim of truthfulness vis à vis literal meaning, see, e.g., Wilson and Sperber (2002). 11 For an extensive discussion, see, e.g., Carston (2002). 15 16 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T seller can overstate, understate, or blatantly lie about their qualities or the real value.12 Next, it has become evident that the distinction Grice drew between particularized and generalized implicatures is in need of some refinement. There is no empirical evidence, for example, that generalized implicatures “kick in” in every context, only to be cancelled when found inconsistent with speaker’s intentions. Rather, there are automatic interpretations, but they tend to be triggered in a particular context or at least promptly withdrawn “locally” as meaning recovery proceeds, rather than being added post-propositionally only to be checked for their consistency with speaker intentions.13 Finally, Grice’s account of meaning as pinned to intentions rather than to the recovery of intentions engendered criticism in that, first, misattribution of intentions can go unnoticed, and, second, the recovery of speaker intentions may simply not go through. So, an alternative would be (i) to make pragmatic theory analyze addressee’s recovered meaning, as in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995) or (ii) to focus on the fact that interlocutors’ intentions are ultimately collective or at least conjoint and that meaning is collectively constructed, as in Arundale’s (1999, 2010) Conjoint Co-constituting Model of Communication, with its emphasis on the interactive production of implicatures and co-constitution of interlocutors’ face.14 In short, the question “whose meaning” pragmatic theory should take on board is by no means settled.15 Human ability to function with incompletely understood representations appears to be a cognitive, and as such, in the context of communication, also a pragmatic universal. Beliefs whose object is a partially understood proposition have been discussed by Sperber (1985, 1996, 1997), who calls them semi-propositional representational beliefs. When they are taken out of their cultural context, they may appear irrational. And yet their rationality is restored when we follow the distinctions between factual and representational, and on the other hand, propositional and semipropositional beliefs. For example, “Red giants become white dwarfs” may be such a semi-propositional belief when held by a layman who trusts a textbook in astrophysics in spite of not fully understanding the terms, and so believing the statement while “putting it in quotes,” so to speak, storing it for future understanding. This belief is then reflective, as contrasted with intuitive or spontaneous, in the sense that the person is aware of holding it, and he/she holds it in virtue of holding some second-order 12 On strategic communication as non Gricean communication, see Asher and Lascarides (2013). On evasive answers and flouting the maxim of Relation, see Marsh (2018). 13 See, e.g., Davis (1998). For early experimental research, see, e.g., articles in Noveck and Sperber (2004). For an endorsement of Gricean “fixed” generalized implicatures (albeit with the proviso that they can be local), see Levinson’s (2000) presumptive meanings. For context driven automatic interpretations, see Jaszczolt’s (2005) theory of Default Semantics. 14 See also Haugh (2007, 2008, 2009); Haugh and Jaszczolt (2012); Elder and Haugh (2018). 15 See also the discussion in Jaszczolt (2016) and (2021a). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication belief about this belief.16 Such beliefs tend to be popular representations of scientific representations of reality and are a kind of metarepresentation (Sperber 2000). Sperber claims that metarepresenting is an important evolutionary achievement; it fosters understanding, cooperation, and communication. Used in communication, it becomes a strong candidate for a pragmatic universal. Finally, it has to be pointed out that candidates for pragmatic universals are not limited to the Gricean, intention-based account. A strong alternative in pragmatics comes from game-theoretic semantics (Lewis 1979; Barwise and Perry 1983), and more recently from their offshoot Equilibrium Semantics (Parikh 2010), whereby conversational interaction is modeled as a language game in which the players strive for an equilibrium, accommodating the interlocutor’s moves wherever the common ground requires some recalibration of assumptions. In Lewis’ (1979: 347) words, “conversational score does tend to evolve in such a way as is required in order to make whatever occurs count as correct play.” Strategic, non-cooperative conversation, which is not covered by Grice’s account, is more easily accommodated in this model. This completes my brief general introduction to the concept of a pragmatic universal. In what follows, I concentrate on the sense of pragmatic universal that pertains to broadly Gricean principles of human rational communicative interaction (at least in standard, “Gricean” contexts), moving now to Grice’s (more, and less, faithful) followers, that is, to post-Gricean developments. 1.3 Post-Gricean Developments 1.3.1 Maxims, Principles, and Heuristics There are two principal paths in post-Gricean debates: one pertains to the debate surrounding the number and scope of the necessary maxims of conversation, subsequently relabeled as principles or heuristics, and the other concerns the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, or, simply, “the border wars” (Horn 2006). The first path is relatively uninteresting and, arguably, partly rests on a mistake of misaligned objectives to which I attend later in this section. But first, it requires a brief discussion. It is indeed the case that Grice’s maxims or “supermaxims” when we include the way they were spelled out into more detailed “submaxims” suffer from redundancy and overlap, and as such also from a limited predictive power in that it is often difficult to pinpoint which particular maxim is responsible for a given implicature (although the property of 16 See Sperber (1996: 89). 17 18 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T calculability of conversational implicatures explicitly demands it).17 So, the reduction to two principles, that of the maximization of informational content (Q Principle) and minimization of form (R Principle) by Horn (1984: 13; see also Horn 1988, 2004), was a welcome revision. The principles work in tandem: “Make your contribution sufficient; say as much as you can (given R)” and “Make your contribution necessary; say no more than you must (given Q).” The mapping onto the original submaxims is also carefully worked out. Truthfulness (Quality) is assumed, but as an overarching, higher-order characteristic that delimits the field of inquiry. Next, Levinson’s (1987, 1995, 2000) Q-heuristic and I-heuristic, amounting to “What isn’t said isn’t” and “What is expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified” (Levinson 2000: 35 37), achieve a similar improvement but with the proviso that we have to distinguish the minimization of content from the minimization of form: providing as little information as necessary is different from using as simple, short, and widely employed expressions as possible. So, a version of the maxim of Manner had to be added after all in the form of the M-heuristic: “What’s said in an abnormal way isn’t normal” (Levinson 2000: 38). Their order of preference (Q > M > I) adds to the predictive power by explaining what happens if more than one heuristic can be invoked, as in the case of (1) where M overrides I and produces the implicature that Lizzie did not kill her pet fish but perhaps neglected it by forgetting to feed it or change the water in the fish tank. (1) Lizzie caused her goldfish to die. For Levinson, the heuristics give rise to default interpretations that he calls presumptive meanings meanings that are strongly associated with certain lexical items and complex expressions and are cancelled where the context so dictates. So, for example, (2) allegedly gives rise to an implicature that the speaker does not know for certain that Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot. It does so in virtue of the relative strength of the predicates to believe and to know where the latter could have been used but wasn’t. (2) I believe that Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot. Scalar implicatures such as that from some to not all in (3) are said to follow the same pattern of presumed meanings, captured by the Q-heuristic, while the implicature in (4), to the effect that William and Harry celebrated their grandmother’s birthday together, is allegedly triggered by the I-heuristic. (3) I read some novels by Dostoevsky. 17 But see also Davis (1998) and (2007) on more radical criticism of calculability: “[T]he theory generates erroneous predictions as readily as it generates correct ones” (Davis 1998: 2) and “Conversational implicatures are rarely if ever calculable. Speakers can properly make their implicatures available by following established practices, whether they be general conventions or personal habits” (Davis 2007: 1671). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication (4) William and Harry celebrated their grandmother’s birthday. This leads us to two more aspects of this post-Gricean debate. The first one is the discussion between the supporters of context-independent, generalized implicatures (that are cancelled when the situation so dictates), and those who, like the representatives of Relevance Theory to which I move next, defend the omnipresence of inference in such pragmatically enriched meanings. As I indicated in Section 1.2, there is no evidence, and little support in the form of theoretical argumentation, that such cancellation does indeed take place. But neither is it likely that inference, even very broadly understood, is an omnipresent process in such cases. Rather, some interpretations can indeed be arrived at automatically, effortlessly, but it is the situation, the context that enables such automatic extensions to the original meaning that the expression itself can be credited with if, indeed, there is such contextfree “starter” meaning. But the latter is a question for another occasion, to do with lexical concepts and concept shifts.18 The second aspect concerns the debate between those who, like Grice, defend the notion of an implicature that is normally calculated post-propositionally (“globalism,” see, e.g., Geurts 2009, 2010) and those who, like Levinson (2000), defend its “local” status that is, arising as and when the relevant expression is processed in the incremental interpretation. This is an actively researched topic, with empirical evidence and theoretical arguments on both sides, but it suffices to flag it here and leave the details for another occasion. Now, post-Gricean accounts differ in the degree of departure from Grice’s original four-maxim setup (or nine-maxim if we count the submaxims), but at the same time, they differ in the degree to which they embrace the criterion of psychological reality. While so-called neo-Gricean approaches by Horn and Levinson stay close to Grice’s original proposal in their respective two- and three-way distinctions into principles (or three- and four-way respectively if the overarching assumption of truthfulness is included), Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; see also, e.g., Sperber and Wilson 2012) advocates one principle of relevance that aims at explaining the production as well as the recovery of meaning: the balance between what they call “cognitive effects” and “processing effort” ensures that communication proceeds efficiently. In other words, the effort invested in the processing of an utterance on the part of the addressee is offset by the additions to the addressee’s information state. Relevance is spelled out as a communicative as well as a cognitive principle. The communicative principle says that “Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158), while its cognitive counterpart says that “Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 260). In practice, this amounts to stating that 18 On recent views on this topic, see, e.g., Carston (2012) and Rayo (2013). 19 20 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T the addressee stops interpreting the speaker’s utterance once he/she has reached an interpretation that is tacitly taken to fulfill the above criteria. The comparison between neo-Griceans and Relevance Theory is, however, not straightforward in that there is a difference between their respective objectives, emphasis, and motivations that obfuscates a comparative assessment. There is also a difference in how faithful they remain to Grice’s original idea of maxims, implicatures, and the very semantics/pragmatics distinction. It is perhaps for this reason that some textbooks advocate the use of the term “post-Gricean” for Relevance Theory, as a theory departing further from Grice in these respects and contrast it with “neo-Gricean” approaches by Horn and Levinson that stay closer to Grice in their spirit. However, we will follow the standard and intuitive distinction as defined in Section 1.1 whereby post-Griceans comprise a much larger pool, namely those who adopt Gricean assumptions of employing intentions and inferences as explanantia for meaning in communication. First, the comparison is difficult in that Grice’s aim was to account for the speaker’s meaning, while Relevance theorists focus on utterance interpretation (see Saul 2002 and Horn 2004: 22). As such, Relevance theorists’ take on the explanatory role of intentions is somewhat different. While they acknowledge the importance of speakers’ communicative and informative intentions, they consider them from the perspective of the addressee who makes informed assumptions about them rather than from the perspective of their holder. This relates to the overall difference in attitude to the question as to how important psychological reality is for pragmatic theory. While Grice and neo-Griceans aim at modeling rational conversational behavior by fitting it into generalizations that give the theory predictive power as well as, as it turns out, power for fuelling computational modeling of discourse (e.g. in Optimality Theory Pragmatics, where constraints are founded on Levinson’s principles, see Blutner and Zeevat 2003), Relevance Theory focuses on the psychology of human communication and cognition or, to repeat, on the actual process of utterance interpretation. The result is that while its two principles are of great interest to cognitive scientists and psycholinguists, they do not come with a rigid, falsifiable, and formalizable theory of meaning that linguists normally strive for, in hope of generating predictions and feeding algorithms.19 Just as attitudes to psychologism differ across language sciences, so will the corresponding objectives. In short, the mistake in comparing the neo-Gricean revisions with Relevance Theory lies in wrongly assuming a common platform of comparison; where objectives differ, so do the revisions. 19 The issue of falsifiability of the principles of relevance is separate from the issue of falsifiability of predictions made by both post Gricean camps. On the latter, empirical evidence has been mounting against cancellable defaults associated with words and structures proposed by neo Griceans – not to be confused with defaults qua automatic but context dependent interpretations in, say, Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2010). For early experimental work, see, e.g., Noveck and Sperber (2004). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication The history of psychologism requires a few more words of introduction here. Negative connotations associated with the term20 are the legacy of Frege (e.g. 1879) who put forward a new, psychology-free conception of logic as a function/argument analysis where the reference of a predicate is a function from objects to truth values. Subjective thoughts were banned and replaced by theoretical constructs. In his words, “[t]here must be a sharp separation of the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” (Frege 1884: 90). Frege (1893: 202) refers to a “corrupting intrusion” of psychology into logic in that “being true is quite different from being held as true.” It is, however, unlikely that a successful ban of psychologism from a theory of natural-language meaning, and especially utterance meaning such as meaningNN, could proceed along similar lines. A degree of psychologism is unavoidable; the question is whether one makes it a focus or an unavoidable concomitant of the fact that the object of study is human communication in the context of language use in society. Hence the differences between neo-Gricean and Relevance-theoretic programs.21 While both capture universals of human communication and cognition, they capture different aspects of them and with different objectives in mind. That said, recent advances in neuroscience notwithstanding, our insights into how meaning is represented and processed by the mind are still limited. That is why it is important to distinguish (i) pragmatic theories that aim at formal representations of utterance meaning and maximizing the predictive power of the theory from (ii) approaches that focus on hypotheses about utterance processing. Discussions about the order in which explicit and implicit components are accessed (e.g. Carston 2007), the extent to which communication is indeed inferential (Recanati 2016), or the local vs. global character of implicatures discussed earlier, belong with the latter. Discussions about the kind of proposition one ought to focus on: that pertaining to the sentence or that pertaining to the communicated content, and principles of the delimitation of the proposition (addressed in the next section) belong with the first. They are, of course, interconnected and most theories have their hand in both camps, but the distinction is important in comparing and assessing post-Gricean approaches in that it affects their objectives and, to repeat, may make comparisons invalid. All in all, revisions to Gricean maxims are an exercise that does not in itself trigger particular excitement: no one subscribes to the “strong psychologism” interpretation of the Gricean or neo-Gricean principles; it is not claimed that principles are interwoven into the brain architecture in the proposed form, nor that we acquire and use them consciously. But they provide excellent heuristics that enable formal modeling of discourse by means of constraints on communication. On the other hand, the very process of interpretation comes with psycholinguistic questions of its 20 See Travis (2006) for a discussion. 21 For a defense of moderate psychologism in natural language semantics and pragmatics, see Jaszczolt 2008. 21 22 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T own that are best left to separate theories and ensuing experimental projects. The post-Gricean debates flagged many related questions that are of a far greater interest to pragmatic theory than the question of how many maxims we need. The central ones among them are the questions as to (i) what counts as semantic and what as pragmatic aspects of meaning and how to delimit them, and the related but often orthogonal question concerning (ii) the scope of the truth-conditional content. These are the questions to which I now turn. 1.3.2 Semantic vs. Pragmatic, Said vs. Implicit, and the Controversy over Truth Conditions The ongoing debate concerning the semantics/pragmatics interface is partly the result of the progressive ways of thinking about the theory of meaning that have been labeled radical pragmatics (Cole 1981), and partly the legacy of the earlier orientation of ordinary language philosophy. The latter allowed for the departure from formal methods of analysis and the definitional association of meaning with language use (Austin 1962), whereas the former backstepped a little, so to speak, to merge the formal, truth-conditional methods with the pragmaticization of the concept of the proposition by means of which the meaning is delimited. Let me begin with Grice again. Pragmatic content plays a variety of different roles in meaningNN. First, disambiguation and reference assignment to indexical terms mentioned earlier (Grice 1978) already suggest that some pragmatic input may be necessary before a sentence yields itself to a truth-conditional analysis. Next, generalized implicatures, deemed to arise irrespective of context, such as those that give rise to the scalar “some” ≫ “not all” inference, are closer to the semantic content than purely pragmatic, so to speak, context-driven particularized ones. Implicatures are weaker than semantic content; potential implicatures, in virtue of being inferred meanings, are in principle cancellable but can be more, or less, entrenched.22 Even the strong potential implicature23 in (5a) to the effect of (5b) can be cancelled as in (5c). (5a) The pianist sat down at the instrument and hit the keys in a way resembling Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor. (5b) The pianist was not particularly accomplished. (5c) After a few bars, I realised it was Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, played with unprecedented skill, insight and feeling. (from Jaszczolt 2012b: 373) 22 I added “in principle” because in recent years, a lot of emphasis has been put on the fact that in some contexts, they can be strongly entrenched. For references and a proposal that cancellability is orthogonal to the said/implicit distinction, see Jaszczolt (2009). 23 For potential implicatures see Gazdar (1979). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication Another category distinguished by Grice that blurs the boundary is that of a conventional implicature. Conventional implicatures are a curious species in that they do not share any standard properties with conversational implicatures: they are not cancellable, not calculable from maxims, and are detachable when a synonym is substituted.24 It is in fact a species of lexical content. Words such as but, manage, or therefore are said to convey conventional implicatures of contrast, overcome difficulty, and consequence, respectively. As such, they effectively pertain to lexical content. The reasons for singling them out are that they allegedly make no difference to the truth conditions of the sentence in which they appear and that they do not yield themselves to easy translation into the metalanguage of predicate logic. And “saving” the metalanguage and the truth-conditional method was part of Grice’s motivation the topic to which I move shortly. So, for instance, but was deemed to be translatable as logical conjunction on a par with and, while the sense of contrast was separated, so to speak, as a conventional implicature. In short, for Grice, truth-conditional semantics is the fixed core of the theory of meaning, while pragmatic inference is wheeled in as its aid and can take different forms: (i) disambiguation and reference assignment within the truth-conditional representation or, outside it, with decreasing degrees of “semanticity”; (ii) conventional implicatures (effectively coded content); (iii) generalized implicatures; and, finally, (iv) context-dependent particularized implicatures.25 This blurred boundary between semantics and pragmatics has been widely discussed and extensively revised in the post-Gricean literature. In particular, there is another way of looking at these “degrees of semanticity” that truly accelerated the post-Gricean boundary disputes. Some implicatures appear to have a direct impact on the proposition expressed by the uttered sentence, while others, like (5b), pertain to separate thoughts. (6b) exemplifies the first category. (6a) You can have fruit or a pie for dessert. (6b) You can have either fruit or a pie for dessert but not both. Most post-Gricean approaches tacitly adopted Grice’s original intratheoretic aim to “save” truth-conditional semantics, but some of them supplemented it with a distrust in the utility of analyzing kinds of meanings that bear little resemblance to the meaning intended by the speaker. They devised a way of keeping truth conditions as a useful tool but applying them to a formula that is effectively an amalgam of the logical form of the sentence and some pragmatic adjustments. Let us take the example of disjunction (or). Disjunction in propositional logic is inclusive: p or q means p, or q, or both. But in English we tend to use or with exclusive meaning: either p or q, but not both. Grice explained this exclusiveness by 24 “Synonym” as far as the truth conditional impact is concerned. 25 For a helpful diagram, see Horn (1988: 121). 23 24 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T means of his Quantity implicature that comes from the conceptual scale <and, or>: when the speaker utters “or,” s/he implicates that “and” is not the case. While for neo-Griceans this also delimits semantics and pragmatics, regarded as distinct contributors to one level of representation (Levinson 2000: 9), Relevance theorists treat those pragmatic developments of the logical form as components of the truth-conditional semantic representation, stressing at the same time the lack of utility of the sentence-based logical form in that it does not correspond to a cognitively real step in utterance interpretation.26 This terminological choice is made in a more radical way, “stretching” semantics even further, in Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2010, 2021b), where the domain of truth-conditional semantics extends beyond the pragmatic modifications of the logical form and comprises even entirely different representations whenever the main message is communicated indirectly. This is so in order to capture what in fact is the intended (and recovered) primary message or what interlocutors themselves would call the main, primary meaning of the utterance. The legacy of Grice consists here of allowing the output of some pragmatic processes to contribute to the truth-conditional content and proposing categories of implicature that can be arranged on a scale of progressive pragmaticization. This opened the floodgates for progressing inclusion of pragmatic aspects in the truth-conditional (and for some, a fortiori, semantic) content in order to make the latter capture the intended message: it was now open to debate how much, and what categories of, such conveyed but unuttered meanings ought to be included.27 I return to this question while discussing varieties of contextualism in Section 1.4. Another important legacy of Grice is that the category of implicature allowed him to substantiate the claim of the methodological superiority of a unitary semantic account over postulating ambiguities. Or in English, for example, could now be equated with disjunction of propositional logic in its semantic content because the exclusive reading could be arrived at via an implicature. Grice (1978) spelled out this economy of senses as a Modified Occam’s Razor: Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Retrospectively, we can say that exorcising methodologically superfluous ambiguities was a landmark in the semantics/pragmatics boundary research that laid foundations for the radical pragmatics in the 1970s with its concept of semantic underdetermination. The latter is best explained in the example of presupposition and negation. The widely quoted sentence in (7a) allows for two interpretations: one on which the presupposition of the existence of the king of France is fulfilled and one where it is not. The interpretations lead to the logical forms in (7b) and (7c), respectively, as first spelled out by Bertrand Russell. 26 See, e.g., Carston’s early work (1988) on the distinction between linguistic semantics and truth conditional semantics. For later developments, see, e.g., Carston (2002, 2012). 27 For early discussions see, e.g., Carston (1988, 1998); Recanati (1989, 2001). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication (7a) The king of France is not bald. (7b) ∃x (KoF(x) ^ ∀y (KoF(y) → y x) ^ ¬Bald (x)) (7c) ¬∃x (KoF(x) ^ ∀y (KoF(y) → y x) ^ Bald (x)) (7c) is sense-general: it says that it is not the case that there is a person who fulfills the conditions of being the (unique) king of France and being bald either because France does not have a king or because it does, but he is not bald. This shows that the two logical forms in (7b) and (7c) are linked by entailment: the former (the presupposing reading) entails the latter (the sense-general one). So, invoking ambiguity now appears unnecessary: we can adopt (7c) and assume that the semantics of sentential negation in English underdetermines the meaning. There is an underspecified semantic representation, and a more specific reading can be explained by pragmatic enrichment in the particular context. Semantic underdetermination, or sense-generality,28 was an important landmark that is often referred to in the history of pragmatics as the Atlas Kempson thesis (see Kempson 1975, 1979, 1986; Atlas 1977, 1979, 1989, 2005; also Wilson 1975). It has become a common assumption that semantic analysis takes us partway, and pragmatic enrichment completes the process of the recovery of utterance meaning, where the latter includes contributions to the truth-conditional content as well as implicatures proper. Atlas’ apt pastiche of Kant captures the gist of the proposal: “Pragmatic inference without sense-generality is blind, but sense-generality without pragmatic inference is empty” (Atlas 1989: 124).29 The most groundbreaking tenet of radical pragmatics is that the unit of which we predicate truth conditions is the utterance (or, in Relevance Theory, thought) rather than the sentence. But this blurring of the boundary, again, opened up a flurry of solutions to the semantics/pragmatics vis-à-vis truth-conditional/non-truth-conditional: as I indicated above, they are by no means the same. First, revising Grice’s model of “degrees of semanticity,” Sperber and Wilson (1986) and Carston (1988) distinguished between the output of syntactic processing of the sentence (linguistic semantics) and the amalgam of the output of linguistic semantics 28 There have been various terms used in the literature for the underdetermination of meaning: underdetermination, underspecification, indeterminacy, sense generality, vagueness, neutrality, and others (see Zwicky and Sadock 1975: 2; Green 1996: 1). See also Zwicky and Sadock (1975) on tests for telling ambiguity and underdetermination apart and Jaszczolt (1999) for a discussion. 29 Which categories of expressions count as semantically underdetermined is still a matter of debate. For example, number terms such as three have been analyzed as semantically lower bound (“at least n”) with the optional, pragmatically triggered upper boundary (“at most n,” Horn 1976), but they have also been analyzed as semantically underdetermined between the at least n, at most n, and exactly n interpretations (Carston 1998). More recently propounded arguments, however, suggest that the “exactly n” meaning is the semantic qua lexical content. For a discussion see Horn (1992, 2006), Koenig (1993), Geurts (1998). 25 26 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T and pragmatic inference (truth-conditional semantics), the latter supplemented with implicatures proper that, in turn, have their own truthconditional representations in virtue of being propositional thoughts. This is the stance adopted in Relevance Theory that distinguishes such “amalgam” representations on the one hand, dubbed “explicatures” in virtue of capturing the explicit content, and implicatures on the other. But then the “semantic” and the “truth conditional” begin to come apart: either there are two kinds of semantics, or, as for neo-Griceans, the “semantic” does not grow with the “truth-conditional.” To complicate matters further, for Kent Bach (e.g. 1994, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2007) the output of pragmatic inference is not the “said,” “explicit” content: in addition to what is said and what is implicated, there are aspects of the content that are implicit in what is said, or implicitures. These are different from implicatures proper that are additional to what is said. People often speak loosely, nonliterally, because it is often more efficient to do so when the addressee can easily recover the “unsaid” aspects. In his celebrated example (8a, after Bach 1994: 267), a mother reacts to a child’s crying about a cut finger: (8a) You are not going to die, Peter. She speaks nonliterally; the content of the sentence is the minimal proposition, to the effect that Peter is immortal, while pragmatic inference produces the message to the effect of (8b). (8b) Peter is not going to die from this cut. So, what is meant by the speaker is the expansion of such a minimal proposition. Similarly, sentences that are syntactically complete but do not come with any clear truth conditions (or, as Bach says, sentences that do not express a proposition but merely a propositional radical), such as (9a), require completion and produce implicitures, as in (9b). (9a) Peter is not ready. (9b) Peter is not ready to take the piano exam. (8) and (9) exemplify two similar phenomena: sentence nonliterality, where the minimal proposition requires expansion or “fleshing out,” and semantic underdetermination, where the propositional radical requires completion, or “filling in” (Bach 1994: 269). These expansions and completions blur the boundary between the said and the implicit in that they are implicit in what is said and, as such, truthconditionally relevant. But on Bach’s account, they do not blur the boundary between semantics and pragmatics: semantics concerns the properties of sentences, and pragmatics of utterances of these sentences tout court. Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication To sum up, neo-Griceans favor adopting the traditional semantics/pragmatics distinction: Levinson (2000), Atlas (2005), and Horn (2006) argue for keeping semantics and truth conditions apart; Horn also supplements it with Bach’s notion of impliciture, while Levinson argues for the middle level of presumptive meanings that sit between semantics and pragmatics regarded as separate modules that contribute to the common slate on which meaning is drawn. What is important is that semantic and pragmatic processes are seen as separate and a fortiori the distinction is never blurred. Whether the effect of a clear boundary has been achieved in neo-Gricean approaches is a debatable issue. Adding the level of what is implicit in what is said (that is, truthconditionally valid but of pragmatic provenance) or the level of presumptive meanings that are so strongly entrenched that they are processed virtually on a par with lexical information, only to be cancelled when not relevant, appears to encroach on semantics quite substantially, especially where these meaning elaborations can be traced to the logical form (Bach’s propositional radical) and lexicon (Levinson’s localized generalized implicatures). Almost half a century after the onset of radical pragmatics, it has to be concluded that what is important and interesting is not how inclusive one wants the label “semantics” to be but how to best delimit the object of study of the theory of meaning and whether, and if so, how, to employ truth conditions in pursuit of this meaning. I return to this debate in discussing the ensuing minimalism contextualism debates in Section 1.4, but suffice it to say that truth conditions proved to be an effective tool for analyzing both (i) the main message conveyed by the speaker, as well as (ii) the sentence content. As I have argued here, (i) still gives rise to controversy in that different theories allow for different kinds and degrees of contribution of pragmatic meaning, advocating different roles that the structure of the uttered sentence has to play in the delimitation of the represented meaning. In Relevance Theory, explicatures are developments of the logical form, albeit with time they become more and more liberal.30 In Default Semantics, to repeat, truthconditional representations can pertain to the implicitly communicated message in the cases where the main message is communicated indirectly that is, the truth conditions can pertain to the entirely “unuttered” content.31 These pragmatic contributions to truth conditions can be considered part of truth-conditional (and cognitively real!) semantics, as in these two approaches, or they can be considered the domain of pragmatics, as in the case of neo-Griceans or in Recanati’s (2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c) Truth-Conditional Pragmatics. 30 See, e.g., Carston (2002) on metaphorical meanings as part of truth conditional content via concept shift. 31 For an introduction to Default Semantics, see, e.g., Jaszczolt (2005, 2010, 2021b). 27 28 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T 1.4 Post-Gricean “Contextualisms” Post-Gricean approaches are a source of important pragmatic universals not only because they provide generalizations and (arguably) principles of cooperation in communicative interaction that come with reasonable, reliable predictive power but also because they strive to delimit a universal object of analysis in the form of the conversational impact of an utterance. They do so by identifying various components of this meaning that are cross-culturally shared such as sentence meaning and its further pragmatic modifications that are in turn subdivided in various ways, as discussed in Section 1.3. In other words, the fact that conveying a message successfully relies on the lexicon-grammar-pragmatics tradeoffs (Jaszczolt 2012a) is itself an important universal of communication to be classified as “semantic” or as “pragmatic,” depending on which orientations from the ones discussed above we adopt. These debates concerning the semantics/pragmatics interface have now largely crystallized as discussions within and between two orientations: that of contextualism and that of semantic minimalism. Contextualism is the view that every instance of utterance interpretation involves top-down processing, that is pragmatic processing that is not a response to any triggers in the lexicon or in the structure of the sentence but rather what Recanati (e.g. 2012a, 2012b, 2012c) calls a free process of modulation. Every word and every structure can be context-sensitive. In more general terms, contextualism is a position that a sentence expresses fully determined content only in the context of a speech act.32 It is a development of the views held in the 1950s by ordinary language philosophers such as later Wittgenstein and Austin and has become one of the most prominent orientations in the study of meaning. Contextualism comes in different flavors. While late Wittgenstein and Austin advocated “meaning as use” that does not yield to formal harnessing, for Relevance theorists or Recanati, it was a reaction to the traditional view that sentences themselves ought to be ascribed truth conditions. Recanati’s what is said, Relevance-theoretic explicature, and merger representation of Default Semantics are examples of such contextualist constructs. For Recanati (e.g. 2002, 2004, 2005, 2007, 2016), the process of arriving at what is said is automatic rather than inferential. It is “subpersonal,” that is, not consciously available. He calls it a primary pragmatic process, contrasting it with a secondary process that is inferential. Differences between views notwithstanding, what is important is that representatives of the latter, truth-conditional contextualist direction agree that a unit of analysis ought to be a proposition to which information from the context of utterance contributes whether it contributes only 32 It is not to be confused with contextualism about knowledge and beliefs in epistemology. On these see, e.g., DeRose (1992, 2009). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication subdoxastically or through conscious inference, and whether it contributes by “developing”/”modulating” the logical form or also in a more radical way is what distinguishes the particular views within it. I will say more on the uses that have been made of the term “radical” later in this section. Now, for Recanati (2004: 90), modulation is always present: “there is no level of meaning which is both (i) propositional (truth-evaluable) and (ii) minimalist, that is, unaffected by top-down factors.” But there is also a more liberal way of looking at meaning whereby truth conditions can be put to different uses. Linguists who are interested in the meaning(s) of a sentence in isolation, or the meaning of a sentence with only those pragmatic additions that fill in “slots” already marked in the syntactic structure, can use truth conditions for this minimal construct. In a very broad sketch, this is the traditional view on the limits of semantics that has been revived in the 2000s as semantic minimalism. In the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, minimalism is often considered to be a valid opposition to the truth-conditional forms of contextualism. In its best-developed version, minimalism claims that pragmatic inference is allowed in the truth-conditional semantic content only if it is constrained by the grammar: there are slots in the syntactic representation that are to be filled in. In her Minimal Semantics, Emma Borg (2004) construes semantic theory as a theory of “literal linguistic meaning” and its task as providing “pure” sentence meaning. For her, processing of sentence meaning is modular and should be kept apart from the understanding of the speaker’s intentions and from any nondeductive inference. Since her semantics is truth-conditional, the obvious concomitant is that sentences have truth conditions even if it would not be possible to tell what situation would make the sentence true as in example (9a). There is no need for contextual enrichment: truth conditions are not conditions of verification. Cappelen and Lepore’s (2005) Insensitive Semantics offers a similar view. They claim that the content of speech acts and the content of sentences should be kept apart, which amounts to keeping semantics and pragmatics apart as well. They follow Kaplan’s (1989) two-dimensional semantics in compiling a set of indexical expressions, such as demonstrative and personal pronouns, that require contextual resolution. But this is as far as the pragmaticization of semantics stretches. Compared with Kent Bach’s view discussed in the previous section, we can see affinities as well as differences. Most importantly, for Bach, sentences do not have to express propositions and as such do not have to have truth conditions; the latter can remain firmly on the pragmatics side of the boundary, used for the analysis of what is said, with implicitures as the covert contributors. For this reason, Bach (2006) calls his view Radical Semantic Minimalism. Returning to contextualism, context-dependence has many facets, and this leads to different ways in which contextualism can be a radical view. 29 30 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T First, as discussed in Section 1.3.1, lexical items need not come with fixed coded meanings; they can be considered as pointers to the contextually determined senses: they have only semantic potential. This constitutes one sense in which we speak about radical contextualism: radical about word meaning (Travis 2008; Recanati 2004; Carston 2012). Another sense of “radical” captures the scope of the pragmatic contribution to the truthconditional content. As I briefly indicated at the end of Section 1.3.2, the theory of Default Semantics goes further than other contextualist accounts in admitting pragmatic meanings into the proposition that captures the primary, main message intended by the speaker and recovered by the addressee, in that this meaning does not have to bear any structural resemblance to the logical form of the sentence. In other words, it need not obey the syntactic constraint. To reiterate, while communicators sometimes convey their message through bare sentence meaning or through sentence meaning that is pragmatically supplemented (e.g. by resolving the referents of the indexicals or by free enrichment as in (9b)), on many occasions they communicate their main message indirectly for reasons to do with tact, politeness, or conforming to conventions of social hierarchy. Contextualism of Default Semantics is “radical” in the sense that truth conditions are applied to the conceptual representation of the meaning that is conveyed through a variety of means, including indirectly. Lexicon and structure are by no means the privileged sources of information. Interestingly, this form of contextualism is an example of how cognitive semantics and truthconditional semantics can meet: truth conditions are used as a tool to formalize the conceptual, not the linguistic, structure. The obvious concomitants include rethinking the principle of compositionality to make it apply at the level of conceptual structure à la Evans and Levinson’s view on universals discussed in Section 1.2, as well as adopting a distinction into primary and secondary meaning that cuts across the traditional said/ implicit distinction: to repeat, in indirect communication, implicatures are primary meanings. The proposed view on defaults is also, in a sense, radical: while strong, expression-based defaults à la Levinson are rejected in accordance with extant experimental evidence as well as in accordance with the principle of economy of processing and with common sense, Default Semantics advocates automatic, default, non-inferential interpretations that arise for the specific context and for the specific interlocutors, engendered by their background assumptions, goals, personal history, and so forth. Contextualism can be radical in yet another important sense, to do with the provenance of pragmatic components of meaning. Normally the constraint that semantics should be delimited by the structure of the sentence results in a form of minimalism. But a form of indexicalism advocated in the so-called unarticulated constituents view attempts to explain a wider range of pragmatic additions by pegging them on elements of an Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication unarticulated syntactic structure. As a result, a variety of pragmatic enrichment can acquire semantic provenance and be marked as such in the syntactic structure that is, it is represented as filling in slots in the logical form (see Stanley and Szabó 2000; Stanley 2002; King and Stanley 2005). For example, according to Stanley and Szabó, the fact that the quantifier phrase “every child” in sentence (10a) can obtain an analysis as in (10b) is explained as follows. The N node in the structure of (10a) contains information about the contextual restriction of the domain of the universal quantifier every: <child, f(i)>, where f stands for a function mapping objects onto quantifier domains and i for an object provided by the context. In other words, the enrichment to (10b) is said to be triggered by the semantic qualification of the noun in the quantifier phrase. (10a) Every child has a bike. (10b) Every child in the speaker’s school has a bike. In a broadly similar spirit, Chierchia (e.g. 2004) derives scalar implicatures such as that from “some” to “not all” from the logical form of a sentence. In his proposal, grammar allows for two interpretive procedures that result in two different values of expressions: a plain value, and a strengthened, scalar one (“some but not all”), where the latter is a defeasible default. This results in a construal where “some of the Griceinspired pragmatics is probably part of the computational system of grammar” (Chierchia 2004: 59). Downward-entailing contexts (such as embedding a sentence under I doubt that . . . ) remove scalar implicatures of the original sentence and add new ones that obey the rule that implicatures must lead to strengthening. The relevant sense of “radical” will then rely on the contrast between accounts that advocate free modulation and accounts such as these two where pragmatic components are structuredriven. The latter are radical in their confidence in the power of semantics (Stanley and Szabó) or syntax (Chierchia). 1.5 Conclusions: The Role of Post-Gricean Theories in the Pragmatics of Intercultural Communication I have introduced in this chapter some seminal aspects of post-Gricean debates, focusing on one “big question,” namely, how to define, delimit, and represent meaning in a theory whose aim is broadly Gricean, in the sense that it purports to peg meaning on speaker intentions and their recognition. I discussed the maxims, principles, and heuristics associated with the principle of cooperation as candidates for pragmatic universals, continuing on the universal status of the object of study delimited by their means, that is, the totality of the communicated meaning, with its “said” and “unsaid” components that Grice’s and post-Gricean approaches 31 32 K A S I A M. J A S Z C Z O L T identify. This aim is of obvious relevance to intercultural pragmatics. Cross-cultural differences notwithstanding, and no matter what degree of pragmatic competence a second language user has attained, the goal of every communication remains the same: to convey meanings and jointly construct them. The delimitation of this meaning and the principles used in its construction and recovery provided by post-Gricean pragmatics are thus of undeniable importance in analyzing how L2 speakers approach the process of conversational interaction. Considered at this level of generalization, it should go without saying that post-Gricean pragmatics ought to abandon the early preoccupation with coming to the rescue of the formal semantics of sentences by adding varieties of “overlays” in the form of saturating slots provided by indexicals, enriching concepts when they are underspecified or wrong for the context and topping it up with implicatures. Abandoning this layered picture, aptly called by Parikh a “pipeline” or “imbricated” picture of meaning and convincingly questioned within situation and gametheoretic semantics (Lewis 1979; Barwise and Perry 1983; Parikh 2010), is not necessarily at odds with the Gricean tradition. And, by the way, neither is game theory itself. While game theorists explain communication through goals and moves of a language game, Griceans get there through intention and inference. But, arguably, they all aim at understanding communicative interaction and its composition. It is true that one way to do so is to look at it by distinguishing the logical form as the output of syntactic processing, its pragmatic saturation and free modulation, and implicatures as its additional inferred meanings, but this “pipeline” picture has already been fraying at the edges even within the post-Gricean camp. First, it is widely acknowledged that utterance interpretation does not necessarily proceed in the above order. Second, the said/explicit divide is, as I argued here, of lesser importance to the modeling of speaker addressee meaning than the primary/secondary meaning divide. The debates, which I could sketch only briefly here, suggest that it is this unit of main, intended, and recovered meaning that lies at the center of research both in theoretical and in applied pragmatics or, in Kecskes (2012: 599) distinction, in cognitive-philosophical pragmatics to which post-Gricean debates concerning the expressed proposition belong, and sociocultural-interactional pragmatics to which the study of sociocultural context and co-construction of meaning belong.33 Intercultural pragmatics needs them both: deeply rooted in the latter, it needs the concept of meaning developed in the first. It requires what he calls a socio-cognitive approach that consists of inquiries both into the interlocutors’ minds and into the world in which interaction takes place (Kecskes 2014: 23). Put differently, interculturality is an aspect of communication, and to study 33 For the relevance of the semantics/pragmatics debates for research on English as a lingua franca, see Kecskes (2019). Post-Gricean Pragmatics for Intercultural Communication the latter one has to delimit communicated meanings as well as, arguably, the associated meaning representations. The knot could not be tighter and this is what this chapter aimed to show, focusing on universal principles of communication; without delimiting and understanding utterance meaning and the principles employed in its construction and recovery, we cannot begin to understand cross-cultural differences in how speakers approach it and how they break the barriers set by their own culture in approaching it in a foreign language.34 References Arundale, R. B. (1999). An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics, 9, 119 153. Arundale, R. B. (2010). Constituting face in conversation: Face, face work, and interactional achievement. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 2078 2105. Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. (2013). Strategic conversation. Semantics and Pragmatics, 6, 1 62. Atlas, J. 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New York: Academic Press, pp 1 36. 39 2 Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication Jacques Moeschler 2.1 Introduction Relevance Theory is a cognitive pragmatic theory devoted to utterance interpretation. Its main assumption is that linguistic communication is guided by the communicative principle of relevance, which states that the addressee is invited to take the speaker’s contribution as optimally relevant. In intracultural communication, the crucial point is to understand how communication succeeds, since its success does not depend on a complete linguistic decoding but rather on accessing the relevant contextual assumptions; that is, the assumptions that are closest to the speaker’s informative intention. This chapter’s first aim is to elucidate both how Relevance Theory is included in Grice’s legacy and how it diverges from Grice. Its second aim is to discuss the place of Relevance Theory in pragmatics today, and more specifically to explore whether Relevance Theory makes different predictions than do neo-Gricean approaches. Its third aim is to give insights into Relevance Theory’s contributions to the intercultural pragmatics agenda, and in particular to discuss how Relevance Theory converges with but also diverges from the intercultural pragmatics paradigm initiated by Istvan Kecskes in 2014. It is common to define Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as a post-Gricean pragmatic theory. This definition, however, is not as clear as it seems: although Relevance Theory borrows some tenets from Gricean pragmatics, it diverges from Grice’s theory of meaning and implicature on some fundamental points. It has been recognized for decades, at least since the publication of Diane Blakemore’s and Robyn Carston’s books (Blakemore 1987; Blakemore 1992; Cartons 2002), that Relevance Theory is a pragmatic theory. In fact, it was only in the book they published in I would like to warmly thank Marcia Hadjimarkos for her English expertise in improving the lexical and grammatical aspects of this chapter. Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication 2012 that Dan Wilson and Deirdre Sperber described Relevance Theory as a pragmatic theory rather than a cognitive theory of communication (Wilson and Sperber 2012). This statement is reinforced by the strong tendency in dynamic semantics of ignoring Relevance Theory’s contributions to the discussion on crucial pragmatic issues such as implicature and presupposition. On the other hand, lexical pragmatics, a recent development in Relevance Theory (Wilson and Carston 2007; Carston 2019), has focused above all on metaphors, metonymy, irony (Wilson and Carston 2006; Jodłowiec and Piskorska 2015; Carston 2017; Wilson 2017), and more recently on nonpropositional effects (Wilson and Carston 2019; Saussure and Wharton 2020). It has mainly been in experimental spheres associated with the European and national XPrag networks developed by Ira Noveck (see Noveck 2018 for a general presentation of experimental pragmatics) that Relevance Theory has been systematically referred to as a baseline for assessing the prediction of pragmatic theories on topics like metaphors (Gibbs 1994), implicatures (Breheny et al. 2006), acquisition (Pouscoulous et al. 2007; Grigoroglou and Papafragou 2019), second language learning (Ifantidou 2019), and bilingualism (Dupuy et al. 2018). The third aim of this chapter is to give some insights on how Relevance Theory can contribute to the Intercultural Pragmatics program Istvan Kecskes initiated in 2004. I will first address the role of context in intercultural communication, exploring how the construction of context plays a role in intercultural communication, assuming that intercultural communication is often, if not always, biased by a potential deficit in linguistic competences. This will lead us to the second issue: the challenge of guaranteeing mutual comprehension in situations in which the use of linguistic information that triggers contextual information is not guaranteed. The interplay between linguistic repertoire and context will be discussed from the standpoints of Relevance Theory and of the intercultural pragmatics approach, which gives a central role to the conceptual-procedural distinction developed in Relevance Theory. 2.2 From Gricean to Post-Gricean Pragmatics In their book Relevance, Sperber and Wilson (1986) suggested a new theory of communication and cognition, which primarily referred to Grice’s (1989) theory of meaning and implicature. The authors were the first to introduce the concept of the inferential model, which completed the code model for explaining communication. For more than a century it had been hypothesized see the famous circuit de la parole or ‘speech circuit’ in Saussure ([1916] 1978: 27) that natural languages are codes, or systems that match strings of sounds with strings of meanings. Chomsky (1995: 2), for example, defines “language as sound with meaning, traceable at least back to Aristotle.” This long-standing tradition of defining language as sound meaning pairs resulted in the definition of communication as 41 42 JACQUES MOESCHLER a process of encoding messages into signals from a sender to a recipient, who symmetrically decodes the sent signals into the intended messages. If one replaces message with thought and signal with utterance, it becomes clear that communication is simply a process of sending an utterance encoding thought which guarantees its transfer from a speaker to an addressee: the transfer process is successful if speaker and addressee share the same code the same language and if no interference (noise) disturbs the transfer process. Sperber and Wilson added the inferential model to the code model. This model was inspired by Grice, although he never used the term himself. The authors asserted that decoding was not a sufficient condition for successful communication, mainly because intended meaning is obtained via an inference, which results from a deductive process starting with premises (utterance and context) and yielding a conclusion (speaker’s meaning). The success of the communication process, which uses natural language as a vehicle, thus depends on the addressee’s capacity to infer a conclusion that corresponds to the intended meaning. This type of content is known as contextual implication, because it results from a process of contextualization, an inferential process which is not obtained from the context or the utterance alone. In a nutshell, contextual implication corresponds to particularized conversational implicature in Gricean theory. The second tenet of Relevance Theory is its definition of communication as an ostensive-inferential process. Linguistic communication is a special case of ostensive-inferential communication. Communicating via a gesture such as pointing, for instance, is a traditional example of ostensive and inferential communication. In an ostensive-inferential communication process, the communicator shows her communicative intention through her utterance, and her addressee is invited to infer her informative intention. In this way Relevance Theory clearly explains misunderstandings, which are defined as situations in which the addressee draws an erroneous conclusion, mainly by selecting inappropriate contextual assumptions as premises in the inferential deductive process. In ostensive-inferential communication, therefore, two intentions are involved: the informative intention (or the speaker’s meaning), and the communicative intention (or the intention to make the communicator’s informative intention mutually manifest). As mentioned above, the speaker, in producing an utterance, shows her communicative intention, which implies that the communicative intention is accompanied by an informative intention. In other words, verbal communication is a special means of conveying intentions. How does this definition of communication relate to Grice’s theory of meaning? The answer to this question leads us to the second Gricean contribution to Relevance Theory. Indeed, Grice defines meaning as implying not one but two intentions. Grice defined nonnatural meaning as follows (1989: 220): “‘A meantNN [nonnaturally meant] something by x’ is Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication (roughly) equivalent to ‘A intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention.’” The two Gricean intentions are, respectively, some effect (informative intention) and the recognition of this intention (communicative intention). Grice’s contribution to meaning is thus quite straightforward: meaning in verbal communication is not a question of convention, unlike the classic Saussurian definition of a linguistic sign, in which meaning a concept or signifié is the counterpart of the acoustic image or signifiant, the link between these two sign components being conventional and arbitrary. The main justification of Grice’s definition is that the effect caused by an utterance, which implies the recognition of its intentional origin, can only be the result of an inference. Grice refers to this result as an implicature. The type of implicature involved in nonnatural meaning is known as conversational. Nonnatural meaning is, from a logical and philosophical perspective, completely divergent from natural meaning. In Gricean terms, if x naturally means p, then x entails p, whereas if x nonnaturally means p, then p can be defeated by a but-clause: “That is to say . . . x means that p entails p” (Grice 1989: 213) in the case of natural meaning, whereas in cases of nonnatural meaning “x means that p does not entail p.” Grice gives the bus example (those three rings on the bell (of the bus) mean that the bus is full), for which the speaker can “go on to say ‘But it isn’t in fact full the conductor has made a mistake’” (Grice 1989: 214). This property, typical of implicatures, is termed cancellability in Grice’s article “Logic and conversation” (1975). Therefore, speaker meaning, otherwise known as conversational implicature, is cancellable: if x conversationally implicates p, then the uttering of x does not entail p (p can be false). For instance, by saying p or q, the speaker conversationally implicates that she cannot say p and q. However, in some cases, p and q can be true of p or q: this is or inclusive meaning. The crucial issue is now to understand how a conversational implicature can be drawn. In Gricean pragmatics, the working out of conversational implicatures is the result of the Cooperative Principle (hereafter CP) “Make your contribution such as is required” (Grice 1975: 45) as well as the nine maxims of conversation, which are grouped into four super maxims: Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. For instance, the not(p and q) implicature triggered by p or q is the result of the presumption of respecting the CP and the use of the first maxim of Quantity, which states that the speaker must be as informative as necessary she must give the strongest information compatible with the first maxim of Quality, which requires that she does not give false information. In Relevance Theory, the nine maxims of conversation are replaced by a single principle, the principle of relevance, which states that the speaker’s utterance is the most relevant one in the circumstances, which justifies its automatic processing: “Every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 158). This principle defined in 43 44 JACQUES MOESCHLER the postface of the second edition of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995) as the communicative principle of relevance explains why engaging in the comprehension process is not a result of the addressee’s decision, but an automatic outcome of the comprehension procedure. The communicative principle of relevance is accompanied by a cognitive principle of relevance, which states that “human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance” (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 610). The cognitive principle of relevance is the result of humankind’s evolution; in other words, in our cognitive ability to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant information. How can the reduction of nine maxims to one principle be explained? According to Relevance Theory, giving enough but not too much information (Quantity) is simply behaving in a relevant manner; not telling what one believes as false or what one lacks evidence for (Quality) is the same as giving relevant information; and speaking clearly (Manner) avoiding obscurity and ambiguity, being brief and ordered also qualifies as being relevant. In other words, the concept of relevance can no longer be considered as a single conversational maxim that requires giving information about the subject of conversation. How can the absence of the CP in Relevance Theory be explained? According to Grice, a speaker can decide to be uncooperative or unengaged in a conversation, or he “may opt out from the operation both of the maxim and of the CP,” for instance by saying I cannot say more; my lips are sealed (Grice 1975: 49). In this case, the CP may or may not be observed. This does not occur within the principle of relevance: in Relevance Theory, this principle must be active, because the speaker cannot decide whether to observe it or not. The principle of relevance is effective for cognitive and communicative reasons: on one hand, communicative motivation is linked to the presumption of optimal relevance, which explains why an ostensive stimulus (e.g. an utterance) is processed, and on the other hand, cognitive motivation is linked to the evolutionary inheritance of the human mind. In other words, both communicative grounding of relevance and cognitive grounding occur. This is not the case with cooperation (see Moeschler 2021). However, according to Grice’s theory of conversation (1975), relevance is what is talked about, or aboutness. In other words, being cooperative by respecting (1) or not respecting (2) the maxim of Relation “Be relevant” (Grice 1975: 51, 54) supposes giving or not giving information, which is known today as the Question Under Discussion (QUD) (Roberts 2004): (1) A: I am out of petrol. B: There is a garage round the corner. (2) A: Mrs. X is an old bag. B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn’t it? Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication In fact, the concept of relevance is defined differently according to Relevance Theory: an ostensive stimulus, for instance an utterance, is relevant inasmuch as it produces a contextual effect, or a modification of the hearer’s cognitive environment. This modification may be the addition of new information in the cognitive environment of the addressee, or the modification of old information either strengthening or suppressing it held by the addressee. This provides an initial definition of communication, whose main purpose is to modify the cognitive environment of the participants. In other words, “an assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effects in that context” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 132). The presence of a contextual effect is the first condition for an assumption to be relevant “an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 125). A second extent condition implies the cognitive effort necessary to produce the contextual effects: “an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that the effort required to process it in this context is small” (p. 125). Therefore, increased contextual effects increase the relevance of an utterance. Conversely, increased cognitive efforts result in less relevance. This comparative definition of relevance diverges completely from Grice in terms of communication as well as meaning: in Relevance Theory, ostensive stimuli like utterances are presumed to be optimally relevant, and the result of processing the utterance begins with the presumption of its optimal relevance. Relevance is thus not something that is sought during the processing of an act of communication: its value is equal to or lower than, but never higher than, what has been presumed. This occurs because an utterance’s degree of relevance cannot be higher than the lowest degree in which an assumption (context or utterance) is held. For instance, if a required contextual assumption is held weakly, then the contextual implication driven by the addition of a contextual assumption and an utterance will always be weak, never strong. As implied by the above, Relevance Theory is a strong contextualist approach to meaning and provides a contrast with the minimalist semantic approach defended by Borg (2004 and 2012) and Cappelen and Lepore (2005). It also contrasts with Grice’s theory of meaning, which is defined as anti-contextualist (Recanati 1994): apart from the category of particularized conversational implicatures, which are contextual, generalized conversational implicatures are the result of the CP and the maxims of conversation, while conventional implicatures are lexically triggered as non-truth-conditional meaning. Thus, these two types of implicatures allow no room for context. To sum up, Relevance Theory may be reasonably defined as a postGricean approach to pragmatics: it is inferential and uses a pragmatic principle to explain meaning computation. On the other hand, it is 45 46 JACQUES MOESCHLER contextual and is not based on the CP and the maxims of conversation, but solely on the principle of relevance. 2.3 Relevance Theory as a Pragmatic Theory We must now decide whether Relevance Theory is a pragmatic theory. A striking fact about the short history of pragmatics is that no initial proposal identified itself as pragmatic. Speech act theory, for example, never used the term pragmatic (see Austin 1962, Searle 1969). The same is also true of Grice. In Relevance Theory, the term pragmatics was only mentioned in the Introduction of Meaning and Relevance (Wilson and Sperber 2012). Pragmatics was described in this first chapter as “the study of language use,” an “empirical science, but one with philosophical origins and philosophical import.” Wilson and Sperber referred to Morris’ definition of pragmatics as a relation between “signs and their interpreters,” as distinct from both syntax (which deals with relations between signs) and semantics (which deals with relations between signs and their denotations) (Wilson and Sperber 2012: 1). Further precise descriptions of the scope of pragmatics were given in Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). One of these, for example, stated that the issue of contextual effects and processing efforts is not pragmatic but psychological: “The problems involved in measuring contextual effects and processing effort are, of course, by no means specific to Relevance Theory or to pragmatics. They affect psychology as a whole” (p. 130). The authors claim that “The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the hearer’s task . . . can be carried out” (p. 179). In other words, pragmatics is a theory of utterance interpretation, or a theory whose main goal is to explain how and why inferred meaning can be derived. One major difference between Relevance Theory and standard pragmatic theories such as Gricean and neo-Gricean theories is Relevance Theory’s refusal to limit pragmatics to implicit and explicit inferred contents. The idea that pragmatics should be concerned purely with the recovery of an enumerable set of assumptions, some explicitly expressed, others implicitly conveyed, but all individually intended by the speaker, seems to us to be a mistake. We have argued that there is a continuum of cases, from implicatures that the hearer was specifically intended to recover to implicatures that were merely intended to be manifested, and to further modifications of the mutual cognitive environment of speaker and hearer that the speaker intended to be made manifest, and to further modifications of the mutual cognitive environment of the speaker and hearer that the speaker intended only in the sense that she intended her utterance to be relevant, and hence to have rich and not entirely foreseeable cognitive effects. (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 201) Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication This quote points out at least four situations that fall within the scope of pragmatics; these contrasts dramatically with classic Gricean and neoGricean approaches to meaning. 1. In the first case, recovery of the implicature is intended and a successful communication process is based on the concurrence of what is intended and what is interpreted by the hearer. This is the traditional Gricean case of conventional and conversational implicature, known in Relevance Theory as strong implicature. 2. The second case deals with “implicatures which were merely intended to be manifested”: in this case, recovery of the implicature by the hearer is not required. Here the speaker wants to make them manifest, in other words, true or probably true.1 3. The third case concerns modifications of the mutual cognitive environment which the speaker intends to make manifest. In other words, the speaker intends to modify the hearer’s cognitive environment by modifying the mutual cognitive environment “[a] cognitive environment of an individual is a set of facts that are manifest to him” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 39). During the communication process, therefore, a modification of the set of facts perceptible or inferable both by speaker and by hearer takes place. This case is weaker than those mentioned above because only the mutual cognitive environment is involved, and this does not include implicatures. 4. In the final situation, an utterance is expected to produce multilayered but unpredictable cognitive or contextual effects, which are not necessarily linked to the effect the speaker intended to produce in her recipient. This typically occurs when weak implicatures are expected to be drawn, as in literary texts: these weak implicatures do not depend on the speaker but on the recipient. This is precisely what happens when poetic metaphors produce a group of weak implicatures that vary from reader to reader. Here are some well-known examples. (3) No man is an island. (John Donne) (4) La femme est l’ avenir de l’ homme. (Aragon) The woman is the future of the man. ‘Woman is man’s future.’ The main consequence of this approach to pragmatic meaning is a unique and original definition of communication: “when you communicate, your intention is to alter the cognitive environment of your addressee” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 46). The main goal of communication, therefore, is to modify the cognitive environments of the 1 “A fact is manifest to an individual at a given time if and only if he is capable at that time of representing it mentally and accepting its representation as true or probably true.” More simply, “to be manifest . . . is to be perceptible or inferable” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 39). 47 48 JACQUES MOESCHLER participants. This explains why Relevance Theory has recently branched into argumentation, whose main goal is persuasion (Mercier and Sperber 2017), and epistemic vigilance, which implies that the addressee must be vigilant enough to avoid being manipulated by the speaker (Sperber et al. 2010). This shows one of communication’s interesting paradoxes: on the one hand, the speaker’s main goal is to modify her addressee’s cognitive environment. On the other hand, she must also manage to hide her intention, because her addressee does not want to be manipulated. How can we resolve this paradox? One answer is given in Anne Reboul’s work on the evolution of language and communication (2013 and 2017). Within an evolutionary scenario that explains the role of implicit communication, Reboul conjectures that communicating one’s own intention implicitly has the advantage of letting the addressee conclude by himself what the speaker aims to communicate. Since implicit contents such as implicatures are cancellable, the speaker may always deny her intentions see the famous but-clause in Grice’s definition of nonnatural meaning. Moreover, as the addressee draws the implicature himself, he cannot reproach the speaker for intending to manipulate him. Implicit communication is thus a means of escaping epistemic vigilance and makes the addressee responsible for the attribution of the speaker’s informative intention. We will now take a look at an important question: since pragmatics is an inferential theory of utterance comprehension, how can we explain that verbal communication is successful? Furthermore, to what extent must meaning be grasped for a minimally successful communication to take place? The first question will be answered below, and the second one will be addressed in the section on relevance and intercultural communication (Section 2.5). 2.4 Relevance Theory and Successful Communication One of Relevance Theory’s most important tenets states that for verbal communication to be successful, it is not necessary for the speaker and her hearer to share identical semantic representations of the utterance. This statement is certainly the most important difference between Relevance Theory and other pragmatic approaches, all of which assert that pragmatic processing occurs after semantics see, for instance, Horn’s (1989) and Levinson’s (2000) neo-Gricean theories. This statement makes predictions about what the relation between the linguistic system and pragmatics might be, as well as about how semantic meaning interacts with pragmatic meaning. According to the traditional Gricean model, semantic meaning is truthconditional, and responsible for the assignation of reference and the attribution of a truth value to propositions. In terms of this model, Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication pragmatic meanings (conventional, generalized and particularized conversational implicatures) do not contribute to truth-conditional meaning, since they are either defeasible (conversational implicature) or not-at-issue (conventional implicature) see Potts (2005) for a detailed neo-Gricean development on conventional implicature. A central issue of Relevance Theory is the disentanglement of pragmatic meaning from semantic meaning. This is primarily possible because semantic computations are not the only inputs for pragmatic processing.2 This is true for two reasons. To begin with, the computation of a proposition, or a complete propositional form, is a pragmatic issue rather than a semantic one. Furthermore, a proposition is composed of concepts, which play a crucial role in the construction of contexts. Let us take a closer look at these reasons. Certain arguments support the pragmatic enrichment responsible for the propositional form of an utterance. For instance, referential expressions, including anaphoric pronouns and indexicals, are responsible for determining the truth value of the proposition. But in order to be truthconditionally evaluated, the logical form, resulting from the semantic computation, must be enriched to a full propositional form. In Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986) as well as in further developments (Carston 2002), this process is presented as a pragmatic one. In other words, the truth value assignable to a proposition is a pragmatic assessment, offering a strong contrast to Gricean and neo-Gricean models of meaning.3 Another argument in favor of pragmatic development of the propositional form is the enrichment of the explicit content, and particularly of the narrowing and broadening of concepts. The ability to assign a narrower or broader meaning to concepts is a pragmatic process that takes place in each use of linguistically encoded concepts. Inferred concepts are modifications of encoded concepts at different levels: in the encyclopedic entries of the concept for the narrowing process, and in the logical entries of the concept in the broadening one (Wilson 2003; Wilson and Carston 2007). These pragmatic developments, or enrichments, are strong arguments for a theory of ad hoc concepts, based on the difference between the linguistically encoded concepts and the ad hoc concepts inferred through communication. The result of these processes of narrowing and broadening is known as an explicature. Hence, explicatures the pragmatic and inferred explicit meaning of an utterance and implicatures the pragmatic and inferred implicit meaning, based on a contextual hypothesis (implicated 2 A standard view in pragmatics is the linear model, in which syntax produces the inputs for semantics, and semantics a logical form as input for pragmatics (Moeschler and Reboul 1994; Jackendoff 2002: 282). These models have mainly been challenged by the assumption that pragmatic meaning intrudes into semantic meaning (Ducrot 1984; Levinson 2000; Jackendoff 2002). In Relevance Theory, the most accepted picture is that of a “parallel adjustment of the two kinds of communicated assumptions,” as implicatures and explicatures, “which continues until the interpretation meets the addressee’s expectation of relevance” (Carston 2002: 326). 3 For instance, reference assignment is defined as a pragmatic process at the level of I(nformative) implicatures in Levinson (2000). See Zufferey et al. (2019: chapter 5) for a development of this idea. 49 50 JACQUES MOESCHLER premise) and the logical form of the utterance leading to an implicated conclusion (contextual implication) are the result of meaning construction occurring during utterance processing. As seen above, concepts play a crucial role in the construction of the propositional form, as demonstrated by the processes of narrowing and broadening. But concepts, the constituents of the logical form of the utterance, also play an important role in the construction of contexts. This is the second reason why the pragmatic process does not occur after the semantic one. A context is defined as a set of assumptions or hypotheses which, combined with the logical form of the utterance, yields a conclusion, a contextual implication, or simply an implicature. How, therefore, is context constructed? First, context is not a given, as described in most pragmatic theories, but the result of a construction process.4 This is mainly based on concepts, and more specifically on the information contained in their encyclopedic entries.5 Variation in the construction of contexts can therefore be easily explained: it depends primarily on the information contained in the encyclopedic entries of the concepts, whose content varies from one individual to another. Second, in order to be efficient in the deductive process leading to an implicature, a context cannot consist of all information contained in the encyclopedic entry of the concepts; it must be restricted to a limited number of assumptions. More specifically, context is a subset of the mutual cognitive environment, or the set of facts that are manifest to both speaker and hearer. The construction process is consequently highly risky: because linguistic communication is both coded and inferential, it cannot be risk-free. It is therefore not so important to explain situations in which communication fails, but rather those in which it succeeds. Two caveats are worth making here. First, for communication to be successful, it is not necessary for the hearer to obtain the exact representation of the communicated thought: linguistic communication is not only a simple coding decoding process, but also an inferential one. Second, the contextual implications drawn by the addressee must belong to the non-null intersection of the contextual implications with the speaker’s thought. In other words, successful communication does not have to be literal for this to occur, the set of implications of the utterance and the set of implications of the speaker’s thought would have to match perfectly but requires that this intersection not be an empty set. The only requirement is that the intersection be 4 The non giveness nature of contexts in Relevance Theory vs. its giveness in traditional models parallels the giveness of relevance, which is inferred in classic pragmatic models. 5 A concept is made up of three entries: a logical entry, represented in analytic entailment rules; an encyclopedic entry, containing all information an individual has stored about the denotation of the concept; and a lexical entry, which is its linguistic counterpart. Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication partial. Technically speaking, there must be an interpretive resemblance between the implications inferable from the speaker’s utterance and those inferable from her thought. This explains why successful communication takes place along a continuum stretching from strong implicatures to weak implicatures, as described above. Last but not least, if relevance is the essential criterion for ensuring successful communication, how can a hearer interpret a speaker’s utterance? In their presentation of Relevance Theory in 2004, Wilson and Sperber provided an answer to this question: the hearer must follow the path of least effort in inferring the explicit and implicit communicated contents. This process is explained through the comprehension procedure (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 613): Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure is as follows: a. Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguation, reference resolution, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied (or abandoned). Inferring contextual effects resembles a straight road more than a twisting mountain trail. However, the search for contextual effects stops as soon as the contextual effects balance their processing costs. In other words, inference of cognitive effects is not infinite. We know that the computation of implicatures is costly (see Noveck 2018 for a synthesis), and that it takes time: “People produce 10 to 12 utterances per minute, which means that each utterance takes about 6 seconds to produce and, one would presume, to interpret” (Zufferey et al. 2019: 69). It is therefore reasonable to imagine that this process requires the computation of cognitive effects in order to be as efficient as possible. A final issue is how the comprehension procedure can be justified. The earlier answer was mainly based on communication. But there is another answer, which is cognitive. The hearer’s capacity to grasp the speaker’s informative intention is known as mindreading in Relevance Theory, and it is a specific cognitive module devoted to utterance interpretation. Mindreading is a specialization of a more general cognitive property of the human mind called theory of mind. It has been argued that the theory of mind, a central property of cognition, is (partially) defective in autism (see Baron-Cohen et al. 1985; Happé 1994). In other words, if communication succeeds, it is not only because the hearer accesses the correct context but also and primarily because his mindreading module leads to the correct path for grasping the speaker’s meaning. If the main hypotheses of Relevance Theory are consistent, then there should be some linguistic means for decreasing processing costs. This is precisely what procedural expressions, originally described 51 52 JACQUES MOESCHLER by Blakemore (1987), do. It is not surprising that a great deal of Relevance Theory research has focused on procedural meaning, triggered by functional categories such as discourse connectives, tenses, indexicals, and referential expressions (see Wilson and Sperber 2012: chapter 7 for an initial discussion; Carston 2002; Escandell-Vidal et al. 2011; more recently Assimakopoulos 2015; Wilson 2016; Moeschler 2016; Moeschler 2019). In conclusion, it may be stated that (i) successful communication does not imply a concurrence of representations at either the semantic or the pragmatic level; (ii) pragmatic comprehension implies the computation not only of implicatures but also of explicatures, defined as the utterance’s truth-conditional inferred propositional form; (iii) utterance comprehension implies a path of least effort in the search for cognitive effects; (iv) certain linguistic devices, such as procedural expressions, are devoted to the minimization of cognitive costs in computing cognitive effects. All of these conclusions make precise predictions about how utterance comprehension takes place, especially as concerns the role of concepts and contexts in processing cognitive effects. These conclusions form the basis of a new direction in pragmatics, which has expanded into experimental methods (Noveck 2018), literary issues (Cave and Wilson 2018), and more recently into the relation between emotion and comprehension (Wilson and Carston 2019; Saussure and Wharton 2020).6 2.5 Relevance Theory and Intercultural Pragmatics This final section will explore the interplay between Relevance Theory and intercultural pragmatics, as laid out in Istvan Kecskes’ book (2014) and in his recent articles (2021a, 2021b). This is an important issue, although intercultural pragmatics is not in principle a theory of meaning. However, intercultural pragmatics, and particularly the socio-cognitive approach to communication (Kecskes 2021a), makes certain claims about communication and meaning. These claims will be compared with Relevance Theory below. First, intercultural pragmatics is contextualist in a weak sense: It is based on the notion of common ground (Stalnaker 1977), defined as the set of background propositions mutually entertained as true by the participants to the conversation. Hence, a pragmatic presupposition belongs to the common ground, that is, to the set of indisputable propositions. Second, intercultural pragmatics is a constructivist theory: meaning is not given once and for all but constructed. The main function of dialogues and conversations, therefore, is to align protagonists and their intended and inferred meanings. This implies that meaning cannot be reduced to what 6 See for recent directions in Relevance Theory, see Scott et al. (2019). Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication the speaker intends to mean (Grice) or to what the addressee infers as the speaker’s meaning (Relevance Theory). This alignment process can occur only in a dialogue: meaning is thus a fundamentally conversational construct, as conversation analysis has shown (see Levinson 1983 for a traditional approach to conversational analysis and ethnomethodology). Third, language is partially but significantly defined as a set of idiomatic and prefabricated formulas (Kecskes 2007; Kecskes and Kirner-Ludwig 2019): these expressions are not compositional, allowing for quick access to conventional meaning, but must be learned, which is a stumbling block to multilingual communication. The formulaic dimension of language is traditionally used to assess a high degree of second language mastery, known as idiomatic proficiency. Fourth, inferred meaning, such as implicature, is the result of the interplay between the speaker’s prior experience and the experience of the hearer in the actual situational context (Kecskes 2021a). In other words, the crucial issue in intercultural communication is the difference between the prior situational context, based on the speaker’s prior experience, and the actual situational context. Relevance Theory refers to this as the mutual cognitive environment. Fifth, construction of the prior context is based on conceptual knowledge and is encapsulated in lexical items. However, procedural information is pragmatic and is triggered by the actual situational context. Finally, intersubjective communication is speaker-biased, because of the speaker’s egocentrism in communication. In other words, intercultural pragmatics is a contextualist theory of language comprehension in a weak sense. Language is primarily biased by an important formulaic component and by the speakers’ egocentrism. Moreover, context must be split into the speaker’s prior situational context and the hearer’s actual situational context. Finally, the conceptual procedural distinction is parallel to the semantics pragmatics one. At first glance, Relevance Theory and intercultural pragmatics appear incompatible. Indeed, while Relevance Theory is a nonlinguistic theory of communication and meaning, intercultural pragmatics gives priority to the speaker and considers meaning to be the result of co-construction rather than inference. Moreover, intercultural pragmatics emphasizes linguistic phenomena, as formulaic language shows. In other words, whereas Relevance Theory is a contextualist approach to inferred meaning, intercultural pragmatics is a constructivist approach to linguistic and pragmatic meaning. However, there are some interesting points of convergence between Relevance Theory and intercultural pragmatics. First, whereas Relevance Theory is maximally contextualist, intercultural pragmatics is moderately contextualist and makes a crucial distinction between the prior situational context and the actual situational context (Kecskes 2021a). This distinction between the two types of context is in fact a major difference, which will be examined more fully below. Second, in both approaches, an important 53 54 JACQUES MOESCHLER distinction must be made between concept and procedure: conceptual knowledge is semantic, whereas procedural knowledge is pragmatic in terms of intercultural pragmatics. Relevance Theory, however, gives semantic status to both types of knowledge (Wilson and Sperber 2012: chapter 7; Moeschler 2019). Finally, both approaches assume that communication is fashioned by a myside bias. Let us examine this last issue, which is crucial for both approaches to meaning and communication. Although Relevance Theory is a theory of utterance comprehension, it gives a central role to the speaker. First, the speaker produces an utterance that allows her addressee to suppose that it is optimally relevant: the speaker is thus committed to her utterance and responsible for it. In contrast, a Gricean approach to meaning predicts that when misunderstanding occurs the addressee is responsible for the failed communication because he has drawn an unintentional or erroneous implicature. Relevance Theory, on the other hand, predicts that misunderstanding is due to the speaker: indeed, the speaker’s utterance allows her audience to presume that it is optimally relevant and worthy of processing. Moreover, if an incorrect context is constructed, resulting in incorrect conclusions, this may be due to the fact that the speaker has incorrectly encoded the conceptual as well as the procedural meaning.7 Second, as mentioned above, there is a myside bias in verbal communication (Mercier and Sperber 2017). According to their book, the addressee must be epistemically vigilant to avoid being manipulated by the speaker. On the other hand, the speaker must be cooperative and not hostile, as otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the addressee would agree to pay attention to the speaker’s utterance and trust her (see the concept of nonhostile manipulation in Reboul 2013). But a problem occurs: whereas the addressee must be vigilant, the speaker is lazy in terms of the quality of her arguments. The speaker is therefore responsible for the relevance of her utterance, but at the same time, she is unwilling to be epistemically vigilant as concerns herself. Reboul (2013 and 2017) concludes that implicit communication, that is, communication via implicature and presupposition, allows one to escape the trap of epistemic vigilance. This is true of intracultural communication but becomes difficult in intercultural communication. Indeed, implicit meaning is not readily accessible to addressees in intercultural 7 It could be argued that both speaker and hearer are responsible for misunderstanding, which is often the case: for instance, the hearer can be misled in the construction of contextual assumption because of his shallow and mistaken linguistic processing. However, Relevance Theory (see, for instance, Blakemore 1992: 175) has insisted on the speaker’s role in such a linguistic processing. Blakemore quotes an extract from Relevance, followed by a footnote (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 263) referring to “highly cost efficient” linguistic structures that constraint the addressee’s processing: “There is a natural linkage between linguistic structure and pragmatic interpretation, and no need for any special pragmatic conventions or interpretation rules: the speaker merely adapts her utterance to the way the hearer is going to process it anyhow, given the existing structural and temporal constraints” (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 217). In this interpretation, the speaker is highly responsible for her linguistic choices, leading to appropriate or inappropriate interpretations. Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication communication. How, then, do interlocutors manage in this type of communication? In Moeschler (2004, 2007), an answer is put forward: intercultural communication is guaranteed when the basic explicature of the utterance is correctly inferred. In other words, the asymmetry between the speaker and the hearer (myside bias, egocentrism) can only be avoided by making their informative intentions explicit. This supposes, however, a sufficient mastery of the language being used, and more generally, the sharing of a common linguistic code. Thus, how can interlocutors make their informative intentions manifest without difficulties in the use of implicit meanings? An answer can be found in the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning. In ordinary intracultural communication, the alignment of the conceptual and the procedural entries of lexical items between a speaker and a hearer is an important part of language mastery on the one hand, and of the social regulation of the interaction on the other. For instance, an error in the conceptual entry causes either the calculation of an inappropriate explicature or an undue implicature on the part of the addressee, which the speaker cannot endorse. Intercultural communication, however, does not involve conceptual entries of lexical items, but rather their procedural entries. In other words, induced inferences are constrained by the fact that procedural entries are either empty or filled in differently in the way that native speakers do. The main cause of incorrect usage of a linguistic expression or lexical item, therefore, is its procedural entry.8 Here is an illustration of these situations: “A Swiss-born and Americaneducated student at Geneva was sitting at a table over a cup of coffee with some friends. Suddenly she stood up and said before leaving” (Moeschler 2004: 68): (6) Bon, je m’ Well, I myself ‘OK, I’m leaving.’ casse. break-1SG Why is uttering (6) wrong? Certainly not because of the conceptual meaning of the expression se casser, meaning ‘to leave,’ but due to the choice of this expression in a friendly situation, because this expression implicates that the speaker is angry. I suggest that the intercultural clash does not lie in the conceptual meaning of the verb se casser, but in its procedural one the instruction attached to its meaning ‘to leave’ in terms of situations in which this expression can be used. To use Kecskes’ wording, the speaker is simply unaware of the implications of the actual 8 This claim is not assumed by intercultural pragmatics, even when it is focused on formulaic language (Kecskes 2007) and odd structures in intercultural communication using a lingua franca (Kecskes and Kirner Ludwig 2019). However, it is based on a generalization of the conceptual/procedural meaning distinction proposed in Moeschler (2019), which ascribes a procedural meaning, as well as a conceptual one, to the open lexicon (lexical categories like nouns, verbs, and adjectives). 55 56 JACQUES MOESCHLER context, because she lacks procedural information attached to the nonliteral, formulaic use of se casser. As these examples show, there are more convergences than divergences between Relevance Theory and intercultural pragmatics. The main issue in intercultural communication, egocentrism, is balanced by the speaker’s laziness. However, as the speaker’s main goal is the acknowledgment of her informative intention, her egocentrism Relevance Theory would qualify this as preferences and abilities in the presumption of optimal relevance9 must be moderated through the ability to represent others as having different contextual inputs. This is perhaps the greatest challenge for intercultural pragmatics: we behave in social and linguistic interaction as human beings, but our behavior can become bogged down in confusion, for instance between conceptual and procedural meaning. An amusing example involves an encounter between an English-speaking client and the concierge in a Parisian hotel: (7) Concierge: Client (caressing the concierge’s hand): Vous êtes d’ où↘□ You are from where ‘Where are you from?’ Vous aussi. You too ‘You, too.’ Vous êtes d’où? is phonologically ambiguous. It can be heard as a question that makes sense in a hotel admission scenario, or a compliment vous êtes doux ‘you are sweet’. Manifestly, the English-speaking client made a conceptual error because of his misleading procedural processing due to a French unmarked intonation, that is, falling (↘□) vs. raising prosody (↗□). 2.6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have demonstrated that Relevance Theory is a true postGricean theory as well as a pragmatic theory. Its main goal is to explain how addressees succeed in interpreting speakers’ utterances. The presumption of relevance, stated in the communicative principle of relevance, forms the basis of automatic processing of utterances, defined as ostensive stimuli, or utterances, that convey a communicative intention whose recognition is a necessary condition for grasping the speaker’s informative intention. 9 Presumption of optimal relevance a. The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the audience’s processing effort. b. It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences. (Wilson and Sperber 2004: 612) Relevance Theory and Intercultural Communication It has been argued that one of main tenets of Relevance Theory is to extend the traditional scope of pragmatics by adding explicatures as well as weak implicatures to conversational implicatures. This extension of the field of empirical research in pragmatics has had certain important consequences. First, new empirical domains have been added to the range of pragmatics: procedural meaning, lexical meaning including issues such as polysemy, metaphors, metonymy, and irony, as well as issues traditionally belonging to literary studies. More recently, questions at the crossroads of inferential pragmatics, politeness, and experimental studies have also become central to pragmatics, not only as concerns Relevance Theory (Mazzarella 2015), but in more general terms, involving psycholinguistic studies (Bonnefon et al. 2009), and sociolinguistics (Terkourafi et al. 2020). The question naturally arises as to whether Relevance Theory can be considered a scientific paradigm. The answer is clearly positive but must be nuanced. Relevance Theory has given rise to several new research directions. Some of these extend beyond traditional trends in the field and have been addressed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Diane Blakemore (2002) on discourse connectives, and Robyn Carston on negation (1996 and 2002), lexicon, and polysemy (Carston 2019). Insights on the issue of the origin of language and communication were initially stated by Sperber and Origgi (2000). New developments have been put forward regarding the role of ostensive communication in the evolution of language (Scott-Phillips 2015) and the role of concepts in the emergence of natural languages (Reboul 2017), as well as on the fact that implicit communication has evolved for verbal communication (Reboul 2013). Certain traditional issues in semantics and pragmatics, including verb tenses and negation, have also resulted in a variety of developments both from the corpus pragmatics perspective and from an experimental standpoint (see respectively Grisot and Moeschler 2014 and Grisot 2017 on tenses, and Moeschler 2018 and Blochowiak and Grisot 2018 on negation). Apart from the wider scope of the empirical and experimental orientation of Relevance Theory, it is pertinent to ask whether this theory can make a positive contribution to intercultural pragmatics. If this is the case, certain relevant topics could be added to the intercultural pragmatics agenda. These would include the balance between the degree of conceptual and procedural meaning necessary for guaranteeing successful communication; the roles of explicit and implicit meaning in intercultural communication; the role of nonpropositional meaning in intercultural communication; the degree of explicitness in translation (TV series, fiction) necessary for communicating contextual effects; and lastly the role of cultural biases in intercultural communication. To conclude on a humorous note, I can’t resist mentioning the following example. In an episode of the well-known sitcom Friends, the 57 58 JACQUES MOESCHLER main characters meet a young woman in the café below their apartment. They began to talk, and ask her where she is from. In the original version, she answers Milwaukee, which is followed by a burst of laughter. In the French version, she answers: La campagne (‘The countryside’)! References Assimakopoulos, S. (2015). Motivating procedural analysis of logical connectives. 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Research in intercultural communication and L2 use (e.g. House 2002; Cieslicka 2007; Kecskes 2010) demonstrated the priority of literal meaning in both production and comprehension. Literal meanings of lexical units serve as core common ground for interlocutors with different L1 backgrounds when they communicate in English. In order for us to understand how default interpretation works in intercultural interactions, first we need to get to know how defaultness occurs in L1. Giora’s study will help us do that. Istvan Kecskes 3.1 Introduction Default interpretation is crucial for the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) and intercultural pragmatics. Participants of intercultural interactions represent different speech communities and cultures, so defaultness can hardly work the way it does in L1. The cognitive mechanism is the same, but the result is different. As interlocutors in intercultural encounters belong to different speech communities, they share limited core common ground of the target language (English), which is the basis for relatively similar This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation grant (no. 540/19) awarded to Rachel Giora. 64 RACHEL GIORA default interpretations in L1. Research in intercultural communication and L2 use (e.g. House 2002; Cieslicka 2007; Kecskes 2010) demonstrated the priority of literal meaning in both production and comprehension. Literal meanings of lexical units serve as core common ground for interlocutors with different L1 backgrounds when they communicate in English. To understand how default interpretation works in intercultural interactions, first, we need to get to know how defaultness occurs in L1. Giora’s study will help us do that. How is default interpretation defined? According to the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora, Givoni, and Fein 2015b), default interpretation is an automatic response to a stimulus. Still, to be considered the default, utterance interpretation must be constructed unconditionally, initially, and directly, regardless of explicit cues or contextual information. Specifically, to be considered as default, stimuli should be (a) unfamiliar, novel, so that responses are constructed rather than accessed directly from the mental lexicon (Giora 1997, 2003); (b) free of semantic anomaly, as in Unchain my heart, Juliet is the sun, which prompts metaphoricalness (Beardsley 1958), or internal incongruity, as in He has made such a good job in discrediting himself (Partington 2011: 1794), or in about as soothing as a cat in a blender (Veale 2013: 14), which biases interpretations toward a sarcastic output; and (c) free of (i) explicit marking (e.g. literally, just kidding, pun intended) prompting low-salience meanings (e.g. Givoni et al. 2013; Givoni 2019), or cues rejecting unintended default interpretations while prompting nondefaultness (see Becker and Giora 2018); and (ii) free of specific contextual information, inviting non/literalness (e.g. Gibbs 1994; Campbell and Katz 2012; Giora et al. 2013; Giora et al. 2015a). Within the framework of the Defaultness Hypothesis, spontaneous, automatic responses to “fully abstract phrasal patterns” (Goldberg 2003: 219; 2006) will be considered as default outputs once their stimuli meet conditions (a c) above for defaultness. These conditions guarantee that potential ambiguity between literal and nonliteral interpretations is allowed a priori so that a preference is allowed. Here, I will show that fully abstract constructions, and strongly attenuating highly positive concepts are all inducing sarcastic interpretations by default (see Giora et al. 2018), whether (i) by means of negation, as in “X is not the most Y,” where Y is a highly positive concept, as in S/he is not the most inspiring person around (Giora et al. 2015b), or (ii) via the simile construction, itself an attenuator, which further involves the “about as X as Y” attenuator (as per Veale 2013), as in S/he is about as strong as an ox (see also Levant et al. 2020), or (iii) by asking rhetorical questions, (i.e. attenuated assertions) involving an intensifier of that attenuation, as in Do you really believe she is inspirational? Such default interpretations are expected to be processed faster than nondefault counterparts. Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics 3.2 On the Superiority of Defaultness 3.2.1 On the Speed Superiority of Default Sarcastic Interpretations over Their Nondefault Literal Counterparts When in isolation, certain constructions, strongly attenuating highly positive concepts, e.g. by means of negation, as in He is not the most adorable artist worldwide, or by the “about as X as Y” attenuator, as in He is about as adorable as the most inspiring artist worldwide, as well as by the “really” intensifier of rhetorical questions, as in do you really believe he is the most adorable artist worldwide?, convey sarcastic interpretations by default (meaning, he is ‘highly disliked’); their literal counterparts, however, communicate nondefault outputs, constructed compositionally (meaning ‘others are more popular’). When in isolation and the affirmative, as in He is the most adorable artist worldwide, such utterances are interpreted compositionally by default, conveying their literal interpretation (meaning ‘he is most highly respected’). To be interpreted sarcastically, though, they should be embedded in context, biasing their interpretation toward their nondefault sarcastic interpretation (i.e. ‘he is highly disliked’). In all, while default interpretations do not rely on context, nondefault counterparts do. Context then supports nondefault interpretations, allowing interpreters to home in on the intended message. It is not the degree of literalness or figurativeness, then, that makes a difference. Instead, it is the degree of defaultness. Consider the following examples in (1) below (originally in Hebrew), all in equally highly constraining contexts (as shown by a pre-test), whose target utterances (in italics, below) and their spillover segments (in bold, below) were tested for processing speed, the latter allowing processing difficulties to spill over to the next two words in the following utterance (Giora et al. 2015b): (1) He is/is not the most restrained person possible. 1a. Negative Sarcasm During the welcoming toast for the new manager, the workers at Shahar Company were waiting patiently for the speech to end. Everyone was already hungry, but they knew it would last only a few minutes longer. Only Eitan got up and began to grab food from the table. He stacked his plate and began gorging himself. Ronit whispered to Hadas: “What an impolite and impatient person. I’m shocked. Can’t he hold on for another minute?” Hadas (grimaced): “Yes, he’s always like this. He is not the most restrained person possible. I think he’s extremely rude.” 1b. Negative Literalness During the welcoming toast for the new manager, the workers at Shahar Company were waiting impatiently for the speech to end. Everyone was 65 66 RACHEL GIORA already hungry, and at a certain point, they started piling their plates. Only Eitan sat quietly and waited. “Look, he’s so polite,” said Ronit to her friend, Hadas. “He’s so great at self-control.” Hadas: “That’s right. He almost always keeps his cool and calm. The only ones in the company who are more composed than he is are Adam and Maor. They’re really the only ones in a company of 500. So, only compared to these two, we might say that he is not the most restrained person possible. I think he’s a role model of restraint.” 1c. Affirmative sarcasm During the welcoming toast for the new manager, the workers at Shahar Company were waiting patiently for the speech to end. Everyone was already hungry, but they knew it would last only a few minutes longer. Only Eitan got up and began to grab food from the table. He stacked his plate and began gorging himself. Ronit whispered to Hadas: “What an impolite and impatient person. I’m shocked. Can’t he hold on for another minute?” Hadas: “I thought he was a polite guy.” Ronit: “Yeah right. He is the most restrained person possible. I think he’s extremely rude.” 1d. Affirmative Literalness During the welcoming toast for the new manager, the workers at Shahar Company were waiting impatiently for the speech to end. Everyone was already hungry, and at a certain point, they started piling their plates. Only Eitan sat quietly and waited. “Look, he’s so polite,” Ronit said to her friend, Hadas. “Yes, it’s very impressive! In the staff meeting we’ve just had, Shlomo was rude to him, but he didn’t respond and kept his cool. He’s really cool and a very considerate guy, and overall, he is the most restrained person possible. I think he’s a role model of restraint.” To test the prediction that defaultness will prevail, we ran an online reading times experiment involving items as in (1) above. Results show that (i) negative targets were processed faster than affirmative counterparts when both were embedded in equally strong, sarcastically biased contexts. (ii) Additionally, negative targets, embedded in sarcastically biased contexts, were also processed faster than negative counterparts, embedded in equally strong, literally biased contexts. Spillover segments showed the same processing patterns of the results. Such results attest to the superiority of defaultness. They show that it is neither literalness, nor affirmation, nor context that matters; instead, it is defaultness that makes a difference (as shown by Giora et al. 2015b). The superiority of default interpretations over nondefault counterparts has been further established when testing other discourse-based negative constructions, such as, Punctuality is not his forte/best attribute; Thoroughness is not her most distinctive feature; Smart? I don’t think so (Giora et al. 2015a). Indeed, the results of the five experiments support the view that negation generates sarcastic interpretations by default. As Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics before, when presented in isolation, novel negative constructions, free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, were interpreted sarcastically and rated as sarcastic, compared to their novel affirmative counterparts (Experiments 1 and 3). Hence, when in strongly supportive, sarcastically biased contexts, they were processed faster than when embedded in contexts, equally strongly biased, supportive of their noncoded nondefault literal interpretation (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiment 5 reduced the possibility that it is structural markedness rather than the attenuation by means of negation that prompts nonliteralness. Such findings attest to the priority of default (here) sarcastic interpretations over nondefault (here literal) counterparts of negative constructions, involving strong attenuation of highly positive concepts (Giora et al. 2018). 3.2.2 On the Speed Superiority of Default Metaphorical Interpretations over Their Nondefault Literal Counterparts Giora et al. (2013) further tested the defaultness of nonliteralness of certain negative metaphorical (X is not Y) and sarcastic (X s/he is not) constructions, meeting the three conditions for defaultness above. Items, such as You are not a pilot; Supportive she is not (the latter involving a marked construction), were interpreted metaphorically (e.g. You are not a pilot) and sarcastically (Supportive she is not) when presented in isolation. When embedded in contexts, equally strongly biased toward either their nonliteral or literal interpretation, they were processed faster in the metaphorically (2a) than in the literally (2b) biased contexts; they were also processed faster in the sarcastic contexts (2c) than in the literally biased counterpart (2d), regardless of markedness: (2) You are not a pilot; Supportive she is not. 2a. David cringed as Ariel completed yet another needlessly dangerous maneuver on the road. His heart pounding, he looked at his fellow passengers and saw they were just as petrified as he was. The speed was mindboggling. When the car careened around the corner, he mustered his courage and shouted at Ariel: “You are not a pilot! You are going to get us all killed! Either you slow down right this second or you drop us all off right here.” Ronny peaked at the people in the back seat and reluctantly eased off the gas pedal. 2b. Avner, the security officer, noticed the captain was sprawled over the dashboard, patently unconscious. He tried to keep cool and grabbed the control stick. Ariel started to panic and whimpered: “You are not a pilot! You are going to get us all killed.” Avner snapped at him: “This is our only hope. This plane isn’t going to land itself.” 67 68 RACHEL GIORA 2c. Yohai was making bold steps toward realizing his dream of becoming a professional stuntman. His mom, though disapproving, did not impede his progress. Granted, she was not thrilled with his career choice, and she indeed offered no encouragement, financial or otherwise, but she didn’t stand in his way. She even showed up in the bleachers for the spectacle when he was about to perform his airborne daredevil antics. His friends were all like, “Dude! Your mom rocks! She’s your no. 1 fan!” Yohai chuckled. “That’s going overboard. Supportive she is not. I guess she couldn’t be expected to be happy with what I do. It was real nice of her to come this time.” 2d. Yohai kept silent while Tidhar’s wife lashed at him with a flood of insult, mocking his idea of opening a café: “You? Be self-employed? Run a business? That would be the day! When pigs fly! Who put that absurd idea into that useless poor excuse for a head? Ain’t gonna happen”! After she had stormed off, Yohai asked: “That’s your wife? Supportive she is not. I guess we can’t expect her to help with the initial fundraising, can we”? Still, to reduce the possibility that it is structural markedness on its own that induces nonliteralness, two corpus-based studies were run. They provided corroborating evidence, supportive of the sarcastic defaultness of the negative items and the literal defaultness of their affirmative counterparts. Indeed, this has been strongly replicated by Giora et al. (2015a). 3.2.3 “About as X as Y” Constructions Attenuating Highly Positive Concepts of Novel Similes In Levant et al. (2020; see also Giora et al. 2018), we attempted to replicate Veale’s (2013) findings, attesting to the ironicity of attenuated constructions, such as “about as X as Y,” as in about as soothing as a cat in a blender, while avoiding the inclusion of the internal incongruity, as in about as pervasive as air. We, therefore, weighed the “about as X as Y” constructions, including no internal incongruity (e.g. about as pervasive as air), against counterparts involving a weaker attenuator “as X as Y” as in, as pervasive as air. Veale (2013) collected simple similes, with a one-word vehicle and without an attenuator (“as * as *”), as in as hot as an oven or as strong as an ox. Then, he harvested a large corpus of similes with the “about” attenuator (“about as * as *”) such as about as pervasive as air as well as a host of similes, involving the about marker and an internal incongruity (e.g. about as soothing as a cat in a blender). He found that 76% of the (“about as”) attenuated similes were ironic, while only 24% of the attenuated similes were judged as literal (i.e. not ironic). He also found that, of the non-attenuated, simple similes (not including the “about” attenuator), only 18% were ironic; the remaining 82% of these similes were interpreted literally. In sum, he showed that the “about” attenuator plays a crucial role in affecting sarcasm by default. Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics In Levant et al.’s (2020) Experiment 3, we aimed to provide support for the predictions of the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora et al. 2015b; Giora et al. 2018), according to which attenuating highly positive concepts (of novel similes, involving no internal incongruity) will generate sarcastic interpretations by default. We, therefore, compared attenuated similes (using the “about,” “almost,” or “at least” markers), alongside highly positive concepts, yet without an internal incongruity (see example 3 below), to their counterparts short of an attenuator (see example 4 below). Booklet A (3) It is absolutely rare, almost as rare as encountering an honest politician. Booklet B (4) It is absolutely rare, as rare as encountering an honest politician. Results exhibited a significant difference in sarcasm rating between similes with (4.33, SD 1.20) and without (4.15, SD 1.10) an attenuating marker, in participant but not in item analysis, t1(91) 1.79, p<.05, t2(17) 1.30, p 10. The aim of Experiment 4 was to test the degree of sarcasm of intensified similes involving highly positive concepts but no internal incongruity. Therefore, instead of using an attenuator, such as about, the similes involved intensifiers (such as absolutely, really, or so). These intensified similes were weighed against unmarked counterparts, not including an intensifier. Given Giora et al.’s (2015b, 2018) Defaultness Hypothesis, we expected these intensified items to be rated as significantly more sarcastic (see example 5 below) than their non-intensified counterparts (see example 6 below). We thus expected to replicate the same pattern of results we found in Experiment 3: Booklet A (5) It is absolutely rare, almost as rare as encountering an honest politician. Booklet B (6) It is rare, almost as rare as encountering an honest politician. Results attested to a significant difference in sarcasm rating between similes with (4.54, SD 1.16) and without an intensifier (4.36, SD 1.10), t1(151) 2.16, p<.05; t2(15) 1.86, p<.05. Intensifying an attenuated construction, such as a simile, seems to render its effect on sarcastic outputs more strongly than in the absence of an intensifier. Strongly intensifying an attenuation of a highly positive concept affects sarcasm interpretation by default. 69 70 RACHEL GIORA 3.2.4 Rhetorical Questions Constructions +/– Intensifiers, Strongly Attenuating Highly Positive Concepts In Giora et al. (2018), we aimed to show that rhetorical questions (in Hebrew), strongly attenuating highly positive concepts by means of an intensifier (e.g. really), such as Do you really believe he is sophisticated?, will get across sarcastic interpretations (see also Brown and Levinson 1978; Ilie 1994; Gibbs 2000; Paolazzi 2013; Zuanazzi 2013; but see Raeber 2016). Given their hedging effect, in Giora et al. (2018), we tested the prediction that intensifying the mitigating effect of rhetorical questions will communicate sarcastic interpretations by default. To do that, we first established a degree of defaultness by presenting participants with strongly mitigated intensified rhetorical questions (Do you really believe he’s sophisticated?) and their counterparts, short of intensifiers (e.g. really, as in Do you believe he’s sophisticated?). Items were presented in isolation and followed by a sevenpoint scale, instantiating a sarcastic interpretation (at the right end of the scale) and a literal interpretation (at the left end of the scale). Results showed that the default, preferred interpretation of the intensified rhetorical questions was sarcastic, scoring high on a seven-point interpretation scale (M 5.67, SD 0.99); the default, preferred interpretation of their non-intensified alternatives was literal, scoring significantly lower on that very same scale (M 3.83, SD 0.82). Such results support the view that strongly attenuating highly positive concepts utilizing intensifiers affects sarcastic interpretations by default; lack of such strong attenuation of highly positive concepts results in a default literal interpretation. Results further imply that the nondefault, non-preferred interpretation of the non-intensified rhetorical questions should be sarcastic; the nondefault, non-preferred interpretation of the intensified rhetorical questions should be literal. Will natural language use corroborate these lab results? To be able to support our predicted findings, based on natural language use, we looked at the first 100 naturally occurring (Hebrew corpusbased) instances of strongly mitigated rhetorical questions (e.g. Do you believe you are smart?) and another 100 first occurrences of mildly mitigated counterparts, short of an intensifier (e.g. Do you believe you are smart?). Findings collected by three judges, native speakers of Hebrew, versed in the field of sarcasm, demonstrated that intensified mitigation of highly positive concepts indeed affects sarcastic interpretation by default; non-intensified mitigation affects literal interpretation by default. Specifically, targets, strongly attenuating, employing an intensifier, highly positive concepts, conveyed their default sarcastic interpretation in 96.8%; only in 3.2% of the cases did they convey their nondefault literal reading, p<.0001. Furthermore, targets short of an intensifying mitigator of highly positive concepts conveyed their default literal reading in 62.4% of the cases; only in 37.6% of the cases did they convey their nondefault sarcastic interpretation, thus attesting to a preference for Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics their default literal interpretation, p<.05. Such results lend strong support to the predictions of the Defaultness Hypothesis, whereby strong attenuation of highly positive concepts conveys sarcastic interpretations by default. Weakly mitigated counterparts will be interpreted literally by default (see Giora et al. 2018). 3.2.5 Dialogic Resonance with Default Interpretations How is dialogic resonance defined? According to Du Bois (2014: 359), dialogic resonance is defined as “the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances,” implemented via echoing an utterance interpretation by its prior or late context (Giora 2007; Du Bois and Giora 2014a). Studies reported here will show that dialogic resonance mainly relates to default rather than nondefault interpretations. 3.2.5.1 Dialogic Resonance with Default Sarcastic Interpretations Recall that according to the Defaultness Hypothesis, constructions involving strong attenuation (e.g. by means of negation) of highly positive concepts, such as S/he is not the most mesmerizing person around; S/he is not particularly smart, will be interpreted sarcastically by default initially and directly even when outside of context. Hence, in natural discourse, such constructions are expected to be mirrored by their environment via their default, here, sarcastic interpretation (meaning S/he is dull; S/he is stupid). Results indeed show that, when in context, such negative constructions evolve and unfold via resonating with their default sarcastic interpretations (see Giora et al. 2020). Will this also be true of the default literalness of affirmative sarcasm? Giora and Gur (2003) showed that items collected from recorded conversations among Israeli friends reveal that 75 percent of the affirmative sarcastic utterances were responded to by echoing their default, contextually incompatible, literal interpretation. Along the same lines, Kotthoff’s (2003) findings showed that affirmative sarcastic utterances, exchanged among German friends’ conversations, were also addressed via their default literal interpretation. This has also been shown to be true of written discourses when authors resonated with their affirmative sarcastic remarks via their default literal interpretations (Giora et al. 2014b). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that, like comprehenders (Giora et al. 2007; Giora 2011a), producers (of both written and spoken discourse) also activate the contextually inappropriate yet default literal interpretations of affirmative sarcasm.1 When in natural 1 On production and comprehension sharing similar processes, see Pickering and Garrod (2013) and references therein; on speakers and comprehenders mirroring each other’s neural activities while interacting, see Hasson et al. (2009); Stephens et al. (2010); see also Giora (2011). 71 72 RACHEL GIORA discourse, default rather than nondefault interpretations prevail, regardless of context or degree of figurativity. This has been further established by Giora et al. (2014a), who also focused on natural discourse. Findings from two corpus-based studies of Hebrew and English items show that negative constructions, such as those discussed above, as in Punctuality is not her best attribute, lend usage-based support to the priority of default interpretations of negative, sarcastic constructions over their nondefault, non-sarcastic alternatives (Giora et al., 2010; Giora et al. 2013; Giora et al. 2014a; Giora et al. 2015a). Moreover, their neighboring utterances reflect their default sarcastic interpretation rather than their nondefault, non-sarcastic alternatives. Consider the following examples, taken from Giora et al. (2014a), which display “X is not her/his/my forte/strongest point” constructions, and “X is not her forte/plus point” constructions, interpretable either sarcastically (7, 9) or literally (8, 10) (target constructions in boldface; interpretations in italics, for convenience): (7) The Columnist picked 30 good names for the article, but his comments were lame. Yeah . . . humor is not his forte. (hodyYanksFan 2005). (8) This is officially the first Powerpuff Girl story I ever wrote. I wrote it in 2000, shortly after I started watching the show. I found it recently, and now I am sharing it with you fantabulous readers. I do not know if this is considered funny because writing humor is not my forte, but I hope you get a chuckle or two out of this. Anyway, please R&R! (Rose 2003). (9) Alas, humor was not her strongest point, and today this fauxromp looks strained and moribund. (10) Humor is not her plus point, but she has always made us laugh with her gimmicks. In examples (7, 9), the discourses feature negative statements (Humor is not his forte; humor was not her strongest point), which convey a nonliteral, sarcastic interpretation while resonating with the opposite (or an attenuated opposite) of what is said: rather than being humorous, “his comments were lame”; rather than being funny, “this faux-romp looks strained and moribund’.” In examples (8, 10), however, rather than resonating with a contrastive reading of the negated concepts, similar negative statements (writing humor is not my forte; Humor is not her plus point) are interpreted literally, conveying a literal, mitigated interpretation of the concept of humor (”I hope you get a chuckle or two out of this”; “but she has always made us laugh with her gimmicks”). Negative constructions, like those above, are susceptible, then, to both nonliteral and literal interpretations. However, Giora et al. (2014a) Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics adduced evidence showing that it resonates with the default sarcastic interpretation rather than the nondefault literal interpretation that prevails. In Study 1, Giora et al. (2014a) aimed to establish that constructions such as “X is not her forte” or “X is not her best attribute” are indeed used sarcastically when in natural discourse, conveying their sarcastic interpretation more often than their literal interpretation. In contrast, their affirmative counterparts are used literally. Based on the interpretations of the first ~150 occurrences of such negative and affirmative constructions in Hebrew and English, scrolled via the search of Google pages, allowed four judges, versed in sarcasm, to identify 141 naturally occurring negative utterances, such as Patience is not her forte/most pronounced characteristic, most of which (90%) were intended sarcastically. Complementarily, most of the 155 (~97%) affirmative counterparts examined were intended literally. In Study 2, Giora et al. (2014a) further studied the dialogic resonance of these utterances’ environment. They examined how the contextual environment of these utterances reflects the interpretations of the negative utterances, which were shown to prompt sarcastic interpretations by default. Results, collected by the same expert judges of Study 1, show that the environment of most of these negative utterances (88%) resonates only with their default sarcastic interpretation. In comparison, only in a few cases (12%) does it resonate with the nondefault literal interpretation. In sum, resonance with default interpretations prevails (see also Giora et al. 2020). 3.2.5.2 Resonating with Default Sarcastic Interpretations: A Corpus-based Study of Rhetorical Questions According to the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora et al. 2015b; Giora et al. 2018; see also Giora et al. 2014a), the discoursal environment of both default and nondefault interpretations should reflect their default readings. Given the high frequency (96.81%) of default sarcastic interpretations of naturally occurring rhetorical questions, strongly attenuating highly positive concepts (see Giora et al. 2018), it seems safe to expect that, as predicted, the discoursal environment of such utterances will primarily echo or resonate with this default sarcastic interpretation; in contrast, targets not strongly mitigated by an intensifier will be echoed primarily via their default literal interpretation, even when sarcastic. Indeed, Giora et al. (2018) tested the prediction of the Defaultness Hypothesis (Giora et al. 2015b; see also Giora et al. 2014a) that their discoursal environment will echo both default and nondefault interpretations via their default interpretation. To test this prediction, judgments regarding the type of resonance (sarcastic/literal) were collected from three raters versed in the field of sarcasm and resonance. They examined the 200 rhetorical questions tested previously for the degree of sarcasm (see Section 3.2.3). One hundred and fifty questions were specified as either 73 74 RACHEL GIORA sarcastic or literal by at least two judges; agreement between judges was high (Fleiss’ kappa 0.56). Results show that rhetorical questions, strongly mitigating highly positive concepts, were echoed by their environment via their default sarcastic interpretation in 70.3% of the cases; only 29.7% of the cases were echoed via their nondefault literal interpretation, p<.0005. Similarly, the rhetorical questions, which mildly mitigate a highly positive concept, showed that such questions were echoed via their default literal interpretation in 77.6% of the cases; only in 22.4% of the cases were they echoed via their nondefault sarcastic interpretation, p<.0001. Such results indeed support the Defaultness Hypothesis. They show that both speakers/authors and addressees are sensitive to the degree of defaultness. To allow resonance with nondefault interpretations, items have to rely on low-defaultness marking and cueing, as Givoni et al. (2013) and Becker and Giora (2018) show. 3.2.5.3 Dialogic Resonance with Default Metaphorical Interpretations Based on corpora search, Giora et al. (2010) showed that utterances of the form “X is not Y,” such as I am not . . .; You are not . . .; This is not . . . (I am not your maid; You are not my boss; This is not food) were primarily metaphorical. They were used metaphorically more often than their affirmative counterparts, which were primarily literal (I am your maid; You are my boss; This is food). In addition, their environment resonated with their metaphorical rather than their literal interpretation (see examples 11 13 below, target utterances in bold, resonance with their default metaphorical interpretations, in italics). When in the affirmative (see examples 12 14 below, target utterances in bold), their environment resonated with their literal interpretations (in italics); similarly, when in the negative (see examples 15 below, target utterance in bold), their environment resonated with their metaphorical interpretation (in italics); when in the affirmative (see example 16 below, target utterance in bold), their environment resonated with their literal interpretation (in italics): (11) You tell me what to do all of the time, what to say, where to hide, and what to do. I am not your wife I am not your maid, I’m not someone that you can lay your demands [on] all of [the] time, I’m sick of this it’s going to stop! (Blige 2007) (12) “No, mum. I am your maid. It is you, who picked me. It is my job to attend to you, mum.” (Summerfield 1998) (13) Don’t ever tell me that “I better do something on my blog.” You are not my boss, so don’t tell me what to write. (Joan 2008) (14) No keeping someone on staff. No extra payroll costs. No third-party human resource company. This means I work for you, and you are my boss. (Banda 2008) Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics (15) “Tell TBS this is not food. They should concentrate on checking upon foodstuff imports many of which are expired or sub-standard or unfit for human consumption,” said stallholder Saidi Abdallah Umbe. (BBC News 2003) (16) This is food, and this is how you eat it. (Chamberlain 2005) In Giora et al. (2010), three experiments conducted in Hebrew, involving “X is not Y” items (where X is a pronoun and Y is a noun), alongside corpusbased studies of English, German, and Russian (see below), show that negation induces metaphoricity by default. Affirmative counterparts, however, come across as significantly less metaphorical. In Experiment 1, in which items were presented in isolation, negative utterances such as I am not your maid, were interpreted metaphorically; their affirmative counterparts, such as I am your maid, were interpreted literally. Experiment 2 compared affirmative (almost) to negative (not) modifiers, allowing a graded rather than a dichotomous response. Results show that compared to their affirmative alternatives, involving the almost modifier, negative modifiers (I am not your maid) were a more robust metaphorizing device, thus inducing more metaphorical interpretations than their affirmative counterparts. Experiment 3 tested the prediction that even novel items (whose equal degree of novelty was established by a pre-test) should be interpreted metaphorically in the negative (This is not Memorial Day, meaning ‘don’t be so sad’) and literally in the affirmative (This is the Memorial Day, meaning, ‘we are celebrating Memorial Day today’). Results showed that the novel negative items were rated as significantly more metaphorical than their equally novel affirmative counterparts. Overall, results from the three experiments support the view that strong attenuation by means of, e.g., negation may generate figurativeness by default (i.e. without relying on context or sematic anomaly, as per Beardsley 1958). To show that such findings may be demonstrated in Hebrew and in various languages, such as English, German, or Russian, Giora et al. (2010: 242 243) further ran corpus-based studies in these three languages. The findings of these studies are presented below, in Table 3.1 (for English), Table 3.2 (for German), and Tables 3.3 (for Russian). Results show that, as predicted, the negative versions were interpreted metaphorically in more than 50 percent of the cases. In contrast, the affirmative counterparts were interpreted metaphorically in significantly less than 50 percent of the cases. This was true of almost all items. Negation, then, most often affects metaphorical interpretations by default. This is true here of both English, German, and Russian. Will these default metaphorical interpretations be mirrored by their contexts via their default metaphorical interpretation? As shown, for instance, by example (11) above (repeated here in 17 below, for convenience), the 75 76 RACHEL GIORA Table 3.1 Proportions of metaphorical interpretations of negative vs. affirmative utterances in English and results of z-ratio tests for the difference between them I am not your maid / I am your maid I am not your secretary / I am your secretary You are not my mom / You are my mom I am not your mom / I am your mom Negative Affirmative z-ratio, significance 90.4% (47/52) 95.7% (44/46) 36% (18/50) 50% (25/50) 30% (15/50) 12% (6/50) 6% (3/50) 16% (8/50) 6.24 ** 8.20 ** 3.68 ** 3.62 * * p<.0005, ** p<.0001 Table 3.2 Proportions of metaphorical interpretations of negative vs. affirmative utterances in German and results of z-ratio tests for the difference between them Das ist kein Essen (This is not food) / Das ist Essen (This is food) Das ist kein Spiel (This is not a game) / Das ist ein Spiel (This is a game) Du bist nicht meine Mutter (You are not my mom) / Du bist meine Mutter (You are my mom) Ich bin nicht deine Mutter (I am not your mom) / Ich bin deine Mutter (I am your mom) Negative Affirmative z-ratio, significance 80% (20/25) 66% (33/50) 82% (41/50) 12.8% (6/47) 22% (11/50) 20% (10/50) 65.9 % (29/44) 12% (6/50) 5.66 ** 4.43 ** 6.20 ** 5.40 ** * p<.0005, ** p<.0001 environment of the negative utterance (I am not your maid) resonates with both, prior negative metaphor (I am not your wife), and late context (I’m not someone that you can lay your demands all of the time, I’m sick of this it’s going to stop!), which communicates the sense of subjugation: (17) You tell me what to do all of the time, what to say, where to hide, and what to do. I am not your wife, I am not your maid, I’m not someone that you can lay your demands all of time, I’m sick of this it’s going to stop! (Blige 2007). To test contextual resonance with default interpretations of negative metaphors, Giora et al. (2010) studied corpus-based items’ contextual resonance with their default (metaphorical) and nondefault (literal) interpretations. Results are presented in Table 3.4 (for English), Table 3.5 (for German), and Table 3.6 (for Russian). Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics Table 3.3 Proportions of metaphorical interpretations of negative vs. affirmative utterances in Russian and results of z-ratio tests for the difference between them Я не твоя секретарша (I am not your secretary) / я твоя секретарша (I am your secretary) он не мой сын (He is not my son) / он мой сын (He is my son) Ты не моя мама (You are not my mom) / ты моя мама (You are my mom) я не твоя мама (I am not your mom) / я твоя мама (I am your mom) это не моё тело (This is not my body) / это моё тело (This is my body) Negative z-ratio, Affirmative significance 85% (17/20) 80% (40/50) 24% (12/50) 72% (36/50) 80% (40/50) 20% (6/30) 2% (1/50) 0% (0/50) 10% (5/50) 12% (6/50) 4.52 ** 7.93 ** 3.69 ** 6.30 ** 6.82 ** * p<.0005, ** p<.0001 Table 3.4 Distribution of different types of resonance in the environment of negative utterances in English and results of exact binominal probability test for the superiority of metaphoric resonance I am not your maid You are not my mom I am not your secretary Only metaphorical resonance 61.7% (29/47) 55.6% (10/18) 79.5% (35/44) Only literal resonance Both metaphorical and literal resonance No resonance 12.8% (6/47) 5.6% (1/18) 4.5% (2/44) 12.8% (6/47) 27.8% (5/18) 9.1% (4/44) 12.8% (6/47) 11.1% (2/18) 6.8% (3/44) p-values p<.0005 p<.01 p<.0005 Results show that, indeed, the environment of negative metaphors in English and German reflects their metaphorical interpretation rather than their literal interpretation. For instance, I am not your maid (first raw of Table 3.4) is mirrored via its metaphorical interpretation in 74.5% (35/47) of the cases; in contrast, its literal interpretation is reflected by the context in only 25.5% (12/47) of the cases. Russian, however, exhibited poor resonance. Corpus-based studies in three languages (English, German, and Russian) corroborate the Hebrew experimental results. They show, first, that in various languages, speakers use negative statements metaphorically; affirmative counterparts are interpreted literally and 77 78 RACHEL GIORA Table 3.5 Distribution of different types of resonance in the environment of negative utterances in German and results of exact binominal probability test for the superiority of metaphorical resonance Ich bin nicht deine Mutter (I am not your mom) Du bist nicht meine Mutter (You are not my mom) Das ist kein Essen (This is not food) Das ist kein Spiel (This is not a game) Only metaphorical Only literal resonance resonance Both metaphorical and literal No resonance resonance 58.6% (17/29) 3.5% (1/29) 13.8% (4/29) 24.1% (7/29) p<.0005 63.4% (26/41) 4.9% (2/41) 17.1% (7/41) 14.6% (6/41) p<.0005 40% (14/35) 54.5% (18/33) 5.7% (2/35) 3% (1/33) 14.3% (5/35) 15.2% (5/33) 40% (14/35) 27.3% (9/33) p<.005 p-values p<.0005 Table 3.6 Distribution of different types of resonance in the environment of negative utterances in Russian and results of exact binominal probability test for the superiority of metaphorical resonance Я не твоя секретарша (I am not your secretary) Я не твоя мама (I am not your mom) Only literal resonance Both metaphorical and literal resonance No resonance 20% (4/20) 5% (1/20) 5% (1/20) 70% (14/20) p=.19 12% (6/50) 0% (0/50) 2% (1/50) 86% (43/50) p<.05 Only metaphorical resonance p-values are less prevalent. An additional inspection of the environment of the negative statements further supports this asymmetry. It demonstrates that, as expected, in most of the cases studied here, the environment of these utterances resonates with their metaphorical rather than literal interpretation. This provides further support for the view that the negation can retain rather than suppress the concepts within its scope, which, under certain circumstances, allows negative utterances to come across as metaphorical. Cognitive Psychology in Pragmatics 3.3 Conclusions Default interpretations involving specific constructions are automatic, spontaneous responses to stimuli. They spring to mind unconditionally, initially, and directly, regardless of the degree of figurativeness (e.g. sarcasm, metaphor, or simile) or contextual support. To be considered a default response, a stimulus should be (i) novel (i.e. not coded in the mental lexicon), (ii) free of semantic anomaly or internal incongruity, which prompt nonliteralness, and (iii) free of contextual support or cues inviting specific interpretations. Given these conditions, constructions involving strong attenuation (e.g. by means of negation) of highly positive concepts (as in He is not the most mesmerizing person around) will be interpreted sarcastically by default, regardless of context. Their affirmative counterparts (He is the most mesmerizing person around) will be interpreted literally by default. Certain negative, “X is not Y” constructions (This is not food; you are not my boss) are interpreted metaphorically by default; their affirmative counterparts (This is food; you are my boss) are interpreted literally by default. Rhetorical questions (a weak form of assertions), when intensified (as in Do you really believe he is the most mesmerizing person around?), will be interpreted sarcastically by default; their non-intensified version (Do you believe he is the most mesmerizing person around?) will be interpreted literally by default. Along the same lines, similes, attenuated by the “about” marker (as in about as pervasive as air), will be more sarcastic than their counterparts not involving the “about” attenuator (as pervasive as air), which will be interpreted literally by default. Our experimental findings indeed support the superiority of defaultness. They show that specific constructions involving strong attenuation of highly positive concepts are interpreted sarcastically by default when outside of context. Hence, when in context, strongly supportive of their sarcastic interpretation, they are processed faster than their nondefault affirmative counterparts, embedded in equally strong contexts, biasing them toward the sarcastic interpretation. It is defaultness, then, rather than context or degree of negation/affirmation, that matters! Furthermore, alongside the Hebrew studies reported here, corpus-based studies of English, German, and Russian show that negation induces metaphoricity by default. Affirmative counterparts, however, come across as significantly less metaphorical. They further show that contextual resonance with default interpretations prevails. It is defaultness and nothing but defaultness that reigns supreme! References Banda, Tracy. (2008). Tracy’s Office Services. August 21, www.tracysoffice services.com/rightbenefits.htm. 79 80 RACHEL GIORA Beardsley, M. (1958). Aesthetics. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Becker, I. and Giora, R. (2018). 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How defaultness affects text production: A corpus-based study of default sarcasm. In A. Athanasiadou and H. Colston, eds., The Diversity of Irony. CLR book series. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Giora, R., Givoni, S., and Fein, O. (2015b). Defaultness reigns: The case of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 30(4), 290 313. Giora, R. and Gur, I. (2003). Irony in conversation: Salience, role, and context effects. In B. Nerlich, Z. Todd, V. Herman, and D. Clarke, eds., Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meanings in Language and Mind. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 297 316. Giora, R., Jaffe, I., Becker, I., and Fein, O. (2018). Strongly attenuating highly positive concepts: The case of default sarcastic interpretations. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 6(1), 19 47. Giora, R., Livnat, E., Fein, O., Barnea, A., Zeiman, R., and Berger, I. (2013). Negation generates nonliteral interpretations by default. Metaphor and Symbol, 28, 89 115. Giora, R., Raphaely, M. Fein, O., and Livnat, E. (2014b). 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A change in time. www.storysite.org/story/ changeintime~02.html (retrieved on September 28, 2008). Veale, T. (2013). Humorous similes. Humour, 26(1), 3 22. Zuanazzi, A. (2013). Italian affirmative rhetorical questions generate ironic interpretations by default. Unpublished ms., University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy. 4 The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics Istvan Kecskes 4.1 Introduction The socio-cognitive approach (SCA) was introduced by Kecskes (2010, 2013) as a theoretical framework for intercultural pragmatics. The new subfield of pragmatics needed a theoretical frame as an alternative to the existing monolingual Gricean approaches in order to explain what happens in intercultural interactions where the interlocutors represent different first languages (L1s) and cultures and not a relatively coherent speech community that is ruled by norms and conventions of language use and usage. Also, the new theoretical framework was expected to account for the far from ideal, untidy, poorly structured, and full of wrong-wordchoices language use of intercultural interactions. SCA does not intend to be cut off from the Gricean theory of pragmatics but rather wants to add to it to help research both in intercultural pragmatics and in L1-based pragmatics. The need for addition arises from the unbalanced explanatory power of existing theories. Although the field of pragmatics has a variety of approaches to language use, most pragmatic research can be related to two fairly broad traditions: linguisticphilosophical pragmatics (or so-called Anglo-American pragmatics), and sociocultural-interactional pragmatics (or so-called European-Continental pragmatics). Linguistic-philosophical pragmatics seeks to investigate speaker meaning within an utterance-based framework focusing mainly on linguistic constraints on language use. Sociocultural interactional pragmatics includes research that focuses on the social and cultural constraints on language use as well. Intercultural pragmatics attempts to combine the two traditions into one explanatory system that pays special attention to the characteristics of intercultural interactions. Consequently, the sociocognitive approach to pragmatics integrates the pragmatic view of cooperation and the cognitive view of egocentrism and emphasizes that both 84 ISTVAN KECSKES cooperation and egocentrism are manifested in all phases of communication, albeit to varying extents. This is important for the analysis of intercultural encounters where sociocultural factors interact with individual cognitive features. What is new in the SCA in comparison to other Gricean approaches are two important claims. First, SCA emphasizes that while (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience, which is a semiotic notion that refers to the relative importance or prominence of information and signs. SCA pulls together these seemingly antagonistic factors (cooperation and egocentrism) to explain production and comprehension in the communicative process. Second, SCA claims that pragmatic theories have tried to describe the relationship of the individual and social factors by putting special emphasis on idealized language use, and focusing on cooperation, rapport, and politeness while paying less attention to the untidy, messy, poorly organized, and impolite side of communication. SCA takes a more down-to-earth approach to communicative encounters than current theories, which may help not only our understanding of intercultural communication but also L1 communication. In the following sections the idealized view of communication is discussed. Then I will analyze how communication is understood in the SCA. Intention and salience are the focus of Section 4.4. The final sections examine the effect of context and common ground. 4.2 The Idealized Approach to Communication Current theories of pragmatics derive from the Gricean idealized view of communication. Grice did in pragmatics what Chomsky did in linguistics but, of course from a different perspective and with a different goal in mind. While Chomsky’s target was the linguistic system, Grice focused on language use. What is common in their approach is the idealization of a knowledge system (Chomsky) and the systematization of a usage system (Grice). Grice developed an idealized description of communication so that we can better understand what actually happens when human beings interact. That was an important step forward in the field of pragmatics. Science is based on idealizations. For example, physicists or chemists often work with ideal models of reality that they abstract from the existence of friction. Abstraction also occurs when we analyze the semantics pragmatics division. Carnap (1942) was quite specific about the relationship of the two by saying: “If in an investigation explicit reference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms, to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics . . . If we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their designata, we are in The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics the field of semantics” (p. 9). It is clear that Carnap treats semantics as an abstraction of pragmatics. Semantics is said to be abstracted away from the specific aspects of concrete discourse situations in which utterances are used. The theory of meaning, in both philosophy and linguistics, is not different. Approaches to the theory of meaning all presuppose an idealized model, which we can call the standard model. In that model various idealizations have been made to draw attention to the central aspects of linguistic communication. There is nothing wrong with idealization. But we should know that what happens in real life is not the idealized version of communication. The question is: what can we offer beyond just criticizing the ideal view? Can we propose an alternative approach or theory that can explain “messy” communication too? Well, there have been attempts to that extent. In a paper Kecskes (2010) argued that current research in pragmatics and related fields shows two dominant tendencies: an idealistic approach to communication and context-centeredness. According to views dominated by these tendencies (Relevance Theory and neo-Gricean approaches), communication is supposed to be a smooth process that is constituted by recipient design and intention recognition (e.g. Clark 1996; Grice 1989; Sperber and Wilson 1995; Capone 2020; Wayne 2021). The speaker’s knowledge involves constructing a model of the hearer’s knowledge relevant to the given situational context; conversely, the hearer’s knowledge includes constructing a model of the speaker’s knowledge relevant to the given situational context. This line of research focuses on the “positive” features of communication: cooperation, rapport, politeness.1 Kecskes (2010, 2020) argued that the emphasis on the decisive role of context, sociocultural factors, and cooperation is overwhelming, while the role of the individual’s prior experience, existing knowledge, and egocentrism is almost completely ignored, although these two sides are not mutually exclusive. The idealistic view on communication that usually goes together with an overemphasis on context-dependency gives a lopsided perspective on interactions by focusing mainly on the positive features of the process. But communication is more than just a trial-and-error, try-and-try-again, process that is co-constructed by interlocutors. It is said to be a non-summative and emergent interactional achievement (Arundale 1999, 2008; Mey 2001; Kecskes and Mey 2008). Therefore, pragmatic theories are expected to focus also on the less positive aspects of communication including breakdowns, misunderstandings, struggles, and language-based aggression features which are not unique and appear to be as common in communication as are cooperation and politeness. It is not just SCA that calls attention to the idealized view of communication that governs pragmatics and linguistic research. Similar criticism 1 Positive in a sense that ensures smooth communication and mutual understanding. 85 86 ISTVAN KECSKES has been expressed by Beaver and Stanley (2019) and Stanley (2018) but from the perspective of political speech. Beaver and Stanley isolated five idealizations (cooperativity, rationality, intentionality, alignment, propositionality) that are used in the vast majority of works in the theory of meaning and argued that these idealizations are scientifically problematic and politically flawed. They use the critique of the standard model of pragmatics to propose a new program for the theory of meaning. What they place at the center of inquiry is precisely the features of communication (such as impoliteness, hate speech, misunderstandings, etc.) that the idealized standard model seem to almost deliberately exclude. What is common in Beaver and Stanley’s and Kecskes’ approach described above is that they both underline that the idealized L1-based Gricean theory can hardly explain the messy and sometimes untruthful reality of communication. However, while Beaver and Stanley set out to change the Gricean approach and develop a new theory of “messy communication,” SCA acknowledges that there is also need for the idealistic approach that provides us with a basic understanding of communicative actions and processes. In the SCA the Gricean theory serves as a starting and reference point to describe and better understand what is expected to happen and what actually takes place in communicative encounters. 4.3 The Egocentrism View SCA attempts to offer a theoretical frame that considers ideal and messy not like a dichotomy but a continuum with two hypothetical ends incorporating not only the basics of the Gricean theory but also what makes communication “messy”: speaker-hearer’s egocentrism. This approach was generated by cognitive psychologists such as Barr and Keysar (2005), Giora (2003), Gibbs and Colston (2012), Keysar (2007) and others who argued that speakers and hearers commonly violate their mutual knowledge when they produce and comprehend language. Their behavior is called “egocentric” because it is rooted in the speakers’ or hearers’ own knowledge instead of their mutual knowledge and common ground. The term is not negative and has nothing to do with “egotistic” behavior. “Egocentric” here refers to the behavior of the interlocutor that is motivated by her/his individual prior knowledge and experience. Studies in cognitive psychology have demonstrated that speakers and hearers are egocentric to a surprising degree. The individual, egocentric endeavors of interlocutors play a much more decisive role, especially in the initial stages of production and comprehension than is envisioned by current pragmatic theories. This egocentric behavior is rooted in the interlocutors’ reliance on their own prior knowledge and experience rather than on mutual knowledge. Speaker-hearers appear to be poor estimators of what their partners know. Speakers usually underestimate the ambiguity The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics and overestimate the effectiveness of their utterances (see Keysar and Henly 2002). Referring to key concept of current pragmatic theories, cognitive psychologists claim that cooperation, relevance, and reliance on possible mutual knowledge come into play only after the speaker’s egocentrism is satisfied and the hearer’s egocentric, most salient interpretation is processed. Barr and Keysar (2005) argued that mutual knowledge is most likely implemented as a mechanism for detecting and correcting errors, rather than as an intrinsic, routine process of the language processor. The egocentric approach is crucial for intercultural pragmatics because in intercultural encounters individual prior experience is even more decisive than in L1 where membership in a speech community provides a core common ground that helps interlocutors process not only literal but also figurative language. Findings by cognitive psychologists have been confirmed by Giora’s (1997, 2003) graded salience hypothesis and Kecskes’ (2003, 2008) dynamic model of meaning. They also underlined that interlocutors appear to consider their conversational experience more important than prevailing norms of informativeness. Giora’s (2003) main argument is that knowledge of salient meanings plays a primary role in the process of using and comprehending language. She claimed that “privileged meanings, meanings foremost on our mind, affect comprehension and production primarily, regardless of context or literality” (Giora 2003: 103). Kecskes, in his dynamic model of meaning (2008), pointed out that what the speaker says relies on prior conversational experience, as reflected in lexical choices in production. Conversely, how the hearer understands what is said in the actual situational context depends on her/his prior conversational experience with the lexical items used in the speaker’s utterances. If we compare the pragmatic ideal version and the cognitive coordination approach, we may discover that these two approaches are complementary rather than contradictory to each other. The ideal communication view adopts a top-down approach and produces a theoretical construct of pragmatic tenets that warrant successful communication in all cases. In contrast, the cognitive coordination view adopts a bottom-up approach which provides empirical evidence that supports a systematic interpretation of miscommunication, communication breakdowns, and repair attempts. In the SCA framework, cooperation and egocentrism are not conflicting, and the a priori mental state versus post facto emergence of common ground may converge to a set of integrated background knowledge for interlocutors to rely on in pursuit of relatively smooth communication. So far, no research has yet made an attempt to combine the two, at least to our knowledge. Therefore, the aim of SCA is to eliminate the ostensible conflicts between common ground notions, as held by the two different views, and propose an approach that integrates their considerations into 87 88 ISTVAN KECSKES a holistic concept that envisions a dialectical relationship between intention and attention in the construal of communication. 4.4 The Socio-Cognitive Approach The socio-cognitive approach (Kecskes 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014; Kecskes and Zhang 2009) highlights the complex role and interplay of sociocultural and private mental models, explains how these are applied categorically and/ or reflectively by individuals in response to sociocultural environmental feedback and framing mechanisms, and describes how this leads to and explains different meaning outcomes and knowledge transfer. In meaning construction and comprehension, interlocutors rely on both preexisting conceptual and encyclopedic knowledge and knowledge co-constructed (emergent) in the process of interaction. SCA is based on two important claims. First, it treats speaker and hearer as equal participants in the communicative process. Each interlocutor is a speaker and a hearer in one body. They both produce and comprehend language while relying on their most accessible and salient knowledge. They are the same person with the same mind-set, knowledge, and skills. However, when acting as a speaker or as a hearer their goals and functions are different. Interlocutors should be considered individuals with various cognitive states, with different prior experience, with different commitments, and with different interests and agenda. An important difference between current pragmatic theories and SCA is that there is no “impoverished” speaker meaning in SCA. The speaker utterance is a full proposition with pragmatic features reflecting the speaker’s intention and preferences and expressing the speaker’s commitment and egocentrism (in the cognitive sense). The proposition expressed may be “underspecified” only from the hearer’s perspective but not from the speaker’s perspective. This is especially important in intercultural pragmatics where the situational context cannot play a selective role to the extent that it does in L1 because of the low level of collective salience and common ground between interlocutors. Second, SCA considers communication a dynamic process, in which individuals are not only constrained by societal conditions but also shape them. As a consequence, communication is characterized by the interplay of two sets of traits that are inseparable, mutually supportive, and interactive: Individual traits Social traits prior experience salience egocentrism attention actual situational experience relevance cooperation intention The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics Individual traits (prior experience → salience → egocentrism → attention) interact with societal traits (actual situational experience → relevance → cooperation → intention). Each trait is the consequence of the other. Prior experience results in salience, which leads to egocentrism that drives attention. Intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance, which (partly) depends on actual situational experience. In the SCA communication is considered the result of the interplay of intention and attention motivated by sociocultural background that is privatized individually by interlocutors. The sociocultural background incorporates the situational environment (actual situational context in which the communication occurs), the encyclopedic knowledge of interlocutors deriving from their prior experience tied to the linguistic expressions they use, and their current experience, in which those expressions are put to use. In communication people demonstrate the combination of their two sides. On the one hand, they cooperate by generating and formulating intention that is relevant to the given actual situational context. In the meantime, their egocentrism (prior experience) activates the most salient information to their attention in the construction (speaker) and comprehension (hearer) of utterances. A crucial notion of SCA is privatalization (making something private, subjectivize something). Privatalization is the process through which the interlocutor “individualizes” the collective. S/he blends her/his prior experience with the actual situational (current) experience and makes an individual understanding of collective experience. This approach is supported by the Durkheimian thought according to which cultural norms and models gain individual interpretation in concrete social actions and events (Durkheim 1982). Before continuing our description of SCA, we need to explain how SCA relates to van Dijk’s understanding of the socio-cognitive view in language use. A major difference is that SCA is an extended utterance-centered pragmatic view, while Van Dijk’s approach is a discursive view on communication. Van Dijk (2008: x) said that in his theory it is not the social situation that influences (or is influenced by) discourse, but the way the participants define the situation. He goes further and claims that “contexts are not some kind of objective conditions or direct cause, but rather (inter) subjective constructs designed and ongoingly updated in interaction by participants as members of groups and communities” (van Dijk 2008: x). In van Dijk’s theory everything is co-constructed by interlocutors in the sociocultural environment (context). There is strong emphasis on meaning construction in the communicative process, but what is somewhat neglected is the “baggage” that the participants bring into the process based on their prior experience. As mentioned above, SCA considers communication a dynamic process in which individuals are not only constrained by societal conditions but also shape them at the same time. Interlocutors rely not only on what they co-construct synchronically in the 89 90 ISTVAN KECSKES communicative process, but also on what is subconsciously motivated by their prior experience. It needs to be underlined that there are social conditions and constraints (contexts) which have some objectivity from the perspective of individuals. So, it is not that everything is always coconstructed in the actual situational context, as claimed in van Dijk’s approach. It is natural that there may always be slight differences in how individuals process those relatively objective societal factors based on their prior experience. Kecskes (2013, 2020) argued that blending is the main driving force of interactions that is more than just a process of coconstruction. It is combining the interlocutors’ prior experience with the actual situational experience which creates a blend that is more than just a merger. In blending, the constituent parts are both distinguishable and indistinguishable from one another when needed. Blending incorporates the dynamic interplay of crossing (parts are distinguishable) and merging (parts are indistinguishable). Depending on the dynamic moves in the communicative process, either crossing or merging becomes dominant to some extent. In the following the main tenets of SCA will be discussed. 4.5 Intention and Salience 4.5.1 Types of Intention SCA considers the interplay of cooperation-directed intention and egocentrism- governed attention the main driving force in meaning production and comprehension. Cooperation means that attention is paid to communicative partners’ intention. Attention is driven by individual egocentrism that is the result of salience. As mentioned above, the pragmatic view is concerned about intention, while the cognitive view is more about attention. But in current pragmatic theories there is no explicit explanation of the relations between these two entities. Relevance Theory (RT) defines relevance with respect to the effects of both attention and intention but does not distinguish these two effects and never clarifies their relations explicitly. RT theoreticians claim that “an input (a sight, a sound, an utterance, a memory) is relevant to an individual when it connects with background information he has available to yield conclusions that matter to him” (Wilson 2004: 3). SCA accepts the centrality of intention in conversation, but it also takes into account the dynamic process in which intention can be an emergent effect of the conversation. Consequently, intention, on the one hand can be private, individual, pre-planned, and a precursor to action, as current pragmatic theories state, or it can be abruptly planned or unplanned, or emergent, ad hoc generated in the course of communication. It should be emphasized, however, that there is not a trichotomy here. Rather, a priori intention, salience-charged intention, and emergent intention are three sides of The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics the same phenomenon that may receive different emphasis at different points in the communicative process. When a conversation is started, the private and pre-planned nature of intention may be dominant, or a subconscious, salience-charged intention may occur. However, in the course of the interaction the emergent and social nature of intention may come to the fore. These three sides of intention are always present in the interaction; the question is only to what extent they are present at any given moment of the process. Emergent intention is co-constructed by interlocutors in the dynamic flow of conversation. This dynamism is reflected in emerging utterances: they may be interrupted, unfinished, cut and/or started again. It is not only the actual situational context, but also the dynamism of the conversational flow and the process of formulating an utterance that may affect and change the intention. Kecskes (2021) demonstrated that with the following example: (1) HKM: Hong Kong Male; CZM: Chinese Male; TYF: Turkish Female; GMF: German Female; BIF: Bolivian Female HKM: Do you think it’s . . . it’s kind of difficult for you to make friends here with Americans? CZM: Hmm. HKM: . . . generally, you know . . . BSF: Yeah. HKM: . . . or it’s more directly than it is in China . . . TYF: Yeah. HKM: . . . in Singapore or that . . . it’s more difficult . . . What do you think so? Why it’s more difficult? GMF: I am maybe, thinking, it’s because . . . I don’t know . . . CZM: I would say the culture issue is the most thing. Because, you know, the background is different and errh . . . even the value is maybe different. BIF: Yeah. But we have a lot of friends from other countries. CZM: Aha. BIF: and we . . . we really met with each other . . . BNF: Yeah. BIF: . . . we aren’t from Americans, I don’t know why. CZM: Oh. BSF: The Americans all the times I guess would know how are you but they don’t really want to know how you are. CZM: Yeah. BIF: Yeah. Yeah. HKM starts the conversation with a pre-planned intention to talk about how to make friends here with Americans. When he sees that the exchange takes off with difficulties a salience-triggered intention leads to an 91 92 ISTVAN KECSKES utterance “. . . or it’s more directly than it is in China . . .” with the goal to provoke responses. CZM’s intention is to explain the issue with cultural differences. BIF’s emergent intention is triggered by CZM’s utterance. She wants to say that they (the international students) have many friends who are not Americans. In the course of this short encounter each of the three types of intentions are represented. SCA introduced a third type of intention in between a priori intention and emergent intention: salience-charged intention. It was pointed out earlier that salience leads to egocentrism that drives attention, which refers to those cognitive resources available to interlocutors that make communication a conscious action. When intention is formed, expressed, and interpreted in the process of communication, attention contributes to the various stages of the process in varying degrees. There are three factors that affect the salience of knowledge and ease of attentional processing in all stages: (a) interlocutors’ knowledge based on their prior experience; (b) frequency, familiarity, or conventionality of knowledge tied to the situation; and (c) the interlocutors’ mental state and/or the availability of attentional resources. Considering the effect of these three factors, the knowledge most salient to the interlocutors in a particular interaction is the information that is included in their knowledge base, is pertinent to the current situation, and is processed by the necessary attentional resources. A priori intention and emergent intention are controlled by the interlocutor to some extent. However, salience-charged intention is not necessarily. This intention is mostly subconscious and automatic and can take the place of either of the other two intentions, as we saw in example (1) where HKM referred to a direct friend-making attempt that was triggered by actual situational relevance and relied on prior pertinent information. Salience-charged intention means that interlocutors act under the influence of the most salient information that comes to their mind in the given actual situational context. 4.5.2 Salience Effect: Inter-label Hierarchy and Intra-label Hierarchy Although SCA considers interlocutors speaker-hearers, it acknowledges that cognitive mechanisms may work differently when an interlocutor is a speaker or hearer. Salience effect is a good example for this (cf. Kecskes 2008: 401). When a lexical item (labeled for private context) is used by a speaker to produce an utterance, private contexts (prior experience of the speaker) attached to this lexical expression are activated top-down in a hierarchical order by salience. For the speaker, there is primarily an inter-label hierarchy (which item to select out of all possible), while for the hearer intra-label hierarchy (which out of all possible interpretations of the particular lexical item) comes in first. The inter-label hierarchy operates in the first phase of production, when a speaker looks for words to express her/his intention. As a first step, s/he has to select words or The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics expressions from a group of possibilities to express communicative intention. This selection may happen consciously or subconsciously. Words and/or expressions constitute a hierarchy from the best fit to those less suited to the idea the speaker tries to express. To explain how this works, we will analyze an excerpt from a movie (see Kecskes 2020). (2) This is an excerpt from the film Coogan’s Bluff. A man and a young woman are sitting in a restaurant after meal. The woman stands up and with a short move reaches for her purse. W: I have to be going. M: (seeing that she reaches for her purse) What are you doing? W: Dutch. M: You are a girl, aren’t you? W: There have been rumors to that effect. M: Sit back and act like one. W: Oh, is that the way girls act in Arizona? When the girl wants to leave the restaurant, she says “I have to be going.” She has had several choices (inter-label hierarchy) to express the same meaning: “I must go now,” “it’s time to go,” “I have got to go,” etc. There is no particular reason for her to use “I have to be going.” This is simply the expression that has come to her mind first out of all possible choices. When the girl attempts to pay, the man expresses his objection by asking “What are you doing?” This hardly looks like salience effect. The man knew exactly what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. The girl perfectly understands what the man is referring to, so she tells him “Dutch,” which means she wants to pay for her share of the bill. This does not look like salience effect but rather a well-planned expression. The man understands what the girl means, although “Dutch” can mean a number of different things (language, people of the Netherlands). “To split the expense” is not very high on the intra-label hierarchy list. Still, that is the most salient meaning, given the situational context. This is why it is important that salience effect and contextual effect run parallel as the Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora 1997) says. A less salient meaning gets the intended interpretation because of the contextual force in L1. The man expresses his disapproval in a very indirect but still expressive way: “You are a girl, aren’t you?” The inter-label hierarchy is governed in this case by a well-planned recipient design. The girl’s response shows that she knows what the man is driving at. Then the man hints at what he expects the girl to do “Sit back and act like one.” The intra-label hierarchy helps the girl identify the figurative meaning of “sit back,” which means that the man does not want her to pay her share. This inductively developed sequence in the segment is a good example for elaborated recipient 93 94 ISTVAN KECSKES design where nothing is said directly, and yet there is no misunderstanding because the speaker alerts the hearer to what he means. 4.6 Two Sides of Context In the SCA context has two sides: prior context and actual situational context. This approach differs from the traditional view on context. What is common in the definitions of context is that they generally refer to the actual situational context of the linguistic sign(s) or utterance. Goodwin and Duranti (1992: 2) argued that context is “a frame that surrounds the event and provides resources for its appropriate interpretation.” “Resources” here refer to any factor linguistic, epistemic, physical, social, etc. that affects the actual interpretation of signs and expressions. According to George Yule (1996:128), context is “the physical environment in which a word is used.” Most of the definitions stick to framing context as the actual situational background. Leech (1983:13) claimed that context refers to “any background knowledge assumed to be shared by speaker and hearer and which contributes to his interpretation of what speaker means by a given utterance.” However, this is just one side of context that is referred to as “actual situational context” by Kecskes (2008, 2010, 2013) and there is no mention of “prior context,” which is an important notion in SCA. In the SCA context is a dynamic construct that appears in different forms in language use as both a repository and/or a trigger of knowledge. This means that it plays both a selective and a constitutive role. Contextualist theories such as Relevance Theory and neo-Gricean approaches argue that meaning construction is primarily dependent on situational context. Carston claimed that “linguistically encoded meaning never fully determines the intended proposition expressed” (Carston 2002: 49). Consequently, linguistic data must be completed by nonlinguistic, contextual interpretation processes. SCA, however, points out that the meaning values of linguistic expressions, encapsulating prior contexts of experience, play as important a role in meaning construction and comprehension as actual situational context. What SCA attempts to do is to bring together individual cognition with situated cognition. This view recognizes the importance of an individual’s background and biases (often prompted by prior contexts, prior experience) in information processing (see Starbuck and Milliken 1988; Finkelstein et al. 2008), but at the same time it also suggests that the context in which individuals are situated is strong enough to direct attention and shape interpretation (Ocasio 1997; Elsbach et al. 2005). Based on this view SCA emphasizes that there are two sides of context: prior context and actual situational context. Prior context is a repository of prior contextual experiences of individuals. Prior context makes things/information salient in The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics a communicative encounter, and actual situational context makes things/ information relevant. Our experience is developed through the regularity of recurrent and similar situations which we tend to identify with given contexts and frames. The standard (prior recurring) context can be defined as a regular situation that we have repeated experience with, and about which we have expectations as to what will or will not happen, and on which we rely to understand and predict how the world around us works. Gumperz (1982: 138) said that utterances carry with them their own context or project a particular context. Confirming Gumperz’s stance, Levinson (2003) claimed that the message versus context opposition may be misleading because the message can carry with it or forecast the context. Prior, reoccurring context may cancel the selective role of actual situational context. This can be demonstrated through an example taken from Culpeper (2009). (3) Culpeper: Example 3: Creative deviation from the default context (cf. “mock impoliteness”) [Lawrence Dallaglio, former England Rugby captain, describing the very close family he grew up in] As Francesca and John left the house, she came back to give Mum a kiss and they said goodbye in the way they often did. “Bye, you bitch,” Francesca said. “Get out of here, go on, you bitch,” replied Mum. ( It’s in the Blood: My Life, 2007) Culpeper explained that the reason why the conversation between the mother and daughter does not hurt either of them is due to the context (“mock impoliteness”), meaning “actual situational context.” However, a closer look at the example reveals that actual situational context plays hardly any role here. The real defining factor is the strong effect of prior context, prior experience that overrides actual situational context: “they said goodbye in the way they often did.” Reoccurring context, frequent use may neutralize the impolite conceptual load attached to expressions. This is exactly what happens here. Context represents two sides of world knowledge: one that is already “encoded” with different strength in our mind (prior context) as declarative knowledge and the other (actual situational context) that is out there in the world occurring in situated conversational events (see Kecskes 2008). These two sides of world knowledge are interwoven and inseparable. Actual situational context is viewed through prior context, and vice versa, prior context is viewed through actual situational context in interactions. Their encounter creates a unique blend of knowledge that supports interpretation of linguistic signs and utterances. According to SCA, meaning is the result of the interplay of prior experience and actual situational experience. Prior experience becomes declarative knowledge 95 96 ISTVAN KECSKES that is tied to the meaning values of lexical units constituting utterances produced by interlocutors. Current experience is represented in the actual situational context (procedural knowledge) in which communication takes place, and which is interpreted (often differently) by interlocutors. Meaning formally expressed in the utterance is co-constructed in the course of communication as a result of the interaction and mutual influence of the private contexts represented in the language of interlocutors and the actual situational context interpreted by interlocutors. In the next section we will discuss common ground that basically unites salience with contextual relevance. 4.7 Common Ground 4.7.1 Common Ground in SCA Common ground refers to the “sum of all the information that people assume they share” (Clark 2009: 116) that may include worldviews, shared values, beliefs, and situational context. Much of the success of natural language interaction depends on the participants’ mutual understanding of the circumstances in which communication occurs. Common ground and collective salience are based on prior experience (prior context) of members in a particular speech community. Clark et al. (1983: 246) defined common ground as follows: “The speaker designs his utterance in such a way that he has good reason to believe that the addressees can readily and uniquely compute what he meant on the basis of the utterance along with the rest of their common ground.” This means that the speaker assumes or estimates the common ground between speaker and hearer with respect to the utterance. Assumed common ground from the speaker’s perspective is based on an assessment of the hearer’s competence to understand the utterance. Common ground makes it possible for speakers to be economical in wording utterances in a given speech community. This traditional approach to common ground, which can be considered core common ground, is clearly based on prior experience. However, common ground has another side. SCA brings a new element into the understanding of common ground: emergent common ground. In the SCA common ground is directly related to prior context (core common ground) and actual situational context (emergent common ground). The question is how much of common ground is the result of prior experience (core) and how much of it is emergent, growing out of actual situational experience. In the SCA we distinguish between three components of the common ground: information that the participants share, their understanding the situational context, and relationships between the participants knowledge about each other and trust and their mutual experience of the interaction. Similar prior contexts, prior experience, and similar The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics understanding of the actual situational context will build common ground. It is important to note that we should not equate prior context with core common ground. Prior context is a privatized understanding, privatized knowledge of the individual based on her/his prior experience. Common ground is assumed shared knowledge. Individual prior context is a part of core common ground that is assumed to be shared by interlocutors. The same way emergent common ground is that part of actual situational context that is assumed to be understood similarly by interlocutors in a given situation. Present research in intercultural pragmatics (e.g. Kecskes 2014, 2019; Liu and You 2019; Garcia-Gomez 2020), and the application of Kecskes’ socio-cognitive approach (e.g. Mildorf 2013; Macagno and Capone 2017; Macagno 2018) with its emphasis on emergent common ground, calls attention to the fact that current pragmatic theories (e.g. Clark and Brennan 1991; Clark 1996; Stalnaker 2002) may not be able to describe common ground in all its complexity because they usually consider much of common ground to be the result of prior experience and pay less attention to the emergent side of common ground. In the meantime, current cognitive research (e.g. Barr and Keysar 2005; Colston and Katz 2005) may have overestimated egocentric (prior experience-based) behavior of the interlocutors and argued for the dynamic emergent property of common ground while devaluing cooperation in the process of verbal communication and the prior experience-based side of common ground. The SCA has attempted to eliminate this conflict and proposes to combine the two views into an integrated concept of common ground, in which both core common ground (assumed shared knowledge, a priori mental representation) and emergent common ground (emergent participant resource, post facto emergence through use) converge to construct a sociocultural background for communication. Based on this view, in the SCA common ground is perceived as an effort to merge the mental representation of shared knowledge that is present as declarative memory that we can activate, shared knowledge that we can seek, and rapport, as well as knowledge that we can create and co-construct in the communicative process. The core components and emergent components join in the construction of common ground in all stages, although they may contribute to the interaction in different ways, in various degree, and in different phases of the communicative process as demonstrated by studies based on the application of SCA (e.g. Mildorf 2013; Macagno and Capone 2017; Macagno 2018; La Mantia 2018). 4.7.2 Nature and Dynamism of Common Ground Core common ground is a repertoire of knowledge that can be assumed to be shared among individuals of a speech community independent of the 97 98 ISTVAN KECSKES situational circumstances, such as when and where the conversation occurs, between whom it occurs, etc. In contrast, emergent common ground is knowledge that emerges, is co-constructed and/or involved as shared enterprises in the particular situational context that pertains to the interlocutors. Core common ground is a general assumption in two ways. First, although core common ground is relatively static and shared among people, it usually changes diachronically. During a certain period, say a couple of years, we may safely assume that interlocutors have access to relatively similar common knowledge because components of core common ground in a speech community won’t change dramatically. However, in the long run it will definitely change. People’s social life, both material and spiritual, will experience some changes over a long period of time, and as a consequence, their core common ground will also be changed. For instance: (4) At the check-out desk in a department store: the customer is about to pay. Sales associate: Credit or debit? Customer: Debit. What the terms “credit” and “debit” refer to is part of core common ground. No more words are need. However, forty years ago that conversation would not have made much sense since credit and debit cards did not exist as a part of core common ground. Second, core common ground may also vary among different groups of individuals within a speech community. Types of shared knowledge may be determined by different factors such as geography, lifestyle, educational, financial, and racial factors. This fact may restrain the accessibility of certain elements of core common ground to particular groups only within that speech community. Emergent common ground is assumptive in that it is contingent on the actual situational context, which reflects a synchronic change between common grounds in different situations. However, emergent common ground is not only new shared knowledge, co-constructed in the course of interaction, but also the modification of shared prior knowledge or experience. There is a dialectical relationship between core common ground and emergent common ground. The core part may affect the formation of the emergent part in that it partly restricts the way the latter occurs. In many cases the emergent part may partly originate in instances of information that are predictable in the core part. On the other hand, the emergent part may contribute to the core part in that the contingent emergent part in a frequent ritual occurrence potentially becomes public disposition that belongs to the core part. In other words, core common ground and emergent common ground are two different components of assumed common ground, which are interconnected and inseparable. The Theoretical Framework of Intercultural Pragmatics 4.8 Conclusions, Ongoing and Future Research SCA offers an alternative approach to communication. Unlike most current pragmatic theories, it does not idealize the communicative process but, rather, makes an attempt to describe it with its ups and downs, organized and messy sides, and polite and impolite features. SCA claims that individual egocentrism is just as much part of human rationality as socially based cooperation is. It takes into account both the societal and the individual factors in communication and considers interlocutors social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a sociocultural collectivity. As Kecskes (2020) pointed out, the central idea of SCA is that there is a dialectical relationship between prior experience and actual situational experience that affects how meaning is created and interpreted. Prior experience results in salience which leads to egocentrism that drives attention. Intention is a cooperation-directed practice that is governed by relevance which (partly) depends on actual situational context.2 As a result, relatively static elements blend with ad hoc generated elements in meaning production and comprehension. Collective salience emergent situational salience, a priori intention emergent intention, and core common ground and emergent common ground are all essential elements of the dynamism of communication. However, they function not as dichotomies but rather as continuums with constant movements between the two hypothetical ends of those continuums resulting in both positive and negative effects in dynamic communication, such as cooperation egocentrism, politeness impoliteness, understanding non-understanding, rapport disaffection, etc. One of the major projects of SCA should be the experimental and corpus-based investigation of the interplay of dynamic elements of communication, such as collective salience and emergent situational salience or prior intention and emergent intention. There have been attempts in this direction as some of the chapters in this handbook demonstrate. SCA considers assumed common ground (CG) to be a central factor of communication that pulls together the other crucial factors such as intention, salience, and context. In the dynamic creation and constant updating of CG, speakers are considered “complete” individuals with different possible cognitive status, evaluating the emerging interaction through their own perspective. Co-constructing CG occurs within the interplay of intention and attention, and in turn the interplay of the two concepts is enacted on the sociocultural background constructed by common ground. In this sense CG plays not only a regulative but also a constitutive role in communication. The approach of SCA to common ground has been in the center of several studies in health communication (e.g. Bigi 2016; Rossi 2016), 2 Actual situational context makes things, events, pieces of knowledge, information, etc. relevant. 99 100 ISTVAN KECSKES dialogue research (e.g. Mildorf 2013; Macagno and Biggi 2017; Weigand 2021), and internet and computational research (e.g. Diedrichsen 2019, 2020; Nolan 2017). SCA as a theoretical frame has been playing a growing role in different branches of pragmatics research in general and socio-pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics in particular. Researchers not only apply SCA as a theoretical framework for their work but also develop it further by modifying or clarifying some of its tenets or claims. Several studies have focused on the interpretation of context and the dynamic model of meaning in the SCA (e.g. Romero-Trillo and Maguire 2011; Mildorf 2013; Moss 2013; Wojtaszek 2016), and intercultural communication (e.g. Kecskes 2014; Liu and You 2019). Khatib and Shakouri (2013) used SCA to explain certain processes in language acquisition. Some theoretical papers on issues like meaning argumentation, presupposition, and miscommunication also relied on SCA as theoretical support (e.g. Rossi 2016; Macagno and Capone 2017; Filani 2021; La Mantia 2018; Macagno 2018; Gil 2019; Ortaçtepe Hart and Okkalı 2021; Martin de la Rosa and Romero 2019; Capone 2020). These studies all underline the potential of SCA to explain important phenomena and processes in communication and pragmatics. However, the theory is still under development and needs further improvement as the chapters of this handbook demonstrate. References Arundale, R. B. (1999). An alternative model and ideology of communication for an alternative to politeness theory. Pragmatics, 9, 119 153. Arundale, R. B. (2008). Against (Gricean) intentions at the heart of human interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics, 5(2), 231 256. Barr, D. J. and Keysar, B. (2005). Making sense of how we make sense: The paradox of egocentrism in language use. In Herbert L. Colston and Albert N. 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Intercultural Pragmatics, 18(3), 337 358. 103 104 ISTVAN KECSKES Weigand, E. (2021). Language and dialogue in philosophy and science. Intercultural Pragmatics, 18(4), 533 561 Wilson, D. (2004). Relevance and lexical pragmatics. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 16, 343 360. Wojtaszek, A. (2016). Multimodel integration in the perception of press advertisements within the dynamic model of meaning. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 12(1), 77 101. Part II Key Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics Research 5 The Cultural, Contextual, and Computational Dimensions of Common Ground Brian Nolan 5.1 Introduction The theory of common ground is an important analytical tool in linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. Common ground has applicability in the characterization of speech acts and allows for distinguishing, for example, between an assertive, which requires a dynamic common ground, and a declarative that depends more on appropriate contextual factors for a successful realization. The theory of common ground is intrinsically linked to how knowledge relates to language and how a discourse advances between interlocutors. As such, the creation and maintenance of common ground have consequences for our stance on knowledge and what we know, believe, desire, and our intentions for action. There are many kinds of knowledge, and a relevant portion of these are framed within a discourse situation, with common ground. We discuss the interfaces and relationship between situation, context, common ground, and knowledge, including cultural knowledge, drawing on the thinking of Malinowski and Firth and others. The challenges addressed are: (a) How do we ground the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity, (b) represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis, and (c) show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning. We characterize situation, context, and knowledge and provide details of a proof-of-concept computational model using common ground implemented within a natural language processing/artificial intelligent application. An operational model of a situation that encompasses relevant context and common ground is provided. 108 BRIAN NOLAN 5.2 Common Ground as the Interface between Context and Language in Interaction We are concerned here with the nature of the common ground and how it mediates the relationship between context and language in interaction within a situation (Clark 1996; Stalnaker 1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2014; Mey 2008; Kecskes and Mey, 2008; Kecskes 2013a, 2013b, 2015). A situation is conceived of as a cognitive frame, referring to one or more events and the participants that play roles within the events and are located in space and time. A situation schematizes the relationships connecting events and participants who each has certain beliefs, about what they and other participants know and believe and intentions and goals, which may diverge. We argue that common ground is at the interface between different kinds of knowledge and language in interaction. In the dynamic model of common ground (proposed by Kecskes and Zhang 2009: 332), communication is considered to be a process coconstructed by the communicative participants, where communication is the result of the interplay of intention and attention on a sociocultural background, and formed on the basis of mutual knowledge of the interlocutors, that results in the construction of mutual knowledge in the communication process. For Kecskes and Zhang, core common ground is composed of at least: (a) common sense, which entails general knowledge about the world, (b) culture sense, which entails our knowledge about cultural norms, beliefs, and values of human society, a community, a nation, and (c) formal sense (of the linguistic system), which entails generalized knowledge about the language system that we use in our social and communicative interactions. Emergent common ground is derived from the interlocutors’ individual knowledge and experience pertinent to the current situation. Clearly, knowledge of various kinds is of central importance to common ground. Indeed, common ground is best understood as contextually relevant knowledge shared between discourse interlocutors. We motivate a model that: (a) grounds the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity, (b) represents these in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis, and (c) shows how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning. We discuss the characteristics of context that might assist us in modeling it, and relate context and common ground through the cognitive framing mechanism of the situation. Some early considerations of context and situation from Malinowski, Firth, and Wegener are introduced. We provide details of a model of common ground as a subset of context along with details of the nature of knowledge and its various kinds. In relation to this, we discuss an innovative proof-of-concept software implementation within a natural language processing/artificial intelligent application in an Dimensions of Common Ground intelligent conversational agent framework, which provides insights into the interface between language and knowledge. To explicate the model proposed, we use examples of assertive and declarative speech acts. The reason for this is that in a dialogue between interlocutors, an assertive builds and updates the common ground of the interlocutors, while a successful declarative is a causing event in itself that results in a modified context, as well as the shared common ground. To demonstrate that intercultural pragmatics and the theory of common ground, as explicated by Kecskes, and the model discussed in this chapter, can be successfully applied crosslinguistically, this study uses examples from Irish. Modern Irish is a VSO language with many interesting features and qualities of interest to linguists. Irish, or Gaeilge as it is known in the Irish language itself, is, together with Scottish Gaelic and Manx, a member of the Q-Celtic grouping of Insular Celtic. Irish is a minority language, and, as such, the linguistics and pragmatics of Irish have not received the same levels of attention as many other languages. The chapter is organized as follows. In Section 5.3, we ask “What is context?” while in Section 5.4, we start the process of motivating the formal connection between situation, context, and common ground that treats common ground as a subset of context. Section 5.5 examines the shared knowledge in common ground and how this knowledge is contextdependent. Section 5.6 outlines an approach to resolving the challenges in formalizing situation, context, and common ground for linguistic analysis. We contrastively model the assertive and declarative speech acts to illustrate the respective roles of context and common ground. 5.3 What Is Context? 5.3.1 The Characteristics of Context It has long been recognized that context informs pragmatic meaning and assists in the construction and maintenance of common ground. The importance of context in pragmatics is reflected in a definition by Auer (2009): pragmatics treats the ways in which linguistic utterances become meaningful through their relation to context(s). Discourse is held to be a system of knowledge and beliefs, social practices, and socially recognizable identities (Flowerdew 2016: 1), while context relates to the situations in which discourse is produced. However, it is recognized that context is quite difficult to define. Blommaert (2005: 251), for instance, defines context as “the totality of conditions under which discourse is being produced, circulated and interpreted.” Context constrains a communicative situation and influences language use, with the most relevant contexts being the social and the linguistic environments. Wodak (2016: 321 346) distinguished different features of context, including the extralinguistic social, environmental variables and institutional frames of a specific “context of 109 110 BRIAN NOLAN situation”, and the broader sociopolitical and historical context within the cultural community. It is true, nonetheless, that discourse interlocutors of a conversation are skilled at understanding the relevant features of context to apply to make their utterances contextually relevant and meaningful. People have sets of linguistic, cognitive, social, cultural, institutional skills and knowledge that they use for retrieving meaning from a discourse. A useful approach is to consider context in relation to a situational frame. Framing is the process by which certain features of the situation are made salient, and this places boundaries on the extent of the context applicable. The frame, therefore, contains a relevant subset of the context and thereby allows for the interpretation of the situation. Frames are basic cognitive constructs that guide our perception of reality: I assume that definitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events . . . and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify (Goffman 1974: 10f). Consequently, language is contextually aligned with expectations for enabling a successful speech act, “. . . contextualization . . . comprises all activities by participants which make relevant, maintain, revise, cancel . . . any aspect of context which, in turn, is responsible for the interpretation of an utterance in its particular locus of occurrence.” (Auer 1992: 4) Mental models (Brewer 1987) of context and representations of common ground are employed by speakers in order to make their utterances appropriate, and context provides this cognitive, social, political, cultural, and historical environment of discourse. Contexts evolve in the course of a conversational exchange. The context is a resource that the participants use to achieve their communicative purposes. What interlocutors say or mean depends on features of the context, so long as the relevant knowledge is available to the addressee. The context, since it includes the beliefs, plans, and purposes of the participants, is what a speech act acts upon. The illocutionary point is to change certain features of the context. If communication is to be successful, the contextual knowledge on which the content of a speech act depends must be knowledge available to the addressee. Linguistic accounts appeal to context as a means of adding meaning to underspecified content in the computation of the meaning of an utterance. However, context remains a fuzzy concept, and heretofore it has seemed difficult to provide a characterization that connects with language, linguistics, and culture (Goodwin and Duranti 1992; Sharifian and Palmer 2007; Serangi 2009; Sharifian 2011, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c, 2017; Diedrichsen 2019). An important question for us then is: How can we characterize in a model the structure of context and common ground, and the representation of actions in context, with our Dimensions of Common Ground ontological knowledge of the world, and using inferences about beliefs, desires, intentions, and goals? Such representation of context and common ground must be available to language. What then are characteristics of context? The characteristics of context are that it acts as a knowledge repository with knowledge appropriately represented, assisting in building the situation model. It is updated across a discourse interaction and plays a role in the activation of knowledge. It forms part of the core common ground between the interlocutors framed by a discourse situation. It is activated in the ongoing interaction as it becomes relevant and eventually shared to an appropriate extent in the emergent common ground. Context contains the set of knowledge modified and updated during the discourse and cannot be separated from the knowledge it organizes. It structures our ontological knowledge of events and things in our world and relations and includes various kinds of knowledge, some of which are process-oriented and dynamic. Other kinds of less volatile knowledge include, for example, concepts, propositions, properties of entities in the world. It includes cultural knowledge, general knowledge, and the shared beliefs that arise from the interplay of culture and social community. Context constrains our interpretation of a situation and guides the determination of relevant meaning. The richer the context, the easier it is to disambiguate an utterance in real time. 5.3.2 What Exactly Are Models of Context and Situation? Context and situation models offer a mental model framework that characterizes the language users’ ability to adapt their discourse in real time. A mental model is a representation of the world in our environment, the relationships between its parts, and a person’s perception about their own acts and consequences. It is an internal representation of external reality and plays a major role in our cognition, reasoning, and decision-making. Context informs the mental models of events and the discourses about events. Therefore, language users need to model both themselves and other aspects of the communicative situation in which they are engaged. We have considerable amounts of world knowledge, and we build mental models of events by activating relevant parts of this knowledge and thus saturate the model with the information implied or presupposed by discourse (Johnson-Laird 1983). The amount of knowledge activated depends on the context, including setting, our assessment of the knowledge base of the interlocutor, goals, and interests. People activate fragments of this knowledge in real time while hearing a sentence. In advancing a discourse, the management of knowledge requires that the interlocutors continually assess the extent of available knowledge to the discourse participants. The construction and maintenance of the (emergent) 111 112 BRIAN NOLAN common ground are informed by context and situation and is a fundamental task of context and situation models. Models of context are important because they inform our understanding of language use culturally, socially, and across situations. What exactly are context models? Context models are constructs within the minds of participants of a situation. They are egocentric within the individual, defined by a set of parameters including the spatial and temporal locus of the discourse, self and other interlocutor participants, the ongoing actions with their specific intentions, and the relevant belief set. They feature our experiences of ongoing perceptions, knowledge, and perspectives about the ongoing communicative situation. They also inform how participants produce and understand discourse and help define the appropriateness conditions of discourse. They enable participants to adapt discourse to the communicative situation as relevant to them at each moment of the interaction. A context model is a mental model that represents the relevant properties of the communicative environment in memory and dynamically controls the discourse processes, ongoing perception and interaction, spatial and temporal settings, participants and their identities, ongoing events, as well as current goals. A context model consists of shared, culturally based schemas which allow real-time interpretation of communicative events. Without these cultural schemas, participants would be unable to understand, represent, and update complex situations (involving time, place, participants and roles, action, goals, and knowledge) in real time. As a special kind of mental model, what do context models actually achieve and do? They instantiate cultural knowledge and worldview of shared beliefs, opinions, and feelings about a situation and its participants. They dynamically update during an interaction and share facets in need of negotiation, as people have different models of the same interaction relevant for the emergence of common ground. A context model interfaces between culture, society, and a discourse situation to integrate the social and cognitive properties of communicative interaction, such as participant roles, with participant beliefs, desires, and intentions, along with contextual knowledge. They provide the cognitive representations that integrate cultural constraints on interactions and a basis for the conditions of successful illocution. Context models provide knowledge that plays a role in communication. Common societal cultural knowledge is a core condition for the production and understanding of discourse. Context models represent what is relevant for the participants in a communicative situation, such that “it has some contextual effect in that context” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 122). An assumption is that previous parts of an ongoing communicative interaction are considered part of the discourse context when what has just been asserted becomes part of the shared knowledge in the common ground of the discourse participants. Context only foregrounds those properties that are discourse relevant. Language users are processing discourse but are also simultaneously, in real time, engaged in dynamically Dimensions of Common Ground interpreting the communicative situation. One of the most significant dimensions of context is that of shared knowledge or common ground. Successful discourse interaction presupposes that language users build situationally appropriate models that are relevantly aligned with a shared common ground. This way, language users can appropriately express their knowledge and opinions about their experiences by adapting their talk and conduct to the knowledge, interests, beliefs, desires and intentions, and other properties of the hearer. The central idea with context (Stalnaker 1999a: 98) is that meaning depends on context, and context is formulated in terms of the shared common ground knowledge of the participants in the context of a situation. What constitutes a situation model and the types of information it might contain? Zwaan and Radvansky (1998) argue for a multidimensional situation model with five dimensions time, space, causation, intentionality, and participant(s). However, apart from spatial and temporal settings and participants, events (and their relations, such as causation), we also need to consider beliefs, desires, and intentions. Situation models are necessary to explain issues of reference and coreference, coherence, perspective, reordering effects, problem-solving, updating knowledge, and common ground. Typically, situation models refer to a discourse representation that captures aspects relevant to a speaker and hearer. Communicative situations may be complex, but participants reduce this complex information in a few schematically organized categories to apply contextual constraints in discourse processing. Situation models, used in an interaction in discourse, require that participants represent their own beliefs, desires, and intentions, as well as their understanding of the other participants. Language users formulate relevant properties of the communicative situation, the properties of knowledge relevant to themselves, but also an assessment of what the other interlocutor participants already know. This knowledge model forms a hypothesis about what the recipients know at any moment and is updated during a dialogue. Common ground is correspondingly updated. 5.4 Relating the Notions of Situation, Context, and Common Ground 5.4.1 The Formalization of Situation, Context, and Common Ground For speech acts to be appropriate, they need to satisfy felicity conditions, formulated in terms of the participants’ knowledge, beliefs, desires, and intentions. In speech act theory, these situational conditions (the beliefs, desires, intentions, knowledge, and status of the participants) are part of the systematic description of language use. The various speech acts of assertive, declarative, among others, have a set of felicity conditions informed by context. 113 114 BRIAN NOLAN We now present, as a part of the formalization of the situation, context, and common ground, for both speaker S and hearer H, related specialized knowledge representations relevant to the communication process and the construction of the dynamic common ground. This motivates the relationship between the situation, context, and common ground. Common ground is a dynamic construct consisting of shared knowledge, mutually constructed by the interlocutors (kb.s1 and kb.h) throughout the communicative process as a dynamic part of the context. Kecskes and Zhang (2009) propose an integrated concept of common ground, in which both a core common ground of assumed shared cultural, ontological, and other knowledge, suitably represented, and an emergent common ground converge to construct a rich background for communication. Situation-bound utterances (SBU), connected to particular social events and situations, are discussed in Kecskes (2010, 2013a: 71). To achieve this, we represent several aspects important to the characterization of the speech act. These are (a) The set of beliefs that the agent S has at any given time, (b) The goals that agent S will try to achieve, (c) The actions that agent S performs, (d) The knowledge of the effects of these actions, and (e) The contextual knowledge the agent S has (which may be incomplete or incorrect). In addition, we define the cognitive states for an agent and use them to describe the various key dimensions as they unfold in a dialogue, preconditions, and postconditions. We employ several predicates that have a reserved meaning (1). (1) Cognitive states for an agent in a dialogue a. Believe′ (Agent, P), has the meaning that the agent believes that P is true for the agent, where P is an expression in a human natural language. b. Know′ (Agent, P) expresses a knowledge state of the agent with respect to P. c. Want′ (Agent, P) means that the agent desires the event or state coded by P to occur. d. Intend′ (Agent, P) means that the agent intends to do P. We maintain that a speech act must be interpreted in the local context of a given situation. The model outlined here proposes a schematic structure of a situation (2) with specific components. These components include the constructional signature2 of the utterance (Nolan, 2017), illocutionary force, initial context at the time of the speech act utterance and containing 1 We use KB .S and KB . H to stand for KnowledgeBase.Speaker and KnowledgeBase.Hearer, respectively 2 The constructional signature of an utterance is used to identify the underlying syntactic pattern for real time linguistic processing, along with the speech act type and associated illocutionary force. In Nolan (2013) we argued for the view that constructions are best understood as residing in a construction repository, with an internal architecture that facilitates the retrieval and activation of a constructional schema based on the constructional signature. We considered a construction as having an internal structure consisting of several elements, including a unique signature along with a set of constraints on the signature. Dimensions of Common Ground the initial core common ground of the S and H along with any preconditions that exist, the speech act proposition, the belief, desire, and intention (BDI) cognitive states of the speaker, the post-context as it is after the utterance of the speech act, and the emerged common ground. The event(s) and arguments of the situation remain represented, of course, as befits the speech act. This serves as a unifying device to link semantics to events through to syntax, and onwards to utterance meaning. Depending directly on the situation and context framing the utterance, the situational preconditions constrain what can be in the proposition for a specific illocutionary force. As well, certain preconditions hold for the successful performance of an illocutionary act. We can consider these preconditions as ranging over the agent’s cognitive state, with respect to belief, desire, and intention. These conditions may additionally have a degree of strength. The degree of strength can relate to the illocutionary point as well as the sincerity conditions. As regards the degree of strength ([Stanford] 2020: Section 5.3.3) of the illocutionary point, two illocutions can have the same point but vary along the dimension of strength. By way of example, requesting and insisting (that someone does something) both have the point of attempting to get the interlocutor to act as suggested. However, insisting is stronger than requesting. For the degree of strength of the sincerity conditions, two speech acts might differ from one another in their strength. Requesting and imploring, for example, both express desires. However, imploring expresses that desire more strongly than requesting. (2) Schema of a situation including context and common ground Situation sit Signature Utterance syntactic pattern Event(s) < v1 (. . . vn) . . . > Verbal arguments < arg1, (arg2, . . . , argn) . . . > Event participants < arg1, (arg2, . . . , argn) . . . > Location.time (time) Location.space (place IllocForce IL INITIAL CONTEXT may be unspecified) Core Common Ground InitialKB.S InitialKB.H 115 116 BRIAN NOLAN Precondition(s) PR O P O S I T I O N Belief Desire Intention Post Context P kb.s B kb.h unspecified kb.s D kb.h unspecified kb.s I kb.h unspecified Emerged Common Ground Postconditions PostKB.S PostKB.H The appropriate representation of contextual knowledge is an important dimension of this model in motivating the interface between knowledge and language, mediated by the speech act. We discuss the nature of the different kinds of knowledge in Section 5.5. The function of knowledge representation (ontology) is to capture essential features of a class of entities and make that information available as required. Context and common ground have a central role in the determination of the conditions of knowledge activation as well as the limits of knowledge validity. Context is activated, and common ground constructed, in the ongoing interaction, as it becomes relevant and is eventually shared by discourse interlocutors. 5.4.2 Context of Situation: Malinowski, Firth, and Wegener The notions of context, situation, and context of culture are found in the work of Malinowski, Firth, and Wegener. Malinowski (1923, 1931, 1935, [1944] 1960) was the first to systematically use the idea of context in a way that was directly linked to the notion of function. In his view, a language is an instrument of communication, used to actively achieve our goals and purposes, and used in speech acts with effects and consequences (Nerlich and Clarke 1996: 294). The meaning of a sentence is considered to be its function, or set of relations, within a context. Dimensions of Common Ground Malinowski applied the term context of situation to refer to the whole of the communicative circumstances, including the speech situation, as well as the sociocultural context. The linguist J. R. Firth (1957, 1968) converged on the idea that the study of meaning and context should be central in linguistics. As utterances occur in real-life contexts, Firth (Östman and Simon-Vandenbergen 2009) argued that their meaning was informed by the particular situation in which they occurred. He borrowed the phrase context of situation from Malinowski (Senft 2007, 2009a, 2009b; Senft et al. 2009) and called his theory the contextual theory of meaning. This context of situation allows for the possibility of a sequence of multiple related events within it.3 The context of the situation, then, is central to linguistic analysis to account for language in its situation of use. Of course, Malinowski or Firth were not the only philosophers or linguists to study the relatedness of language context and situation. Nerlich (1988, 1990) considers the study of language by Philipp Wegener in the nineteenth century and on the situational context in which people use language. Wegener studied language as “situated action,” and he was much admired by both Malinowski and Firth and directly influenced their research into language and context. Wegener ([1885] 1991) motivated his theory in virtue of his concern with the social construction of language, in which every utterance has to be understood by the hearer who retrieves and constructs a relevant meaning, based on the context, situation, and pragmatic common ground. Whether the utterance meaning is successfully retrieved depends on the hearer’s expectations, the purpose and goal of the action, and the dialogue schema. When the situation does not contain the necessary elements needed by the hearer to retrieve a meaning, then a more comprehensive description and explanation is required within the dialogue from the wider context. This will be proportionate to the amount of knowledge missing from the hearer’s base. Malinowski extended the notion of context beyond the context of situation into the context of culture (1935: 73). Language, considered as a lexical and grammatical system, is related to its context of culture, while instances of language in use are related to their context of situation. We have seen that Malinowski was the first to use the context of the situation (1923: 307) in the sense of the events unfolding and happening when people speak. The situation functioned to cast into the perceptual spotlight a subset of context, as the situation framed and informed a piece of spoken discourse. A criticism of Malinowski is that his claim that language use should be studied in context is programmatic and, as such, is difficult to make operational as a theory for use in the analysis. A criticism of Firth is that his remarks on context do not constitute a theory. 3 This is important for serial verbs languages where many verbs constitute a single holistic event in a situation 117 118 BRIAN NOLAN 5.5 The Shared Knowledge in Common Ground 5.5.1 Common Ground Knowledge Is Context-Dependent Common ground knowledge is context-dependent, and discourse is produced and interpreted under the guidance of our mental context models. Once knowledge is communicated to a hearer, this knowledge becomes part of the common ground pertaining to the discourse and can be presupposed in further communication between the speaker and hearer. The role of knowledge in models of context and common ground has consequences for the production and comprehension of discourse (Figure 5.1). The management of knowledge guides the production of speech acts, and many elements of discourse are shaped by the ways that participants represent and manage (mutual) knowledge. Common ground is the subset of context compatible with our knowledge. The idea, according to Stalnaker (2014: 45) is that the core common background knowledge is shared by the participants in a conversation. Common ground emerges through communicative interaction in a discourse where assessments are made of the extent of the shared knowledge between interlocutors such that the respective common grounds are constructed and maintained, as appropriate to the context of a situation in which the discourse unfolds (Nolan 2014). In this view, a speech act must be interpreted in the context of a given situation. As we mentioned, a situation is considered to be a structured object that serves as a unifying device linking semantics to events, through to syntax, and CONTEXT KNOWLEDGE SELF OTHER Model of THIS conversational agent Model of OTHER conversational actor Dialogue situation COMMON GROUND Morpheme store Personality and emotions Discourse workspace memory Task reasoning World state reasoning Social context Lexicon Construction repository Language model/Grammar Natural language PARSE INPUT Natural language generate OUTPUT Speech act communications Figure 5.1 Framework for a dynamic common ground Dimensions of Common Ground onwards to utterance meaning via common ground. People interpret what happens around them and, consequently, build a mental representation that reflects their recognition, conceptualization, and understanding of a specific situation. This interpretation is constrained by the knowledge of the participants of the situation. 5.5.2 What Is Knowledge? Scientists have uncovered the different kinds of knowledge that people use, how this knowledge is mentally organized, and how it is leveraged. We know very many things. We know that the earth is round, and you know that Dublin is the capital of Ireland. We have geographical knowledge of the region in which we live, linguistic knowledge of our favorite languages, the mathematical knowledge that two plus two equals four; that π is an irrational number with an approximate value of 3.14, along with aesthetic, ethical, moral, and various kinds of scientific knowledge. However, any discussion of knowledge must understand a basic linguistic fact about how the verb know functions in discourse. The verb know has both a propositional and a procedural sense. This contrast is found in knowing that something is the case (that-knowledge) versus the practical knowledge of knowing how to perform some action to realize some end result (how-to-knowledge). There are different kinds of knowledge: (1) Declarative, descriptive, or propositional knowledge (knowledge-that) is where a person knows that p (where p is some statement or proposition). (2) Competence, procedural, or ability knowledge is where a person knows how to do something requiring a level of skill. This knowledge-how involves an ability to perform a skill (consciously or unconsciously) and is concerned with rules, strategies, and procedures. (3) Acquaintance knowledge is where a person knows something or someone. We have direct experience with people, objects, and artefacts within the world. (4) Empirical/a posteriori knowledge proceeds from observations or experiences to the deduction of probable causes. Scientific inquiry is a way of acquiring world knowledge. (5) A priori knowledge is gained independently of investigation. (6) Heuristic/tacit knowledge is amassed through the experience of solving past problems. It describes a rule of thumb that guides the reasoning process. (7) Testimonial knowledge is gained directly via the testimony of others through someone telling us what they know, or indirectly by reading the testimony of others. (8) Metaknowledge is knowledge about the other kinds of knowledge and how to use them. This knowledge guides our reasoning processes. 119 120 BRIAN NOLAN (9) Structural knowledge describes our overall mental model of a problem. It is concerned with ordered sets of rules, relations between concepts, and relations between concept and object. Typical of this type of knowledge is our mental model of concepts and objects. It is widely accepted that sense perception, memory, introspection, and reasoning are evidential knowledge sources for our beliefs. They provide evidence through such things as memory, sense, introspective, and rational intuitions (Lemos 2007: 29). Knowledge plays a role in models of context and common ground. Strategies for discourse are based on the shared nature of the knowledge of interlocutors. Speech participants may be of different knowledge communities, with different standards for its members to regard certain beliefs as knowledge, and what constitutes knowledge for one community may be false belief or unknown in a different culture. Hearers interpret discourse in terms of the model they construe of the communicative situation and its associated context. Common ground, in a sense, acts as a kind of decentralized knowledge system supporting the cognitive activation of a subset of those parts of contextual knowledge relevant to a speech act in a discourse. Understanding the nature of knowledge is rather tricky (Pojman 2001; Rescher 2003; Pritchard 2018). It becomes particularly acute in the world of artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP), for example, with intelligent software agents, where a rigorous formalism is required, with knowledge specified in a computer tractable form, and computed with such context and common ground. The purpose of knowledge representation is to express knowledge (Minsky 1975; Sowa 1984, 1987, 1997, 2008; Chein and Mugnier 2008). A knowledge representation scheme is a set of conventions about how to describe classes of things. Knowledge representation includes logical schemes with predicate and propositional calculus, procedural schemes (with IF/THEN rules), and networked schemes including semantic nets and conceptual graphs. The nodes in a networked scheme denote objects or concepts, their properties and corresponding values. Arcs denote relationships between the nodes and may have weights that denote a cost factor of some kind. Generic knowledge serves to construe mental models involved in the production and comprehension of discourse such as news stories, and more generally to engage in everyday social interaction. The various kinds of knowledge contained in common ground ranges from volatile/dynamic information in the current dialogue chain with its events and references, to the nonvolatile/non-dynamic cultural knowledge. This includes knowledge of the linguistic system, structural knowledge of the entities, actions and context of the local environment relevant to the interlocutors within the dialogue, various scripts, schemata (Schank 1975; Schank and Abelson 1975, 1977) and frames, knowledge of recent-to-far-past historical context and associated entities, actions and consequences, general ontological knowledge Dimensions of Common Ground about the world, cultural knowledge, ways of doing things and behaving in our society, and shared worldview perspective. Recent work has implemented (Panesar 2017, 2019a, 2019b), as a proof of concept for English, a model of conversational agents in a computational framework that builds on the notion of speech acts (Searle 1969, 1976), making the relation between knowledge and discourse explicit. The agent framework constructs a common ground in a discourse workspace to underpin the conversational interaction. A conversational agent has both “internal” and “external” models to support the speech acts. The internal model of the agent is concerned with the internal state of the agent, based upon the intersection at any given time on the agent’s internal beliefs, desires, and intentions, known as BDI states. The external model of the agent is composed of an interaction model with its world (human agent and other agent). The language model is based on a computational implementation of Role and Reference Grammar (Nolan 2012; Nolan and Diedrichsen 2013), a cognitive-functional model of language with a bidirectional linking system between semantics and syntax. In the agent architecture outlined in Figure 5.2, the relationship between agent parameters and behavioral choices made during the parse/generation of natural language conversation is governed by the Agent Dialogue Manager. This rule-based system maintains the BDI state of the conversational agent, to control a generalized natural language conversation system and supply the appropriate parameters for conversational behaviour. The innovation of this research resides in the combination of models and their interoperability, and it provides new insights into the interface between language and knowledge. 5.6 The Challenges of Context and Common Ground for Linguistic Analysis We may formally model properties of context and common ground, just as we can formalize the semantic logical structures of natural language. We formulate appropriateness conditions in terms of the situational conditions, of beliefs, desires, and intentions, and knowledge of S and H. We describe here how we model such a situation, how the relevant properties of such a situation are selected, and how this model and its schematic categories operate in discourse. The challenges we address are: • How do we ground the notion of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity, in a situation? • How do we represent them in such a way that it becomes operationally useful in linguistic analysis? 121 MODEL COGNITVE AGENT PHASE 2 UTTERANCE MODEL RRG PHASE 1 NLU KNOWLEDGE MODEL PLANNING MODEL BDI MODEL RESPONSE SPEECH ACT CONSTRUCTION LEXICON CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS PHASE 3 − AGENT DIALOGUE MODEL NLU DIALOGUE MANAGER UPDATE TO SPEECH ACT PERFORMATIVES APPLY RRG LINKING RULES CONSTRUCTION SELECTION PRE-ANALYSIS LANGUAGE TASKS Figure 5.2 Conceptual framework of the conversational software agent (Panesar 2017) USER Agent integration trace USER Dimensions of Common Ground • How do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning? A dialogue unfolds in the context of a social environment and situation (cf. Weigand 2021). In situations and their associated contexts, we create a common ground and determine its scope and parameters. We assess the extent of the interlocutor’s knowledge to inform and advance the conversation toward common understanding. With people we know, we can rely on having a reasonable set of shared knowledge and a common ground to facilitate our communication. Communication is successful when H determines in real time S’s intentions from the type of the speech act uttered. H can proceed to the identification of S’s illocutionary act through determining the speech act via the syntactic pattern its constructional signature, and determining the belief, desire, or intention that S is expressing. An act of communication is successfully achieved if H identifies the BDI expressed, in the way that S intends. Therefore, to inform someone of something is not only to express a belief in it but also to express one’s intention that H come to believe it. The assertive and declarative speech act types each have a different function in communication. An assertive speech act is statements of fact that convey information to H, and this information may be true or false, while a declarative speech act causes events and establishes social facts that update context. In this account, a formalized characterization of these speech acts and their function is provided, where context and common ground, along with belief, desire, and intention, are shown to play a significant role. The contextual knowledge, and how it informs common ground, is shown within the relationship between knowledge and language. The properties of the situation, context, and common ground feed into the utterance in a fundamental way. Interpreting a speech act in a situation requires us to consider these dimensions as part of the interaction. As we find, an appropriate context is a core satisfaction condition of a felicitous declarative speech act, while a common ground is important for assertions. An utterance has a syntactic expression encapsulating an event with a linguistic structure, and the utterance type identifies a speech act with an illocutionary force which are both connected in a meaningful way. Determining the nature and content of utterances is not easy, but it turns out that as people, we are actually good at doing this, given an appropriate shared common ground. We propose a formalization of this model of common ground that can (i) resolve diverse kinds of knowledge bases that occur in discourse, and (ii) be utilized in the characterization of various speech acts and performatives. The formalization exemplifies elements of the interfaces between knowledge, context, situation, and both core and emergent common ground. While we concentrate here on the formalization of the model and the set of 123 124 BRIAN NOLAN Table 5.1 The operations on common ground Operations on common ground FUNCTION OPERATION GET: ADD: CHECK: CHECK: FIX: UPDATE: Attention and salience Ground Track Verify Repair Accommodate relationships between knowledge, context, situation, and core and emergent common ground, it is important that we note the operations that work over common ground. The informational contents of common ground, and the operations (Table 5.1) that act on it in its construction and maintenance (including grounding, verification, repair, accommodation, etc.), actively contribute to the emergent common ground of the discourse interlocutors. While salience and attention bring some candidate entity to our notice for possible inclusion in common ground, the addition of new information to common ground occurs over communicative interactions via the grounding of new information. With grounding, information known to the speaker becomes accepted, recognized, and known to the hearer. Grounding is intrinsically connected with the participants’ management of common ground. Core common ground contains already known information. Emergent common ground builds on core common ground with the adaptation of new information, in a dynamic emergent manner, as an update mechanism. The maintenance of common ground requires that we track what is already in common ground, and how that knowledge changes as a dialogue advances. Verification of a common ground update occurs each time a conversational partner responds to the previous contribution without taking the opportunity to repair any perceived misunderstandings. Verifications allow the conversation to continue. With verification, affirmations of understanding occur when conversational participants use indicators of acknowledgment (such as yeah, and I see, and so on, for English). Sometimes, however, a grounding operation fails and an interlocutor needs to activate repair strategies for dealing with the error. These repair strategies may include a request for clarification, full repeat, rejection and start-over, or immediate feedback with the correct form. In turn, accommodation is necessary once the hearer recognizes that something is wrong in a dialogue, and that an accommodation is needed by adding a missing belief to update common ground. Accommodation is an inferential process that operates on presuppositions and operates as an update to common ground in response to when a speaker uses some expression with some previously unmentioned information. Dimensions of Common Ground We provide a case study where we contrast the assertive with the declarative speech act of Irish4 with respect to the implications for the representation of knowledge in core and emergent common ground, knowledge of context, and the situation. We first examine the assertive speech act and we represent it schematically. In the determination of uttered meaning, we appeal to a logical form based on the logical structures (LSs) of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Nolan 2012), along with a logical notation to encode belief, desire, intention as component parts. This assists with the formalization of the situation, context, common ground, and the speech act, in a logical representation. According to Stalnaker (1978: 78 95): First, assertions have content; an act of assertion is, among other things, the expression of a proposition something that represents the world as being a certain way. Second, assertions are made in a context a situation that includes a speaker with certain beliefs and intentions, and some people with their own beliefs and intentions to whom the assertion is addressed. Third, sometimes the content of the assertion is dependent on the context in which it is made, for example, on who is speaking or when the act of assertion takes place. Fourth, acts of assertion affect, and are intended to affect, the context, particularly the participants’ attitudes in the situation; how the assertion affects the context will depend on its content. An assertive utterance commits S to a proposition being true such that in uttering the assertive, S asserts that proposition, if S expresses (a) the belief that the proposition holds, and (b) the intention that H believes that proposition. The assertive (3), with Irish data, uses a syntactic construction with a transitive lexical verb, an actor, and undergoer. (3) Assertive utterance a. Dhún Lorcán an doras Close:V . P S T Lorcán D E T door:N ‘Lorcán closed the door.’ [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ [door, closed’]] b. Constructional signature: [V . T N S NP NP] We can imagine a context where there is a room with an open door. Someone closes the door, and it happens to be a person called Lorcán. When S relays this fact to H, as part of an ongoing dialogue, an assertion is made. Therefore, the assertion Dhún Lorcán an doras ‘Lorcán closed the door’ is satisfied in this context of the utterance where it is true that the door is, in fact, closed by Lorcán. In arriving at an understanding of 4 The functional characterizations of Irish have been reported on in Nolan (2008, 2012, 2013, 2014). 125 126 BRIAN NOLAN the assertive and its formalization, we use the idea of a situation, specific to S and H, at the moment of utterance. We will also appeal to the idea that S is motivated by a set of beliefs, desires, and intentions and that this influences discourse behavior toward H. S will assess the extent of the common ground shared with H and accordingly, through the discourse, construct the common ground and maintain it appropriately (as will H with respect to S). Both S and H each have a knowledge base, which we label as kb.s and kb.h respectively, that will converge into a common ground such that CG ≡ kb.s ⊕ kb.h. This knowledge base is the set of relevant knowledge from within the context. In Table 5.2, we provide a sketch of how the various dimensions needed to derive utterance meaning link together based on our formalization of the assertive in (3). In this formalization we identify the Situation (Sit), Context, KnowledgeBase.Speaker (kb.s), KnowledgeBase. Hearer (kb.h), Preconditions (Precon), Proposition (Prop), Belief (B), Desire (D), Intention (I) states, and Postconditions (Postcon) resulting from the utterance of the assertive speech act. Furthermore, we identify this situation with a label this.sit and the initial context, and core common ground for S and H (as a convergence arising from kb.s and kb.h). The relevant contents of common ground for S are explicitly identified. While the initial kb.h does not indicate content at this point, for kb.s we show this as containing two logical structures: (1) [exist’ (door)] and (2) [be’ (door, open’)]. These act as the precondition for S in making the assertive utterance. We indicate the actor and undergoer within the various logical structures, and the BDI states. For B, we use a predicate bel’ (LS). For D, we use a predicate want’ (ls) and for I, we use a predicate intend’ (LS). Reading these, S believes the door is closed. S desires ( wants’) that H believe the door is closed. S therefore intends that H believes the door is closed, and that the closing action was undertaken by Lorcán. H will apply several cognitive operations to determine how common ground is updated. Attention and salience will bring this item to the foreground for processing. The proposition expressed by S is grounded and verified, perhaps by direct observation in this instance. Common ground is accordingly updated, such that the resulting postcondition is that H believes the door is closed: B E L ’ (H, [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)]) The proposition of this assertive is that the door is closed. In this situation, we have an utterance utt0 containing an expression (in Irish) with a constructional signature of [v.tns NP NP], signaling an illocutionary force of assertive. This utterance is represented formally to indicate that the expression1 is the carrier of what is said, which feeds into the utt0 speech utterance. H is caused to hear the speech act (SA) uttered by S. The subscripts index back to the knowledge components in the schema of the situation. We represent the Dimensions of Common Ground Table 5.2 Assertive: formalization of situation of utterance Situation this.sit SIGNATURE V.TNS NP NP Speech act UTT0: Event(s) E X P R E S S I O N 1 : [do’ (A R G 1 ) close’ (A R G 1 , A R G 2 ) ^ be’ [A R G 2 , pred’]] < close v>: dún ‘close’: [do’ (X 1 ) close’ (X 1 , Y 2 ) ^ be’ [Y 2 , closed’]] ILLOCFORCE ASSERTIVE : Dhún Lorcan an doras [do’ (S , say’ (S , E X P R E S S I O N 1 )) and C A U S E (hear’ (H , SA))] Verbal arguments v: < A R G 1 , A R G 2 > Event participants < ARG1, ARG2> Location.time Time Location.space Place INITIAL CONTEXT Core Common Ground Ontology 1. I S A (D O O R , thing): Ontology: D O O R I S A thing (that may be open | closed) 2. I S A (L O R C A´ N , person): Ontology: L O R C A´ N I S A person 3. I S A (C L O S E :v, event): Ontology C L O S E I S A event process InitialKB.S KB.S 1. 2. InitialKB.H [exist’ (door)] ^ [be’ (door, open’)] KB.H 1. [exist’ (door)] ^ [be’ [door, open’]] PRECON 1. 2. PROP [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)] BELIEF B E L’ (S, [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)]) DESIRE W A N T ’ (S, [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)]) INTENTION I N T E N D ’ (S, B E L ’ (H, [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)]) POST CONTEXT Emerged Common Ground B E L’ (H, [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)]) POSTCON B E L’ (H, [do’ (Lorcán) close’ (Lorcán, door) ^ be’ (door, closed’)]) P O S T K B .S KB.S 1. 2. P O S T K B .H [exist’ (door)] ^ [be’ (door, closed’)] KB.H 1. 2. [exist’ (door)] ^ [be’ (door, closed’)] utterance utt0 and the expression expression1 as a logical structure in the style of RRG. We represent the expression embedded in the utt0 utterance as: 127 128 BRIAN NOLAN [do’ (S , say’ (S , E X P R E S S I O N 1 )) and CAUSE (hear’ (H , SA))] E X P R E S S I O N 1 : [do’ (A R G 1 ) close’ (A R G 1 , A R G 2 ) ^ be’ (A R G 2 , pred’)] UTT0: Encoded in the expression is a closing event with the various arguments represented with subscripts which can then be identified from the ontology available in the initial context. We use subscript indexing to relate elements across the model to indicate the linking between components of knowledge and context. For example, the speech act contains expression1 and this is also similarly identified as having identity within the event denoted. We apply the same subscript denotation method to arg1, arg2, etc. within the example, for the event participants/verbal arguments. At the event level, a simple5 verbal predication is found in a sentence with a single clause containing a single verb and its arguments that denote a single event and the participants of that event. The clause encodes an event which unfolds within a particular time envelope. We schematically identify a logical form, where the situation, context, and common ground all feed into the utterance meaning. The “what is said’” is reflected in the event and its semantics, while the assertion is derived at a higher level of abstraction, as the pragmatic utterance level. We code an initial context of the situation showing a basic ontology, and we show the common ground of S and H. Representing meaning in communication therefore necessarily includes the recognition of belief, desire, and intention in the type of situation, the associated illocutionary force, cultural conventions, various kinds of knowledge, with common ground. The interpretation of the utterance is informed by its context, in a dynamic process co-constructed in discourse. A function of the declarative is that it establishes social facts during its performance and, consequently, is a causing event in itself. Example (4) gives an example of a declarative, for a Christian religious ceremony using Irish as the officiating language. The appropriate context that must be in place for a valid wedding ceremony to occur is identified in (5). (4) 5 a. AN DEARBHÚ: Labhraı́onn an sagart leis an phobal. I bhfianaise Dé agus os comhair an phobail seo thug H1.name agus H2.name a gcead agus a móideanna pósta dá chéile. D’fhógair siad a bpósadh trı́ shnaidhmeadh lámh, agus trı́ fháinne a thabhairt agus a ghlacadh. Mar sin de, in ainm Dé, fógraı́m gur lánúin phósta iad. b. THE DECLARATION: The priest addresses the people. In the presence of God, and before this congregation, H1.name and H2.name have given their consent and made their marriage vows Complex predications and complex events within a situation are reported on in Nolan (2017). Dimensions of Common Ground c. to each other. They have declared their marriage by the joining of hands and by the giving and receiving of a ring. Therefore, in the name of God, I pronounce that they are husband and wife. I bhfianaise Dé agus os comhair an phobail seo D E T congregation this In (the) presence (of) God, and before In (the) presence (of) God, and before this congregation thug H1. N A M E agus H2. N A M E a great agus Give:V . P S T H1. N A M E A N D H2. N A M E their permission and a móideanna pósta dá chéile. their vows marriage to each other. H1. N A M E and H2. N A M E have given their consent and made their marriage vows to each other. D’fhógair siad a bpósadh trı́ shnaidhmeadh lámh, Declare:V . P S T 3 P L their marriage:V N by (the) joining:V N (of) hands They have declared their marriage by the joining of hands agus trı́ fháinne a thabhairt agus a ghlacadh. P R T give: V N and P R T receive:V N . and through ring and by the giving and receiving of a ring. Mar sin de, in ainm Dé, Therefore in (the) name (of) God Therefore, in the name of God fógraı́m gur lánúin phósta iad. pronounce:v. P R S + 1 S G that couple married 3 P L . A C C . I pronounce that they are married. A declarative is satisfied if (i) its proposition becomes true for the first time at the moment that it is said, and (ii) while S is saying it, S intends for that particular condition to occur and knows how to make it occur. Context is important for the felicitous use of the declarative speech act. A contextual condition about the ability, authority, knowhow is included to ensure that S is able to complete the declarative and thereby ensure the satisfaction of the appropriate condition. This helps eliminate instances where S has the intention, but not the social or conventional position of authority to make the declarative succeed. The declarative speech act is culturally informed and causes an event in itself the marriage of the two participants. Some other constraints apply as preconditions, including, for example, that the participants must be adult and not already legally married. The declaration part of the overall utterance establishes the appropriateness of the context. In this, the setting [context location] is a part of the context and the participants [situation participants] all play important and necessary 129 130 BRIAN NOLAN roles in the event [situation event]. The priest or minister, S, as agent of the activity, is vested with authority by the state to perform the wedding as a legal event. The people getting married are willing adult participants, denoted as H1 and H2 respectively, that give consent. (5) The appropriate context for wedding ceremony declarative a. The setting is a strict part of the context. b. The participants all play important and necessary roles in the event. c. The priest or minister, S, is vested with authority by the state to perform the wedding as a legal event. d. The people getting married are willing participants who both give free consent. We provide a formalized example in Table 5.3 of a representation of the declarative for the wedding that illustrates the important contribution of context to its successful realization. In fact, the context is of critical importance, with common ground having a lesser significance. The initial context has an ontology where wedding is known as an event process. The contextual preconditions (Precon), which act as the felicity conditions, are necessary for the wedding ceremony to be successful. Several preconditions are specified: (a) Person 1 is not married, (b) Person 2 is not married, (c) Person 1 and Person 2 want to marry each other at this place and time, and (d) the priest or minister who will conduct the ceremony, and make the appropriate utterance, has the legal authority to marry people. We represent these preconditions individually as: ( be’ ( P E R S O N 1 , M A R R I E D ) : Person 1 is N O T M A R R I E D ( be’ ( P E R S O N 2 , M A R R I E D ) : Person 2 is N O T M A R R I E D W A N T ’ (marry’ (Person 1, Person 2)): Person 1 W A N T T O M A R R Y Person 2 W A N T ’ (marry’ (Person 2, Person 1)): Person 2 W A N T T O M A R R Y Person 1 Speech act A C T O R has appropriate A U T H O R I T Y to marry people NOT NOT The BDI variables are stated. The post context condition (Postcon) is that, after the successful ceremony when the performative was realized, the two people are married to each other. We represent this as: be’ (Person 1 and Person 2, married’): Person 1 and person 2 M A R R I E D to each other ARE In Section 5.5, we discussed the nature of knowledge. What knowledge from context and common ground are activated here with this declarative example? Specifically, the activated parts of relevant context and common ground include local dialogue, with salient events and references within the dialogue relating to the wedding frame and associated participant Dimensions of Common Ground Table 5.3 Declarative: formalization of situation of utterance SITUATION wedding. S I T SIGNATURE V.TNS NP NP ADJ NP Speech act UTT0: H2, Event(s) : fógraím gur lanúin phósta iad [do’ (S , say’ (S , E X P R E S S I O N 1 )) and C A U S E (hear’ (H 1 SA))] AND EXPRESSION1: [do’ (A R G 1 ) pronounce’ ([ be’ (A R G 2 and A R G 3 , pred’)]) < pronounce v>: fógair ‘pronounce’: [do’ (X 1 ) pronounce’ ([ be’ (X 2 and Y 3 , married’)]) ILLOCFORCE DECLARATIVE Verbal arguments v: < A R G 1 , A R G 2 , A R G 3 )> Event participants < A R G 1 , A R G 2 , A R G 3)> Location.time Time Location.space Place I NITIAL CONTEXT Ontology Core Common Ground ONTOLOGY: wedding I S A event P R O C E S S (Person 0) of speech act has appropriate A U T H O R I T Y U N D E R G O E R s (Person 1 and Person 2) are W I L L I N G P A R T I C I P A N T S L O C A T I O N : The speech act must be uttered in an appropriate location T I M E of speech act is appropriate for the event denoted ACTOR InitialKB.S N OT ( be’ ( P E R S O N 1 , MARRIED): Person 1 is NOT MARRIED InitialKB.H N OT ( be’ ( P E R S O N 2 , MARRIED): Person 2 is NOT MARRIED PRECON N OT ( be’ ( P E R S O N 1 , M A R R I E D ) : Person 1 is N O T M A R R I E D ( be’ ( P E R S O N 2 , M A R R I E D ) : Person 2 is N O T M A R R I E D W A N T ’ (marry’ (Person 1, Person 2)) W A N T ’ (marry’ (Person 2, Person 1)) : Person 1 and Person 2 W A N T T O M A R R Y E A C H O T H E R A C T O R (Person 0) has appropriate A U T H O R I T Y to marry people N OT Prop Person 1 and Person 2 W A N T to marry each other B N OT N OT D (BE’ (PERSON 1, (BE’ (PERSON 2, WA N T ’ WA N T ’ I MARRIED) MARRIED) (Person 1, marry’ (Person 1, Person 2)) (Person 2, marry’ (Person 2, Person 1)) Person 1 I N T E N D S Person 2 I N T E N D S POST CONTEXT TO MARRY TO MARRY Person 2 A T Person 1 A T THIS CEREMONY THIS CEREMONY Emerged Common Ground be’ (Person 1 and Person 2, married’) : Person 1 and person 2 A R E each other POSTCON be’ (Person 1 and Person 2, married’) : Person 1 and person 2 A R E each other MARRIED MARRIED PostKB.S KNOW’ ( Person 1, be’ (Person 1 and Person 2, married’)) PostKB.H KNOW’ ( Person 2, be’ (Person 2 and Person 1, married’)) to to 131 132 BRIAN NOLAN roles. Additionally, language and knowledge of the linguistic system is included here. Environment, encapsulating various kinds of knowledge, relates to the wedding frame and its schema. Recent events contain knowledge of wedding-related concepts and facts. Similarly, historical knowledge has shared cultural knowledge of weddings. Common sense has general ontological knowledge about the world, its events, and participants as they relate to weddings. Cultural knowledge captures an individual’s sense of the ways of doing things within a community, ways of behaving, common belief sets, values, the perspectives they share, and worldview. What is activated here is a wedding frame and associated schema, with a set of scripts for the behaviors of people at a wedding, a belief in marriage, and a value system supporting marriage in that society. The actor of the speech act has the appropriate authority to conduct the ceremony. The undergoers, the two people who intend to get married (Person 1 and Person 2) are willing participants. Finally, the location of the wedding ceremony is in an appropriate and legitimate location. The time scheduled for the wedding ceremony is appropriate for the event denoted. In our characterization of the assertive and declarative speech acts, we argued that a consideration of the situation, its context, and common ground is necessary. This occurs dynamically and naturally between the human interlocutors in a dialogue. An assertive speech act utterance declares some fact, where the situational context informs common ground and the speech act interpretation. This may include, for example, the contextual assignment of values to any indexical elements and variables in the logical structure of the utterance. The meaningful unpacking of the speech act interaction involves consideration of S’s beliefs, desires, and intentions, and the requirements posed by the preconditions in context. The beliefs and desires motivate the sets of intentions of S. In contrast, for the declarative utterance, we have seen that context, common ground, belief, desire, and intention are important. Context contributes to the felicity conditions which must be in place. The contextual criteria must be satisfied for the declarative speech act to achieve its purpose. The actor of the declarative speech act must have the correct authority and status for their words to have the appropriate illocutionary force. Indeed, part of the felicity conditions for marrying people concerns the institutional status of the speaker. The declarative act is successful if its felicity conditions are fulfilled. The development of a formal model of how the discourse meaning is composed, from linguistic and nonlinguistic components, requires a formalization of the speech act that takes into consideration its situation of occurrence and context, the belief, desire, and intention of S (and H) and the common ground. Dimensions of Common Ground Expression of utterance SITUATION of utterance CONTEXT of situation COMMON GROUND (between S and H) Precondition(s) BDI (of S and H) RETRIEVING THE UTTERANCE MEANING Revised BDI (of S and H) Postcondition(s) Updated COMMON GROUND (between S and H) Updated CONTEXT Figure 5.3 Computing utterance meaning from situation, context, and common ground 5.7 Conclusions In retrieving the meaning of speech acts, it is necessary to consider the context and common ground of the utterance, in a situation (Figure 5.3). In a discourse situation, felicitous utterance interpretation needs to be sensitive to information from a variety of different sources and the dimensions of the situation, including context, common ground with cultural, general, and local context-specific knowledge. The model proposed enables us to address the challenges posed by context and common ground. 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Psychological Bulletin, 123, 162 185. 6 Role of Context Anita Fetzer 6.1 Introduction Context is one of those terms referred to in all kinds of context, serving as some kind of constraint or explanation on deviations from regularities and rules. Nevertheless, what is actually meant by context or what is referred to by context is often left underspecified. Context has become a major field of research in not only the humanities and social sciences but also information technology, economics, natural science, and engineering. The impact of context or particular contextual features has been acknowledged explicitly in all of these research domains, and context itself has become an object of investigation with diverse, if not mutually exclusive conceptualizations. What Is a Context? is the title of an edited volume on linguistic approaches and challenges to context (Finkbeiner et al. 2012). Implicit in the question is the presupposition that context exists, while the wh-question implies that the question can be answered, at least to some extent. Finding appropriate answers to that question is not that simple, as the volume informs us. This is not only because of the context-dependence of the concept itself but also because of different research designs, research goals, and perspectives toward the object of analysis. It may be examined from an interlocutor’s perspective and their implicit and explicit references to context in interaction, which are made manifest in their negotiation of communicative meaning and in their co-construction of local and global contexts. Context can also be examined from the analyst’s perspective with a focus on the linguistic realization of conversational contributions and their constitutive parts, presupposing some kind of generalized interlocutor in some kind of generalized context. While the former captures the dynamics of context, the latter favors a more general conceptualization of context. The theoretical construct of context has been addressed from intra- and interdisciplinary perspectives. The multifaceted nature of context and the 140 A N I TA F E T Z E R context-dependence of the concept itself have made it almost impossible for the scientific community to agree on one definition of context, or on one theoretical perspective: some approaches analyze, formalize, or describe only a minute aspect of context, while others opt for a more holistic analysis and description (cf. Fetzer 2004, 2010, 2012; van Dijk, 2008; Finkbeiner et al. 2012; as well as the interdisciplinary biyearly conferences on context: e.g. Bouquet et al. 1999; Akman et al. 2001; Blackburn et al. 2003; Brézillon et al. 2017). Context is no longer seen as an analytic prime in these research paradigms, but it is nevertheless conceived of as a more or less generalized concept which may be decomposed into its constitutive parts. In social-studies paradigms, context has been further subclassified into more particular kinds of context constrained by social variables, for instance, status, gender, ethnicity, or native/non-native speaker, allowing for more fine-grained analyses of meaning-making processes in context. Context is a fundamental premise in pragmatics. This also holds for pragmatics-based subdisciplines, for instance, computational pragmatics, sociopragmatics, discourse pragmatics, legal pragmatics, internet pragmatics, and intercultural pragmatics. Pragmatics is fundamentally concerned with communicative action and its felicity in context, investigating communicative action with respect to the questions of what is communicative action, what may count as communicative action, what communicative action is composed of, what conditions need to be satisfied for communicative action to be felicitous, and how communicative action is related to context. These research questions and the object of research require communicative action to be conceived of as a relational construct, relating communicative action and context, communicative action and interlocutors, and interlocutors with the things they do with and without words in context. The classical distinction between semantics and pragmatics is based on the relationship between meaning and context: the former has been described as the study of context-independent meaning, and the latter is referred to as the study of context-dependent meaning. The mutually exclusive description of the two fields has been blurred by the analysis of meaning in default contexts, accommodating pragmatic principles in the determination of truth conditions (see, e.g., Jaszczolt 2005), Bach’s narrow context (1997) or Terkourafi’s minimal context (2009) thus going beyond the differentiation between natural meaning also referred to as what is also referred to as said and non-natural meaning (or: meaningnn) speaker-intended meaning or what is meant. Natural meaning is investigated in default contexts, and non-natural meaning is investigated in generalized context with a focus on generalized implicatures, and in particularized contexts with a focus on particularized implicatures (cf., e.g., Levinson 1983, 2000; Grice 1989). Role of Context Context has been described as providing the “glue” in interlocutors’ meaning-making processes with the implicit premise that interlocutors share some kind of common background for their construction of meaning and their construction of context in interaction, if not fully, then at least partially. In intercultural encounters, this premise does no longer hold by default. Here, interlocutors share common background only to some degree, if at all. Thus, the role of meaning construction in context as well as of context construction is far more complex. The goal of this chapter is to present prominent approaches to context and adapt them to the requirements of intercultural pragmatics, which studies interlocutors of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The chapter discusses the necessary refinements of the theoretical construct of context which would allow for intercultural adaptations. Pragmatics and its subdiscipline of intercultural pragmatics share a conceptualization of context as a relational construct, channeling the production and interpretation of conversational contributions, providing the “glue” that makes the constitutive parts of communication cohere. However, they differ with regard to what counts as “glue,” and how “glue” is utilized in meaningmaking processes. In the following, two different perspectives on context are presented. Both conceive context as a dynamic relational construct, and both are more and less explicitly based on the premises of (1) intentionality of communicative action, entailing conscious interlocutors endowed with rationality who not only are accountable for communicative action in general and their communicative acts in particular but can also account for them; (2) cooperation; and (3) contextualization and indexicality of communicative action. Section 6.2.1 examines context and context constructions from the perspective of interlocutors; Section 6.2.2 investigates context constructions from the perspectives of the analysts; Section 6.3 presents an outlook to the role of context in intercultural pragmatics, discussing discourse as context, and context as discourse. 6.2 Contexts and Context Pragmatics examines the question of how interlocutors do things with (and without) words in context, namely, how they communicate felicitously in context. It examines the influence of linguistic context (or co-text) and extralinguistic context (or social context) on the production and interpretation of conversational contributions, identifying regularities of language use across discourse domains. In interactional linguistics and in ethnomethodological conversation analysis, context is seen as an interactional achievement (Heritage 1984; Goodwin and Duranti 1992); it is described as a relational construct in sociopragmatics (Fetzer and Akman 2002; Fetzer, 2004, 2010) and as a 141 142 A N I TA F E T Z E R psychological construct in Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986). Functional (cognitive) grammar refers to context as “other minds” (Givón 2005). Within these research paradigms, context is dynamic, relating interlocutors and the language they use in a dialectical manner. Conversational contributions are doubly contextual (Heritage 1984: 242): they rely upon the existing context for their production and interpretation, and they are, in their own right, events that shape new contexts for actions that will follow. To capture the dialectics of the dynamic processes, communication has also been described as “both context-creating and context-dependent” (Bateson 1972: 245). This is because conversational contributions contain context and they are at the same time contained in context. In a similar vein, context is seen as imported into communication and as invoked in communication (Levinson 2003). In interactional sociolinguistics, context is brought into the communicative exchange and it is brought out in the communicative exchange (Gumperz 1992). Interaction-based conceptualizations of context are based on the premise of indexicality of communicative action, relating an exclusively product-oriented conception of context-as-given which is external to a conversational contribution to the inherently dynamic process of contextualization which is interdependent on a conversational contribution and its surroundings. Context is thus no longer solely a social construct but rather a dynamic socio-cognitive construal feeding on the contextualization of communicative action in general and the contextualization of communicative acts in particular. Consequently, contextualization has been assigned the status of a universal in human communication (Gumperz 1996: 403), which manifests itself locally with respect to the negotiation and co-construction of meaning in context. The interactionbased approaches to context allow for intercultural-pragmatic adaptations as regards its status as negotiated and co-constructed, as will be discussed in the following. 6.2.1 Interlocutor’s Context Context as a theoretical construct has undergone some fundamental rethinking in pragmatics and its subfields, especially discourse pragmatics, internet pragmatics, and intercultural pragmatics, where the commonality or sharedness of context can no longer be presumed.1 The multifaceted nature of context is reflected not only in the pluralism of the sequential organization of discourse-as-a-whole in both discourse pragmatics and internet pragmatics, but also in the interlocutors’ construal of discourse common ground (cf. Meierkord and Fetzer 2002; Fetzer 2021). In intercultural pragmatics, the sequential organization of discourse is also of relevance with respect to the structuring of discourse and its degree of 1 I would like to thank one of my reviewers for the insightful comment. Role of Context explicitness, but what is more important are the interlocutors’ speechcommunity-specific expectations about verbal and nonverbal formatting of a contribution and of what the contribution counts as. Context has been analyzed as a product of language use, as interactionally negotiated and co-constructed, and as imported and invoked rather than being looked upon as an external constraint on linguistic performance (Levinson 2003; Fetzer 2011). The psychology of communication adopts the interlocutor’s perspective. Bateson (1972) conceives context along the lines of the gestalt-psychological distinction between figure and ground and the related concepts of frame and framing. Frame is seen as a delimiting device which “is (or delimits) a class or set of messages (or meaningful actions)” (Bateson 1972: 187). Because of their delimiting function, “psychological frames are exclusive, i.e. by including certain messages (or meaningful actions) within a frame, certain other messages are excluded,” and they are “inclusive, i.e., by excluding certain messages certain others are included” (p. 187). The apparent contradiction is eradicated by the introduction of set theory’s differentiation between set and non-set, which like figure and ground are not symmetrically related, as explained by Bateson: “[p]erception of the ground must be positively inhibited, and perception of the figure . . . must be positively enhanced” (p. 187), concluding that the concept of frame is metacommunicative, which also holds for context: “the hypothesis depends upon the idea that this structured context also occurs within a wider context a metacontext if you will and that this sequence of contexts is an open, and conceivably infinite, series” (Bateson 1972: 245). By relating set and non-set, frame and metaframe, and context and metacontext, Bateson provides a system which may account for the different meaning-making processes in intercultural encounters: “whenever this contrast appears in the realm of communication, [it] is simply a contrast in logical typing. The whole is always in a metarelationship with its parts. As in logic the proposition can never determine the metaproposition, so also in matters of control the smaller context can never determine the larger” (Bateson 1972: 267). Interlocutors’ construals of context lie in the local discourse context. They share the premise that communicative action in general and communicative acts in particular can never be fully explicit: “Underdeterminacy is an inherent characteristic of human language, since no natural-language sentence can encode interlocutors’ intended statements fully” (Ariel 2008: 265). In a similar vein, but more explicitly, Levinson argues that intentionality is a fundamental premise of natural-language communication: human interaction, and thus communication, depends on intentionascription. Achieving this is a computational miracle: inferences must be made way beyond the available data. It is an abductive process of 143 144 A N I TA F E T Z E R hypothesis formation. Yet, it appears subjectively as fast and certain the inferences seem determinate, though we are happy to revise them when forced to do so. (Levinson 1995: 241) Intention ascription, abduction, and inferencing are fundamental to resolving underdeterminacy in the interlocutors’ meaning-making processes. While the Gricean paradigm and its differentiation between what is said and what is meant accounts for conversational contributions produced in context (Grice 1975), Relevance Theory utilizes implicature and explicature, pragmatic enrichment, and broadening and narrowing of conceptual meaning (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Clark 2013). In both frameworks, communication is seen as a context-dependent endeavor, in which communicative meaning may go beyond the level of what has been said. Hence, what is said cannot be equated with pure linguistic meaning but rather is “closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) . . . uttered” (Grice 1975: 44). Unlike the rather controversial status of “what is said” in semantics and pragmatics, “what is meant,” that is, the sum of “what is said” and “what is implicated” (e.g. Huang 2014: 31 32), has always been equated with nonnatural meaning. Grice (1975: 43 44) differentiates between implicate and the related nouns implicature (cf. implying) and implicatum (cf. what is implied). He distinguishes between two basic types of implicature: conventional implicature and conversational implicature. Generalized conversational implicature is also referred to as default implicature or pragmatic regularities (Bach 2006). This is in line with Levinson’s claim that “utterance-types carry generalized implicatures . . . rational speakers meannn both what they say (except in non-literal uses of language) and what that saying implicates; different layers of meaning all come under the umbrella of meaningnn” (Levinson 2000: 373). While conventional implicature is connected closely with linguistic form, for instance with connectives (e.g. but, therefore, however), implicative verbs (e.g. manage, forget to), honorifics, or nonrestrictive relative clauses, conversational implicatures are essentially connected with the maxims on the one hand and sequentiality on the other, as is reflected in Grice’s (1975: 48) reference to dovetailed and its adaptation to the contextual constraints and requirements of discourse as dovetailedness (cf. Fetzer 2004). Both the (neo)-Gricean and relevance-theoretic approaches to meaningmaking processes in context are generally based on interlocutors from a more or less homogeneous speech community and their ways of doing things with words, that is their conventions, or pragmatic regularities. For an intercultural-pragmatics perspective to meaning-making processes in context, the analysis of pragmatic regularities needs to be adapted to the requirements of two, if not more, different speech communities and their ways of how they usually do things with words, not only in context and Role of Context contexts, but also in discourse and discourses, as is going to be illustrated with the following exchange between a nonnative speaker of English A (Ann) and a speaker of Irish English B (Bob): A1: B1: A2: B2: Would you like a cup of tea? I thought you’d never ask. looks irritated Oh I did not mean to say that you were impolite. It’s an Irish saying of “yes please.” A1’s conversational contribution realizes the communicative act of invitation. Its linguistic realization is conventionally indirect thus minimizing the risk of being assigned the communicative meaning of an informationbased yes/no-question, thereby relating the communicative act and the interlocutors, and the interlocutors, their exchange and the local context, and their negotiation of the validity of contributions and context construals. B1’s response, if we take A1 as a first part of the adjacency pair invitation acceptance / rejection, and B1 as the second part of that adjacency pair, is not realized without delay by a simple “yes, please” and thus does not constitute an acceptance on the what-is-said level. On the natural-meaning level, Bob says that he had expected Ann to have invited him for a cup of tea for quite a while. A2’s nonverbal response (looks irritated, and failture to act as Bob had expected Ann to act, that is put the kettle on to make tea) makes manifest the misunderstanding, which Bob intends to repair by being more explicit about his intended meaning, not only referring to unintended perlocutionary effects (“I did not mean to say you were impolite”) but also explaining the language-variety-based source of the misunderstanding (B2 counts as “yes please” in Irish English). The interactional-sociolinguistic concept of contextualization, which has been further refined concerning decontextualization and recontextualization, and the related process of entextualization offer a dynamic context-bound approach to meaning-making processes not only within one speech community, but also across speech communities.2 6.2.1.1 Contextualization In interactional sociolinguistics with its premise of contextualization as a universal in natural-language communication, meaning-making processes as interpretation of conversational contributions are functionally equivalent to the contextualization of conversational contributions. Contextualization refers to a process of enriching inexplicit forms and contents thereby assigning discursive values to indexical tokens; this is done through contextualization conventions and conversational inference, which are connected closely. Both require particular inference 2 For a recent proposal which explicitly refers to such differences between communities and how they may be empirically captured, see Terkourafi (2019). 145 146 A N I TA F E T Z E R triggers to initiate a process of context-dependent cognitive operations, e.g., inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning. A device, which is of key importance in that respect, is the interactional-sociolinguistic contextualization cue. Contextualization cues are metalinguistic devices, which can be realized phonologically3, for instance by intonational contours, stress, and pauses; they can be realized lexically, for example by particles and metacommunicative comments; they can be realized syntactically, for instance by nondefault syntax; and they can be realized nonverbally: Contextualisation cues are a class of what pragmaticians have called “indexical signs,” which serve to retrieve the contextual presuppositions conversationalists rely on making sense of what they see and hear in interactive encounters. They are pure indexicals in that they have no propositional content. That is, in contrast to other indexicals like pronouns or discourse markers, they signal only relationally and cannot be assigned context-free lexical meanings. Yet they play a major role in transforming what linguists refer to as “discursive structures” into goal-oriented forms of action. (Gumperz 2003: 9). Regarding their function in discourse, contextualization cues import context into the interaction, and they bring context out in the speech activity by channeling “inferential processes that make available for interpretation knowledge of social and physical worlds” (Gumperz 1996: 383). Contextualization is based on the premise that language is a socially situated form and that language variation and alteration are not random or arbitrary, but communicatively functional and meaningful. In interactional sociolinguistics, language use is always embedded in the delimiting frame of a speech activity, and against that background, the contextualization of conversational contributions utilizes not only local conversational inferencing “concerning what is intended with any one move and what is required by way of a response” (Gumperz 2003: 14), but also global conversational inferencing “of what the exchange is about and what mutual rights and obligations apply, what topics can be brought up, what is wanted by way of a reply, as well as what can be put into words and what is to be implied” (p. 14). 3 Gumperz presents a telling example of intercultural mis contextualization of intonation contour in a service encounter at a major British airport, where Indian and Pakistani service personnel offered gravy to customers using a falling intonation contour: “newly hired Indian and Pakistani women were perceived as surly and uncooperative by their supervisor as well as by the cargo handlers whom they served” (Gumperz 1982: 173). The allocation of the Indian and Pakistani women to a negative reference group (“surly and uncooperative”) was due to different contextualization conventions: the British English speech community assigns a falling intonation contour the status of a strong directive illocutionary force (“take the gravy or leave it”) while the Indian and Pakistani speech communities contextualize the contour as a polite request (“would you like some gravy?”). Gumperz points out that “the variability in contextualization convention is culturally significant” (1996: 392). Role of Context The distinction between different types of meaning inferred through deductive and non-monotonic reasoning, namely, between the discrete operators of a formal language and their natural-language counterparts, is further refined by Levinson, pointing out their subjectively determinate nature: “Conversational inferences have a number of very special properties: they are speedy, they are non-monotonic (the same premises can give different conclusions in different contexts), they are ampliative (you get more information out than went in) and they are subjectively determinate” (Levinson 1995: 238). In communication, interlocutors intend their addressees to construe certain contexts. While they may import particular types of context through local conventional and nonconventional means for instance, deictic expressions, quotations, generalized and particularized implicatures, and contextualization cues the invocation of context is also done by the employment of more globally oriented means, such as style, register, social deixis, and generalized and particularized implicatures exploiting deviations from how things are typically done in a particular context, and in interaction. This is reflected, for instance, in the use of informal expressions or nonstandard phonetic realizations in political discourse by elite politicians intending to align with ordinary people, for instance the use of /t/-glottalling by the Labour politician Ed Miliband (Kirkham and Moore 2016), in academic discourse by academics intending to demonstrate the importance of research results to a nonacademic audience, for instance by narrating science (Armon 2019), or in the use of formal expressions and standard phonetic realizations in vernacular-based interactions in the local context of conversational quotations as a stance-taking device. From a construal-of-context perspective, this means that interlocutors make their contribution as explicit “as is required” and that they import the appropriate amount of context, which they consider to be required for felicitous communication. Interlocutors may import context into the discourse through conventional means, such as deictic expressions, referring to person (and their social positioning), location, time, and discourse. As for the exchange of Ann and Bob above, Ann made her contribution as explicit “as is required” by formulating her invitation in a conventionalized-indirect manner and by formulating the invitation accordingly, she imported generalized context with the appropriate degree of politeness into the interaction. Bob had also considered his response to be “as is required,” presumably indexing his Irish-English by accent and presupposing Ann to know the Irish-English contextualization convention of “I thought you’d never ask” as a polite acceptance of an invitation. Ann’s nonverbal response, however, contained the nonverbal contextualization cue of an irritated facial expression which signified to Bob that he had not imported the appropriate context into the local interaction. Bob contextualized the nonverbal contextualization cue accordingly and imported the required context into the exchange in his follow-up repair B2, utilizing a meta-comment (“It’s 147 148 A N I TA F E T Z E R an Irish saying of ‘yes please’”) for the explication of presupposed background knowledge and for repairing the unintended perlocutionary effects (“I did not mean to say that you were impolite”). To communicate felicitously, interlocutors need to presuppose certain brute facts about the world and of the world they communicate about, and they need to make their conversational contribution “such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice 1975: 45). In intercultural interactions, the certain presupposed brute facts may obtain for the interactants involved, the linguistic realization of references to the brute facts, and predications on the brute facts may, however, diverge. From a theorybased perspective, this is not problematic as meaning is negotiated in interaction. The negotiation-of-meaning sequences in intercultural interactions are expected to be different, though: they are more explicit as regards reference resolutions, conceptual adaptations on the propositional domain, and they are more explicit as regards illocutionary force, perlocutionary effects, and communicative goal, as has been shown in the analysis of the Ann Bob exchange above. As for the structuring of discourse, more explicit delimitations of sequences and more explicit metadiscursive comments are to be expected. From the perspective of intercultural interactions, the contextual information referred to by Gumperz is expected to be more explicit, and the contextualization conventions for presuppositions regarding what the activity counts as are also expected to be more explicit. Regarding negotiation-of-meaning sequences in intercultural interactions, more instances of recontextualization and decontextualization may be found in the contextualization of conversational contributions (cf. Fetzer 1994, 2007b; Weizman 2007). 6.2.1.2 Recontextualization and Decontextualization In natural-language communication, conversational contributions and the discourse in which they are embedded (cf. Fetzer 2018) come in with the presumption of being more or less coherent, and this fundamental premise also holds for intercultural encounters. Interactants usually act in accordance with this premise when producing or: entextualizing, as is described below in Section 6.2.1.3 and contextualizing conversational contributions directed at them or at others involved in multiparty interactions. As has been shown above, meaning-making processes are based on local and global inferencing, thus going beyond the encoding and decoding of meaning. From an interactional perspective, meaning-making processes are performed by all interactants and the processes and products of the contextualization of conversational contributions are negotiated by the interacting interlocutors, either in the here and now in face-to-face interactions, or in a mediated manner in some virtually shared space and time Role of Context in synchronous and asynchronous interactions (see Fetzer 2021). In the negotiation of meaning, some constitutive parts of the meaning-making process, for instance (1) reference resolution, that is self-reference with the first-person-singular pronoun I and other-reference with the secondperson-singular pronoun you, or (2) narrowing or broadening of conceptual meaning on the propositional level, for instance like broadened to like to drink, and (3) the interpretation of illocutionary force on the communicative-act level “I thought you’d never ask” as acceptance of the invitation in the Ann Bob exchange, may differ to varying degrees. To reach a more or less shared understanding of what conversational contributions count as, interlocutors may need to adapt the products of their meaning-making process to the ones retrieved and argued for by their fellow interlocutors, and thus decontextualize a prior contextualization product in order to be able to recontextualize it, so that some shared meaning-making may be reached and agreed upon by the interlocutors involved in the interaction. This has been the case with Bob decontextualizing his response B1 (“I thought you’d never ask”) making explicit its discursive value in that particular context (“yes, please”). While contextualization describes the process of assigning values to indexical tokens in a particular discourse in a particular context, which are referred to as discursive values, recontextualization describes the process of adapting these discursive values which have been assigned to the tokens in the interlocutor’s construal of a prior context either in an ongoing interaction or in some prior interaction to the constraints and requirements of different contextualization processes. Decontextualization, by contrast, describes the process whereby an indexical token is extracted from a particular context and assigned a generalized discursive value in a generalized context, which closely approximates natural meaning. The contextualization of conversational contributions is informed by a relational conceptualization of context which relates interlocutors, their contributions, discourse and context, thereby paving the ground for the production and interpretation of further contributions, indicating how the interaction is intended to proceed. Thus, contextualization and sequentiality are connected intrinsically. For this reason, a contextualization-based approach to interaction in general and to intercultural interaction in particular needs to be based on the premise not only that discourse and its constitutive parts, conversational contributions, come in with the presumption of being more or less coherent, but also that meaning-making processes and contextualization are interdependent on the construal of discourse coherence. Both are not identical, but supplementary: while meaning-making processes and contextualization of conversational contributions are local and bottom-up, focusing on individual contributions and their constitutive parts, the construal of discourse coherence is both bottom-up and top-down, relating the contextualization and possibly recontextualization of conversational contributions to a larger whole. For the 149 150 A N I TA F E T Z E R exchange between Ann and Bob analyzed above, this means that the invitation has been a constitutive part of a larger interaction, such as a workrelated meeting in Ann’s office, or a casual visit at Ann’s home. The social role of Ann as a host is part of the social context of the interaction and triggers the impoliteness-colored implicature of Ann not being a good host. In interaction in general and in intercultural interaction in particular, discourse is a constitutive part of context, and context is a constitutive part of discourse. Conceiving of context not as an external constraint on communicative action, but rather as an interlocutor’s construal which is negotiated in interaction, and conceiving of discourse not simply as communicative action but rather as macro communicative action in context, which is composed of micro communicative acts, assign discourse and thus context embedded in discourse and embedding discourse the status of rational, intentional, conscious, and cooperative communicative action, which is contextualized locally to vouchsafe local discourse coherence and globally to vouchsafe global discourse coherence. 6.2.1.3 Entextualization Contextualization describes the process of assigning discursive values to indexical tokens in discourse in context; recontextualization describes the process of adapting discursive values which have been assigned to tokens in a prior context to the constraints and requirements of a different context, and decontextualization describes the process whereby an indexical token is extracted from a particular context and assigned a generalized discursive value approximating conventional meaning. Entextualization4 accounts for meaning-making processes in context, adopting a linguisticrealization perspective to interlocutors’ communicative intentions. It thus differs from contextualization and recontextualization with its focus on interlocutors’ inferencing. For the Ann Bob exchange, this means that A1 entextualizes the communicative act of invitation with conventionalized indirectness, and that B1 entextualizes the communicative act of acceptance with an Irish-English variant which in the context of an intercultural interaction carries the risk of mis-contextualization, as had been the case. He could have also opted for the conventional acceptance “yes, please.” Entextualization refers to an interlocutor’s linguistic realization of discourse in general and thus to its production, and it refers to the encoding of indexical tokens and their contextual embeddedness in discourse: 4 The use of “entextualisation” in this chapter shares Park and Bucholtz’s (2009: 489) conceptualization of entextualization in terms of “conditions inherent in the transposition of discourse from one context into another.” By additionally considering entextualization in local contexts, it goes beyond their more global perspective. This is the case when interlocutors assign an unbounded referential domain, for instance “here,” the status of a bounded referential domain, for instance “here in London.” It also applies to unbounded events, for instance, the embodied act of speaking, or to its particularization as well as to communicative action, for instance, the linguistic realization of requests and acceptances. Role of Context “I link processes of entextualization to the notion of mediation . . . involving the encoding, transfer, and decoding/interpretation of meaning” (Jaffe 2009: 573). A classic example of entextualization is quotation. For the communicative act of quotation to be felicitous, the interlocutor who performs the act of quoting entextualizes an originally embodied act of speaking and its force, and metarepresents it with a verb of communication. Other contextual coordinates, such as temporal, local, and discursive embeddedness of the quoted material may also need to be entextualized and metarepresented in the quoting discourse (see Fetzer 2020). Contextualization, recontextualization, and entextualization allow for an account of meaning-making processes in context and in discourse which goes beyond the production of context-independent sentences or context-based utterances. The both relational and process-oriented framework allows us to shift the traditional focus on the production format as the sole creator of meaning to analyzing the role of the reception format in natural-language communication in general and to intercultural interactions in particular. It provides a frame of reference which allows for the analysis of natural-language communication as a truly dyadic endeavor (Linell 1998, 2009) and a joint undertaking (Clark 1996). An analysis of interactions be they intra- or intercultural based on contextualization, recontextualization, decontextualization, and entextualization provides new insights into the interlocutors’ meaning-making process with respect to their linguistic realizations in interaction, as well as with respect to understanding. It shifts the focus from the investigation of products to the negotiation of meaning in context and to reaching some kind of shared product. From a theoretical perspective on intercultural pragmatics, contextualization and entextualization in intercultural interaction seem to rely more on conventional meaning, as has been the case with Ann’s use of conventionalized indirectness for entextualizing her invitation and for the conventional-meaning-based contextualization of Bob’s response, while their intra-cultural counterparts would allow for more variation, as has been the case with Bob’s entextualization of his acceptance. Thus, joint undertakings and joint constructions seem to be done differently in intercultural pragmatics. 6.2.1.4 Individual Contexts and Subjective Context Interlocutors’ construals of context are local and tend to focus on the local discourse context. Adopting a bird’s-eye perspective on the world rather than on discourse and its participants, Penco (1999) transcends the interlocutor-centered outlook on context, differentiating between subjective context and individual context. The former refers to a subjective, namely, cognitive (or epistemic), representation of the world, and the latter refers to an individual representation of the world. Both may be identical but need not be. This is because subjective context refers to an individual set of beliefs, which may belong to an individual participant or a 151 152 A N I TA F E T Z E R community, and individual context refers to an individual representation of the world, which is functionally synonymous with the set of beliefs of an individual interlocutor, which may be quite idiosyncratic. The differentiation between subjective context and individual context is of great importance to the analysis of interlocutor-centered construals of context, as it allows for an explicit distinction between the socio-cognitive construal of individual context anchored to a single interlocutor, such as Ann’s what-is-said context construal with her not having been a good host based on B1 “I thought you’d never ask” intended as an entextualized acceptance, and the interlocutors’ construal of in Penco’s terms subjective context, which is negotiated by the interlocutors in and through the process of communication and thus shared to some extent by the interlocutors, for instance Bob’s repair by explicating his background assumptions and entextualizing them accordingly resulting in a shared context construction of invitation and acceptance. In intercultural pragmatics, individual contexts may diverge to an even larger extent, and that is probably one of the reasons that intercultural negotiation-of-meaning sequences, in which contextualization and entextualization are an object of talk, are generally more explicit and lengthier as regards the use of referential expressions, referential domains, and generalized and particularized discursive values of the constitutive parts of a conversational contribution, if not of the entire contribution. From a language-usage perspective, interlocutors construe individual contexts in their interactions, and they co-construct context through their interaction. By construing local contexts against the background of prior conversational contributions, they co-construct local context for upcoming contributions: a conversational contribution relies upon the existing context for its contextualization and entextualization, and it is an event that shapes a new context for the communicative action that will follow. This is because conversational contributions contain context and are at the same time contained in context. The importation of context and its invocation in interaction are complementary. Context importation can be felicitous only if the addressees take up the interlocutor-intended importation of context and invoke the intended context. To account for the dynamics of interaction, the universal of contextualization and its manifestation in recontextualization, decontextualization, and entextualization may serve as valuable tools. 6.2.2 Analyst’s Context The relational nature of context as well as its complexity and multilayeredness have been examined from the interlocutors’ perspectives: context has been analyzed as a product of language use, as interactionally negotiated and co-constructed, and as imported and invoked. This section changes the perspective, adopting an analyst’s perspective. It discusses Role of Context typologies of context based on the question of what that thing called context contains. From language-use and interactional-sociolinguistic perspectives, context contains linguistic material referred to as linguistic context (or co- text). Linguistic context comprises linguistic constructions (or parts) embedded in adjacent constructions (or further parts), composing a whole clause, sentence, utterance, or text. Social and sociocultural material is referred to as social and sociocultural context. Both constitute the context of an interaction and are defined by deducting linguistic context and cognitive context from a holistic conception of context. Constituents of social context are, for instance, interlocutors and other participants, and their social identities brought into the discourse and brought out in the discourse, the immediate concrete, physical surroundings, and institutional domains. Sociocultural context represents a particularization of social context, colored by culture-specific variables, for instance culture- and subculture-specific conceptualizations of age, gender, and ethnicity.5 Cognitive material is referred to as cognitive context. Cognitive context is the foundation on which inference and other forms of reasoning are based, and thus is indispensable for contextualization, recontextualization, decontextualization, and entextualization. 6.2.2.1 Linguistic Context Linguistic context comprises the actual entextualization of the interlocutors’ communicative intentions in interaction. It refers to the actual linguistic surface available to all interlocutors involved in intra- and intercultural interactions. As regards the example discussed above, its linguistic context comprises the following parts: (1) Would you like a cup of tea; (2) I thought you’d never ask; (3) Oh I did not mean to say that you were impolite. It’s an Irish saying of “yes please.” The linguistic context contains the following meta-signals: the pure quotation “yes please” signaled with appropriate pauses referring to (2), the discourse marker “oh” with a rising intonation contour in (3), the rising intonation contour of the question in (1), and the falling contour for (2). From a parts-whole perspective, linguistic context (or co-text; cf. de Beaugrande and Dressler 1981; Janney 2002; Voltolini 2021) denotes a relational construct composed of local and not-so-local adjacency relations. The connectedness among linguistic parts constituting a linguistic whole is looked upon analogously to Searle’s (1969) conception of regulative rules and constitutive rules with the rule-governed realization of linguistic constructions constrained by the rules of grammar, and the production and interpretation of communicative acts constrained by felicity conditions. 5 The differentiation between social context and sociocultural context is based on logical typing and refers to theoretical constructs only. The ordering does not imply any kind of “homomorphism of the different cultural contexts,” as queried by one of the reviewers. 153 154 A N I TA F E T Z E R The contextualization and entextualization of conversational contributions is based on the constitutive parts of language: syntax, morphology, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics. While syntax is composed of structural units for instance, constituents in traditional grammar, phrases in functional grammar and generative grammar, groups in systemic functional grammar, or constructions in construction grammar it is the linear ordering of the individual parts within a hierarchically structured sequence which constitutes their grammatical function. The adverb really, for instance, realizes the grammatical function of a sentence adverbial with wide scope if positioned initially or finally, as in “Really, Ann is a polite person.” If the adverb really is positioned medially, it is assigned the grammatical function of the adverbial of subjunct with narrow scope, as in “Ann is a really polite person.” Or, the proper noun Bob can realize the grammatical function of object in “Ann criticized Bob,” and it can realize the grammatical function of subject in “Bob criticized Ann.” Thus, it is not the linguistic construction as such, which is assigned a grammatical function. Rather, it is the positioning of a linguistic construction within a hierarchically structured sequence, which assigns it a grammatical function.6 Semantics has been traditionally defined as the investigation of contextindependent meaning while pragmatics has been promoted as the investigation of context-dependent meaning. From a parts-whole perspective, truth-conditional semantics examines the meaning of a whole proposition by identifying its constitutive parts of reference and predication. Whenever all of the constitutive parts are true, the meaning of the whole proposition is true. In that frame of reference, the propositions Peter does not do anything to get out of that job and Peter does not do nothing to get out of that job do not share the same truth conditions and therefore are not identical. From a pragmatics-based outlook, however, they may share the same communicative status in interaction, for instance, as variants of the entextualization of the communicative act of complaint. The following section presents cognitive context which is indispensable for contextualization, recontextualization, decontextualization, and entextualization. 6.2.2.2 Cognitive Context Cognitive context comprises representations of common ground which has been further differentiated into discourse common ground and interlocutor-specific representations of discourse common ground, that is individual discourse common ground and collective discourse common ground. The former captures the process of an individual’s processing of discourse as regards contextualization and recontextualization, and the 6 Word formation processes and inflection in morphology, and assimilation, full and reduced forms, and stress and intonation in phonology may be analyzed along similar lines (see Fetzer 2017). Role of Context latter captures the negotiated and ratified outcome of the individual interlocutors’ processing of discourse (Fetzer 2007a). Individual and collective discourse common grounds are generally not identical, but they need to overlap for communication to be felicitous. Common ground has also been distinguished with respect to core common ground and emergent common ground (Kecskes 2014). Thus, common ground is presupposed and given but at the same time also co-constructed and dynamic. Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986) differentiates between cognitive environment and cognitive context: the former refers to a set of facts, while the latter refers to a set of premises, namely, true or possibly true mental representations. Constitutive elements of cognitive context are mental representations, propositions, contextual assumptions, which may vary in strength, and factual assumptions. Assumptions are read, written, and deleted, and contextual implications are raised in strength, lowered in strength, or erased from memory. Since cognitive contexts are anchored to an individual but are also required for a cognitively based outlook on communication, they must contain assumptions about mutual cognitive environments. Thus, cognitive context is not only defined by representations but also by metarepresentations. To describe multilayered cognitive context, Relevance Theory employs the onion metaphor and represents context as an onion with its constitutive layers. What is of importance for language processing and inferencing is the premise that the order of inclusion corresponds to the order of accessibility. This ensures that both processes are ordered, and that their order is based on metarepresentations, meta-layers, and metacontexts. Cognitive context is utilized for inference and other forms of reasoning.7 It is indispensable to the contextualization, recontextualization, and decontextualization, as well as to the entextualization of interlocutors’ communicative intentions, and to their use of language and of other semiotic codes, as has been discussed in the analysis of the intercultural exchange between Ann and Bob. Givón describes one of the functions of cognitive context as follows: First, we noted that context is not an objective entity but rather a mental construct, the construed relevant ground vis-à-vis which tokens of experience achieve relatively stable mental representation as salient figures. Whatever stability mental representations possess is, in large measure, due to the classification of tokens of experience into generic categories or types. (Givón 2005: 91) What is important for the investigation of cognitive context is the differentiation between types of experience in the Ann Bob exchange the entextualization of the communicative act of invitation and its 7 Nyan (2016) approaches context construction within an adaptive approach. 155 156 A N I TA F E T Z E R acceptance or rejection and tokens of experience, in our case the entextualized “I thought you’d never ask,” which could not be allocated to the corresponding type when contextualized online. Types of experience are of prime relevance to contextualization, recontextualization, decontextualization, and entextualization, while tokens of experience are connected to practical reasoning and abduction, in and through which tokens are categorized into types. Contexts are not objective or deterministic constraints of society or culture, but individual and subjective interlocutor construals, which are negotiated in interactions and assigned the status of social constructs if ratified in the interaction. In Givón’s terms, the negotiation of context construal is based on their classification as types and tokens. This differentiation is not only of relevance to the micro domain of interaction. It has been expanded to the meso domain of genre, channeling and filtering the contextualization and entextualization conversational contributions, as is going to be examined in Section 6.2.2.4. Cognitive context is a structured and multilayered whole, which is indispensable for contextualization, recontextualization, decontextualization, and entextualization. The nature of the connectedness between its constitutive layers and subsystems is metacommunicative and metasystemic. 6.2.2.3 Social Context and Sociocultural Context Social context goes beyond linguistic context and cognitive context and is generally seen as “external” to the interlocutors’ interaction, for instance, the location, most likely a room, in the Ann Bob exchange. This also holds for sociocultural context, which is a particularization of social context colored by cultural variables, e.g. mono- and polychronic conceptualizations of time, or mono- and multidimensional conceptualizations of interlocutors. However, this does not mean that social and sociocultural context are not referred to in the interaction and thus imported and entextualized, as is the case with the indexicals here, now, or I, respectively “here on Jupiter,” “now at this very moment at 5.11 pm here in Sheffield,” or “I as Foreign Secretary.” In interaction studies, the categories of speaker, hearer, and audience are no longer seen as analytic primes, since they denote interactional categories. They have been refined by Goffman (1981) and Levinson (1988) with respect to their footing in the participation framework. In an actual speech situation, however, the interlocutors and their interactional roles do more than simply contextualize and entextualize conversational contributions. In a sociocultural context, they subcategorize into social roles and their gendered and ethnic identities, to name but the most prominent ones. In institutional communication, the interlocutors’ institutional roles embody institutional power, as is reflected in their contextdependent rights and obligations. Role of Context Social and socio-cognitive approaches to context are ethnomethodological conversation analysis and interactional linguistics. They conceive context as an interactional achievement and are based on the premise of indexicality of social action and thus on context as negotiated and coconstructed: “[I]n an interaction’s moment-to-moment development, the parties, singly and together, select and display in their conduct which of the indefinitely many aspects of context they are making relevant, or are invoking, for the immediate moment” (Schegloff 1987: 219). Here, common context is synonymous with sociocultural context, whose relevance is spelled out by Hanks (1996: 235) as follows: Hence it is not that people must share a grammar, but that they must share, to a degree, ways of orienting themselves in social context. This kind of sharing partial, orientational, and socially distributed may be attributed to the habitus, or relatively stable schemes of perception to which actors are inculcated. Another culture-dependent outlook on communication has been promoted by ethnography of communication, in particular by the concept of a speaking grid (Hymes 1974). Hymes systematizes the embeddedness of communication with respect to its constitutive components of situation (the physical setting and the psychological scene), participants (speaker, hearer, and audience, and their statuses in the participation framework), ends (the goal and the purpose of the speech event from a sociocultural viewpoint), act sequence (how something is said with regard to message form and what is said with regard to message content), key (mock or serious), instrumentalities (channels, i.e. spoken, written, email, multimodal), norms of interpretation and forms of speech (vernacular, dialect, standard), and genre. The concept of a speaking grid has been refined by Gumperz (1992), who explicitly connects the cognitive operation of inference with the sociocultural activity of conversation. His conception of conversational inference represents a context-bound process of interpretation in which others’ intentions are assessed, and in which self illustrates their understanding and comprehension through their response. Because of its cultural base, the meaning that emerges in conversation is different for participants if they are not members of the same speech community. Interactional sociolinguistics bridges the gap between linguistic context on the one hand, and sociocultural and social contexts on the other, and between linguistic, social, and sociocultural contexts on the one hand, and cognitive context on the other. This is mainly due to conceiving speech activities (or discourse genres) as some kind of blueprint which embeds them in local context while at the same time delimiting them from more global context. 157 158 A N I TA F E T Z E R 6.2.2.4 Context as Token and Context as Type Givón (2005) differentiates between tokens of experience and more stable types of experience. This allows him to account not only for the ongoing process of language processing in context and for the administration of common ground, but also for connecting the here and now of an interaction with prior experience and memory. That is to say, interlocutors administer incoming contributions by processing them as tokens of experience in interactional-sociolinguistic terms, by contextualizing contributions and by classifying them into already existing or newly construed types of experience. For the Ann Bob exchange this means that Ann cannot relate Bob’s entextualization of acceptance with the corresponding type she has stored in her memory, and she does not know how to connect Bob’s response with other rejection-types stored in her memory, and that is why she initiates a negotiation-of-meaning sequence. A similar kind of reasoning as regards the connectedness between token of experience and type of experience is found in the interactional-sociolinguistic premise of indexicality of communicative action. Here, it is not only linguistic expressions, whose resolution depends on context, but rather the communicative-action-as-a-whole. This does, of course, also hold for the constitutive parts of the communicative action, but it is the communication action-as-a-whole, and its embeddedness in a discourse genre, which constrains contextualization and meaning-making processes. From this perspective, context is no longer solely a social phenomenon but rather a dynamic socio-cognitive construct which is negotiated in interaction. The negotiation of a jointly constructed representation of context feeds on the contextualization of communicative action and its constitutive parts, for instance, participants, local and temporal embeddedness in the micro and macro domains which are related in a dialectical manner. Discourse genre and other larger units function as metasystems for conversational contributions: Rather, genres are types. But they are types in a rather peculiar way. Genres do not specify the lexicogrammatical resources of word, phrase, clause, and so on. Instead, they specify the typical ways in which these are combined and deployed so as to enact the typical semiotic action formations of a given community. (Thibault 2003:44) Discourse genres are not only important because of their status as metasystems; they also connect individual action with collective goals (Alexander and Giesen 1987), thus bridging the gap between monolithic interlocutors and their roles and functions in interaction. To capture the dynamics of context, however, its conceptualization would need to go beyond a simple description or classification of various types of context. It would explicitly need to account for the administration Role of Context of context as regards the updating of incoming and outgoing contextual information, which may include restructuring operations or deletions. 6.3 Conclusions: Discourse as Context, and Context as Discourse Context has been described as a dynamic and relational construct which is both process and product. It denotes an interactional achievement from the interlocutors’ perspectives in intra- and in intercultural pragmatics. Context is related intrinsically to the interlocutors’ contextualization, recontextualization, and decontextualization of conversational contributions and their constitutive parts in interactions. It is related intrinsically to the entextualization of interlocutors’ communicative intentions in conversational contributions. This holds for the local domain of discourse as well as on the more global level with regard to their embeddedness in discourse genre. Meaningmaking processes are interdependent on the contextualization of contributions and are constrained by contextualization conventions, which diverge for members of different speech communities. Pragmatics has analyzed communicative action as X counts as Y in context C (see Fetzer 2021) and the construal of context as X is contextualized as Y in the construal of context C. Discourse pragmatics has expanded the frame of reference and contextualized interlocutors doing things with words as X may count as Y in discourse D in context C, and the construal of context as X may count as Y in discourse D in the construal of context C. From an intracultural-pragmatics perspective, interlocutors generally undertake similar meaning-making processes and construe similar kinds of context. For interlocutors from different speech communities, however, meaning-making processes and construal of context will differ. Not only may contextualization conventions differ with respect to different degrees of explicitness and the number of metacommunicative devices employed to guide the addressees in their construal of context, but also the interactional organization of sequentiality in discourse genre will differ with respect to indicating possible brackets and boundaries. 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Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 141 152. 163 7 (Mis/Non) Understanding in Intercultural Interactions Jagdish Kaur 7.1 Introduction Intercultural interactions are increasingly becoming the norm as speakers of diverse first languages and cultures find themselves needing to communicate with one another both in personal and in professional domains for any number of reasons. Communication, intercultural or otherwise, presupposes some degree of shared or mutual understanding between speakers. According to Schegloff, “talk in interaction is built for understanding, and on the whole effortless understanding” (1987: 202) when speakers are members of the same speech community. Conversely, speakers of different first language and cultural backgrounds are expected to encounter difficulties in understanding one another due to the absence of shared knowledge, experiences, norms, communicative styles, and the like. As scholars adopting a “problems approach” to intercultural communication state, “differences in language and culture quite naturally lead to communication difficulties” (Weigand 1999: 764) as “people with entirely different backgrounds are unable to understand one another accurately” (Samovar and Porter 1991: 21). The risk of misunderstanding and miscommunication is said to be greater as speakers face difficulty in drawing inferences from what their interlocutors say given the absence of shared linguacultural backgrounds (e.g. Thomas 1983; Gass and Varonis 1991; Scollon and Scollon 1995). Early research that highlighted the difference principle as central to the study of intercultural communication, whether from a culturalanthropological perspective, an interactional-sociolinguistic perspective, or a cross-cultural pragmatic perspective, has been criticized for overemphasizing the causal role of cultural difference in misunderstanding (Sarangi 1994; Koole and ten Thije 2001; ten Thije 2006). To counter “analytic stereotyping of intercultural encounters,” Sarangi (1994: 413) Understanding in Intercultural Interactions advocates a discourse-analytic approach to the study of intercultural interactions that allows the analyst to go beyond cultural differences to consider the role of the social and institutional contexts in miscommunication. Additionally, there has been a shift in research focus from intercultural misunderstanding to intercultural understanding in recent years as reflected, for example, in the contributions to the edited volume Beyond Misunderstanding (Buhrig and ten Thije 2006); the contributors illustrate how participants in interaction in a range of contexts and settings utilize various linguistic means to arrive at mutual understanding. Similarly, research in intercultural pragmatics is concerned with explicating how speakers of different cultures and first language backgrounds use a common language to achieve communicative success (Kecskes 2018). In this regard, studies on the pragmatics of English as a Lingua Franca (henceforth ELF) provide empirical evidence of how speakers of diverse first languages are able to effectively use English as a common language to achieve their communicative goals not only in casual or informal conversations but also in high-stakes encounters in academic, business, and other professional settings (for a review see Seidlhofer 2011; Mauranen 2012, 2018; Cogo 2015). The present contribution addresses the topic of (mis/ non)understanding in intercultural interactions from an ELF perspective given the substantial research conducted on the subject in the field. In the next section, the concept of “understanding” in interaction and related terms are examined, followed by a review of findings from relevant ELF studies. 7.2 Defining Understanding, Misunderstanding, and Non-understanding “Understanding” in interaction is conceptualized differently depending on the approach or perspective adopted. From a conventional cognitive perspective, understanding is “an unobservable private mental event” (Taylor 1986: 179) that occurs when the hearer or recipient is able to attribute meaning to an utterance or determine the speaker’s intention behind the utterance. Taylor (1986) explains that this conceptualization of understanding is associated with a telementational view of communication and places the duty of understanding squarely on the hearer. Conversely, within more recent interactional perspectives (e.g. ethnomethodology and conversation analysis), understanding is conceived of as “a collective achievement, publicly displayed and interactively oriented to within the production and monitoring of action” (Mondada 2011: 542; Robles 2017); it is this conceptualization of understanding that informs the present chapter. Vendler categorizes understanding as “an achievement verb” (1994: 14; see also Koschmann 2011) and suggests that the phrase “trying to 165 166 JAGDISH KAUR understand” conveys the idea of understanding as a process that requires effort but is success-oriented. Achieving understanding is neither solely attributed to the speaker nor the hearer; rather, it is a joint enterprise that both the speaker and the hearer engage in; while the hearer has a duty to understand, the speaker is equally expected to make himself/herself understood (Dascal and Berenstein 1987). The significance of interaction in achieving understanding is highlighted by Kurhila (2001) who affirms that it is in and through interaction that participants establish mutual understanding; using various linguistic and nonlinguistic means, speakers collaborate and negotiate understanding on a turn-by-turn basis to arrive at shared understanding. Weigand asserts that understanding is in fact always a case of “coming to an understanding” (1999; see also Bazzanella and Damiano 1999) as participants interactively co-create meaning in an ongoing manner. Bremer et al. (1996: 12) also propose the notion of “understanding as a continuum” with total or near-total understanding on the one end and the absence of understanding on the other. This view of understanding permits varying degrees of understanding and nonunderstanding in interaction. The perspective of understanding as interactional achievement, which underlies the conversation analysis (CA) approach, conceives of understanding as a locally accomplished matter that results from collaboration and negotiation between participants in interaction. The sequential organization of talk allows participants to display their understanding of each other’s contributions; specifically, the recipient displays her/his understanding of the speaker’s utterance by producing a relevant action in the next turn. This also allows the speaker to check on the understanding achieved by the recipient and to initiate or perform repair if there is evidence of mis/non-understanding so that intersubjective understanding is reestablished (Sidnell 2010; Mondada 2011; Robles 2017; Kaur 2021). Schegloff and Sacks describe the process of co-constructing and displaying understanding as follows: By an adjacently positioned second, a speaker can show that he understood what a prior aimed at, and that he is willing to go along with that. Also by virtue of the occurrence of an adjacently produced second, the doer of a first can see that what he intended was indeed understood, and that it was or was not accepted. (1973: 297 298) In other words, it is the adjacent positioning of turns and “next turn proof procedure” (Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998: 15) which forms the basis upon which mutual understanding is interactively constructed and which allows participants “to monitor each other’s understanding on a turn-byturn basis” (Wooffitt 2005: 33). As alluded to above, understanding is not always achieved in the first instance; communication not infrequently results in some degree of Understanding in Intercultural Interactions non-understanding or misunderstanding. According to Dascal, “a significant part of understanding speech has to do with misunderstanding” (1987: 442), which explains the purported ubiquity of misunderstanding in talk (Dascal 1999; House et al. 2003). While misunderstanding has been investigated with the aim of uncovering various aspects of the phenomenon (e.g. types, sources or triggers, consequences, and so on), more importantly perhaps is that the study of misunderstanding and nonunderstanding is able to shed light on how interaction works; Zaefferer puts it as follows: “if one wants to get insight into how a system works, it is more revealing to regard instances of small misfunctions than examples of perfect functioning” (1977: 329; see also Sarangi 1994). From an interactional perspective, misunderstanding and non-understanding are significant insofar as they reveal the segments of talk where the process of coming to an understanding is made public. The speakers’ moves to negotiate, and co-construct understanding, are made visible and analyzable particularly at those points or junctures in the interaction where shared understanding is at risk. While some scholars are inclined to use the term “misunderstanding” in a broad sense to encompass various problems of understanding, including partial/non-understanding as well as performance errors, it is possible to distinguish misunderstanding from non-understanding. Both represent different types of trouble with understanding, result in different outcomes for the recipient, and may elicit different reactions from the speaker. Nonunderstanding occurs when the recipient is unable to attribute meaning to a part or the whole of a speaker’s prior utterance, while misunderstanding happens when the recipient’s interpretation of the speaker’s utterance does not match the speaker’s meaning or intention (Bremer et al. 1996). In the case of non-understanding, the recipient, who is aware of her/his inability to comprehend, may choose to either let the problem pass (Firth 1996) or reveal the problem through various means including the use of non-specific indicators of trouble (e.g. what? or huh?) or more overt metacomments such as I don’t understand. Additionally, lack of uptake in the next turn may also point to a problem of non-understanding. Understanding and non-understanding are not polar opposites but rather represent a graded phenomenon which may be updated and transformed through negotiation between the participants in interaction. Extract (1) illustrates a case of non-understanding from an ELF small-group interaction in an academic setting; the participants, who are postgraduate students, are discussing their internship placements. (1) (from Kaur 2009: 86) 01 R: so do you think if I:: ask Faridah (0.7) can she help me about 02 the: (1.1) give support- supports if I:: (0.6) want to internship 03 (0.7) at the: embassy 167 168 JAGDISH KAUR 04 05 06 07 08 D: → R: D: → A: D: oh [sorry? [atwhere? embassy embassy it’s good D’s inability to recognize or comprehend R’s place reference (i.e. “embassy”) causes him to request a repetition of the item in question. D makes the problem public in line 4 when he uses a non-specific repair initiator in the form of “sorry” in questioning intonation. However, since the word “sorry” overlaps with a false start produced by R, D makes a second attempt to elicit a repetition by using the wh-question word for place (i.e. “where”) in line 6 which specifies the source of the trouble. This leads A to repeat the word “embassy” in the next turn which succeeds in resolving D’s initial non-understanding. Unlike non-understanding, a recipient who misunderstands is unaware of her/his misinterpretation of the speaker’s meaning. Bremer et al. regard misunderstanding as an “illusion of understanding” (1996: 41) as the recipient is likely to believe that s/he has understood the speaker when in fact the reverse is true. Similarly, Bazzanella and Damiano refer to misunderstanding as “a form of understanding” (1999: 817), as unlike nonunderstanding where there is the absence of understanding, in misunderstanding the recipient arrives at some semblance of understanding, albeit the wrong one. Overt misunderstandings are generally revealed in the next or a subsequent turn when the recipient produces a response which is not aligned with the speaker’s prior utterance. Extract (2), also from an ELF small-group conversation, illustrates a case of misunderstanding; while talking about the recreational activities available on a nearby island, W suggests going on a trip there. (2) (from Kaur 2011: 108) 01 W: so I wanted to: ask if anyone wants to go 02 S: → er during this week? 03 W: no:: next time 04 S: next time yeah W’s question is line 1 is underspecified; she omits information on when exactly she intends for the suggested trip to take place. S’s response in the next turn, which takes the form of a confirmation request, reveals the inference he has drawn with regard to when they would make the trip (i.e. the current week). W’s response in line 3 clears up S’s misunderstanding; while “next time” is equally vague and does not pinpoint the exact date of travel, it clarifies that she intends for the trip to take place at some point in the future and not in the current week. Understanding in Intercultural Interactions The two extracts above illustrate how overt misunderstanding and non-understanding differ in how they are revealed after the speaker’s turn and the recipient’s own level of awareness of the problem. The speaker’s response in third position may also vary according to the nature of the problem. Attempts to distinguish misunderstanding from non-understanding is not always a straightforward matter, however. Bremer et al. (1996) highlight the difficulties in this regard as some misunderstandings may in fact stem from partial or non-understanding of the speaker’s utterance. Determining the recipient’s degree of awareness of an understanding problem can also be somewhat challenging; while a confirmation request may bring to light a misunderstanding of the speaker’s meaning (e.g. line 2 in Extract 2), it equally reveals the recipient’s uncertainty of the understanding achieved, thus, pointing to some level of awareness of an understanding problem. The move by some scholars to label all understanding problems as “misunderstanding,” however, is equally problematic, as this can result in overstating the occurrence of misunderstanding in interaction; in such instances, claims made about the frequency of misunderstanding in certain types of interaction will need to be treated cautiously as communicative acts meant to request repetition as a result of partial understanding may also be labeled as misunderstanding. The approach to interaction analysis that relies on emic perspectives provides much-needed support for more accurate interpretations of spoken data; specifically, the participants’ orientations to problems of understanding and the ensuing process of negotiating meaning and coming to an understanding needs to be taken into account for a more nuanced description of understanding in intercultural interactions. In the next section, findings from ELF studies on the subject of (mis/non)understanding are discussed. 7.3 (Mis/Non)Understanding in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Interactions The past two decades have seen growing research interest in the use of English as a shared language in intercultural interactions. This development is unsurprising considering that globalization has led to greater interconnectedness worldwide and English has become a global medium of communication between people of different first language and cultural backgrounds (Seidlhofer 2011; Mauranen 2018). Researchers who investigate the pragmatics of ELF are keen to shed light on how participants of diverse linguacultural backgrounds are able to communicate effectively and achieve their communicative goals despite the variability, fluidity, and unpredictability associated with the use of a lingua franca (Firth 2009; Seidlhofer 2011; Cogo 2015; Cogo and House 2018; Kecskes 2019). Variability in the form and use of English within and across speakers 169 170 JAGDISH KAUR particularly is said to contribute to the “complexity of ELF” (Baird et al. 2014: 172) and can potentially impact participant understanding in interaction. Findings from various ELF studies to date, however, indicate that misunderstanding and non-understanding do not define ELF interactions; rather, it is the participants’ extensive use of pragmatic strategies to negotiate and co-construct understanding that stands out in such interactions. In an early study aimed at identifying features of ELF in casual conversations among international students at their hall of residence, Meierkord noted that the intercultural interactions were “characterized by cooperation rather than misunderstanding” (2000: 11). While dysfluencies in the form of cut-off utterances, pauses, restarts, and hesitation markers, as well as simultaneous speech, were common in her data, there was little evidence that these features contributed to misunderstanding. In addition to the increased use of various strategies (e.g. backchannels and collaborative utterance completions), Meierkord also attributed the lack of misunderstanding to the participants’ efforts at constructing shared communicative norms and practices that were distinct from the communicative behaviors associated with their respective linguacultural backgrounds. Similarly, House (2002) noted various speech dysfluencies, nonaligned simultaneous speech, and poorly managed turn-taking in a thirty-minute conversation among four university students of varied linguacultural backgrounds; despite the presence of pragmatic dysfluency, she noted the “paucity of misunderstandings” in her data, unlike “the many and varied misunderstandings found in previous analyses of other native-non-native talk” (2002: 251; see also Mustajoki 2017). House also found that her participants’ culture-specific communicative behavior had little consequence on their interactions in ELF. The aforementioned findings provide support for Firth’s (1996) earlier observation not only that intercultural interactions in ELF are meaningful and ordinary but that participants display “extraordinary ability to make sense in situ” (1996: 256) notwithstanding the presence of linguistic infelicities and pragmatic dysfluency, or perhaps as a result of it. Kaur (2009, 2010, 2012, 2017) has conducted extensive research to examine how participants in ELF interaction in an academic setting achieve mutual understanding and to identify the pragmatic strategies they use to negotiate and co-construct understanding. Using conversation analytic methods to analyze data comprising naturally occurring smallgroup discussions and conversations, she found communication breakdowns to be rare; misunderstandings and non-understandings that occur are addressed and worked through as a matter of course with minimal disruption to the progressivity of the talk. In a study that looked specifically at the sources of misunderstanding, Kaur (2011) found that many of the misunderstandings that occurred could be traced to ambiguity; as in intracultural communication (see, e.g., Schegloff 1987; Bazzanella and Damiano 1999), ambiguity in ELF communication stems from ambiguous Understanding in Intercultural Interactions semantics, problematic reference or lack of specificity. Not unlike Meierkord (2000) and House (2002), Kaur found no evidence of misunderstanding in her data that could be attributed to cultural difference; she explains that the participants’ “shared non-nativeness” (Hülmbauer 2009) in English may be cause for greater “concern with achieving mutual understanding in the lingua franca” (2011: 113) and this may downplay the salience of cultural differences. This study lends support to Mauranen’s (2006) findings on the sources of misunderstanding in ELF interaction. Mauranen, who also observed few misunderstandings in her ELF data from an academic setting, had this to say: I found no clear evidence of culture-based comprehension problems, at least not in the traditional sense of “national culture.” Apart from the most surface-level misunderstandings concerning the linguistic meaning of items, the other types are not specific to lingua franca communication, but likely to occur elsewhere independently of the speakers’ native languages. (2006: 144) In a more recent study, Pietikäinen (2018a) examined the occurrence of misunderstanding in the conversations of seven intercultural couples using ELF. While couples in an intimate relationship are expected to have built common ground and established shared communicative practices, their familiarity with one another means that they are apt to more openly indicate understanding difficulties which might otherwise be allowed to pass in other types of ELF interactions (cf. Firth 1996). Even so, Pietikäinen found that “ELF couples do not struggle with many misunderstandings” and those that occurred were mainly attributed to “vagueness” or “confusion over the reference point or frame of talk” (2018a: 208; see also Mauranen 2006; Kaur 2011). In the context of intercultural coupletalk, misunderstanding is more likely to stem from lack of explicitness due to an expectation of understanding (i.e. “common ground fallacy”) than from cultural difference. Thus, contrary to the conventional perspectives of intercultural communication, ELF studies that use naturally occurring spoken data reveal that such interactions are not in fact fraught with mis/ non-understanding and communication breakdown; problems of understanding that occur do not seem to have very different triggers from those that occur in intracultural interactions (e.g. ambiguity) and are “completely undisruptive in the progression of the interaction” (Pitzl 2005: 68). Pietikäinen’s (2018a) study, however, points to the need to pay closer attention to the influence of contextual factors (in her case the “stage of contact”) on intercultural understanding and misunderstanding (see also Pölzl and Seildhofer 2006). Given the aforementioned findings, Mustajoki set out to answer the following question: “Why is miscommunication more common in everyday life than in lingua franca conversation?” (2017: 55). Drawing 171 172 JAGDISH KAUR comparisons between speakers of the same language who know each other well and acquaintances who use a lingua franca, Mustajoki identifies “recipient design” as a key factor that contributes to fewer misunderstandings in the latter. Precisely because of the lack of commonalities between speakers of a lingua franca of different cultural backgrounds, there is greater awareness of the risk of mis/nonunderstanding and hence greater attention given to recipient design. The term “recipient design,” which has its origins in CA, is defined as “a multitude of respects in which the talk by a party in a conversation is constructed or designed in ways which display an orientation and sensitivity to the particular other(s) who are the co-participants” (Sacks et al. 1974: 727). Given the diversity of ELF contexts and the variability in English use, speakers strive to produce recipient-designed talk that accommodates their interlocutors so as to effectively co-construct talk that is orderly, meaningful, and comprehensible. Speakers of ELF do this in large part by deploying a range of pragmatic strategies that facilitate understanding and contribute to communicative effectiveness. Below, ELF speakers’ use of pragmatic strategies are discussed in greater depth with the support of data extracts from relevant ELF studies. Numerous studies on ELF pragmatics have focused on the pragmatic strategies (used interchangeably with “communication strategies”) that speakers use to negotiate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of their communication in ELF in a range of settings and contexts (e.g. Mauranen 2006, 2007; Cogo 2009, 2010; Kaur 2009, 2010, 2012; 2017; Björkman 2011, 2014; Hynninen 2011; Matsumoto 2011, 2018a; Pietikäinen 2018a; Jafari 2021). Cogo and House identify this area of research as the “most developed in ELF pragmatics” (2017: 172). Pragmatic strategies are in essence communicative devices such as repetition, paraphrase, comprehension checks, code-switching, and word replacements that speakers in interaction use to facilitate understanding and/or to promote rapport and solidarity; the discussion will focus on the former, i.e, comprehension-enhancing strategies, as the use of these strategies are motivated by the need to understand and be understood. As stated previously, the heterogeneity of ELF speakers and the asymmetries present in ELF encounters (Björkman 2014) as well as the ensuing “hybridity, fluidity and variability” (Cogo 2012: 290) characteristic of ELF can pose a risk to achieving shared understanding. Mauranen asserts that participants in ELF communication “anticipate such difficulties, and attempt to offset this by working harder toward mutual understanding” (2006: 124). “Working harder” entails using suitable strategies “for negotiating and monitoring understanding, signaling non-understanding, and pre-empting potential communicative problems” (Cogo and Pitzl 2016: 343 344) which contributes to communicative effectiveness and the Understanding in Intercultural Interactions success of intercultural interactions in ELF. Participants not only conjointly resolve misunderstandings or non-understandings when they occur but more importantly preempt such problems from the outset (Mauranen 2006, 2007; Kaur 2009, 2012, 2017; Björkman 2014; Cogo and Pitzl 2016; Pietikäinen 2018a). As ELF studies generally point to the nonprevalence of misunderstanding in intercultural interaction, the focus of the discussion below will be on participants’ use of preemptive strategies that facilitate and enhance understanding in ELF interaction; the collaborative use of these strategies stands out as a key feature of ELF interaction (Cogo and House 2018). A notable multifunctional strategy found to be a strategy of choice to preempt understanding problems in ELF is the simple straightforward practice of repeating part or the whole of a prior utterance (see, e.g., Mauranen 2006; Lichtkoppler 2007; Cogo 2009; Kaur 2009, 2012; Björkman 2011, 2014). Repetition is used in a range of ways to preempt mis/non-understanding and is considered “a vital constituent of ELF talk” (Lichtkoppler 2007: 59). The speaker may choose to repeat some part of her/his ongoing or prior utterance (i.e. same-speaker repetition) to reinforce and enhance recipient understanding. It may also be used by the recipient (i.e. other-speaker repetition) to elicit confirmation of a candidate understanding or further clarification when there is some uncertainty as to the speaker’s meaning. Confirmation of understanding may then be provided through a repetition of the segment of talk in question; a repetition can also serve to display or claim understanding at the end of a negotiation sequence. Extract (3) comes from a group-work discussion among university students of different linguacultural backgrounds at a technical university in Sweden. Björkman (2014) provides the extract to illustrate how key information is repeated to enhance mutual understanding. (3) (from Björkman 2014: 130) 01 S1: he said er higher surface area per volume er er er lets you increase the 02 → temperature it he said, er er er higher surface area per volume will er 03 → mean that you can increase the temperature 04 S3: yeah (but) it’s er higher er surface area per volume is we have smaller 05 droplets when you have a better mixing you have higher 06 S2: yeah 07 S1: → you can increase the temperature Björkman, who found repetition to be “prominent in the data in general” (2014: 130), argues that S1’s repetition of two key phrases, i.e., “higher surface area per volume” and “increase the temperature” (lines 1 to 3), is unlikely to be due to her/his lack of fluency in English given that S1 is able to reformulate “lets you” as “will mean that you can” in the same utterance. Clearly, the point that S1 is trying to make in this discussion hinges on the aforementioned expressions, which explains 173 174 JAGDISH KAUR the recycling of these two segments of the utterance. S3 in the next turn repeats the first segment “higher surface area per volume” which s/he then expands in order to clarify meaning. S1, in line 7, completes S3’s utterance by yet again repeating the second segment “increase the temperature.” Kaur (2012: 603) explains that repetition of key words or phrases “allows the speaker to foreground and give prominence to those items considered central in understanding” the message. In repeating these phrases, the speaker also provides redundancy, which reduces the density of the information being conveyed and can contribute to easing the recipient’s processing load and enhancing understanding. The extract demonstrates how participants in ELF interaction deploy repetition strategically to collaboratively and conjointly construct shared understanding. Same-speaker repetition that is designed to enhance recipient understanding can also take the form of parallel phrasing where a segment of talk is repeated with slight variation each time, which results in what appears like an enumerated listing of objects (Norrick 1987; Kaur 2012). In addition to providing redundant material, this kind of repetition also increases explicitness, which improves on the clarity of the speaker’s utterance. Extract (4) from a small-group discussion in an academic setting is an example of parallel phrasing (Kaur 2012); V and S are discussing the benefits of e-trade. (4) (from Kaur 2012: 600 601) 01 V: 02 S: ºuhhuhº 03 V: er distance is no longer a barrier, 04 05 S: V: → yeah distance is no longer an impede[ment 06 S: 07 V: → 08 S: ºuhhuhº= 09 V =you understand? because no matter where you are you’ll get the 10 wherever their target groups are: located it is no longer [yes it is no longer an obstruction, information. In trying to get across the idea that sellers and buyers are able to trade in spite of the distance separating them, V uses syntactic parallelism where syntactically identical utterances are produced which display variation in the choice of just one (synonymous) lexical item (see lines 3, 5, and 7). There is sufficient evidence in the extract that V’s use of this form of repetition is aimed at enhancing S’s understanding. First, in line 3, V replaces his use of the pro-term “it” (line 1) with its referent “distance.” Problematic reference is a potential source of misunderstanding as any inaccuracy on the part of the recipient in linking the pro-term with its referent may result in “an interpretive error” (Schegloff 1987). The move to self-interrupt in order to Understanding in Intercultural Interactions substitute the pro-term with its referent (i.e. lexical or word replacement) is in itself a preemptive strategy that seeks to raise explicitness and enhance communicative clarity (Kaur 2011). Second, V’s use of a comprehension check in line 9 (i.e. “you understand?”) following the parallel phrases constitutes an explicit move to elicit confirmation of understanding from S; it is also a preemptive strategy that is used to monitor and check on recipient understanding. V’s use of a combination of preemptive strategies word replacement, parallel phrasing, and comprehension check evidences his orientation toward enhancing clarity and facilitating recipient understanding. The extract also demonstrates how speakers in intercultural interaction in ELF do not take understanding for granted and as such put in “noticeable effort” (Mauranen 2006: 125) to secure shared understanding from the outset. In addition to same- and other-speaker repetition of prior talk, speakers in ELF interaction “engage in rephrasing their own speech to a considerable extent” (Mauranen 2006: 138). While rephrasing of prior talk may be motivated by various reasons, Mauranen asserts that the action is typically motivated by “a desire to improve clarity” (2007: 252), which contributes to enhanced understanding. The move to replace the pro-term “it” with its referent “distance” in Extract (4) above is an example of how rephrasing of form (or word replacement) can remove any obscurity with regard to the referent so that recipient understanding is secured. The example also demonstrates the speaker’s possible anticipation of difficulty in understanding that can arise from the use of a pro-term in ELF interaction where the threat of mis/non-understanding is heightened due to increased contextual diversity and variability in the form and use of English. Extract (5) illustrates another example of rephrasing that points to efforts at simplifying language in order to enhance understanding. In this extract from Björkman (2014), the participants, who are university students at a Swedish university, are discussing the costs involved in a project. (5) (from Björkman 2014: 130) 01 02 03 04 05 06 S2: S1: S2: S1: → S2: S1: the flow and so really like what he told us at the same time buy two yeah two (xx) two (xx) two, what did he say about the distance it will be double, I mean two times two two continuous (xx) yeah As Björkman explains, S1, in line 4, responds to a question S2 puts forward in the previous turn; although S1 uses the term “double” in the first instance, s/he promptly rephrases this term as “two times” following the discourse marker “I mean.” The move to rephrase 175 176 JAGDISH KAUR “double” with what may be considered a simpler term by virtue of it being more commonly used reflects S1’s efforts “to make the answer more explicit, to avoid the potential problem of the word ‘double’ not being registered by the other students” (2014: 130). In addition to simplifying the lexical item in question, S1 also employs a “rephrase marker” (Mauranen 2012: 184) to announce the rephrasing. Mauranen, who compared a corpus of spoken interaction in ELF with an English as a Native Language (ENL) corpus, notes the greater frequency with which rephrase markers are used in the former compared to the latter. She attributes this not only to the widespread occurrence of self- or same-speaker rephrasing in ELF interaction but also to “the tendency towards explication in ELF . . . which have shown ELF speakers striving for greater explicitness in search of mutual understanding” (Mauranen 2012: 184). Thus, even in the absence of any signs of difficulty in understanding, speakers in ELF interaction take preemptive measures to forestall such problems through the use of a strategy like rephrasing which is marked and announced clearly. In addition to same-speaker rephrasing, the recipient may also rephrase part or the whole of a speaker’s utterance in the next turn. Among others, the recipient’s move to rephrase the speaker’s prior talk may be motivated by a desire to check on the accuracy of a candidate understanding. This strategy is commonly used when the speaker’s utterance displays nonstandard formulations or is marked by dysfluencies or other speech perturbations; in such cases, making the understanding achieved public allows the speaker to detect and address any misunderstandings that may occur (Kaur 2010). Extract (6) from Lichtkoppler (2007) comes from a conversation between a Japanese exchange student (S1) and an Austrian accommodation officer (S2). (6) (from Lichtkoppler 2007: 56) 01 S1: erm (.) is it possible (.) 02 S2: Mhm 03 S1: to move before one or or two da:ys because 04 S2: → earlier. 05 S1: yeah. From a native-speaker perspective, S1’s utterance in line 3 can be said to display some “nonstandard” use of English. While nonstandard use of English generally does not pose a problem to understanding (Seidlhofe 2011; Mauranen 2012), S2 rephrases “before one or two days” as “earlier” in the next turn (line 4). Lichtkoppler explains that such a move ensures that “any ambiguities can be immediately ruled out” (2007: 56), as it provides the speaker the opportunity to verify the understanding arrived at, which S1 does in line 5. Understanding in Intercultural Interactions Other-speaker rephrasing constitutes a “checking mechanism” (Kaur 2010: 202) that allows the recipient to monitor their understanding of the unfolding talk and in this way preempts an episode of mis/ non-understanding. While the use of pragmatic strategies like repetition and rephrasing in ELF interaction has been widely studied, participants in fact deploy a much wider range of strategies to raise explicitness and improve on the clarity of their speech as a means of preempting trouble in understanding. Mauranen (2007), for example, observed how participants who use ELF in an academic setting front the topic as a way of orientating the listener to a topic or referent change. This strategy, which she terms “topic negotiation” (also referred to as left-topic dislocation), follows this structure: (Demonstrative +) noun phrase + coreferential subject pronoun (e.g. The + noun phrase + he/she/it/they) (2007: 254). The following examples from Mauranen illustrate participants’ use of topic negotiation: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) Estonia and Latvia they have this problem with Russian minority but people, peasants, they fought for the Swedish king for when these kind of kidneys they are put into an adult patient so these differences they are important but anyway if at this point (2007: 254 255) By using a noun phrase to first introduce a topic and then immediately following this with a subject pronoun that reinforces the topic in question, the speaker is able “to ensure that interlocutors have the same topic in mind before going on” (Mauranen 2007: 253). Mauranen explains that in an ELF context, which is characterized by a higher degree of unpredictability and variability, negotiating topic in the manner illustrated above makes the topic or referent change explicit and in this way prevents the occurrence of mis/nonunderstanding. These speakers seem to display greater concern with achieving shared understanding than with grammatical correctness. Kaur (2017) also found that speakers in ELF interaction may selfinterrupt to insert a parenthetical remark in their ongoing utterance that exemplifies, describes, defines, compares, or contrasts a particular point as a means of increasing the clarity of their speech. The use of the parenthetical remark is motivated by a desire to make meaning clear by providing additional information. Extract (7), which comes from international students’ discussion of internship placements, illustrates a case of the speaker providing examples to clarify meaning in a parenthetical remark. 177 178 JAGDISH KAUR (7) (Kaur 2017: 39) 01 S: because AEI wants to know (0.6) er how we arrange for internship 02 → and also (1.1) maybe traveling cost, the airfare and how we: (0.6) 03 → erm (0.7) where I me I mean where we:: er (0.5) choose to sleep for 04 → accommodation they want to know because they have to (0.5) contact 05 06 us if if there is some emergency happening. R: uhhuh In line 1, S informs R that the institute at which they are enrolled will need to be informed of the arrangements they make for their internship. However, the nature of these arrangements, i.e. “how we arrange for internship,” is underspecified and as such, ambiguous. Perhaps sensing the apparent lack of clarity of the preceding segment of talk, S selfinterrupts to provide examples of the arrangement details they would need to furnish the institute, i.e. travel and accommodation details (lines 2 to 4). Within this move to clarify meaning, S provides a second level of exemplification when he gives an example of the kind of “traveling cost” that might be incurred, i.e. “airfare.” S then repeats an earlier segment, that is, “they want to know” after the parenthetical remark before explaining the reason behind the requirement. By combining the parenthetical, comprising two levels of exemplification, with the repetition, the speaker provides both additional information and redundancy. Kaur explains that these strategies represent the speaker’s “attempt to reduce the need for their interlocutors to make inferences . . . and in this way may improve the chances of their message being understood” (2017: 42). 7.4 Significance of ELF Research Findings The data extracts reproduced above reveal how speakers in intercultural interaction who use ELF achieve mutual understanding. As observed by ELF scholars like House (2002), Mauranen (2006, 2007), Kaur (2009, 2012, 2017), and Pietikäinen (2018a), mis/non-understanding is not a prevalent feature of intercultural interaction in ELF “because speakers resort precisely to the pre-emptive and negotiating strategies” (Cogo and House 2018: 221) detailed above. While speakers are obviously aware of the linguacultural differences present and the lack of common ground, they do not appear to problematicize these differences; rather, they display keenness on achieving communicative goals through effective communication. As demonstrated above, understanding is an interactional achievement, which involves mutual monitoring of the unfolding talk and concerted efforts at increasing explicitness and enhancing clarity where and when necessary with the aid of various strategies. Mauranen asserts that “clarifying and explicating strategies are cooperative: participants have common interests to achieve communication and striving for clarity Understanding in Intercultural Interactions is a way of working towards this goal together” (2012: 167). The cooperativeness observed when participants negotiate understanding is in fact a feature central to ELF interactions (Firth 2009; Seidlhofer 2011). However, this is not to suggest that speakers in ELF contexts do not participate in talk that is disaffiliative or confrontational, as in other kinds of interactions (see, e.g., Jenks 2012; Kappa 2016); rather, cooperativeness and mutual support come to the fore when participants strive to avoid misunderstanding and non-understanding. The study of the role of pragmatic strategies in meaning negotiation and the co-construction of shared understanding in spoken interaction has become a major area of research in ELF pragmatics. The findings, as described above, are significant to the field of intercultural pragmatics, which shares a similar interest in the “explicit negotiation of meaning and development and use of trouble anticipating and avoidance strategies” (Kecskes 2014: 19). As previously stated, participants in intercultural interactions deploy various strategies to create redundancy (e.g. through repetition of prior talk), check on understanding, as well as increase explicitness and enhance communicative clarity. Mauranen in fact observed early on that “[W]hat appeared to characterize ELF was the considerable effort invested in preventing misunderstanding” (2006: 146), which seems to stand out as a key feature that distinguishes intercultural interaction from intracultural communication. In the case of the latter, ambiguity in language use is common as speakers are often economical in their use of language and rely much more on the context to interpret meaning (Piantadosi et al. 2012). As Piantadosi et al. (2012) explain, speakers in intracultural communication favor communicative efficiency over unambiguous language use when meaning can be gleaned from the context. Similarly, Mustajoki (2017) affirms that in everyday intracultural communication, speakers are inclined to use indirect speech acts on the basis of assumed common ground among the speakers; conversely, in lingua franca contexts, speakers tend to favor direct speech acts in order to be as clear as possible on account of the lack of common ground. As such, despite “a large number of non-standard expressions” (Mauranen 2018: 14) in ELF interaction, mis/non-understanding is uncommon; it is the attention to clarity through the use of various explicitness strategies that can be said to contribute in no small measure to the effectiveness of such interactions. While both ELF and intercultural pragmatics focus on “actual language use” (Kecskes 2014: 19), the insights obtained from ELF research on how speakers preempt understanding problems have practical application and relevance to language pedagogy, generally, and English Language Teaching (ELT), specifically. Given that speakers in real-world lingua franca settings rely heavily on various communication strategies to negotiate and co-create meaning, it is necessary to reexamine language 179 180 JAGDISH KAUR teaching approaches that overly emphasize native-speaker norms and usage. Increasing evidence points to the social and interactive nature of meaning-making, where adaptive and accommodative skills are crucial for effective communication; such skills include the adept use of various pragmatic strategies to enhance communicative clarity, as illustrated above. Vettorel (2018), who reviewed a variety of ELT textbooks and materials, however, found insufficient attention given to the formal teaching of communication strategies; if and when topicalized, learners were provided with formulaic expressions that tended to be overly formal and elaborate, and structured exercises that did not mirror actual use in interaction (e.g. filling out blanks, matching expression with function, etc.). To prepare learners of English or any other language for real-world communication, findings on how speakers actually use language in interaction must inform practice. In this regard, efforts must be made to increase learners’ awareness of the available strategies and how they may be effectively used in interaction to promote mutual understanding. In addition, learners must be provided with contextualized samples of strategiesin-use and opportunities to practice the use of these strategies in meaningful classroom activities. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the aforementioned, however (see Kaur 2019). 7.5 Conclusion and Future Directions in Research As long as there is a need for people of different linguacultural backgrounds to communicate whether face to face or mediated by an electronic device the need for a lingua franca will remain relevant. And as intercultural interaction continues to proliferate, how speakers make meaning and achieve shared understanding through a lingua franca will continue to be a subject of scholarly inquiry. While empirical research on the use of ELF over the past two decades has provided useful insights into the aforementioned, there is a need to expand the scope of study to include a wider range of settings. Much of the research on ELF to date has focused on intercultural interactions in both the business and the higher education contexts where participants display fairly high levels of proficiency in English. A better grasp of the language understandably allows the speaker to use a wider range of strategies, including rephrasing toward greater explicitness, using meta-discourse, or inserting parenthetical remarks to make meaning clear. While scholars like Björkman (2011) assert that all speakers regardless of proficiency are able to make use of pragmatic strategies, it is to be expected that the types of strategies used, and the effectiveness of the chosen strategies will vary according to the speaker’s level of proficiency. Sato et al., who examined the use of Understanding in Intercultural Interactions communication strategies by Japanese learners of English with lower proficiency levels, confirm that “certain CSs [communication strategies] may require higher linguistic proficiency” (2019: 15); their participants were inclined to use nonlinguistic resources such as gestures and onomatopoeia as well as code-switching instead of strategies that required more skilled use of the language. This finding presents a gap in ELF pragmatics research which has largely neglected the use of ELF outside business/professional and higher education settings. In order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of how speakers in intercultural interactions come to an understanding, it is imperative that the interactions of speakers of lower proficiency levels with limited experience in the language are given equal attention. Future research of ELF pragmatics that focuses on meaning negotiation and the preemption of mis/non-understanding should also investigate the speaker’s use of multimodal resources to more accurately describe the process of coming to an understanding. To date, the majority of ELF studies have been based on audio recordings of ELF interactions with few exceptions (cf. Pietikäinen 2018b; Sato et al. 2019). The insights obtained based purely on the analysis of the spoken word without recourse to the embodied resources speakers rely on will remain partial, as it neglects the fact that understanding results from the intricate interplay of both linguistic and nonlinguistic features of interaction. Particularly in the context of preempting mis/non-understanding, speakers rely equally on embodied displays of understanding or nonunderstanding, as they do on linguistic ones, which invariably influences the speaker’s action in the next turn. As Mondada explains, “understanding is constantly displayed in a multimodal way: participants manifest their current understanding in their gesture, gaze, facial expression, body position, etc.” (2011: 545; see also Hindmarsh et al. 2011). To date, several scholars have examined the use of nonlinguistic means such as silence and laughter in ELF interaction (e.g. Meierkord 1998; Pietikäinen 2018b; Matsumoto 2018b); Matsumoto (2018a) in particular observed her participants’ use of laughter to signal non-understanding and to indirectly invite repair. 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Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 763 785. Wooffitt, R. (2005). Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction. London: Sage. Zaefferer, D. (1977). Understanding misunderstanding: A proposal for an explanation of reading choices. Journal of Pragmatics, 1(4), 329 346. 8 Creativity and Idiomaticity in Intercultural Interactions Marie-Luise Pitzl 8.1 Introduction This chapter illustrates how creativity and idiomaticity manifest in naturally occurring interactions in intercultural contexts, focusing on contexts in which English is used as a lingua franca among multilingual speakers. Section 8.2 starts by providing theoretical perspectives on creativity and idiomaticity. It argues for the importance of metaphor and idiomaticity clines for conceiving linguistic and idiomatic creativity and discusses the role of co-text and context for interpreting metaphorical expressions. Sections 8.3 and 8.4 review empirical findings about individual instances of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity in intercultural encounters by drawing on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) data from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) and from published studies. Although idiomatic and metaphorical creativity is by no means unique to ELF communication, the examples of ELF data in these two sections illustrate the extremely broad range of forms (Section 8.3) and functions (Section 8.4) that idiomatic and metaphorical creativity can have in intercultural interaction, taking ELF interactions as a specific case in point. In doing so, existing research findings clearly demonstrate that idioms, metaphors, and their creative use are relevant to intercultural contexts because lingua franca speakers use these expressions and do not shy away from or avoid them. While examples in Sections 8.3 and 8.4 are individual occurrences of low-frequency expressions in different intercultural ELF interactions, Section 8.5 turns to a more transcultural perspective on such encounters by emphasizing the group and development dimension of such interactions. Aligning with ongoing work on Transient International Groups (Pitzl 2016, 2018b) and Transient Multilingual Communities (Mortensen 2017), Section 8.5 indicates future directions for a transcultural and multilingual 188 MARIE LUISE PITZL view on creativity and idiomaticity. It illustrates how processes like idiomatizing (Seidlhofer 2009, 2011) may prompt the emergence of groupspecific linguistic practices, whereby initial instances of creativity may evolve to become conventionalized by means of interaction. Such a focus on linguistic group development alerts us that we need to work toward uncoupling the conceptual link between seemingly stable (speech) communities and single-*language1 (L1) idiomaticity when our research is concerned within interactions in inter/transcultural groups. This issue is relevant for the future description of ELF use but applies in the same way to the study of other lingua francas and descriptive work on intercultural interactions among multilinguals. Section 8.5, therefore, illustrates the relevance of a transcultural, multilingual, and micro-diachronic take on creativity and idiomaticity. 8.2 Theoretical Perspectives on Idiomaticity and Creativity The term idiom is inherently fuzzy and far from being unambiguously defined or definable. Many scholars distinguish between a broader meaning of idiom as “a general term of many kinds of multi-word item, whether semantically opaque or not” (Moon 1998: 4) and a narrower meaning of an idiom as a unit which is “fixed and semantically opaque or metaphorical” (Moon 1998: 4). The broader meaning resonates with Sinclair’s (1991) idiom principle and captures many linguistic phrases and expressions that are typically fairly high in frequency and may or may not be “semantically opaque” (Moon 1998: 4). Although some scholars label these high-frequency expressions idioms, they are more commonly referred to by other terms, which include formulaic language, phraseology, (semi-)fixed expressions, multi-word units, phrasal lexemes, prefabs, or collocations (see, e.g., Cowie 1998; Erman and Warren 2000; Grant and Bauer 2004; Kecskes 2007; Skandera 2007; Granger and Meunier 2008). This list of terms is necessarily incomplete and certainly somewhat “messy,” since the meanings ascribed to them by different scholars are far from unified. The terms mentioned above may overlap and/or build on one another in different ways. As Moon (1998: 6) puts it, “there is no unified phenomenon to describe but rather a complex of features that interact in various, often untidy ways and represent a broad continuum between non-compositional (or idiomatic) and compositional groups of words.” Thus, what Bolinger pointed out more than forty years ago still holds true today: “There is no clear boundary between an idiom and a collocation or between a collocation and a freely generated phrase only a continuum with greater density at one end and greater diffusion at 1 See footnote 2 for the use of * here. Creativity and Idiomaticity the other” (Bolinger 1977: 168, quoted in Moon 1998: 6). If this holds true for L1 use, it would seem to be even more relevant for intercultural interactions. 8.2.1 Idioms and Idiomaticity: Gradeability and Continua The multiplicity of terms and expressions that might be referred to as idiomatic and the lack of clear boundaries between these makes the area of idioms and idiomaticity a terminological and conceptual quagmire. From the perspective of intercultural interactions and intercultural pragmatics, the most crucial point is not the lack of precise terminology, however, but the fact that expressions which might be labeled idioms or, in a broader sense, idiomatic are gradable and exist on various clines. This means that even from an L1 point of view that is, if we disregard the complexities of multilingualism and intercultural communication for the moment expressions are probably best seen as being more or less idiomatic rather than as idiomatic vs. utterly non-/un-idiomatic. Gradeability applies to idioms and idiomaticity in a particular *language or a particular *variety,2 but also to the qualities typically associated with idioms. So-called idiomatic expressions might be thought of as existing on idiomaticity clines that range from frequent, two-word collocations (like you know or sort of) to infrequent, semantically complex, non-compositional, figuratively intransparent multi-word units (like the much-quoted kick the bucket). Yet, most idioms and conventionalized figurative expressions are somewhere in between these two extremes. In addition, different expressions are not only more or less idiomatic but also more or less fixed, frequent, conventional, lexicalized, semantically (in)transparent, compositional, decomposable, and/or metaphorical. These characteristics, in turn, affect their potential for creative variation in principle, but also in a specific situational context. Such idiomaticity clines can be said to exist for expressions in a particular *language (or *languages), like *English, *German, *Italian, or *Korean. Thus, scholars who operate within a predominantly “monolingual” single-*language paradigm (i.e. who are concerned with describing characteristics of one particular *language) may be interested in producing detailed categorization schemes and may devote their attention to subdividing idiomatic expressions on such clines into different types of idioms. Yet, if research is concerned with idiomaticity and creativity in intercultural encounters and engages with language produced by speakers with individual multilingual repertoires who interact with other speakers with 2 Following the convention established in Pitzl (2018a, 2018b), the terms *language/s and *variety/ies and labels for individual *languages are written with an * symbol to convey a post structuralist understanding of these terms, emphasizing their non boundedness and non homogeneity. 189 190 MARIE LUISE PITZL different individual multilingual repertoires, detailed categorization schemes for idioms in a single *language are of fairly limited usefulness. While awareness of idiomaticity and idiomatic expressions as gradable (i.e. as more or less idiomatic, fixed, conventionalized, etc.) will be important also for intercultural pragmatics, approaching multilingual data with predetermined categories of idioms in just one *language seems unsatisfactory as a starting point. As I have argued elsewhere (e.g. Pitzl 2009, 2018a), if our focus is how on idiomaticity and linguistic creativity can be conceptualized for and manifest in intercultural encounters, it seems more essential to explore how metaphoricity and figurativeness that is inherent in most idiomatic expressions affect their potential for creative variation, appropriation, and functional use in different situational contexts.3 8.2.2 Metaphoricity, Creativity, and Co-text Similar to idiomaticity clines, we can conceive of different types of metaphor as existing along clines of metaphoricity (see Pitzl 2018a: 60 67, drawing on research by e.g., Black 1993; Goatly 1997; Cameron 1999a, b; Hanks 2006). An example of such a metaphor cline is a continuum that ranges from metaphors that have a codified figurative meaning (here referred to as conventional metaphors) to metaphors that are original, in the sense that they appear to be newly coined (more or less ad hoc) by a language user (here referred to as dynamic metaphors). If we look at the phrase terminological and conceptual quagmire used in the previous section, for instance, engaging with the (degree of) metaphoricity of this phrase seems more important for a discussion of its creativity than trying to determine whether or not the expression ‘counts’ as an idiom or classifying what type of idiom it might or might not be. The figurative use of quagmire is a good example of a conventional metaphor, i.e., a word or phrase that has a codified metaphorical meaning.4 Although quagmire is not ‘multi-word’ and thus would typically not be labeled an idiom its codified status as conventional metaphor could nonetheless prompt people to refer to its figurative use as “idiomatic” for *English. So although it is metaphorical, the figurative use of quagmire is not particularly creative because its figurative use is 3 Note that a substantial amount of research concerned with (what authors may refer to as) an intercultural perspective on idioms (and/or metaphors) adopts what to my mind is more aptly seen as a cross cultural perspective. That is, many studies on idioms and metaphors involve a central element of comparison between *languages and/or *cultures, for instance, by examining idiom translation, idiom borrowing, or the relevance of particular conceptual metaphors across different *cultures, *languages, or *varieties (see, e.g., several chapters in Musolff et al. 2015). Although such research provides an important contribution to the study of idioms and idiomaticity, it is not addressed in this chapter, since more comparative (cross cultural) approaches tend to put less emphasis on the interactive dimension of interculturality, which is, however, the focus of this chapter. 4 Merriam Webster’s dictionary specifies quagmire as “soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot,” but also as “a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position.” The latter constitutes codified figurative meaning. Creativity and Idiomaticity conventional to the point of having been codified. What might make individual instances of quagmire creative is their immediate syntagmatic co-text and their embeddedness in a particular situational context.5 Both co-text (i.e. the words that immediately surround quagmire) and context are important considerations from the point of view of pragmatics, since they can either downplay or enhance the metaphoricity of a particular word or expression. In terms of syntagmatic co-text, the combination of quagmire with the adjectives terminological and conceptual in the phrase terminological and conceptual quagmire (used above) creates “domain incongruity” (Cameron 1999b: 108) within the phrase and thereby heightens, increases, and potentially reactivates the (conventional) metaphoricity of quagmire (remetaphorization). The noun phrase relates concepts from two different conceptual domains and is new in the sense that it represents no established collocation and yields a new metaphorical mapping. It links the conventional metaphor quagmire to the topic of the text (here: the topic of the chapter or, more precisely, the topic of the section and paragraph, i.e. research terminology). A similar establishment of domain incongruity can be observed in (1), taken from a panel discussion carried out using ELF and included in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Here the conventional metaphor rebirth is linked to the societal and historical development of a country. (1) [. . .] women (.) who b:egan to show their faces to the world? (.) to look at the world through their own eyes (.) and to experience their own potential? (.) were as if REborn. (.) [. . .] turkish women characters (.) whether they were in readers or in other textbooks? (.) were depicted (.) as self-confident citizens who took part in a rebirth of a country. (.) [. . .] (VOICE, PRpan1:15; voice style, bold emphasis added) The domain incongruity between rebirth as conventional metaphor and the topic is created through immediate syntagmatic co-text. The co-text heightens the nonliteralness of rebirth, increases its metaphoricity, and, thus, the likelihood of active metaphor processing. Although there is no formal variation in the word rebirth itself, the expression rebirth of a country in (1) is more actively and dynamically metaphorical than the preceding use of reborn in the same utterance. In contrast to most examples that will be analyzed in Sections 8.3 and 8.4 below, neither terminological and conceptual quagmire or rebirth of a country are variants of preexisting idioms, since in both cases, the conventional metaphors are not multi-word. Yet, as expressions, terminological and conceptual quagmire and rebirth of a country share many similarities with Grant and 5 See Widdowson (2004: 58–73) for an elaborate discussion of co text and context and Widdowson (1996: 32–33) on syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. 191 192 MARIE LUISE PITZL Bauer’s (2004) categories of figuratives and ONCEs, i.e. multi-word units (MWUs) with only “one non-compositional element” (Grant and Bauer 2004: 52). Just like Grant and Bauer (2004: 58) “reject . . . over-elaborate classifications and definitions of idioms” in favor of focusing greater attention on the “unpicking” of figurative language for language learning, I argue that metaphoricity needs to play a central role in the interpretation and analysis of creativity and creative idioms in intercultural communication (taking ELF interactions as a case in point). Engaging with metaphor and metaphoricity (alongside idiomaticity and creativity) allows us to incorporate and discuss a wider range of creative figurative expressions in intercultural interactions, including creative realizations of one-word metaphors and idioms with overt or covert multilingual influences. A mere focus on idiom categories within a single *language (e.g. *English for ELF data) would be likely to miss out on these instances of creativity. In addition, the *language-independent ability for metaphor creation and metaphor processing also provides us with a potential explanation for the functionality of many creative idioms in intercultural (ELF) situations. 8.2.3 Evaluating Creativity: The Importance of Context Importantly, whether or not expressions like a rebirth of a country (or any of the examples given below) are seen as creative is ultimately a matter of evaluative judgement. Nonetheless, if we analyze naturally occurring data, it may be useful to rely on a more form-oriented definition of linguistic creativity, such as “the creation of new (i.e. non-codified) linguistic forms and expressions in ongoing interaction/discourse or the use of existing forms and expressions in a non-conventional way” (Pitzl 2012: 37). Such a definition can serve as a starting point for identifying which expressions or phrases in naturally occurring data (captured in corpora like VOICE, for instance) might be worth analyzing in more detail. This allows us to describe forms (Section 8.3) and functions (Section 8.4) of linguistic creativity in naturally occurring data, which in turn can make us aware of the need for describing processes of idiomatizing and emergent idiomaticity longitudinally and micro-diachronically (Section 8.5). Yet, we need to be aware that research on creativity also always comes with an evaluative dimension and involves judgments. On the one hand, such judgments about creativity are linked to text and co-text. They relate to a word or phrase’s formal and semantic properties (text) and its immediately surrounding words (co-text). As illustrated above, the syntagmatic form of an entirely new or creatively varied phrase and its ensuing degree of metaphoricity and domain incongruity will influence our interpretation and evaluation of them as creative. On the other hand, any judgment of creativity is not only influenced by text and co-text but also always context-dependent. That is to say, the evaluation of portions of language as creative or not creative is always Creativity and Idiomaticity shaped by the discourse context in which these portions of language occur as text. This context includes aspects like mode, genre, or domain conventions that are seen as relevant (or irrelevant) to the interpretation of a particular text or part of a text as discourse (see Widdowson 2004 on text, co-text, context, and discourse). Compare, for example, the discourse conventions associated with a written academic publication (like this one) with the conventions for spontaneous spoken interaction or those associated with different literary genres (see, e.g., Widdowson 2008). Most crucially for the study of intercultural communication and intercultural pragmatics, context conditions that influence judgments about linguistic creativity also include assumptions about the participants (cf. Hymes’ 1974 SPEAKING heuristic), i.e. the particular speakers or writers that are the producers of language and of a particular text (or part of a text). Alongside factors like genre conventions, judgments about linguistic creativity thus are intricately linked to qualities that are ascribed or denied to particular (groups of) speakers/writers by (particular) audiences.6 Just as influential work by Carter (2004) asserts the authority to creative language use for average L1 users of *English in everyday spoken conversation, work on ELF interactions asserts the authority to linguistic creativity for multilingual (E)LF speakers. If we steer clear of undue simplifications, then creativity, metaphoricity, and also idiomaticity are obviously never absolute. They are always somehow gradable and also relative. They depend on context factors like genre, mode, and maybe most importantly for intercultural pragmatics, the authority ascribed to participants as bona fide producers and users of a language. So what is, or is not, evaluated as creative is always influenced by who is passing judgment as well as by who or what is being judged. With regard to Csikszentmihaly’s (1999) systems model of creativity, this means that evaluations of creativity depend on the field (i.e. the audience or gatekeepers) and the individual (i.e. the producer of creativity) within in a particular domain (see, e.g., Carter 2004: 37 39; Pitzl 2018a). There is simply no stretch of language that would always be evaluated as creative or metaphorical, or idiomatic. These judgments are always context-dependent and are also relative in time. Because whether or not a stretch of language is perceived as creative or conventional (or even idiomatic) is most certainly influenced by when something is said or written. As will be illustrated below (Section 8.5), this is not only regarding absolute measures of time (i.e. 1950 vs. 2020) but also regarding the chronology and micro-diachronic development of interaction. Before I suggest some future directions and potential methodological paths toward an even more transcultural, dynamic, and multilingual take on creativity and idiomaticity in transient intercultural situations (Section 8.5), the next two sections will 6 A more extensive discussion of parameters for defining creativity (i.e. Who? What? What for? For whom?) and of myths about who or what tends to be seen as creative can be found in Pitzl (2013, 2017). 193 194 MARIE LUISE PITZL take stock of current findings on formal characteristics (Section 8.3) and functional purposes (Section 8.4) of creative expressions in intercultural encounters. The domain of research that is used to illustrate key issues concerning creativity, idiomaticity, and metaphoricity in intercultural encounters is primarily descriptive research on ELF interactions among multilingual speakers. The issues raised, however, are clearly not specific or limited to the use of ELF communication but will similarly affect other lingua franca encounters and transient multilingual contexts. 8.3 Idiomatic and Metaphorical Creativity in Intercultural ELF Interactions: Formal Characteristics This section provides examples of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity in intercultural encounters, primarily drawing on research on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication. Most examples are taken from VOICE7 but are also supplemented with some instances from the ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic settings) corpus and online ELF communication, drawing, for example, on research by Franceschi (2013) and Vettorel (2014). Most existing studies to date analyze and discuss individual instances of creativity in interactive intercultural data. In doing so, these studies tend to adopt an established perspective on intercultural communication and intercultural pragmatics that focuses on language use and linguistic and pragmatic behavior in intercultural interactions (cf. Zhu 2011: 4 8; Cutting 2015: 68 87). Such research provides us with important insights on formal characteristics and functional purposes of linguistic creativity in intercultural encounters. These insights offer a good starting point for more dynamic, multilingual, and transcultural approaches to investigating creativity and idiomaticity that might be pursued more extensively in the future (see Section 8.5). 8.3.1 Idiom Variation: Lexical Substitution, Syntactic and Morphosyntactic Variation Starting with formal characteristics of individual instances of idiomatic creativity, some examples found in naturally occurring ELF interactions can partly be categorized according to types of idiom variation that are also attested in L1 use. These include lexical substitution, and syntactic and morphosyntactic variation (Langlotz 2006). Lexical substitution means that a speaker replaces one lexical element in an idiom with another lexical element, while syntactic variation “involves changes in the 7 Many examples from VOICE listed in this chapter are discussed in more detail, often with more context of interaction, in Pitzl (2018a). For practical purposes, most conversational mark up has been left out in the presentation of examples in this chapter. Full details of transcripts can be found in the respective corpus texts (e.g. PRqas409, PRpan1) in VOICE, which is available as an open access online resource. Creativity and Idiomaticity constructional organization” (Langlotz 2006: 180) and morphosyntactic variation “covers inflectional variants of one (or several) idiom constituents, including verb inflection, noun inflection (pluralisation) and the flexible use of determiners and quantifiers” (Langlotz 2006: 179). Individual instances of lexical substitution in VOICE often involve substitutions within the same word class. An adjective thus usually replaces an adjective, as in (2). In addition, speakers in intercultural encounters in VOICE generally tend to substitute semantically related words, as in (3). (2) turn a blank eye (cf. ‘turn a blind eye’) (VOICE, PRqas409:12) (3) draw the limits (cf. ‘draw the line’) (VOICE, PRpan1:22) Sometimes substituted words in creative idioms used in spoken ELF conversations can be hyponyms or superordinate terms, as in (4) or (5). Similar examples are also found in ELF online use, as in (6), and in spoken academic ELF settings, as in (7). (4) don’t kill the messengers (cf. ‘shoot the messenger’) (VOICE, EDwsd302:1164) (5) sit in the control of (cf. ‘be in control of’) (VOICE, POmtg542:215) (6) play with phrases (cf. ‘play with words’) (Vettorel 2014: 202) (7) don’t step on each other’s feet (cf. ‘step on somebody’s toes’) (Franceschi 2013: 86) In (7), a term of embodiment is substituted for another (feet for toes), but lexical substitution also occurs quite regularly, with terms of embodiment being used in the place of more abstract concepts. Examples of this kind, like (8) and (9), are discussed, for example, in Seidlhofer (2009: 204 205). (8) keep in the head (cf. ‘bear/ keep [sb/sth] in mind’) (VOICE, POmtg213:394) (9) doesn’t come to their head (cf. ‘come to mind’) (VOICE, POwgd243:113) On rare occasions, the substituted word may be more abstract than the original one. If this is the case, the substituted term is usually closely linked to the actual topic of a conversation, as in (10), when the speakers are actually discussing a process in the course of their business meeting. (10) smooth the process (cf. ‘smooth the path/way’) (VOICE, PBmtg269:917) With regard to morphosyntactic variation, creative idioms in spoken and online ELF use exhibit instances of phenomena like pluralization as in (11) to (13), flexible use of determiners as in (5) and (14), and prepositional variation as in (15) to (19). 195 196 MARIE LUISE PITZL (11) carved in stones (VOICE, PRqas224:26) (12) pieces by pieces (VOICE, POprc557:5) (13) they’ll get us into troubles (Vettorel 2014: 202) (14) third time’s a charm (Vettorel 2014: 203) (15) in the right track (VOICE, POmtg404:293) (16) on the long run (VOICE, PBmtg300:3151) (17) remember from the head (VOICE, PBmtg300:2140) (18) in my mind, it makes sense (Vettorel 2014: 203) (19) as exchange for (Vettorel 2014: 203) Syntactic variation and changes in construction happen either via extending idiom constructions or, more frequently, via internal syntactic modifications. Such internal modifications can, for example, occur through the insertion of adjectives, adverbs, or pronouns as in (20) to (23). A more substantial change in syntactic construction happens in (24). (20) a bigger share of of this pie (VOICE, PRpan13:103) (21) go er into much details (VOICE, PBpan25:6) (22) the big crest of the wave (VOICE, PBpan25:52) (23) two different sides of the same coin (VOICE, POwgd12:651) (24) my head is splitting up (cf. ‘a splitting headache,’ Vettorel 2014: 203) Clearly, many more examples of these types of idiom variation and idiomatic creativity could be given. The individual expressions tend to be fairly unique, since most of the idioms that are creatively varied are quite low in frequency. We would therefore not expect these phrases to occur repeatedly or with high frequency in 1-million-word corpora like VOICE or ELFA, let alone multiple times in a single conversation. Hence, the point is certainly not to claim that these are “ELF idioms” or that idioms in intercultural interactions always “look like this.” Nonetheless, as illustrated above, the processes that enable these individual instances of creative idiomaticity like lexical substitution, and syntactic and morphosyntactic variation are quite well attested in studies of naturally occurring language use. It is thus not surprising that they would also be found in intercultural ELF use and would enable multilingual speakers to produce creative realizations of individual idiomatic expressions by exploiting their metaphoric potential. Creativity and Idiomaticity 8.3.2 Ambiguous Cases While examples categorized according to Langlotz’s (2006) distinction above might suggest a certain extent of regularity within creative idiom variation, many idiomatic and metaphorical creativity instances are by far less regular and considerably “more messy” than the examples given thus far. Consequently, ELF interactions and presumably many other intercultural encounters also contain many metaphorical and creative expressions that are difficult to categorize neatly. For one, it is obvious that the three types of idiom variation illustrated above are not mutually exclusive. They can occur in various combinations, up to the point where expressions like (25) and (26) are varied so considerably from potentially corresponding idioms that it becomes difficult to argue with certainty that these are variants of particular (*English) idioms.8 (25) it will explode por-hopefully not in our faces but it will explode (VOICE, POmtg403:565) (26) i feel that many times i am pulling the brakes (VOICE, POmtg314:180) (27) paving the ground (VOICE, POwgd243:252). Similarly, processes like blending, which fuse two or more idiomatic expressions, constitute valid alternative interpretations for some phrases like (27), which may have more than one corresponding *English idiom (pave the way vs. prepare the ground). This ambiguity in identifying corresponding phrases is one of the reasons why the notion of approximation (Section 8.3.4) is of only limited usefulness for explaining idiomatic and metaphorical creativity in intercultural situations. Creative metaphorical phrases exist on a fluid continuum that does not always allow us to point toward canonical or codified phrases that might be “approximated” by speakers. 8.3.3 Multilingual Repertoires, Overt and Covert Multilingual Resources In addition, since we are looking at intercultural interactions among multilingual speakers, illustrated by means of ELF data, there is the issue of borrowing idioms as well as metaphorical images from other *languages, which clearly involves processes that are different from approximating L1 use of a *language. ELF speakers build on, reactivate, and exploit the “metaphoric potential” (Cameron 1999b: 108) and inherent creativity (cf. Langlotz 2006: 11) of conventional expressions. Crucially, they do so not only by drawing on *English. Since interactants have Individual Multilingual Repertoires (IMRs), which form a situational Multilingual 8 This issue is discussed in more detail in Pitzl (2018a: 119–120, 125). 197 198 MARIE LUISE PITZL Resource Pool (MRP) in each lingua franca situation (Pitzl 2016: 297 299), instances of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity in intercultural interactions may often have an explicit or implicit multilingual dimension. The multilingual nature of creative expressions may be explicitly flagged, as in (28) to (30). Yet, speakers’ IMRs can also only covertly influence language behavior, as presumably the case in (31) to (33). (28) they say that’s it’s a saying in holland that er we don’t have savings but under the bed we have a lot of er money in the sock (VOICE, PBmtg300:2426) (29) in austria it was it wa- running under the term hh <L1ger> orchideenstudien {literally: orchid studies; derogatory term for most humanities subjects because they are beautiful but useless} </L1ger> (VOICE, EDsed251:396) (30) what the germans call erm of course the [. . .] <LNger> kueche kich(.) kueche kirche kinder {kitchen church children} </LNger> idea (VOICE, POmtg403:103+109) (31) don’t praise the day yet (VOICE, POmtg314:37) (32) okay so so stereotyping is you put them all in one pot (VOICE, EDsed31:802) (33) how to say it in english like knife with double blade (VOICE, POwsd372:793) Following Cogo’s (2018, 2021) distinction, examples (28) to (30) constitute instances where idiomatic and metaphorical creativity coincides with the overt use of multilingual resources. Example (28) highlights the speaker’s multilingual repertoire and regio-cultural identity by referring to a saying in holland, which is then rendered in *English by the speaker. In a related fashion, examples (29) and (30) include overt switches to another *language (here: *German). In the case of orchideenstudien in (29), *German happens to be the speaker’s L1, whereas in (30) the switch to the *German phrase kueche kirche kinder is produced by a speaker whose first language is *Danish, not *German. In contrast to this, examples (31) to (32) are not at all flagged as multilingual but are instances of metaphorical and idiomatic creativity that are likely to be influenced by covert multilingual resources (with reference to Cogo’s 2018, 2021 terminology). That is to say, the expressions don’t praise the day yet (31) and put them all in one pot (32) both have corresponding idioms in the speakers’ L1s, namely *Polish (31) and *German (32). It is therefore quite plausible that speakers’ IMRs will have influenced or prompted the creation of these phrases. Yet, this multilingual influence is invisible in the data and not drawn attention to or commented on by Creativity and Idiomaticity speakers (hence covert multilingual resources). In the context of interaction (i.e. for the interlocutors), (31) and (32) can thus be said to function primarily as novel metaphors and need to be decoded, processed, and interpreted as figurative expressions from scratch. Example (33) is probably best seen as a borderline case. Although the speaker mentions uncertainty how to say something in english thereby expressing metalinguistic awareness explicitly in a kind of metapragmatic comment the metaphorical image of a knife with double blade itself is only covertly multilingual. There is no explicit mention of the speaker’s own multilingual repertoire in (33), no code-switching and no explicit mention of other *languages, countries, or peoples (see Pitzl 2016: 303 304 for an extensive discussion of this example). 8.3.4 More than Approximation While some ELF scholars, like Mauranen (2012) and Vetchinnikova (2019), might refer to many examples above as instances of approximation (rather than as instances of idiomatic or metaphorical creativity), I consider the approximation-perspective somewhat limiting. Approximation does not take into account overtly or covertly multilingual examples (as the ones listed in the previous section). Speaking of varied occurrences of “phraseological units” as approximations to a “target” (Mauranen 2012: 144) tends to reinforce a single-*language view in which instances of use in ELF communication are primarily seen as instances where speakers “approximate” *English. This does not seem compatible with current applied linguistic frameworks and theories on multilingualism (e.g. Canagarajah 2013; Busch 2017; Kimura and Canagarajah 2018) and translanguaging (e.g. Wei 2018), where boundaries between *languages and linguistic resources are seen as much more malleable and fluid. A focus on approximation does not account for the manifold influences between speakers’ multilingual repertoires, expanding situational multilingual resource pools, and emergent idiomaticity in transient groups. If approximation is seen as central, then ELF (or any other lingua franca) use is primarily framed as the use of L2 *English, which is then either implicitly or explicitly contrasted with L1 use. For instance, Mauranen (2012) remarks that [w]hat is thus worth noticing about these [varied phraseological] units is not only that ELF speakers tend to get them slightly wrong, but perhaps more importantly that they not only use them but also get them approximately right. That we find them outside environments of language pedagogy is important for efforts to understand their significance to SLU [i.e. Second Language Use]. Pedagogical settings may reward learners for their correct use and penalise them for minor 199 200 MARIE LUISE PITZL deviations, whereas in real-life SLU such as lingua franca communication, their use must be discussed in other terms. (Mauranen 2012: 144, emphasis added) Expressions like the examples given above (Sections 8.3.1 to 8.3.3) and those provided by Mauranen (2012) herself demonstrate their relevance and importance in real-life situations “outside environments of language pedagogy,” as Mauranen (2012: 144) states. Yet, it seems strange and somewhat unfortunate to argue this extremely valid point by evaluating these expressions as “approximately right” (p. 144). Framing and conceiving of lingua franca interactions primarily as instances of Second Language Use (SLU), as Mauranen does in this short passage, risks cutting off the multilingual complexity of the speakers, their multilingual repertoires and identities and the inter/transcultural dimension of interactions. If we see idioms, metaphors, and phraseological expressions only through the lens of (L2) *English, we are likely to lose sight of the multifacetedness of individual speakers’ full range of multilingual resources and of the flexible and universal nature of metaphor. 8.3.5 Multiple Origins: A Multilingual View on Metaphorical Creativity For the reasons outlined above, focusing solely on idiom use and idiomatic creativity would be reductive for the study of creativity and idiomaticity in intercultural pragmatics. Rather, as I have argued above, idiomatic creativity tends to coincide and be intricately linked with metaphorical creativity and with multilingualism. The creation of many new linguistic forms and expressions becomes possible through metaphor as a cognitive mechanism. This shift in emphasis away from just idioms and so-called idiomatic use toward metaphors and figurative language is crucial for the inclusion of a multilingual view on idiomatic creativity. Idioms are always in some way tied to or associated with a particular *language or *languages (see Seidlhofer and Widdowson 2007: 368 on idioms and the territorial imperative). Metaphor, in contrast, is a mechanism that is cognitively universal and shared by interactants in intercultural encounters irrespective of speakers’ particular linguistic background(s), their individual multilingual repertoires, and their competence in particular *languages (e.g. *English). The ability for recognizing and processing, for creating and interpreting familiar as well as unfamiliar metaphors is not tied to any *language. Instead, metaphor manifests in language use in a myriad of different ways, including overt and covert multilingual use in intercultural encounters, as we have seen above. Shifting our focus from idiom to metaphor, we can therefore posit that metaphorical creativity in ELF interactions (and presumably many other intercultural encounters) may arise in essentially three different ways: Creativity and Idiomaticity metaphors may be entirely novel in that images and metaphorical semantic relations appear to be created ad hoc in context by a speaker. Secondly, they may be related to and/or varied from idioms or conventional metaphors (including single words) that exist as conventional expressions/ terms in the *language that is the main reference point for an interaction (i.e. *English in the case of many ELF encounters). Thirdly, metaphors may be created when idioms and images from other *languages are transplanted to (E)LF communication. In theory, each of these three scenarios can occur on its own. Yet, they are actually not mutually exclusive. Analyzing naturally occurring interactive (E)LF data, we may come across examples, where one of these three scenarios seems much more likely than the other two. Hence, some individual examples can be grouped under certain headlines (as I have done in the previous sections). Nonetheless, it is quite plausible that more than one of these mechanisms applies to the same naturally occurring creative expression. That is to say, the metaphor (34) we should not wake up any dogs may have been covertly influenced by an idiom from another *language (e.g. *German) as well as by an existing *English idiom (see Pitzl 2009: 308 310). These two interpretations are not in contradiction. Since we are looking at language use by multilingual individuals, both can be true at the same time. Even more crucially, irrespective of its psycholinguistic and cognitive origins for the producer, the expression may operate as dynamic and ad hoc metaphor in the context of interaction for the interactants. That is to say, in the situational context of an ELF business meeting in which it is uttered, the phrase may simply be recognized, processed, and interpreted as a metaphorical and figurative expression by the other ELF speakers present. Interlocutors do not need to be familiar with the potentially corresponding *English or *German idioms in order to make sense of (34). They will be able to process its metaphorical meaning without reference to any idioms, as long as the situational context in which the phrase is produced provides enough clues to interpret what the metaphorical image stands for. 8.4 Functions of Idiomatic and Metaphorical Creativity in Intercultural ELF Encounters If we turn to functions that such individual instances of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity may fulfill, the most important overall finding is that the formal variation of idioms and creative use of metaphors is, generally speaking, not at all a disrupting factor in naturally occurring intercultural interaction. Although one always needs to be cautious with 201 202 MARIE LUISE PITZL generalizations, there is ample empirical evidence from studies on creativity in ELF use, such as Franceschi (2013), Vettorel (2014), and Pitzl (2018a) and on ELF communication more generally, such as Seidlhofer (2009, 2011), Cogo and Dewey (2012), Mauranen (2012), and many others, which suggests that metaphorical creativity and creative variation of idioms do not constitute “problems” in intercultural ELF encounters. So when Prodromou (2008: 238) states that “as far as idiomaticity is concerned, L1-users are playing at home, with rules that they can bend according to need; L2-users are playing away and if they break the rules they may be penalized,” this is not borne out by empirical evidence provided by ELF research. In most intercultural interactions where the majority of interactants are lingua franca users, neither penalization nor mockery is observable. In general, speakers simply do not seem to be in the habit of sanctioning each other for nonconventional use or creative expressions. This observation also holds true for lingua franca interactions which involve L1 speakers, who similarly tend not to cast themselves as “custodians for English” or as “language police” in face-to-face situations. In light of this, one gets the impression that the looming threat of ridicule if you “say something wrong” seems to be kept alive most effectively by anecdotal or fictional scenarios of language use in which nonnative speakers are being mocked for “incorrect use.” Remarks like “telling a greengrocer that you can ‘become a cabbage cheaper in the supermarket’ . . . will at the very least get you laughed at,” as put forward by Swan (2012: 380, my italics) seem to perpetuate the myth that “incorrect use” will have negative social ramifications for the “perpetrator.” Such anecdotal or fictional scenarios are likely to help ensure that “the desire of many non-native users of English to approximate to NS [native-speaker] usage” (Swan 2012: 381) stays intact. Telling learners and users of any *language or *variety (or dialect or jargon) point-blank that they will get “laughed at” for saying something unusual seems anachronistic, patronizing, and outdated in 2020 in light of current theories of multilingualism, in light of speakers’ multilingual repertoires and identities, in light of Communicative Language Teaching, and in light of empirical evidence on intercultural encounters. Whenever interlocutors including L1 speakers have some basic degree of intercultural awareness (see, e.g., Baker 2015), naturally occurring data show that they generally do not mock, penalize, or laugh at others’ language use in the course of interaction. On the contrary, the fact that creative idioms and metaphorical expressions are used in intercultural interactions allows us to illustrate the wide range of functions these fulfill. Creativity and Idiomaticity 8.4.1 Interpersonal and Social Functions To begin with multilingual metaphorical creativity and idioms from other *languages (cf. Section 8.3.3), these may serve as displays of multilingual and/or multicultural identity or serve to establish linguistic as well as interand transcultural rapport with interlocutors. The overt multilingual examples given above (examples 28 to 30) all contribute to this purpose. Good additional examples of this are also the use of fleur bleue in (35) in connection with the concepts cheesy and kitschig (discussed at length in Cogo 2010: 300 302; see also Cogo and Dewey 2006: 66 69) and the use of fuma come un turco in (36) (discussed at length in Pitzl 2018b). (35) so . . . blue flower we say, . . . fleur bleue (Cogo 2010: 301) (36) we have a proverb like italians (.) er (.) <LNita> fuma come un turco {smoke like a turk} </LNita> (VOICE, LEcon548:374) When creative expressions are used without code-switching or overt reference to other *languages or cultures, these can be said to fulfill a range of specific functions in ELF interactions that can be broadly organized along the lines of Halliday’s (1985: xiii) distinction between ideational and interpersonal purposes (Pitzl 2012: 47; 2018a: 154 155). A similar organization of two broad functional strands for figurative language and idiomaticity is also proposed by Franceschi (2013), who distinguishes communication strategies and social functions in relation to how idioms are used in the ELFA corpus. With regard to the interpersonal or social functions of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity, metaphorical expressions can serve to establish and maintain rapport and solidarity. This happens with regard to multilingual resources, but also with regard to non-overtly multilingual metaphors that seek to reinforce social closeness, as in (37) to (39). (37) we are all on the same [. . .] on the same boat I think . . . on the bus on the train (Cogo 2010: 303) (38) the ball is in your corner (VOICE, PBmtg414:2133) (39) I’m not trying to grill S4 poor S4 (ELFA, Franceschi 2013: 93) As many metaphorical expressions are actually multifunctional and serve more than one purpose, expression of social closeness or humor can also serve to mitigate propositions and minimize potential face threats. This may involve humorous undertones as in (37), subtle hints at responsibilities in professional contexts as in (38), or explicit facesaving attempts and metapragmatic comments as in (39). Humor and joking by means of metaphorical creativity can, however, also occur just for their own sake, i.e., without being intended to mitigate a face threat. 203 204 MARIE LUISE PITZL Furthermore, multilingual speakers sometimes use creative idioms and metaphors to express subjectivity, project stance, and position themselves in relation to a particular issue. (40) well to MY head that is not a joint degree (VOICE, POwgd325:41). This function is partly observable in (38) and (39), but also in expressions like (26) or (40). 8.4.2 Ideational and Transactional Functions If we turn to the second overall category, instances of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity are used for ideational and transactional purposes (cf. Franceschi’s 2013 communicative strategies). Quite a number of metaphorical expressions serve functions like emphasizing, as in (41) and (42), summarizing (43), and increasing explicitness (44) in different ELF interactions. (41) i’m up to my hh big toe i’m a cargo guy (VOICE, PBmtg300:1229) (42) all this shit it takes hell a lot of time (VOICE, PBmtg27:425) (43) what i was trying to sort of like put together in a nutshell here (VOICE, PRqas224:26) (44) a joint program doe- doesn’t exist in the air so to say (VOICE, POwgd14:616) The ideational and explanatory function of metaphors becomes particularly relevant when speakers are discussing rather abstract concepts or topics. An example of this is the creative use of in a nutshell for explanatory purposes in (45). (45) the time (.) where somebody <soft> e:r </soft> live in e::r hh the surrounding and everything? hh and (.) the genius is er the ONE (.) who: is able (.) to <fast>i don’t know</fast> hh make out something or exPRESS (1) make it to the point (2) putting in in (.) putting his time in a nutshell (.) so KANT (.) according to this theory would be the one who put the: (.) philosophical hh knowledge that was reached at his time in a nutshell. (VOICE, EDsed251:455; voice style, bold emphasis added) In this utterance, the speaker uses the nutshell-metaphor twice in a relatively short stretch of speech in order to express rather abstract notions about the role of a genius, using the example of philosophical knowledge and the philosopher Kant. Notably, the second use of in a nutshell is more elaborate and an expanded reformulation of the speaker’s previous sentence in the same utterance (make out something or express [. . .] make it to Creativity and Idiomaticity the point [. . .] putting his time in a nutshell). The fact that the speaker stays with and elaborates the nutshell-metaphor indicates that rather than being viewed as problematic, the speaker perceives it to be useful and effective in making his rather abstract point. A central characteristic of many creative idioms and metaphors in intercultural interactions is that they are multifunctional, that is to say, they fulfill more than one function in the stretch of conversation where they occur. Thus, many instances of metaphorical creativity listed above operate at an interpersonal as well as at an ideational level. The same phrase can express humor, mitigate a sensitive proposition (interpersonal/interactional), and summarize what was said before (ideational/transactional). Furthermore, it might have an additional multilingual component that may, if overtly addressed, contribute to building transcultural rapport. Although evidence in VOICE suggests that some speakers have a greater tendency to use creative idioms and metaphors than others, metaphorical creativity, as discussed in this chapter, is widely used by speakers from all kinds of L1 and regio-cultural backgrounds in ELF encounters. Since each creative expression is low in frequency, they are generally not on the way to becoming new lexicalized “ELF idioms.” When the examples listed above are first used in intercultural interactions, they are thus not “idiomatic” and they do not need to be. They are, first and foremost, metaphorical. Sometimes, they may be prompted by relying on preexisting idioms in the multilingual repertoires of speakers; sometimes they are just newly created. Irrespective of their individual origins, as metaphors, they are meaningfully embedded in the co-text and context of interaction where they are used. This is what renders them intelligible, interpretable, and functional. 8.5 Emergent Idiomaticity: Toward a Transcultural, Multilingual, and Micro-diachronic View While the examples of creative idioms and metaphors discussed so far are individual occurrences, such expressions can, on occasion, be taken up by other interlocutors and thus also prompt more sustained processes of idiomatizing (Seidlhofer 2009, 2011), which might prompt the emergence of group-specific linguistic practices. This section, therefore, provides an outlook on future research perspectives concerning creativity and idiomaticity in intercultural interactions. It suggests that a transcultural and micro-diachronic perspective, embedded in ongoing research on Transient International Groups (Pitzl 2016, 2018b) and Transient Multilingual Communities (Mortensen 2017), might enhance our understanding of these phenomena. 205 206 MARIE LUISE PITZL 8.5.1 Creativity, Idiomaticity, and Change: The Importance of Chronology and Diachrony In addition to contextual factors (cf. Section 8.2), chronology has a direct effect on any judgment of linguistic creativity. For one, it influences judgments of creativity because instances of language use are anchored in time. For an evaluation of linguistic creativity, it clearly matters whether something was said yesterday, in 1950, or several centuries ago. Yet, much shorter periods of time can also play a role. For instance, speaking about a lockdown at the end of 2020 (when this chapter is being written) is different than it was in 2019 and the years before. A word that was originally associated with individual buildings and short periods of time (usually hours) took on an additional metaphorical meaning in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of 2020, it most prominently refers to government-issued restrictions imposed on large geographical areas (most often entire countries) for substantial periods of time (i.e. usually weeks or months, rather than hours or days).9 This new expanded figurative meaning went hand in hand with an enormous rise in frequency in 2020. The NOW corpus (News on the Web), for instance, shows a frequency of 5.31 occurrences per million of lockdown for the second half of 2019, which rises to an incredible 267.09 and 180.70 instances per million in the first and second half of 2020.10 So at some point (presumably at the end of 2019), the metaphorical extension of the word lockdown was new when it first occurred. By the end of 2020, this meaning of lockdown had undergone a fast-paced conventionalization to the point where it is codified not only in *English, but also in other *languages.11 The immediate history of the word lockdown is indicative and illustrative of the speed of ongoing language change (especially in the lexicon) and also expanding language contact (on a global scale, especially with *English). Yet, as I shall briefly exemplify below, chronology and diachrony are also highly relevant with regard to still much shorter periods of time. As has been discussed already, in intercultural pragmatics and (*English as a) lingua franca research, we tend to be concerned with intercultural interactions (rather than cross-cultural linguistic comparisons). Though locally and contextually specific and unique, such intercultural interactions are also situations of language contact, namely a kind of language contact that can be described as highly complex, dynamic, and transient. 9 Other than referring to the “confinement of prisoners” and “an emergency measure or condition in which people are temporarily prevented from entering or leaving a restricted area or building (such as a school) during a threat of danger,” Merriam Webster codifies a third meaning of lockdown as “a temporary condition imposed by governmental authorities (as during the outbreak of an epidemic disease) in which people are required to stay in their homes and refrain from or limit activities outside the home involving public contact (such as dining out or attending large gatherings).” It seems safe to assume, also in light of the example sentences provided, that this third meaning was only codified in the course of 2020, as a result of the outbreak of the Covid 19 pandemic. 10 Frequencies obtained via NOW Corpus (News on the Web), www.english corpora.org/now/ on December 17, 2020. 11 See, e.g., “Lockdown, Lock down, der,” Duden, www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Lockdown (December 18, 2020) for *German. Creativity and Idiomaticity 8.5.2 Idiomatizing and Transient International Groups If encounters are linguistically and culturally heterogeneous and/or take place among speakers who are not acquainted with each other, speakers have to negotiate their shared linguistic and communicative resources. For intercultural encounters, research on ELF communication has provided ample evidence of this over the past two decades, describing interactive processes like negotiation of meaning (e.g. Cogo and Dewey 2006, 2012; Pitzl 2010; Seidlhofer 2011; Kaur 2017), but also negotiation of interculturality (e.g. Baker 2015, Zhu 2015). Since “establishing common linguacultural ground . . . becomes an intrinsic part of every encounter” (Seidlhofer 2011: 4) in intercultural interactions, it is particularly interesting to think about how such common ground (cf. Kecskes 2019) emerges in intercultural interactions and how this affects creativity and idiomaticity. Changes in expressions or meanings from creative to conventional happen not only across centuries, decades, years, or months, or in entire populations of speakers. As shown, for instance, by Seidlhofer (2009: 205; 2011: 138), processes of “idiomatizing” and conventionalization can also manifest in hours and minutes of interactive conversations. Seidlhofer (2011: 139 141) discusses how the repeated use of the adjective endangered in an international group of academics gives rise to a semi-fixed collocational pattern (endangered + noun) in the course of one long speech event in VOICE (POwgd14). In this new pattern, the meaning of endangered has been figuratively extended from living species (such as endangered animals) to the inanimate realm of university programs and academic disciplines. This new metaphorical meaning is reinforced and conventionalized in the international group of speakers through the collocations endangered factor, endangered programs, endangered fields (twice), endangered study, endangered areas, endangered disciplines, and endangered activities (see Seidlhofer 2011: 139 141). This example prompts Widdowson (2015: 366) to suggest that “[o]ne line of future research would be to identify the patterns of linguistic regularity that represent the locally emergent idiomaticity in ELF interactions” (my italics). Such patterns of locally emergent idiomaticity may, of course, manifest in any group of interactants, including fairly “homogenous” constellations of speakers who have the same L1 and regio-cultural background. Yet, especially intercultural interactions, in which groups of multilingual speakers are per default linguistically and regio-culturally heterogenous and diverse, provide us with excellent opportunities to empirically describe how individual initial instances of creativity may become increasingly normal and even idiomatic for groups in short time spans. In light of the dynamic nature of intercultural communication, I have therefore recently suggested that research on ELF interactions, and intercultural communication more generally, would benefit from putting greater emphasis on the “group and development dimension” (Pitzl 207 208 MARIE LUISE PITZL 2018b: 37) of these encounters as transcultural (cf. Baker 2018) by engaging with them through the lens of Transient International Groups (TIGs) (Pitzl 2016, 2018a, 2018b, 2019). For one, work on TIGs and also Transient Multilingual Communities (Mortensen 2017) involves a conceptual shift that embraces and expects transience and instability in language use and that regards individual multilingualism, linguistic and cultural diversity, meaning negotiation and emergent local practices as normal and to be expected. As Mortensen (2020: 306) points out, “[a]ll social configurations are in some sense characterised by transience, but in lingua franca scenarios, the transient nature of social arrangements is often enhanced,” which may allow us “to observe social and linguistic norms ‘in the making,’ in an interplay between local dynamics and wider contextual constraints” (Mortensen 2020: 306). Crucially, engaging with the transient and dynamic group dimension rather than an assumed (stable) community dimension of intercultural interactions also involves a shift in methodology. I have suggested that this shift in methodology should involve a micro-diachronic approach to analyzing interaction (Pitzl 2018b, 2019, 2021), which devotes greater attention to how language use actually develops across time, i.e. throughout entire intercultural interactions or sequences of interactions. Furthermore, a TIGs approach focuses on multilingualism and regiocultural diversity and clearly sees lingua franca encounters as much more than mere instances of L2 use. If we conceive of interactants as having holistic Individual Multilingual Repertoires (IMRs) that comprise Situational Multilingual Resource pools (MRPs) (cf. Pitzl 2016) in different TIG interactions, existing research shows that participants are unlikely to be protective or possessive of particular (L1) *English regio-cultural territory. Nonetheless, the “territorial imperative” (Seidlhofer and Widdowson 2007: 368) might still be at work in TIGs, but it will predominantly serve the creation of new and emergent “translingual and transcultural territory” (Pitzl 2018b: 37) that is specific to and characteristic for a particular TIG. Metaphorical creativity and idiomatizing can contribute to the creation of such shared linguistic and transcultural group territory and may play a central role in shaping linguistic group identity in TIGs. 8.5.3 Emergent Multilingual Idiomaticity and Idiomatic Multilingualism In some TIGs, idiomatizing processes may be overtly linked to speakers’ multilingual repertoires and the expansion of the groups’ MRP. As illustrated by Kalocsai (2014: 123) and Pitzl (2022), the development of situational multilingual practices may manifest with regard to such mundane activities as saying “cheers” in different *languages. Although the practice of saying “cheers” multilingually may not be novel or unique, the potential patterns and forms (i.e. which *languages speakers actually use) are always Creativity and Idiomaticity group-specific. In consequence, any specific multilingual patterns need to be created and established anew in each TIG. In interaction, this process will start with individual instances of code-switching and overt multilingual creativity. Micro-diachronic analysis of interaction allows us to show with a high amount of empirical detail how such initial instances may subsequently develop into multilingual patterns and practices that are created and reinforced through instances of repetition, uptake, and convergence in the course of a conversation (see Pitzl 2022). If a TIG is stable enough, such multilingual patterns and practices may become established and actually characteristic for a particular TIG, irrespective of whether the group eventually matches the criteria of a Community of Practice (CoP) or not. When a participant in Kalocsai’s Erasmus student ELF-CoP eventually instructs her to “Say ‘Salute!’ It’s an Italian evening!” (Kalocsai 2014: 123) even “if in their immediate environment there were no Italian speakers” (Kalocsai 2014: 123), the multilingual practice of toasting multilingually has become so conventionalized in the group (or CoP) that it might be counted as an example of what I suggest we might call multilingual idiomaticity. In other words, what starts out as an individual instance of multilingual creativity in an intercultural ELF interaction (for instance, saying Salute or chin chin or na zdrowie instead of *English cheers) may on occasion be taken up by interlocutors in a TIG. In this way, through repetition and productive and receptive accommodation, it may eventually evolve to become a group-specific multilingual practice. This practice may, in turn, become so established (if the TIG is persistent, stable, and long-lived enough) that it will be regarded as characteristic and potentially idiomatic for this particular group or CoP to the point where it will be expected and even regulated, as shown by the remark of Kalocsai’s (2014) participant. Figure 8.1 loosely illustrates the path of this (micro-)diachronic development, suggesting that multilingual creativity, multilingual practice(s), and multilingual idiomaticity could, in some situations, also be succeeded by a fourth stage that I have tentatively labeled idiomatic multilingualism. Intentionally combining the dichotomous terms idiomatic and multilingualism, I am putting forward the idea of idiomatic multilingualism here in order to highlight that being multilingual is actually something that can be idiomatic for many intercultural or rather transcultural (cf. Baker 2018) interactions. Just like Mondada (2004) talks about “doing being plurilingual” and Firth (2009: 150) talks about “doing being ‘at work’” (original emphasis), we can Multilingual creativity Multilingual idiomaticity Multilingual practice(s) Figure 8.1 From multilingual creativity to idiomatic multilingualism Idiomatic multilingualism 209 210 MARIE LUISE PITZL think of different ways in which a multilingual lingua franca speaker may be doing being multilingual members of a particular multilinglingual and transcultural group. This will be especially relevant in situations where speakers habitually draw on, mix, and mesh multilingual resources from the IMRs. Situations that involve extensive translanguaging, code-switching, codemixing, and code-meshing might actually be thought of as being characterized by such idiomatic multilingualism, where using only one single *language might actually be perceived as unidiomatic by participants. Crucially, because of its diversity and context-specificity, multilingual idiomaticity and idiomatic multilingualism will always depend on shared history and shared experience that the same multilingual interlocutors have with each other. Yet, how long multilingual speakers actually need as a group to arrive at any potential stages of multilingual idiomaticity or idiomatic multilingualism is a matter for further empirical investigation. Since first micro-diachronic case studies (e.g. Pitzl 2021, 2022) suggest that the joint formation of group-specific multilingual practices (that may, in turn, lead to multilingual idiomaticity) may actually emerge in the course of single conversations, it is possible that the emergence and local conventionalization of group-specific multilingual idiomaticity and idiomatic multilingualism in TIGs actually requires far less time than we might expect. 8.6 Conclusions This chapter has discussed how creativity and idiomaticity may manifest in intercultural interactions with a specific focus on contexts of ELF use. Section 8.2 set out with a theoretical account of idiomaticity as gradable and suggested the importance of metaphoricity, co-text, and context for interpreting and evaluating linguistic creativity. Subsequently, Section 8.3 provided examples of idiomatic and metaphorical creativity in ELF interactions, partly grouping them according to more regular idiom variation processes and pointing out ambiguous cases, and discussing the relevance of multilingual repertoires. Section 8.4 examined interpersonal/social and ideational/transactional functions that these expressions fulfill in intercultural ELF interactions, demonstrating first and foremost that creative use of idioms and metaphors does not constitute a “problem” in these encounters. Finally, Section 8.5 provided an outlook on what a still more dynamic and multilingual perspective on creativity and idiomaticity in transcultural interaction might entail. Contributing to ongoing work on Transient International Groups and Transient Multilingual Communities, it suggested how initial instances of multilingual or metaphorical creativity might evolve to what might be thought of as group-specific multilingual idiomaticity or even idiomatic multilingualism. Future research on intercultural pragmatics in ELF and other lingua franca situations might thus Creativity and Idiomaticity pursue a more transcultural and micro-diachronic approach to the study of creativity, idiomaticity, and the use of metaphors. Aims for future research might be to show in detail how these phenomena evolve in the course of fairly short time spans in interactions and, in doing so, how they contribute not only to shared understanding and rapport development but also the establishment of linguistic group identity in TIGs and various multilingual environments. References Baker, W. (2015). 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For instance, the verb support has a literal meaning that can be defined as the action of holding a physical weight such as a building or structure to prevent it from falling, as in these wooden beams support the roof, and a metaphorical meaning that can be defined as the act of approving an idea, person, or organization, as in I support your ideas. It is not only verbs that can have both literal and metaphorical meanings. The noun fork, for instance, has a literal meaning that can be defined as a metal or plastic object used for eating, as in forks and spoons are on the table, and at least one metaphorical meaning that can be defined as a place where a road, path, or river divides into two parts, as in when you get to the fork, take the trail on the right. All forms of conventional metaphors are typically read and understood by native speakers effortlessly. However, for nonnative speakers, the situation may be different and conventional metaphors such as those indicated above may pose communicative problems. The difficulties may be amplified in those types of intercultural communication in which native and nonnative speakers are involved. Problems can arise when the native speaker is not aware of the fact that she is using a metaphor and that it may be problematic for the nonnative speaker. This chapter starts by illustrating how native and nonnative speakers process and interpret metaphoric expressions, focusing on metaphor comprehension more extensively than on metaphor production. The scientific literature involves a larger number of empirical studies on metaphor comprehension. In particular, in Section 9.2 I focus on the two main mechanisms responsible for metaphor processing, namely comparison Metaphors in Intercultural Communication and categorization. In Section 9.3, I focus on how the mechanisms involved in metaphor processing may vary, describing how different groups of individuals and even different individuals within the same group may process the same metaphors in different ways. In Section 9.4, I focus on two specific groups of individuals, namely native and nonnative speakers, and I explain the notion of metaphoric competence in relation to the two groups. In Section 9.5, I describe the three possible variables that researchers deem responsible for the different ways in which metaphors can be processed. These three variables are Conventionality, Aptness, and Deliberateness. Section 9.6 describes how these three variables may affect metaphor processing in intercultural communication from a pragmatic perspective.1 I finally conclude with Section 9.7, where I give an outlook about the directions I foresee gaining momentum in the coming years, within the field of metaphor studies and in relation to intercultural pragmatics. 9.2 Metaphor Comprehension: Processing by Comparison and by Categorization In the past forty years, the embodied and grounded cognition frameworks have deeply affected theoretical and empirical approaches to metaphor definition and analysis. In these decades, metaphor has been primarily studied as a cognitive mechanism that pertains to the realm of thoughts and concepts but rises to the surface of language, generating metaphoric expressions that are used in everyday communication. For instance, the fact that we talk about ideas as if they were entities that we can give, grasp, and even chew suggests that we conceptualize this abstract concept as if it was a concrete object. Based on our previous experiences with concrete entities and know how it feels in our body to physically give, grasp, and chew, we can then understand the meaning of ideas, which cannot be literally given, grasped, and chewed. Our understanding of ideas, derives from the mapping of our knowledge associated with concrete concepts onto the abstract domain of ideas. In this perspective, personal experiences underscore the understanding of abstract concepts through (embodied) metaphors (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Gibbs 2006; Littlemore 2019). The focus on the cognitive mechanisms involved in metaphor cognitive processing characterizes a large part of the empirical research conducted on this topic in the past four decades. As a matter of fact, in this time frame metaphor has become the object of research and empirical investigation of an increasingly large number of scholars embedded in scientific fields, such as cognitive science (e.g. Landau et al. 1 I am very grateful to Gudrun Reijnierse for providing insightful expert feedback on preliminary versions of this chapter. Her advice and suggestions, especially in relation to Deliberate Metaphor Theory (henceforth, DMT), have been crucial. 217 218 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI 2010), cognitive psychology (e.g. Gibbs 2017), cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Gibbs and Steen 1997; Kövecses 2002), cognitive pragmatics (e.g. Tendahl and Gibbs 2008), and cognitive semiotics (Zlatev 2012). The popularity of the (broadly speaking) cognitive approach to metaphor and the focus on what happens in the speakers’ minds when they understand and produce metaphors has been facilitated by the concurrent rise of the embodied and grounded frameworks of cognition. This theoretical approach suggests that language processing involves activating those neural circuits that are also involved in perception and action (e.g. Barsalou 1999, 2008; Gibbs 2005; Pecher and Zwaan 2005). In particular, regions in and around the motor system have been shown to get activated when observing actions rather than simply performing them (Buccino et al. 2001) and when reading words that denote actions (Hauk et al. 2004). A critical bottleneck within the grounded cognition framework is the grounding of abstract concepts: what type of perceptual and motoric information is involved in the processing of words denoting abstract concepts which, by definition, lack tangible referents that can be physically experienced? Metaphor provided a viable answer to this theoretical problem. Abstract concepts are not devoid of perceptual content, but they are instead grounded in perception and action indirectly, via metaphorical mappings that anchor them to concrete concepts (see Pecher 2018; Bolognesi and Steen 2019 for discussions on this topic). These concrete concepts, in turn, can be more easily perceived through bodily experiences. Within the cognitivist approach to metaphor, the comprehension of metaphorical statements has been traditionally interpreted in two different ways. The comparison view suggests that metaphors are interpreted by means of a horizontal alignment of the two metaphor terms and the subsequent activation of inferences that highlight relevant features to be mapped from the source to the target (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999; Gentner 1983; Clausner and Croft 1997; Gentner and Markman 1997; Grady 1997; Gentner et al. 2001; Kövecses 2002). According to the comparison view of metaphor processing, when we read the statement she devoured this novel, we understand the metaphorical use of devour thanks to a comparison with the literal meaning of this verb. In particular, in its literal sense, devour is typically used within the animal domain, in association with food and feeding (the animal devoured the carcass). When this verb is used together with human agents, in the domain of human activities, and association with books, the literal meaning produces a conflict that can be solved if a metaphorical interpretation is activated. The metaphorical interpretation is constructed on the basis of a mapping between the literal and the metaphorical meanings of this verb, where parts of the literal meaning are projected onto the metaphorical meaning. In this case, the relevant portions of meaning that are mapped across the two domains Metaphors in Intercultural Communication can be identified with “the intake of substance” (in one case food, in the other case knowledge) and the eagerness with which such action is performed (voracity in the literal sense, and impatience in the metaphorical sense). Within the comparison view of metaphor processing, both the terms (and the related domains) of the metaphor are active in the mind of the speaker, and their horizontal alignment enables the metaphor’s comprehension. It shall be noted that the comparison (as well as the categorization) view has been traditionally exemplified by means of direct metaphors, in which both terms are laid out (e.g. my lawyer is a shark, or my job is a jail). Here they have been exemplified through an indirect metaphor, that is, the metaphorical use of the polysemous verb devouring, because of their predominance: indirect metaphors are substantially more frequent in language use compared to direct metaphors (see Steen et al. 2010). In contrast with the comparison view of metaphor comprehension, the second type of process, based on semantic categorization, has been identified and analyzed in the literature to explain how metaphors are comprehended (Glucksberg and Keysar 1990; Glucksberg 2001; Glucksberg 2008). According to the categorization view, the metaphor target becomes a member of a more generic, superordinate category, to which the source of the metaphor belongs as a prototypical member. To continue with the example illustrated above, the metaphorical meaning of devour (namely, reading eagerly) would become a hyponym of the generic and inclusive category that could be summarized as “taking in something quickly and eagerly.” Within this superordinate category, the literal meaning of devour (namely, eating ravenously) is already a prototypical member. In this view, the two meanings of devour play different roles in this comprehension process; the literal meaning (namely the source) provides a superordinate category that can be used to characterize the metaphorical meaning. The metaphorical meaning (namely, the metaphor target) selects the relevant features of the superordinate category and blocks irrelevant features. In the example above, with the verb devour, the use of the mouth in the action of intaking is an irrelevant feature for the definition of the superordinate category in which both metaphor terms are embedded. From this perspective, the comprehension of a metaphor proceeds through a vertical process of abstraction and categorization. Sperber’s and Wilson’s (1995) Relevance Theory, in this regard, adopts a view of metaphor comprehension that can be considered similar to the categorization view, where metaphors consist of ad hoc conceptual categories that can be obtained by broadening or narrowing the literal meaning of a lexical entry (Carston 2002; Sperber and Wilson 2008). In this sense, Relevance Theory can be compared to the categorization view of metaphor comprehension: the source of the metaphor, also called “base,” activates a superordinate category from which a metaphoric meaning can be derived. However, it shall be observed that in Relevance Theory, the 219 220 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI topic enables the process of meaning construction through pragmatic inferences that are driven specifically by the principle of relevance, a prerogative that does not characterize the more classic categorization view. Both views on metaphor processing (namely, processing by comparison and processing by categorization) are backed up by empirical studies (see, e.g., Bowdle and Gentner 2005 for a review). Therefore, it was necessary to identify a comprehensive theoretical framework that would take both processes into account and distinguish in which circumstances each of them, respectively, would come into play. In other words, it was necessary to identify a variable that would determine in which cases a metaphor is processed by comparison and in which cases it is processed by categorization. Bowdle and Gentner proposed that the degree of a metaphor’s conventionality can explain whether a metaphorical statement is processed by comparison or by categorization (Bowdle and Gentner 2005; Gentner and Bowdle 2008). The Career of Metaphor Theory summarizes this view, suggesting that novel metaphors are processed by comparison, a more cognitively taxing task, while conventional ones are processed by categorization, a less cognitively taxing. In this sense, metaphors that become increasingly more common in language pursue a “career” in which they tend to evolve from being processed by comparison to being processed by categorization. Glucksberg and Haught (2006) and Jones and Estes (2006), instead, suggested that the variable that can explain whether and when a metaphor is processed by comparison or by categorization is Aptness. Metaphor aptness is defined as the extent to which the conceptual category of the metaphor source captures important features of the target (Blasko and Connine 1993; Chiappe and Kennedy 1999; Jones and Estes 2006). In this view, metaphors that are more apt (novel or conventional ones alike) are processed more easily by categorization, while metaphors that are less apt require cross-domain mappings and are processed by comparison. More recently, a third view has been suggested to account for the two different but coexisting comprehension processes. This third view sees in metaphor deliberateness the reason for the activation of each of the two comprehension processes (Steen 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017). According to this view, a metaphor is deliberate when it is produced with the intent of instructing the addressee to “adopt an ‘alien’ perspective on a target referent so as to formulate specific thoughts about that target from the standpoint of the alien perspective” (Steen 2009: 180). Deliberate metaphor use is, therefore, “the intentional use of a metaphor as a metaphor” (Steen 2015: 67). The variable Deliberateness, in this sense, pertains to the communicative dimension of metaphor and operationalizes the intents that motivate metaphor use: if a metaphor is used intentionally as a metaphor, then it is used deliberately. Deliberate metaphors are more likely to be processed by means of comparison, while nondeliberate Metaphors in Intercultural Communication metaphors are more likely to be processed by means of categorization. The reader may argue that novel metaphors, because they require the speaker to construct new meaning rather than retrieve it from memory, are more likely to be used deliberately and thus processed by comparison. Similarly, the reader may suspect that conventional metaphors are more likely to be used nondeliberately and thus to be processed by categorization. However, conventional metaphors can also be used deliberately and thus “revitalized” and processed by comparison, for instance, when they are signaled in the text by specific lexical and pragmatic markers (e.g. Goatly 1997; Cameron and Deignan 2003; Semino 2008; Krennmayr 2011; CharterisBlack 2012; Nacey 2013; Steen 2016; Keating 2021). These signals include intensifiers like actually, literally, or utterly and metacomments that are used as communicative fillers to stress specific communicative intentions like, so to speak, one could say, or as it were. Among the various types of signals, Cameron included “supra-segmental features in talk or orthographic feature(s) in writing” (2003: 101). These could be changed in the duration of the pronunciation of specific words, or changes in the articulatory quality of the speech, or changes in pitch, aimed at marking specific words to signal that they hold a pragmatic weight that is different from the other words in the statement. The value of DMT is hotly debated, with some scholars suggesting that there is no empirical evidence in support of this theory (notably, Gibbs 2015), and other scholars claiming instead that contrasting findings reported in the literature on metaphor processing can be reinterpreted in a way that supports DMT (e.g. Cuccio 2018). While the jury is still out regarding the interpretation of empirical data that could support or disprove this theory, deliberateness appears to be a solid, theory-driven variable that pertains to the communicative dimension of metaphor and can be used to investigate metaphors produced with different communicative intentions and metaphors that therefore may generate different types of pragmatic inferences. The deliberate use of metaphor can be embedded in a more general type of language use, which in pragmatics is called deliberate creativity (Kecskes 2016). This is defined as a conscious type of language use, in which the creation of sentences and utterances is achieved without resorting to prefabricated units or combining ready-made expressions. In this sense, creative metaphoric expressions would be produced deliberately, and conventional metaphoric expressions, which are a specific type of formulaic language that may be stored and retrieved holistically rather than constructed anew every time, can be classified as expressions of deliberate creativity when they are produced consciously and are signaled in texts. These three main views, proposed to reconcile the different processing strategies involved in metaphor comprehension, are based on different variables, namely Conventionality, Aptness, and Deliberateness. These three variables differ from one another in theory, and possibly they differ also in the way they predict different types of linguistic and psycholinguistics 221 222 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI measures. For instance, Conventionality may be related to word frequency, while this is not necessarily the case for Deliberateness. Aptness may be associated with high levels of metaphor appreciation, while this is not necessarily the case with Conventionality, and so forth. The coming sections offer an attempt to elaborate on this issue and its implications for intercultural communication. 9.3 Variability in Metaphor Processing Within the cognitive turn in metaphor research, most of the early work focused on empirical analyses aimed at unraveling the common ground in human perceptual experience, assuming that it would be possible to sketch a single set of shared experiences that would motivate our understanding of common abstract concepts and therefore our ability to interpret metaphors (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Having established that it is possible to identify some common ground in metaphor processing and that this is basically linked to the experiences that our (human) bodies can afford, in more recent years the focus seems to have shifted toward the sources of variation in bodily experiences, and thus in how different types of speakers comprehend and produce metaphor (Littlemore 2019). As Littlemore points out in her comprehensive analysis of all possible sources of variation of embodied metaphors (2019), while cross-cultural variation has received some attention already in relatively early works (e.g. Kövecses 2005), other sources of variations remained mostly uninvestigated until recently. These include age, gender orientation, physical or linguistic impairment, personality traits, ideology, political stance, and religious beliefs, among others. Notable exceptions have been provided by Casasanto (2009), who proposed the body-specificity hypothesis already more than a decade ago. Casasanto’s hypothesis relates to the embodied theories of cognition and suggests that if thinking implies constructing and combining mental simulations of embodied experiences, then people with different kinds of bodies must think differently because they systematically interact with the world in ways that differ from the way in which the majority of people do. Casasanto tested this hypothesis on left-handed individuals compared to right-handed individuals and reported empirical evidence showing that left-handed individuals do not share the metaphorical association between positive valence and the right side of the body, a common metaphor shared by right-handed individuals (2009, 2014). Such conventional metaphor is lexicalized in many linguistic expressions (be my right-hand man vs. having two left feet), which are nevertheless arguably used by right-handed and left-handed individuals alike as formulaic language. This suggests that individuals subconsciously associate good things not with their right body side but rather with their dominant body side, a finding that validates the body-specificity hypothesis. Metaphors in Intercultural Communication People with different kinds of bodies construct different mental representations for concrete concepts and abstract ones, such as “good things,” by means of metaphors grounded in the different experiences afforded by their bodies. The sources of variation associated with physical properties of the individuals, such as size and shape of the body, are intertwined in complex ways with other individual sources of variation such as personality traits, cognitive styles, and personal beliefs. For example, Boers and Littlemore (2000) tested whether people with different cognitive styles (in particular, holistic vs. analytic and verbalizers vs. imagers) interpreted conceptual metaphors differently. The authors found that holistic individuals were significantly more likely than analytic ones to rely on the blended conceptualization of the two domains involved in the metaphor and that imagers were significantly more likely than verbalizers to relate to stereotypical images when interpreting the metaphors. Other empirical studies tested individual differences in metaphor processing in relation to other personality traits, such as the need for power (Gkiouzepas 2013, 2015; Lee and Schnall 2014), conscientiousness (Duffy and Feist 2014), need for cognition (Perez-Sobrino et al. 2018), skills in creative thinking (Birdsell 2017), number of languages spoken (Werkmann Horvat et al. 2021a), psychopathy (Meier et al. 2007), political inclination (Landau et al. 2009), and religious beliefs (Li and Cao 2016). This complex scenario brings so many factors to the surface that influence how metaphors may emerge and consolidate in mind and how metaphors are understood in various communicative settings. It can be hypothesized that metaphor conventionality, aptness, and deliberateness, and thus metaphor processing by means of comparison or categorization, are also subject to the same sources of variation indicated above. For example, the same metaphor may be perceived to be conceptually conventional by a specific individual but not by another and therefore it may be processed differently by the two hypothetical individuals. In this regard, the very notion of metaphor conventionality may need further clarification. Metaphor conventionality is a property that pertains to the conceptual dimension of metaphor. Conceptual metaphors are classically classified on a scale of conventionality. On this scale, the more a metaphor is conventional, the more it emerges in lexicalized linguistic expressions that are commonly used in daily language (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The distinction between conceptual metaphors and linguistic or other types of metaphoric expressions is a cornerstone within the cognitive linguistic tradition of metaphor analyses. As a matter of fact, the existence and the status of conceptual metaphors are traditionally assessed through analyses of linguistic expressions that underscore the conceptual metaphoric structure. While conventionality is typically contrasted with novelty and attributed to the conceptual dimension of metaphor, within the linguistic dimension, that is, the level of linguistic metaphoric expressions, the terminology adopted to distinguish common 223 224 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI from uncommon metaphors may involve labels such as “familiarity,” “creativity,” “conventionality,” or “novelty.” While an in-depth review of the different terminology used to refer to common and uncommon metaphoric expressions in the literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, it shall be mentioned that these labels may define different aspects of metaphor use. Phillips (2012), for instance, suggests distinguishing between conventional metaphoric expressions from familiar metaphoric expressions. In her view, the conventionality of a metaphoric expression is a phenomenon pertaining to the language and its community of speakers and identifiable in corpus data through frequencies of use. Conversely, the familiarity of a metaphoric expression is a phenomenon that lies with the individual and her background knowledge, which is typically not identifiable in corpus data. Inspired by Giora’s work (1999), Phillips further suggests that the perceived familiarity of a metaphoric expression by an individual may be referred to the degree of salience of its figurative meaning, a perspective that steers toward the perception of a metaphoric meaning in the mind of the individual and therefore the perceived aptness of a metaphor, rather than its frequency of use observed in corpus data. Both conventionality and familiarity seem to be continuous rather than binary variables: a linguistic expression can be more conventional or less conventional to a specific linguistic community and more familiar or less familiar to a specific individual. Having differentiated these aspects within the level of metaphoric expressions, it follows that, given a conventional metaphoric expression, it may be very familiar to a specific group of speakers but not to other groups. For example, a community of computer geeks might use verbs such as download very frequently and in creative ways. For instance, they may refer to the verb download to refer to tangible referents and not just to software and applications (e.g. did you download the new office chairs from the truck?). For this community, the metaphoric meaning of download in the context of moving office chairs, therefore, may be perceived to be more familiar than for other communities, for which instead this use may be perceived to be very unfamiliar. Notably, the familiarity of metaphoric expressions may differ depending on whether a speaker is native or nonnative. In the next sections, the different processing strategies (by comparison or by categorization) and the different variables that may determine such processing strategies (conventionality, aptness, and deliberateness) are discussed in relation to the intercultural setting where native and nonnative speakers meet. In particular, first, I will briefly outline the issue of defining and assessing metaphoric competence in the nonnative speaker; then I will explain that the empirical literature on metaphor processing in L2 is typically focused on idioms and compares the processing of literal vs. conventional metaphoric expressions. Finally, I will elaborate on how the three variables (Conventionality, Aptness, and Deliberateness) deemed to be responsible for different types of metaphor Metaphors in Intercultural Communication processing may change as a function of the speaker’s type (native or nonnative) and act in intercultural communication from a pragmatic point of view. 9.4 Metaphoric Competence and the Nonnative Speaker Metaphor comprehension is arguably among the most difficult aspects involved in the lexical and pragmatic competencies to be acquired by nonnative speakers. In a seminal work conducted by Low (1988) and consequently developed by Littlemore and Low (2006), the authors provided a theoretical account for the types of knowledge that the nonnative speaker shall acquire in order to develop a metaphoric competence that can be compared to that of native speakers. These skills include the ability to detect the boundaries of conventional metaphors, and thus the extensions that are documented and acceptable in the target language and those that are not; the ability to interpret and detect hedging language; and the cultural awareness about sensitive topics in the target language. Building upon this seminal work, Littlemore and Low argued that an additional dimension of metaphoric competence is the ability to reflect on a metaphor in a sort of metacognitive manner and playfully reliteralizing it in acceptable ways, as in I fell in love, and it was a painful fall, indeed. All the skills that taken together account for a speaker’s metaphoric competence have been recently operationalized in a battery of tests developed by O’Reilly and Marsden (2021), aimed at constructing tools that can be used to assess the metaphoric competence of nonnative speakers. In this work, the authors also provide a thorough description of each specific type of metaphoric skill that can be assessed with each specific test, such as the ability to recognize, recall, and produce metaphorical phrasal verb particles, idiomatic expression, and figurative collocations. Despite the variety of ways in which metaphors can be expressed, most research on the comprehension of figurative language by nonnative speakers is based on the specific type of figurative (metaphoric) expressions commonly called idioms (Charteris-Black 2002; Cieślicka 2006; Siyanova-Chanturia et al. 2011; Carrol and Conklin 2014; Cieślicka 2015; Carrol and Conklin 2017; Carrol et al. 2018). This is also argued by Nacey (2013), who points out that for the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), metaphor is an important aspect of the lexical competence in L2, but such competence appears to be summarized by this particular kind of metaphor, that is, phrasal idioms or frozen metaphors, which are only a minimal part of the metaphors actually found in language. These figurative expressions are particularly tricky for nonnative speakers because of the extreme degree of noncompositionality of their meaning. Consider the most classic idiomatic expression, kick the bucket: none of the individual meanings of the words 225 226 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI that compose this expression provides a transparent clue about the meaning of the figurative expression (i.e. to die). While idiomatic expressions are certainly difficult to comprehend by nonnative speakers, paradoxically, it might be easier for the nonnative speaker to realize that such expression is not to be interpreted in a literal way when contextualized in a situation, compared to other forms of metaphorical language that are slightly more semantically transparent. For example, during a conversation, it might be easier for a nonnative speaker to recognize that she kicked the bucket is a sentence that requires a nonliteral interpretation, compared to the sentence she passed on. Once the nonnative speaker detects the presence of nonliteral language as in she kicked the bucket uttered in the context of elderly home, for example, she might engage in a series of pragmatic inferences that, supported by contextual clues, may then lead her to interpret the intended meaning, which in the example above would be “she died.” Conversely, in she passed on, it might be more difficult for the nonnative speaker to realize that the statement has to be interpreted in a figurative manner because the compositional meaning that can be constructed by adding up the individual meanings of the words passed and on might not be detected by the “metaphor radar” in the nonnative speaker’s mind. In relation to this, Littlemore (2001) and Littlemore and colleagues (2011) have shown that L2 speakers find it difficult to comprehend indirect metaphors that are highly conventionalized, such as the figurative use of the phrasal verb drying up in the sentence funds dried up. More recently, Mashal and colleagues (2015) reported empirical evidence that supports the claim that conventional metaphorical expressions are more effortful for L2 than for L1 speakers. In a recent empirical study, Jankowiak et al. (2017) compared the processing of metaphorical expressions in L1 (Polish) and L2 (highly proficient in English with L1 Polish). The study used EEG to explore L1 and L2 comprehension of expressions that the authors refer to as novel metaphoric expressions (e.g. to breed rumors), conventional metaphoric (to silence rumors), literal (to deny rumors), and anomalous word pairs (to cry rumors). The authors found that more cognitive resources are required in the interpretation of novel expressions in both the L1 and the L2. The results also showed that L2 speakers find it difficult to comprehend both novel and conventional metaphoric meanings compared to the literal statement. Conversely, L1 speakers find it more taxing to process novel but not conventional metaphors. This suggests that L2 speakers are less sensitive to the levels of the conventionality of metaphoric meanings. In a more recent study, Werkmann Horvat and colleagues (2021b) tested L1, proficient L2 speakers, and intermediate L2 speakers of English in their ability to read and make sense of conventional indirect metaphoric expressions involving a verb (e.g. invest effort), compared to literal expressions (e.g. invest cash) and to meaningless juxtapositions of words (e.g. invest garden). The literal and metaphorical statements were fully balanced in terms of word lengths, frequency of occurrence across corpora of both, the word Metaphors in Intercultural Communication taken alone, as well as the whole statement. In a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm combined with a lexical decision task, the authors found that while for L1 speakers there is no difference in the processing times of conventional metaphoric expressions and literal statements, for advanced L2 speakers the metaphorical statements required more effort and thus processing time. Interestingly, for intermediate L2 speakers the authors reported no significant difference between any of the three conditions. This suggests that below a certain level of proficiency, L2 speakers are not sensitive to the semantic priming effect. Conversely, proficient L2 speakers are sensitive to this effect and therefore benefit in terms of processing time from the literal connections between verbs and nouns (invest cash), but they struggle in processing (conventional) metaphorical statements (invest effort). These results further support the idea that while for native speakers, there is no difference in processing literal and metaphorical (conventional) statements, for (advanced) language learners’ conventional metaphoric expressions may still be problematic. To conclude, recent empirical investigations show that native and nonnative speakers approach metaphors in different ways but also suggest that the different processing strategies may depend not only on the type of metaphor but also on the type of speakers and their proficiency in the language in which the metaphor is used. 9.5 Conventionality, Aptness, and Deliberateness in Metaphor Processing The differences in processing times reported for L1 and L2 speakers in reading conventional metaphoric expressions as opposed to literal statements suggest that while L1 speakers may typically process these statements by means of categorization (in line with the Career of Metaphor Theory), proficient L2 speakers, despite their fluency in L2, may process these statements by means of comparison, a more cognitively demanding operation. It remains now unclear whether and to what extent the L1 of a bilingual speaker influences her metaphor processing strategy in L2. In particular, a conventional metaphorical expression like invest effort can be frequently found in English corpus data, but this does not imply that the same expression is frequently found in the linguistic input to which the English L2 speakers are exposed. Moreover, it could be the case that a metaphorical meaning is used more frequently in the input to which L2 speakers are exposed, compared to the corresponding literal meaning. For instance, L2 students may be exposed more frequently to the collocation invest effort, where invest is used metaphorically, compared to the collocation invest cash, where it is used literally. In this case, the L2 speaker may think that invest has one meaning, which is, for her, the literal meaning of invest. Finally, it may be the case that in the L1 of the bilingual 227 228 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI speaker, there is an equivalent of the verb invest and that this is used in the same array of contexts in which it can be used in L2. This arguably facilitates the interpretation of metaphorical expressions in L2. In this regard, Giora (1999) suggests that the primacy of a word’s meaning (literal or metaphoric) is determined by its salience. A salient meaning is a meaning that can be retrieved from the mental lexicon rather than being constructed in context. Factors contributing to salience can be identified with conventionality, frequency of use, and familiarity. Therefore, it may be the case that for a nonnative speaker the metaphoric meaning of a word may be more salient than the literal meaning. Aptness measures a variable that can be defined as the perception of how well a source (metaphor vehicle) covers salient features of the target. Apt metaphors cover more salient features and therefore are easier (often faster) to process, compared to less apt metaphors (Jones and Estes 2005, 2006; Glucksberg and Haught 2006). For example, a metaphor like beaches are grills, which is not lexicalized in the English language, and therefore is creative, can be perceived to be apt in the sense that it is relatively easy to identify the salient feature that makes the comparison appropriate. This is the high temperature (the heat) that characterizes both beaches and grills. The construction of a metaphorical equivalence between the two is therefore easily interpretable because the metaphorical similarity between the terms is constructed on the basis of semantic features that are highly salient for both concepts. Conversely, less apt metaphors are based on equivalences between entities that do not share salient properties. For instance, in silence is an apron, there is no shared salient property between the two concepts. Silence may be associated with quiet time, relaxation, or emptiness and isolation, and so on, while an apron may be typically associated with cooking or cleaning and with clothing in general. The salient properties of each of the two concepts do not overlap, and therefore the metaphor may be perceived to be hard to comprehend and to interpret: it may therefore sound as non-apt. Nonetheless, the more this metaphor sinks in, the more likely it is that a metaphorical interpretation will emerge as the reader starts to navigate not only the salient properties associated with each concept but also the less salient ones. For example, silence can be used to protect, cover, and not disclose important information, much as aprons are used to protect clothes from dirt or food. The supporters of the Aptness view suggest that apt metaphors may be understood through a categorization process, while non-apt metaphors, whether or not they are familiar or conventional, are processed by comparison because they cannot evoke any metaphoric categories relevant to the important features of the topic. They would therefore invoke a literal comparison, thereby triggering a cross-domain mapping. While from a theoretical perspective Aptness is a transparent and clear variable, from a practical perspective it is difficult to measure in a direct way. Therefore, typically, aptness is operationalized with aptness judgments: native speakers are asked to rate Metaphors in Intercultural Communication a metaphor’s aptness on a scale. This indirect measuring method is problematic because, as Jones and Estes (2006) discovered, subjective ratings of conventionality and aptness are highly correlated and possibly confounded. In other words, speakers may rate a metaphor’s aptness in terms of its conventionality under the idea that something conventionalized must also be apt because it has become very familiar to the speaker. Jones and Estes (2006), for example, argue that when conventionality is operationalized through ratings elicited from participants, then these ratings tend to actually reflect the aptness of the metaphors used as stimuli. Thibodeau and Durgin (2011), moreover, show that when corpus-based frequencies are used instead of human-elicited conventionality ratings, then conventionality is again highly correlated with metaphor aptness. Therefore, the best possible way to operationalize these variables into numeric scores involved in metaphor processing continues to be debated. Moreover, it remains an open empirical question that of understanding the variation in metaphor’s aptness across L1 and L2 speakers and how the different perceptions of metaphor’s aptness may affect the communication between native and nonnative speakers or between nonnative speakers who do not share the same L1. In the next section, I will elaborate on these issues. Deliberateness is a variable that affects the communicative dimension of metaphor. Deliberateness differentiates between those metaphors that are used with the intention of changing the reader’s (listener’s) standpoint on a given topic and those metaphors that are used without this specific intent. As Steen argues, deliberate metaphors work as “perspective changers” (Steen 2016: 116) in that they provide an external perspective on a topic, which stimulates the reader/listener to draw attention to the source domain referent of the metaphor. To achieve this communicative goal, deliberate metaphors are very often signaled in the discourse (Reijnierse et al. 2018), a peculiarity that facilitates the initiation of the pragmatic inferencing process that leads the listener to adopt the alien perspective indicated by the speaker/writer. Similes are typical examples of how figurative (metaphorical) comparisons may be used deliberately in discourse (Reijnierse et al. 2019). Consider, for instance, the statement the salesman dropped the price like a bomb. In the first part of this statement, the verb dropped is used metaphorically in association with the object price, which cannot be literally dropped. The metaphor that dropped the price, however, is indirect, not signaled in the discourse, and lexicalized in language. These features suggest that it is a nondeliberate metaphor, which is used in discourse without the specific communicative purpose of changing the listener’s standpoint on this financial move. However, the second part of the statement, like a bomb, has a precise communicative function: that of revitalizing the literal meaning of dropping by adding an additional direct object (the bomb) that can be literally dropped. This communicative operation arguably leads the reader/listener to recast her 229 230 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI interpretation of the verb dropped, activate the literal meaning of this verb, which is selected by the new object (bomb), and eventually reprocess the metaphor dropped the price as a metaphor, and thus by cross-domain comparison. The signal introduced in the discourse, therefore, suggests a deliberate use of the (conventional) metaphoric expression dropped the price. Here it is important to acknowledge that the metaphor used deliberately is a conventional expression (dropped the price). Per se, this conventional expression may be processed by categorization, as predicted by the Career of Metaphor Theory. This implies that the literal meaning of dropped (i.e. the deliberate action of letting something fall) may not be accessed by the reader during the processing of the first part of this statement. However, the second part of the statement is constructed in such a way that this conventional expression is revitalized and the literal meaning of dropping gets activated so that the metaphor is processed by comparison between the literal and the metaphorical meanings of the verb dropped, each selected by a specific object (the bomb and the price). The predictions about the activation of the source domain (the literal meaning of dropped in this example) during metaphor processing are best addressed in experimental psycholinguistic research, and current endeavors are pursuing this goal using, for instance, eye-tracking techniques (de Vries et al. 2018; Werkmann Horvat et al. in prep.). De Vries and colleagues, for example, used the Deliberate Metaphor Identification Procedure (henceforth, DMIP, Reijnierse et al. 2018) to identify potential deliberate metaphors in two literary stories and then investigated the reading behavior of seventy-two participants who were asked to read them. The texts were previously analyzed and manually annotated for the presence of deliberate metaphors, nondeliberate metaphors, and nonmetaphorical words. The authors found that deliberate metaphors were read significantly slower than nondeliberate metaphors, and they found significant differences between more and less experienced readers. Moreover, nondeliberate metaphors were read slower than nonmetaphorical words. The difference in reading times, in this case, is significant but probably needs to be taken with caution (p 0.03, compared to p<0.001 for the difference in reading times between deliberate and nondeliberate metaphors). The slower reading times between deliberate and nondeliberate metaphors, in line with previous scientific literature, are interpreted as a sign that participants processed deliberate metaphors by means of cross-domain comparison. Extra time is required to focus the attention on the source domain as a separate domain of reference compared to the target domain. Conversely, nondeliberate metaphors do not function as metaphors at the level of communication, and therefore do not require extra processing time and can be processed via simple lexical disambiguation, remaining within the target domain. In pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, metaphor deliberateness is investigated in its manifestations, communicative Metaphors in Intercultural Communication functions, and variation across genres, word classes, modalities, and registers (e.g. Beger 2011, 2016; Pasma 2011; Nacey 2013; Ng and Koller 2013; Tay 2013; Perrez and Reuchamps 2014; Reijnierse et al. 2019). As a matter of fact, analyses focused on the communicative roles of metaphor are part of a relatively recent trend that sees various scholars interested in the communicative effects of metaphor use (e.g. Wee 2005; Semino and Steen 2008; Gola and Ervas 2016; Hampe 2017). Despite the recent renewed interest in the communicative aspects of metaphor use, which move beyond the investigation of the cognitive mechanisms that characterize metaphor processing in the speaker’s mind, how deliberateness affects intercultural communication remains uncharted territory. In particular, it remains to be explored and consequently tested in the experimental setting how and whether deliberateness changes in intercultural settings, compared to communicative settings in which the speakers share the same cultural background. 9.6 Conventionality, Aptness, and Deliberateness in Intercultural Pragmatics The conventionality of a conceptual metaphor within the Conceptual Metaphor Theory is commonly determined on the basis of systematic correspondences found in the language (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). For instance, the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY emerges from the analysis of linguistic expressions in English, such as saving time, wasting time, spending time, and stealing time. In fact, many languages share similar sets of metaphoric expressions and collocations featuring TIME, suggesting that the same conceptual metaphor is lexicalized in various expressions that can be observed in many western languages. This, of course, does not imply that such a metaphor is universal. Moreover, even in those languages where this conceptual metaphor is lexicalized, the documented expressions do not necessarily overlap. For example, in Italian there are conventional expressions equivalent to saving time (risparmiare tempo) and wasting time (sprecare tempo), but there is no equivalent to spending time (*spendere tempo). While in English it is possible to spend a holiday, spend a summer, spend a week, spend a minute, in Italian TIME cannot be spent. Or better, expressions like spending time in Italian will be recognized as new, not lexicalized, and, therefore, arguably, used deliberately as metaphors. Moreover, such expressions are likely to be perceived as apt because they rely on an underlying conceptual metaphor that is present in the conceptualization of TIME within the Italian culture. Italian speakers may recognize in the use of Italian expressions equivalent to spending time, a calque from an English expression, or broadly speaking an anglicism, with all the possible pragmatic inferences that using this type of language might 231 232 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI trigger. In this perspective, it could be argued that TIME IS MONEY is a conventional conceptual metaphor in both Italian and English, but that such a metaphor affords a different (although partially overlapping) array of lexicalized expressions in each of the two languages. The partial overlap between metaphoric expressions lexicalized in the two languages suggests that there are nuanced differences in the way that speakers of Italian and English respectively conceptualize TIME as MONEY. These nuanced differences in conceptualization may be explained within a theoretical framework where the conceptual dimension of metaphor is composed of different layers that vary in granularity and complexity. Kövecses (2017), for instance, outlines various theory-driven levels of representations of metaphor in thought, where the different layers vary in terms of semantic richness, ranging from the very schematic image schemas (Johnson 1987) to the less rich domains, followed by frames (Fillmore 1982; Sullivan 2013) and finally mental spaces (Fauconnier 1994). This last layer, namely mental spaces, constitutes the level of conceptual representation at which metaphors are represented in high resolution and can be contrasted to the low-resolution semantics afforded by the image-schematic level. To take an example used by Kovecses himself, the conceptual domain BUILDING is characterized by several image schematic representations, which have been labeled in the scientific literature as CONTAINER, VERTICALITY, and STRUCTURED OBJECT. As a conceptual domain, BUILDING is used in conventional conceptual metaphors such as THEORIES ARE BUILDINGS, which emerge from the systematic occurrences of linguistic expressions in which buildings are used to talk about theories and arguments (e.g. “this theory has solid foundations”). At a more fine-grained level of conceptual richness, BUILDING consists of a number of frames: it possesses a CONSTRUCTION frame, a STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS frame, and a CONSTITUENT PARTS frame, which encompasses concept, such as walls, rooms, doors, windows, a FUNCTION frame that provides information about who uses the building, and so forth. The richest level of conceptual representation, the level of mental spaces or scenarios, emerges when we use language in real communicative contexts, and thus we contextualize, elaborate, and modify frames. At this level, for example, specific types of buildings can be used to talk about attitudes and behaviors toward specific topics, as in the corpus example reported by Kövecses: “public employee unions, in league with compliant state officials, have built a fortress around their pension systems” (2017: 338). From the perspective of metaphor variation, arguably the more a metaphor is described at a deep level of analysis or at a low-resolution level as I claim (e.g. at the level of image schema), the more its representation is inclusive, and it is, therefore, likely to be present in the conceptual systems of many linguistic communities. Conversely, the more a metaphor is analyzed at a representationally rich level, or a conceptual level characterized by highresolution semantics as I would call it (e.g. at the level of mental spaces), Metaphors in Intercultural Communication the more the metaphor is likely to be “colored” with culture-specific aspects, and therefore it is less likely to be shared across communities. Thus, the more we analyze a metaphor at a deep, generic level, for instance, in terms of its image-schematic structure, the more we are likely to witness that the same deep representation is shared across cultures. This is not necessarily due to the fact that such representation is embodied. It could be due to the fact that image-schematic representations are poor, characterized by a very limited number of traits, and therefore highly inclusive and easily applicable to a range of situations. It is, therefore, more probable to find them. Conversely, the details and vivid representations that characterize richer levels of metaphor conceptualization and that eventually emerge to the surface through linguistic expressions are more likely to differ across languages, cultures, and speakers because it is statistically more difficult to find the exact same configuration of multiple conceptual features. In the case of TIME IS MONEY, the conceptual representations of this metaphor in English and Italian might overlap at the deeper, more inclusive levels, and then present a slight divergence at the richer levels of conceptual representation, which is eventually reflected in the similar but not fully overlapped set of linguistic expressions afforded by the two languages. In intercultural communication between native and nonnative speakers, the more the levels of conceptual and linguistic representation of metaphor diverge between the speakers’ L1, the more the communication may be difficult. There may be different types of problems, ranging from simple delays in comprehension to complete failure of understanding the speaker’s intentions. From a pragmatic perspective, these delays and misunderstandings are caused by the formulation of inferences that do not meet the speaker’s communicative intentions. Such mismatching inferences, as suggested above, are arguably more frequently encountered at those levels of metaphor representation that are semantically richer. A critical and still open empirical question that can be formulated in relation to metaphor conventionality in intercultural communication is the following: Between the image-schematic level of metaphoric representation (which is likely to be more widespread and shared) and the most semantically rich levels of metaphor representation, are there any systematic variations in the way conceptual metaphors diverge across languages and cultures? Metaphor aptness, unlike conventionality, does not formally take into account the various conceptual levels at which the salient features of a metaphor may be identified in order to perceive an expression as apt or non-apt. Aptness is defined in terms of the salience of the semantic features that come into play for the comprehension of the metaphor. To the best of my knowledge, the Aptness view does not advance specific hypotheses for the mutual intelligibility of native and nonnative speakers using metaphors. Nonetheless, the following reasoning can be elaborated. Metaphors are typically alignments of concrete and abstract meanings, 233 234 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI where concrete meanings usually act as sources of conceptual mappings. The question arising is, therefore, whether concrete concepts and concrete word meanings are relatively stable across languages and cultures or whether, instead, they are subject to important cross-cultural and crosslinguistic variation. A recent study conducted by Vivas and colleagues (2020) suggests that concrete concepts trigger the activation of core features that are relatively stable across languages. In this study, the authors adopted a classic property generation task, thanks to which they elicited and collected semantic features produced by American English, Argentinian Spanish, and Italian native speakers in relation to a set of concrete words used as stimuli. Speakers had to imagine the concept denoted by the word (e.g. shovel, presented in the L1 of the speakers) and list the salient properties of this concept in their native language. The analyst then retained only the features that were consistently produced by many participants, in line with classic norming data collections (e.g. McRae et al. 2005). Despite some cross-cultural differences (e.g. Americans mentioning that shovels are typically used to move snow, while Argentinians lack this association), core features (e.g. <elongated shape>, <can have a handle>, <used to dig>, etc.) were consistently produced in response to the stimuli by all the linguistic communities. To be more precise, in this study the authors show that most features of concrete objects are typically shared across languages. However, some features produced by participants appeared to be context-dependent. These encompass, for instance, features describing typical situations in which concrete concepts denoting artifacts and tools are used. These context-dependent features are more likely to vary across languages. For instance, a shovel may be prototypically used to move snow in North America, but this may not be prototypically the case in Argentina. Therefore, while North Americans conceptualize shovels as tools prototypically used to move snow, Argentinians do not share this idea. If shovels were to be used in intercultural communication between North Americans and Argentinians as metaphor sources, the feature <used to move snow> (salient for North Americans but not for Argentinians) might produce different perceptions of metaphor aptness. For instance, a North American academic may compare the activity of marking exams to the activity of shoveling, with the specific situation of shoveling snow in mind. In fact, marking exams is a responsibility that takes place at specific moments during the year. It requires energy and time. It is necessary to the community and needs to be done relatively quickly, much like keeping the sidewalk and doorstep free from snow. Such a set of inferences, based on the contextual feature of moving snow, may not be shared by the Argentinian speaker, who may instead think about shoveling as to an activity that can be optionally done in the garden, in different moments of the year, without much urgency. For the Argentinian speaker, therefore, the metaphor of marking exams being compared to shoveling may be perceived as less apt than it is Metaphors in Intercultural Communication perceived by the North American speaker because the two speakers associate different salient features to the same concrete concept (shovel). Aptness in this sense depends on the type of (salient) features that are highlighted by the metaphor and whether they are shared between speakers. Deliberateness is a variable that generates various hypotheses that are relevant from an intercultural pragmatic perspective. As mentioned above, deliberate metaphors are typically signaled in discourse. This peculiarity makes deliberate metaphor stand out from the rest of the discourse and more likely to be noticed by both native and nonnative speakers alike. In their more direct form, for example, deliberate metaphors may be structured as similes. When using a deliberate metaphor, the producer has the intent of changing the receiver’s standpoint. It follows that she arguably has an idea about the identity or profile of her receiver. In this sense, a speaker who uses a deliberate metaphor directed to a nonnative speaker is arguably more likely to use signals that may help the receiver detect the metaphor and more likely to use a (deliberate) metaphor that, in her opinion, has a good chance to meet the receiver’s inferences. Conversely, when a metaphor is used nondeliberately, the sender does not use the metaphor as a metaphor, i.e. with the intent to have the recipient (explicitly) consider the target domain from the perspective of the source domain. This is probably a very common scenario in those types of intercultural communication settings where a native speaker uses a metaphor nondeliberately as a metaphor (for instance, a conventionalized expression), but the receiver, a nonnative speaker, will intend it as deliberate and thus will process the metaphor, by comparison, focusing on the meaning of the source domain. In this case, the receiver may pay attention to the features that characterize the metaphor source and change her perspective on the topic discussed by the sender in a way that was not predicted or intended by the sender. In this scenario, the meaning of the metaphor is not negotiated between the two speakers because the metaphor does not belong to the shared communicative field in which the speakers act linguistically to express and interpret each other’s intents. In relation to these scenarios, a recent empirical study (MacArthur 2016) investigated the use of overt and covert metaphors produced by academic mentors to convey specific messages to students who are nonnative speakers in academic conversations. In her definition of overt and covert metaphors, MacArthur explains that overt metaphors are explicit analogies or nonliteral comparisons signaled in the discourse. Covert metaphors are non-signaled conventional metaphorical expressions. In my interpretation of this distinction, overt metaphors are typically (but not necessarily) novel. Covert metaphors are typically (but not necessarily) conventional. In her empirical investigation, MacArthur explains that while her initial hypothesis would be that overt metaphors would be a particularly effective means of communicating an idea in the context of cross-cultural 235 236 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI mentoring, a comparison between overt and covert uses of metaphors revealed that covert metaphors are used much more frequently than overt metaphors and that, interestingly, the communicative success of any use of metaphor did not depend on the use of overt or covert metaphors. The communicative success of a metaphor’s use was rather granted by the repetition or rewording of the metaphor vehicles across turns and speakers. This feature of the discourse indicated that the participants in the conversation were actively negotiating the metaphor’s meaning in the conversation, proving that the metaphor was being processed as a metaphor. Conversely, when the metaphor vehicle was not elaborated, reworded, or discussed by the speakers across turns, the metaphor was arguably not picked up by the receiver. This study suggests that nonsignaled metaphors can also be considered deliberate because their meaning can be actively negotiated by native and nonnative speakers. These preliminary empirical findings suggest that deliberate metaphors (both creative and conventional alike) can be used intentionally by a speaker with the pragmatic purpose of making the receiver processing the metaphor as a metaphor, but can also be interpreted deliberately by a receiver, even when they were not produced deliberately by the sender. The more the metaphor is discussed explicitly as a metaphor and therefore elaborated and repeated, as shown by MacArthur, the more it is likely that the participants to the conversation perceive it to be effective. In this sense, deliberateness becomes a feature that characterizes not just the production process by a speaker or the comprehension process by a receiver, but both perspectives integrated within the communicative act itself. Moreover, the pragmatic negotiation of a metaphor’s meaning in a given context, achieved by means of overt discussion, elaboration, and repetition of the metaphor, which is therefore processed as a metaphor, is arguably likely to increase the perception of its aptness in the speakers’ mind, by activating repeatedly features that become salient, in the given context. Finally, such elaboration and focused attention by both sides onto a shared metaphor are likely to increase the perception of familiarity of that metaphor, which, as described above, is the individual’s dimension of conventionality. 9.7 Conclusions and Outlook While the past forty years have witnessed the emergence and consolidation of a cognitive perspective on the study of metaphor, in recent years the focus is starting to take into account not only the cognitive operations and the conceptual representation of metaphor in the mind of the speakers but also the pragmatic effects that metaphor use support. In this scenario, Deliberate Metaphor Theory enriches and integrates previous theoretical positions such as the Career of Metaphor Theory and the Metaphors in Intercultural Communication Aptness view, proposing that the differences observed in metaphor processing may be attributed to a variable that belongs to the communicative dimension of metaphor: deliberateness. Within the fields of experimental pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics, deliberateness is likely to become a central topic of investigation for scholars working on metaphor because this variable offers a wide range of open empirical questions that can be addressed from a theoretical perspective as well as from an experimental perspective. In particular, the current status of the scientific literature leaves some compelling research questions open to empirical testing. First, while deliberateness per se can be identified in the discourse, for example by means of the ad hoc created procedure DMIP (Reijnierse et al. 2018), it remains to be understood and tested whether the potential deliberateness identified in the discourse corresponds to specific processes that can be detected and measured in the mind of the participants to the conversation. In particular, it remains to be measured more extensively and with multiple approaches, whether a metaphor that is marked for deliberateness in the discourse is necessarily produced deliberately by the sender (thus through the activation of the source domain) and interpreted as such by the receiver too. In this regard, slower reaction times and eye gazes focused on the source domain, or the metaphor vehicle, may need to be integrated with empirical findings aimed at measuring the intentionality by which a deliberate metaphor was really produced with the communicative goal of changing the receiver’s perspective on a topic, and with empirical findings aimed at unraveling the actual cognitive operations that a receiver undertakes when she is taking more time to process a deliberate (vs. a nondeliberate) metaphor. Second, all the sources of variation in the type of speaker, observed in metaphor processing (as brilliantly defined by Littlemore 2019), such as gender orientation, political preferences, and so forth, may be elaborated in relation to deliberateness and therefore in relation to the actual use of a metaphor marked for deliberateness: how does the processing of a metaphor as a metaphor change as a function of the type of speaker? Finally, where can one draw the borders (the beginning and the end) of a deliberate metaphor? In particular, imagine the scenario where a conventional metaphor is likely to be produced deliberately because it is signaled in the text by linguistic clues in a way that suggests that the metaphor is revitalized and the source domain likely to be activated by a receiver. For example, in the statement Italy fell into a deep economic crisis but then managed to climb out of it, the verb fell is used metaphorically in the collocation fall into a crisis. This is a conventional and arguably nondeliberate metaphor if one looks at the first part of the statement alone. However, the second part of the statement displays a metaphorical use of the verb climb, which relates to the previous (conventional) metaphor, and has the communicative effect of 237 238 MAR IANNA BOLOGNESI revitalizing it or, arguably, making it deliberate. This implies that the reader is likely going to re-process the meaning of falling into a crisis by activating the literal meaning of falling, which could be previously unnecessary (according to the career of metaphor, for example) to the comprehension of the conventional metaphoric expression. The second part of the metaphorical statement, therefore, suggests that even the first part of the statement might have been produced deliberately by the speaker, but this may not be the case for the receiver, who may process the first part of the statement as a nondeliberate conventional expression, thus by means of semantic disambiguation, and then reprocess it later, by activating the source domain, triggered by the second part of the statement that features a metaphorical use of the verb climb in the context of leaving behind a period of economic crisis. What is, therefore, the deliberate metaphor: the first part of the statement, the second part of the statement, or the whole statement? And for whom is this metaphor deliberate? For the speaker, for the receiver, or both? These and possibly other open questions are likely to be debated in the coming years, taking the study of metaphor in new and exciting research directions. References Barsalou, L. W. (1999). 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The socio-cognitive approach to communicative interaction acknowledges the importance of cooperation and common ground but maintains that interlocutors tend to adhere to their individual background knowledge and experience for production and comprehension. The shared knowledge base may therefore not be fully available prior to the exchange but, rather, established dynamically and interactively in the course of the conversation. Discussing internet memes, it will be shown that stable core common ground and dynamic emergent common ground are fundamental assets for the description of contemporary and future phenomena in digital communication. I will argue that internet memes represent a kind of communication where emergent common ground is aspired rather than resorted to as an emergency solution when core common ground is lacking. A long tradition in linguistic pragmatics, going back to Grice’s theory of cooperation, assumes that any linguistic interaction necessarily involves common ground, which is a mutually shared knowledge base that has to be considered and, if necessary, made available by a speaker engaging in a conversation. The hearers’ interpretation, according to this line of thinking, will also be maximally cooperative, which means intentionally based on the common ground shared with the speaker. 246 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN Cognitive research has challenged the view that sees intention, cooperation, and common ground at the core of every natural interaction. Studies suggest that in the actual conversational situation, both speakers and hearers show egocentric behavior in that both production and comprehension may proceed on the basis of the individual’s own existing knowledge, rather than on a previously identified basis of shared knowledge with the interlocutor(s) (Barr and Keysar 2005; Colston 2008; Keysar 2008). Regarding the possibility of spontaneous, dynamic, interactive, and creative efforts to the formation of common ground as a shared knowledge base, Kecskes and Zhang (2009, 2013) introduce a binary approach to common ground. Considering the importance of a shared basis for understanding, but also considering situations where a full a priori assessment of common ground is not possible, they suggest two variations of common ground that are potentially interdependent: core common ground as a relatively stable knowledge base and emergent common ground, which is knowledge that is cooperatively built up in communication. In this chapter, I will explain the differences between core and emergent common ground, with special emphasis on the importance of the notion of emergent common ground for communicative phenomena that go beyond the scope of language and linguistic items. I will discuss the theory of core and emergent common ground with a view toward internet pragmatics, which, given its global reach, always includes an intercultural viewpoint as well. Analyzing internet communication provides certain challenges to existing pragmatic theories, because aspects like context, recipient design, shared background knowledge, and the signification itself apply differently than would be the case in real-life interactions (Xie and Yus 2018). In particular, I will demonstrate that internet memes are a form of communication that relies on emergent common ground to a great extent, as the culture that brings them up as well as their shape and content are novel, interactively formed, and rich in variation. I will argue that the interaction with memes is an example of a kind of communication where emergent common ground is not just the “emergency resort” that is applied when common ground fails, but that emergent common ground is a communicative, interactive force in itself that draws its power from individuals’ motivation to interact and make connections with others by building up and making sense of new means of expression. The chapter will proceed as follows: Section 10.2 gives an overview of the traditional notion of common ground, its use, denomination, and effect in linguistic theory. It will also discuss criticism of this notion, as socio-cognitive studies suggest that communicators show significant degrees of egocentrism in interaction, which is something that is not accounted for by pragmatic theories focusing on cooperation and common ground. Section 10.3 introduces the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) that views core and emergent common ground as two facets of common ground, as communication not only operates on shared a priori knowledge Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics but also involves dynamism and co-creation of information by the interlocutors. This section will also discuss formulaic language, as it plays a role both in the consolidation and reflection of core common ground and in the provision of the potential for creation and variation which is emergent common ground. Section 10.4 introduces internet memes as a modern form of communication in digital media. Internet memes are similar to formulaic language, as they resemble templates with recurrent components involving formal and functional features. The section provides an analysis of currently popular internet memes in terms of core and emergent common ground. Section 10.5 gives a summary and discussion of the contents of this chapter. 10.2 Common Ground Common ground is a term first used in publications by H. H. Clark (1996) and Stalnaker (2002) and attributed to Grice (1989) (Kecskes 2014: 152). To ensure proper understanding and smooth communication, it is widely assumed that interlocutors rely on common ground as a basis for the production and comprehension of their respective utterances. Common ground, in this approach, is the mutual belief that the speaker and the other person(s) taking part in the interaction share certain portions of knowledge as a prerequisite to the current conversation (Clark and Marshall 1981; Clark 1996; Levinson 2006; Enfield 2008; Tomasello 2008; Clark 2015). 10.2.1 Common Ground and Linguistic Choices What is called common ground here goes by a number of denominations in the theory of linguistic pragmatics. “Common knowledge, mutual knowledge, shared knowledge, assumed familiarity, presumed background information” (Kecskes 2014: 152), given information, accessible information (Prince 1981; Du Bois 1985, 1987) are other words for broadly the same phenomenon. Common ground needs to be established in order for a conversation to go forward, which is a process called grounding (e.g. Clark 1996, 2015; Fetzer and Fischer 2007). The establishment and/or availability of common ground has an effect on grammar. Shared material usually gets marked by pronouns and definite markers, while new, yet to be established information bears more lexical and phonetic weight and gets marked by indefinite markers in languages where there is such a distinction. As for word order, there is a tendency to position given elements before new elements in a sentence (Chafe 1976; Haftka 1978; Hawkins 1978, 1994, 2004; Gundel et al. 1993; Fretheim and Gundel 1996; Lyons 1999). There is evidence that syntactic constructions are chosen with respect to the availability of common ground as well. Generally, the subject or privileged syntactic argument (Van Valin 2005) of a sentence bears common ground material, and 247 248 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN syntactic constructions are chosen to this effect. This may lead to the formation of passive structures, where these are available, and antipassive structures in ergative languages. Case marking in languages worldwide is affected by common ground in that there is a global tendency to use less complex marking for subjects that refer to common ground (Silverstein 1976, 1981; Du Bois 1985, 1987; Blake 1994; Dixon 1994; Lambrecht 1994; Haspelmath 2005; Diedrichsen 2006). The choices speakers make with respect to wording, emphasis, and grammatical structures in order to ensure the recognition of common ground is called recipient design (Goodwin 1981; Sacks 1992). Recipient design is an important aspect of cooperation, which is, according to Grice (1989), the human behavioral prerequisite of successful communication. Cooperation entails that interlocutors mutually recognize their intentions and goals and make a joint effort to achieve them (Kecskes 2014: 155). Speakers make sure that their listeners are “on the same page,” so to speak, and they may go through great lengths to ensure that this is the case, by, for example, giving explanations where needed and choosing wording and grammatical constructions that are not confusing with respect to the givenness status of the matter on hand. 10.2.2 Common Ground vs. Egocentrism The view that common ground is at the heart of everything that happens in human communication has been challenged from a number of viewpoints. While it is still deemed important that speakers establish a shared basis for their interactions, it may not be the case that this shared basis, i.e. the common ground, is established as a prerequisite of the conversation. Barr and Keysar (2005), Keysar (2008), and Colston (2008) show through cognitive psychology studies that spontaneous interaction is like a trialand-error process that is co-constructed by the participants. Interactants in a conversation behave much more egocentrically than a common ground theory based on cooperation, joint effort, and recipient design would allow. There are anchoring, contrast, and assimilation effects, which means that a person’s memory may be coloured by things they heard or saw before the interaction. There may be false memories, and speakers’ minds may drift during the conversation, which impacts their concentration on what is being discussed. Also, speakers could just purposefully make their contribution without considering common ground at all, for example, in a monologue that is aimed at formulating an idea without allowing interruption, or in order to impress the audience, and make them feel that the speaker her/himself is so much more knowledgeable in a particular field. Colston (2008: 173) suggests also that comprehension should be viewed as a continuum, because degrees of comprehension vary across situations. Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics The continuum ranges from something minimal to an elaborate, in-depth understanding, and depending on the situation and the nature of the conversation, the comprehension reached may just be “good enough” for the current interaction. The point on the continuum that counts as “good enough” might have to be negotiated or silently agreed upon in the interaction. Colston (2008: 179 183) maintains that interlocutors can assume portions of the conversation as common ground after the fact, based on the experience that the hearer was able to understand the contribution by the speaker to a sufficient degree. The illusion of consistent memories and the illusion of the full accuracy of common ground sustain common ground and allow communication to function. Keysar (2008: 291 192) also remarks that there is no objective measure of the actual success of everyday conversations, and that oftentimes miscommunication will go unnoticed or unaddressed. In conclusion, regarding common ground as a mandatory prerequisite to any natural conversation is a very idealistic approach that might be considered too ambitious, given that human memory does not always work in perfect favor of an audience’s needs (Barr and Keysar 2005; Gerrig and Horton 2005; Colston 2005, 2008; Keysar 2008; Gibbs and Colston 2019). 10.3 The Socio-cognitive Approach: Core and Emergent Common Ground According to Kecskes (2008, 2010, 2014) and Kecskes and Zhang (2009, 2013), interaction is much more chaotic, involves less “sameness” among the interlocutors (Sanders 2019), and less balance and agreement than has been claimed or implied by advocates of pragmatic theories that emphasize the role of common ground and cooperation. Within a culture of speakers, understanding is generally enabled because each interaction is embedded in a sociocultural background of linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. In cases where there is not enough shared background, as in lingua franca interactions (Kecskes 2014; Ortaçtepe and Okkalı 2021), speakers will adjust the way they express themselves in order to ensure understanding. In such encounters, intercultures emerge and the knowledge base they operate upon is partly created interactively in the conversation. The socio-cognitive approach (SCA) has been developed by Kecskes (2008, 2010) with the Dynamic Model of Meaning (DMM) and Kecskes and Zhang (2009, 2013) with the distinction between core and emergent common ground. The SCA suggests that in human interaction, cooperation and egocentrism are not antagonistic phenomena. Interlocutors are viewed as rational “social beings searching for meaning with individual minds embedded in a socio-cultural collectivity” (Kecskes 2014: 42). 249 250 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN The rationality of the interlocutors entails both cooperation and egocentrism. The egocentrism is an attention bias that is the result of prior individual experience. During the interaction, people assume that their respective perceptions of reality are related. This is how their common knowledge of reality becomes reinforced (see also Wittgenstein 1960; Berger and Luckmann 1966; Garfinkel 1967; Kecskes 2014). “What we deal with as objective, is socially constructed” (Kecskes 2014: 44). According to Gibbs and Colston (2019), there is always an emergent quality to common ground. Human nonverbal and verbal behaviors adjust naturally in conversation, which is a self-organizational process. Common ground therefore naturally emerges as coupled behavior, and it is not the case that two or more discrete sets of meanings or intentions are brought together in interaction. “Meaning is constructed “on the spot” from conversational interaction rather than being buried inside speakers’ minds and then fully expressed in the language they use” (Gibbs and Colston 2019: 16). Social practices are conventionalized routines that involve culturally acquired knowledge, but also knowledge that is socially constructed in the situation. In the socio-cognitive approach, two kinds of common ground are suggested, which are potentially part of any interaction in variable degrees: core and emergent common ground. 10.3.1 Core Common Ground Core common ground is regarded as relatively static knowledge. It is generalized, common knowledge that belongs to a speech community as a result of prior interactions and experience. This knowledge is shared before and independent of the actual situational context (Kecskes 2014: 162). Core common ground is a general assumption in two ways. 1. It is static and shared among people, but it can change diachronically. 2. It can vary among different groups of individuals, dependent on their education, geography, lifestyle, etc. The three subcategories of core common ground are common sense, culture sense, and formal sense (Kecskes and Zhang 2009; Kecskes 2014). Common sense is generalized knowledge about the world. It is based on observation of the objective world and cognitive reasoning of it. Culture sense comprises generalized knowledge about cultural norms, beliefs, and values of the human society, a community, or a nation. It entails customs and ethics, and the knowledge of social science (Kecskes 2014: 161 162). Formal sense in terms of knowledge of the linguistic system includes generalized knowledge about the language system shared, which may be more than one. Social norms and practices, but also culturally shared sentiments and sensitivities are reflected in commonly known expressions that may be Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics larger than words. These complex patterns are called “formulaic language” in the SCA and “constructions” in Construction Grammar theory (Goldberg 1995, 2006; Kay and Fillmore 1999; Croft 2001; Jackendoff 2002; Gonzálvez-Garcia and Butler 2006; Butler 2009, 2013). Proficiency in the use of these formulaic expressions, such as collocations, fixed semantic units, frozen metaphors, phrasal verbs, speech formulas, idioms, and situation-bound utterances (Coulmas 1981; Kecskes 2014: 105), is shared as core common ground in a community of speakers, to the detriment of people who are new to the community. The use of formulaic language is adaptable, however, such that constructions can be modified or newly created on the go, if necessary or desired (Hopper 1998, 2004, 2011, 2015; Sharifian 2017). The interactive creation of linguistic material is considered to be a case of emergent common ground. According to the SCA, formulaic expressions incorporate not just the linguistic elements that build them, but also the situations and settings that they are typically used for. In intercultural pragmatics, formulaic expressions are essential parts of pragmatic competence, reflections of native-like behavior that often express cultural values, social expectations, and speaker attitude. Formulaic utterances create shared bases for common ground in interaction. Their use requires communicative experience in a culture, and at the same time, they reflect this shared experience back to the interlocutors and reassure them in their common understanding. Cultures using formulas “afford their members the tranquillity of knowing that what they say will be interpreted by the addressee in the same way that it is intended” (Tannen and Öztek 1977: 524). This “tranquillity” is not available for people outside the In-Group (Kecskes 2014: 111 112). Formulaic expressions present a challenge to L2 learners with limited intercultural experience because these do not share the usage history of the expressions. 10.3.2 Emergent Common Ground The notion of emergent common ground takes into account the egocentrism that may be involved in language production and comprehension. It also considers that speakers may not have a common basis, for example if they are from different cultural backgrounds. Emergent common ground is sensitive to the contingent situational context. It is defined as dynamic, particularized knowledge created in the ongoing communication and triggered by the actual situational context. It is divided into two subcategories: shared sense and current sense. Shared sense is particularized knowledge about personal experiences that interlocutors share. It varies with respect to the relationships of the interlocutors and their mutual knowledge that is based on their individual personal experience. The shared sense may have to be adjusted in the situation. Current sense entails the emergent perception of the current situation. It is also dynamic, 251 252 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN as it may need to be co-constructed when interlocutors perceive the same situation differently. Emergent common ground is assumptive in that it is contingent on the actual situation (Kecskes 2014: 162 164). Emergent common ground is therefore defined as a knowledge resource that is dynamically created in interaction. It complements the knowledge shared by interactants prior to the communication. The concept of emergent common ground is very important, as it accounts for the dynamicity of communication and provides a way to describe the portions of mutually shared information that are created interactively in the conversation. The notion of emergent common ground is also making a strong point toward the flexibility and inclusiveness potential of communication, as it acknowledges situations where people from diverse backgrounds talk to each other: These situations clearly show that communication is not all about a priori shared knowledge. According to the above considerations, emergent common ground has the following functions: 1. To repair knowledge deficits or mismatches in communication. 2. To bring the conversation forward and move it to new areas. 3. To include people from different backgrounds by adjusting the shared knowledge base. I argue that this is not the complete picture of the functionality of emergent common ground. Kecskes (2014: 116 118) reports that English Lingua Franca (ELF) speakers tend to take certain precautions with respect to the language they use among each other. For example, they avoid formulaic expressions, because they think another nonnative speaker may not understand them. It also happens that the speakers create their own formulas, which are either motivated by sayings in their own L1, or created on the spot, and picked up by other ELF speakers in conversation. An expression thus coined and accepted can become a part of the interculture being created. In one situation reported by Kecskes, a group of ELF speakers adopted the term native American in order to refer to “native speakers of American English,” and kept on using this term throughout their conversations, even though they were aware that this was not the correct usage, and they also knew about the correct term. Kecskes (2014: 118) observes: They even joked about it and said that the use of target language formulas coined by them in their temporary speech community was considered like a “joint venture” and created a special feeling of camaraderie in the group. Regarding observations like this, I argue that the function of emergent common ground may not be exhaustively described in terms of an emergency solution for cases when there is not enough core common ground available to sustain the conversation. The special feeling of camaraderie, the experience of “joint venture” in the conversation among strangers Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics may be the thing that interactants are actually looking for. The sense of community resulting from coining new expressions and building up shared knowledge together is one of the things that establishes and entertains human culture. Emergent common ground is a contributor to it, just as well as core common ground has the capacity to reassure people of their shared culture. I therefore suggest considering some additional functions of emergent common ground. Extended functions of emergent common ground: 4. To allow people to be part of emergent culture, emergent communities, ignite community spirit, enhance people’s sense of identity and belonging. 5. To encourage and enable people to find or create new ways of communicating. Communication is an open-end, open-topic, open-source activity that can be discovered, imagined, innovated, created interactively any time, across cultures, and across channels. In the following section, I will give an example of a kind of interaction that makes use of emergent common ground in the sense just described. Internet memes in digital communication are a modern form of human interaction where formal modes of expression and meaning and function conventions are interactively created using a multitude of modes of signification, like graphics, photo, video, and print. The participation is voluntary, unguided, and global. I will argue that the theory of core and emergent common ground provides a powerful basis for the explanation of the attraction, creativity, and functionality of cross-cultural global digital communication. 10.4 Internet Memes The term internet meme is related to Dawkins’ concept of a meme from his 1976 publication The Selfish Gene. A meme in Dawkins’ sense is a cultural unit, like an idea, a style, or a portion of knowledge, that has a potential to get passed on over generations of people and is contingent on factors that resemble the conditions guiding genetic evolution. There is replication and spread under selective pressure, such that memes that are not “fit” for situations and tasks on hand will not replicate. The identification of a biological gene with a cultural meme has been discussed and criticized widely (Rose 1998; Blackmore 1999; Conte 2000; Sperber 2000; Edmonds 2005). The application of the term meme for digital media contents is generally unrelated to this scholarly discussion, but the factors replication and spread are significant for their functionality. Internet memes as a form of communication in “networks of mediated cultural participation” (Milner 2012: 10 11) are nowadays well known within mainstream communicative culture. Like linguistic constructions, they emerge and 253 254 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN replicate in interaction and adapt a usage and meaning convention that cannot be derived from the parts they are composed of. They are complex form function units allowing and inviting variation within limits that are themselves part of the interactively created conventions (see Section 10.3.2, Diedrichsen 2013a, 2013b). Internet memes are generally used to comment on something, bring an argument across, or share a sentiment. They can be serious and straightforwardly express social or political criticism, but mostly, their content is to be understood in a humorous way, potentially including dark or bitter humour. The shape an internet meme can take is limited only by the technical affordances of digital communication, so they appear in a variety of forms and genres. Shifman (2014) defines internet memes as groups of content items. These are bound together by common features, i.e. memetic dimensions (Shifman 2014: 39, emphasis in original) that are recognizable for informed users and that may act as incentives for imitation. According to Shifman (2014: 41), an internet meme can be defined as: “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which (b) were created with awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users.” The most popular and familiar genre is the Image Macro meme, where an image is combined with text in a recurrent format. Memes are meant to provoke a reaction from the recipients, which may include a comment and/or a replication plus variation of the content. Each meme has its own topic, refers to a certain circumstance, action, mood, or attitude that users can relate to, and the variations that are appropriate for a meme are not limitless. Proper conduct of making and reading memes is learned through (sub)cultural engagement, just like formulaic language and indeed any language use is learned through continuous cultural experience (Eco 1976; Wittgenstein 1960). Proficiency in using and reading memes is a form of “literacy.” The site knowyourmeme.com serves as a database that gives up-to-date information about memes and their usage: “Becoming literate in these groups is a phatic process, since levels of meme literacy serve as cultural capital, differentiating members from non-members” (see also Miltner 2014; Katz and Shifman 2017: 828; Nissenbaum and Shifman 2017). Memes are a phatic form of communication in that their function lies in social bonding rather than in the exchange of information (Varis and Blommaert 2015; Yus 2019a). The enormous spread and ubiquitous usage of memes can be explained by the social aspect that comes along with sharing insider knowledge about pop culture and other content (Dynel 2016). The experience of understanding the meme, getting the humor, and having access to the necessary background knowledge is uplifting, as it creates emotions of connection and intimacy. The experience of shared Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics cultural information triggers a “joy of mutual manifestness” (Yus 2018a: 123). Internet memes have been described as folklore, as their communicative potential unfolds in interaction. The tension that ensues between the discovery of new ground for creativity, play, and humour, on the one hand, and the unwritten rules that only informed people know about, on the other hand, can have positive effects on individuals’ sense of identity (Knobel and Lankshear 2007; Yus 2011, 2018a, 2018b, 2019a, 2019b; Shifman 2014; Philips and Milner 2017; Milner 2018; McCulloch 2019; Diedrichsen 2020a). I will show in the remainder of this section that for an analysis of the interaction with memes, the theory of core and emergent common ground is highly valuable, because both of these aspects of common ground apply in this fast-paced, global form of communication. 10.4.1 Use of Core and Emergent Common Ground in Memes In the usage of memes in digital communication, core and emergent common ground both apply, as they enable and sustain each other. For the production of memes and their appreciation by fellow users, the core common ground is the shared interest and expertise in popular culture and social media content. A meme’s character as a sign is generally an emergent one, as there is no previous convention for the particular form meaning constellation. Digital media bear a flood of new contents in every minute, and not every one of them becomes a meme with a usage convention. When a new picture text combination appears, participants may eventually tune in on a common usage and a recognizable form meaning correlation. Productions that do not catch on with other users will not reach meme status (Osterroth 2015). Therefore, with the dynamicity and fast pace in which internet contents are created and shared, there is an aspect of emergent common ground to any meme usage, as there is great uncertainty as to whether a given convention is stable enough to be relied upon. If a meme gets established and its form meaning correlation and usage convention remain stable over a noticeable period of time, it can be considered to be core common ground for informed users, as for these users it is available prior to any interaction with social media. Thus, when a picture text combination is finally recognized as a meme, its convention of usage is its usage history. Successful and trending memes draw more instances of themselves, as they reach many users in diverse variations. This gives users an idea of their form, function, and usage, and at the same time inspires more users to create an instance of the meme. This newly created instance will make a novel point that fits into the general usage schema and apply it to new situations. The following section provides an analysis of two recent and popular memes in terms of the portions of core 255 256 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN and emergent common ground that go along with their function in communication. 10.4.2 Analysis: Portions of Core and Emergent Common Ground in the Communication with Memes When a picture/text combination is in the process of getting established as a meme, there are aspects that help users in the interpretation. The “correct” usage of a meme is gathered through communicative experience with the meme. Once users “get” the meme, they understand which parts of the meme are constant and necessary in order for the meme to be recognized and carry its communicative function, and which parts are open for variation. These usage rules are transient and flexible, but one will find that if the rules are bent too much, the character of the meme, including its semiotics, and humor will fade. If this happens to a large degree, a meme will lose its point and will not be attractive anymore. The meme variations attested in knowyourmeme.com and other sites therefore are generally consistent with the rule description given in Tables 10.1 and 10.2. For the popular Image Macro memes, it is possible to extract components which resemble formal and functional aspects that are relevant for the description of natural language also (Diedrichsen 2022). I argue that each Image Macro meme has recognizable features in terms of the components Form, Topic, Participants, Sentiment, and Pragmatics. These components resemble the dimensions of cultural items pointed out as content, form, and stance by Shifman (2014: 39 41). These are features that can be recognized and may be imitated. The Form component entails aspects of the general visual composition of the meme, including details of the image and the use of language. Shifman’s content dimension entails my components Topic and Participants. The Topic component provides the main theme of the meme. The Participants component informs about the participant roles engaging in the meme. They are generally signified by the people or objects shown in the image, but it is possible, especially in reaction memes, that another party is involved. Shifman’s stance dimension is supposed to break down into the following three subdimensions (Shifman 2014: 41, italics in original): (1) Participation structures these delineate who is supposed to participate as regards the users joining in the meme exchange (2) Keying this involves the tone and style of communication after Goffman (1974/1986) (3) Communicative functions following the typology by Roman Jakobson (1960) that identifies six fundamental functions of human communication: (a) referential, oriented at the outside world; (b) emotive, Expression of embarrassment (potentia y on beha f of others) Pragmatics Graduation of expression: embarrassment – shame (for onese f) Potentia ity of accusation IF (shame directed at others) Sentiment may be expressed on beha f of onese f or others. Graduation embarrassment – shame Shame, embarrassment, sense of being caught Sentiment Situation of awkwardness Peop e, objects, organizations represented by Kento (cou d be se f) Awkwardness [its rea ization and contemp ation] Topic Caption: updates situation and participants. Image (options): objects inserted in the picture, combinations with other images Emergent common ground: update, variab es per meme instance Participant(s) Person rea izing and contemp ating awkwardness Written caption Two images: 1. Puppet Kento ooking backwards 2. Kento ooking down Form Awkward Look Monkey Puppet Core common ground: constant features Table 10.1 Core and emergent common ground in Awkward Look Monkey Puppet Core common ground: constant features Written caption: Image: Leonardo DiCaprio (Leo) with a smirky augh, ho ding a wine g ass (scene from Django Unchained). Smirky humor [ aughing at own joke/prank, ight socia win] Winning party (Leo), party pranked/ joked at (not pictured) Schadenfreude, de ight over successfu joke/prank, awareness that the socia win is not significant Dec aration of socia win, mockery, or accusation of peop e (inc uding se f or personified objects) aspiring to such easy socia successes Leonardo DiCaprio aughing Form Topic Participant(s) Sentiment Pragmatics Graduation mockery – accusation (directed at se f or others, a so objects) These sentiments may be found in se f or ascribed to others Specification of ro es, contingent on updated occasion Occasion, actua joke, prank Caption: updates situation and participants. Image (variations): Leo with a different object, in different environments, recombinations, meta versions Emergent common ground: update, variab es per meme instance Table 10.2 Core and emergent common ground in Leonardo DiCaprio laughing Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics oriented toward the sender’s own emotions; (c) conative, essentially imperatives; (d) phatic, i.e. finding measures to facilitate, prolong, or end the communication; (e) metalingual, i.e. addressing the code for agreement on a definition or for negotiations concerning a denomination; (f) poetic, focusing on aesthetic aspects. While I believe that meme communication is generally phatic, and that the choice of participation structures is a matter of the social networks rather than the memes themselves, all of the other aspects mentioned under keying and communicative functions are subsumed in my components Sentiment and Pragmatics. The Sentiment component is, in my view, a very important component, as it tends to be the main motivation for the creation of the meme, and it is a success factor as well, because memes expressing widely relatable sentiments invite more replications and iterations. The sentiments expressed in memes often revolve around personal complexes, social difficulties, and misfortunes that the individual has experienced. The fact that users feel free to express unpopular feelings anonymously pertains to the egocentricity of communicative expression. If the sentiment is relatable and well expressed in the meme, other users will tune in and create variations of the meme that express their own personal take on the given sentiment. The Pragmatics component is the expressive power of the meme, which is generally its illocutionary force (IF). The components are constant across Image Macro memes, and they are therefore part of the core common ground that meme users share before they interact with a particular meme: it is general structural knowledge about the form and usage.1 The components are useful for the analysis of core and emergent common ground in individual memes. Tables 10.1 and 10.2 show analyses of meme content. The middle column depicts the constant features of the meme in question, pertaining to the components Form, Topic, Participants, Sentiment, and Pragmatics, as shown in the left column. These constant features are core common ground for users as soon as they have sufficient experience with a particular meme. The rightmost column informs about possible variation found in instances of a meme, again subclassified according to the components suggested. These are the unpredictable, variable parts that can be considered emergent common ground: They are open to users’ creativity. As for the Form of 1 A reviewer correctly remarks that it may be difficult to partition meme features into portions of core and emergent common ground, and to talk about “constant features,” given the interactional, dynamic nature of internet memes. However, I do argue that the proper understanding and usage of memes is not something entirely fluid and context inspired, and the variations a given meme can take on are not limitless. As I have argued earlier in this section, recurrent features make a meme formally recognizable and give informed users an idea of its usage. The features are learned through exposure to the memes, i.e. through communicative experience. I have pointed out that the features described as “core common ground” here are highly time sensitive. Around the time period of observation, the appearances of the respective memes across social media and their description in the database knowyourmeme.com do not suggest much cross interactional variation regarding the features classified as core common ground features here. 259 260 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN a meme, there are recurrent, stable features in the image and generally a written caption that constitute core common ground for the formal knowledge of this meme. Variations occur in the content of the written caption, and aspects of the picture may be altered per meme instance. For the components Topic and Participants, the emergent common ground consists in an update of the general meme-specific Topic/Participant outline given in the core common ground column in Tables 10.1 and 10.2. The update concerns the situation and theme referred to by the particular meme instance and the people or objects playing a role in it. This update will be addressed in the written caption. The components Sentiment and Pragmatics tend to be constant across memes, but meme instances may involve graduation in the strength of the sentiment, and some variability in the IF. A meme can show variation in both of these components depending on the person(s) seen as the subject(s) or main participant(s) of the meme. In this section, variations of two memes will be analyzed. The denomination of the memes follows knowyourmeme.com. These two memes were highly popular and widespread in the summer and autumn of 2020. The analysis of their form and function is based on occurrences of these memes during this time period. The memes are called: 1. Awkward Look Monkey Puppet. 2. Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing (as Calvin Candie from Django Unchained). 10.4.2.1 Awkward Look Monkey Puppet: Description, Examples, and Analysis Awkward Look Monkey Puppet has become popular as a reaction image, as of 2019. It shows a set of two images of a Monkey puppet named Kento from the Japanese children’s television show Okiku naru Ko that aired from 1959 until 1988. A Spanish version of the show aired in Latin America from 1984. The meme likely originates from the Spanish version. In the first image, the puppet is rolling its eyes back, as if realizing that something is not right, and then down, as if it were contemplating the awkwardness of the situation. The website knowyourmeme.com notes that the profile shot of the puppet was probably edited, as in the TV series the eyes are fixed. Reaction images are images or animated gifs that are used to express an emotion as a reaction to something that has happened. Reaction images are often used in discussion threads in the same function as emoticons: displaying a facial expression as a reaction. Diedrichsen (2020b) has argued that some reaction memes are used in a similar fashion like situationbound utterances (SBUs) and conversational routines (Coulmas 1981; Kecskes 2008, 2014). As memes, reaction images usually come with a caption that describes the situation triggering the reaction shown in the image (knowyourmeme.com). Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics When you accidentally look at someone and realize they were already looking at you Figure 10.1 Awkward Look Monkey Puppet in the role of somebody experiencing and contemplating an embarrassing social situation. https://images.app.goo.gl/ruG69Sicb7zrUY7n7 (retrieved October 2, 2020) Society: I hate 2020 Me who wished for no school, waking up late everyday, social distancing, and having more time to play games at the start of 2020: Figure 10.2 Awkward Look Monkey Puppet in the role of the self, realizing and contemplating that they had wished for the global fate of 2020 for low egoistic reasons (laziness and social avoidance). https://images.app.goo.gl/qz2jDWXZwqR7GwpW9 (retrieved October 2, 2020) 261 262 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN In Awkward Look Monkey Puppet, the caption comments on an embarrassing situation that a user has experienced (Figure 10.1) or the experience of being caught out on some wrongdoing or antisocial thinking (Figure 10.2). There is some variation in the usage of this meme, but the aspect of “awkwardness,” which is generally a frequent topic in memes, is the common denominator. The general function is expressing a reaction in terms of the realization that something is wrong or awkward in a situation, either in one’s own or others’ behavior or attitude. 10.4.2.2 Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing: Description, Examples, and Analysis Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing is an Image Macro showing the character Calvin Candie played by DiCaprio in the film Django Unchained (2012). The character shows a smirky tongue-in-cheek smile while holding a drink. The picture became very popular as a reaction meme from August 2020 (knowyourmeme.com) and invites many formal variations that are interesting for the discussion of core and emergent common ground. The particular kind of laugh shown in the picture, alongside the widely known movie character, frames an immature joke, or an instance of schadenfreude (German for “delight at others’ misfortune”) (stayhipp.com). Many uses of this rather recent meme point the recipient to the general area of smirky humor, where one laughs at their own joke or prank and delights at another party’s confusion (Figure 10.3), while the meme also carries a notion that the joker may be the only one who laughs, and that the social win is an easy and insignificant one. It expresses a humorous criticism or mockery of such behaviors. The main expression of the meme applies to edited versions of it as well, which appear in many formal variations. In Figure 10.4, the Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme shows the movie character in the role of politicians taking delight in breaking their promises, insinuating that they were never going to keep them. The image is contrasted with another Leonardo DiCaprio meme called Great Gatsby Reaction, showing a still of Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of Jay Gatsby from the 2013 movie The Great Gatsby, wearing a dinner suit and toasting a Martini glass. While this meme does not seem to have a consistent meaning convention (knowyourmeme.com), it is used here to signify the feigned generosity and grandeur of politicians making promises. In Figure 10.5, the movie character is shown peeking out of a jeans pocket. According to the caption, the face is mimicking the expression of a vaccine opponent’s smartphone (assuming it is carried in the front pocket), equipped with the tracking technology that vaccine opponents suspect to be in vaccines. Figure 10.6 is especially interesting in that it shows an instantiation of the meme that is not only culture-specific, but also contingent on a point in time in a particular place. The meme is used to reflect Irish people’s Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics Me rapidly muting and unmuting myself during an online meeting so my colleague thinks her internet is acting up again Figure 10.3 Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme showing the movie character in the role of the user being amused by their own prank on the colleague. https://images.app.goo.gl/ vjmhgJsb1HZq1hFJA (retrieved October 2, 2020) Politician's promises before an election After the election Figure 10.4 Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing Image Macro contrasted with Great Gatsby Reaction Image Macro, showing the same actor in scenes from different movies to illustrate the point the meme makes: the user accuses politicians of making generous promises only in order to get elected, but after the elections, voters feel betrayed as the promises are not kept. https://images .app.goo.gl/Ve1wfTiKgTipEtZ38 (retrieved October 2, 2020) sentiments in the week before September 21, 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. The image of Leonardo DiCaprio is shown holding a pint of Guinness instead of his wine glass, and the caption reads “Culchies on Monday.” Monday, September 21, 2020 was the day when pubs in Ireland were allowed to open after a closure that had lasted half a year due to COVID-19 precautions. However, as there was a surge in Covid cases in Dublin at that time, Dublin was exempted from the reopening. The word “culchies” refers to people living in the Irish countryside, and the meme is tailored to express their alleged feeling of relief and smirky victory over the city dwellers who were still not allowed to go out for a drink. 263 264 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN Figure 10.5 The movie character from the Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme features in a photo edition mimicking a smirky laugh of a phone, carried in the jeans pocket, that does what vaccine opponents suspect of vaccines. https://images.app.goo.gl/Cy6neqP79C76ngQt9 (retrieved October 2, 2020) Culchies on Monday Figure 10.6 The movie character from the Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme features in a photo edition shared in Ireland, portraying “Culchies.” Irish TV, September 17, 2020. www.facebook.com/ irishtv/posts/3440344409320837?comment id=3444786155543329. Reproduced with permission (retrieved October 2, 2020) The success of the meme is certainly fed by the popularity of the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who appears in very many memes, and of the film from which the still is taken. Knowledge of the source content is not generally necessary for the interpretation and usage of a meme, however, as the previous example in 4.2.1 has shown: very few present-day users would have watched a Japanese TV show that ceased to air in 1988, but still the meme involving the character from it is popular. Meme use is a collective, global effort of making sense and finding new ways of expressing aspects of everyday experience. Such an opportunity of global, Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics unsupervised, immediate joint signification has not existed before digital communication and the social channels it provides. 10.5 Discussion and Conclusions This chapter has explained common ground in its traditional pragmatic sense, based on cooperation and recipient design. It has also explained the criticism that this notion has been facing in the last ten+ years and that led to a reconsideration of common ground. Common ground is still considered as a very important aspect of communication, in that the interacting parties need to share portions of knowledge in order to communicate successfully. The socio-cognitive approach and its theory of core and emergent common ground builds on the recognition that common ground may not be available as a stable knowledge base shared by interactants prior to the conversation. Interaction partners tend to be egocentric in that they base their production and interpretation efforts on their own personal experience and knowledge more or less deliberately, due to memory or attention deficits, and therefore, significant portions of the shared knowledge base may need to be established as part of the conversation. This is especially necessary when the interacting parties do not share a lot of background knowledge due to diverse cultural backgrounds. The theory of intercultural pragmatics distinguishes between core common ground, which is a culturally informed shared knowledge base for interactants, and emergent common ground, which is shared knowledge that is dynamically created in the course of the communicative interaction. I have argued in this chapter that emergent common ground in terms of interactively built knowledge should not be regarded as merely an emergency solution or compromise that is put to use when things don’t work out in conversation due to missing core common ground. Rather, in order to motivate, activate, and facilitate communication, both core and emergent common ground are equally important and equally useful. Core common ground is the stable basis that acts as a ground for the interaction and reminds participants of their shared cultural and communicative experience. The experience of finding and creating emergent common ground, in terms of newly shared knowledge and jointly invented means of expression, is engaging and identity-enhancing for the participants. This can be observed in lingua franca conversations, where participants enjoy the experience of coming up with new expressions together, because it creates a bond (Kecskes 2014: 155; see also Pitzl 2017). Pullin (2017: 337 338) observes the same for cooperatively created humor in lingua franca situations. I have included internet memes in the discussion of core and emergent common ground, as they represent a novel form of communication that makes use of modern digital media and explores new means of signification. Internet memes in the form of Image Macros are formulaic expressions 265 266 ELKE DIEDRICHSEN utilizing visual content that is generally coupled with written captions. I have argued that in memes, recognizable patterns of formal ingredients take on usage conventions by adapting to recurrent communicative functions. These emergent conventions with their rules and restrictions are unprecedented, and therefore have to be discovered and negotiated among the participants. This is a huge space for emergent common ground to unfold. I have argued that both core and emergent common ground play a role in the interaction with internet memes. Their respective impact varies dynamically between uses, depending on the publicity of a meme and the complexity of the background knowledge required to use it. In this chapter, both public, general and time-sensitive, group-specific instances of memes have been discussed. The meme components suggested in Section 10.4.2 are part of the core common ground that users share about memes. Users know that memes have a recognizable form, each meme has instances that revolve around a common topic involving participant roles, and that each meme expresses a certain sentiment and has an illocutionary force. Users know also that memes invite variations to a certain degree, but that there has to be consistency with respect to these five components. Recurrent aspects in these five components need to be recognized and reapplied in order for the meme to carry forward its communicative effects. For the usage of memes, further core common ground areas comprise the daily news, historical and political facts, other general or peer-specific world knowledge, knowledge about pop culture, trending jokes, and memes. Also, in order for a meme to catch on with either a global audience or a peer group, it needs to apply to sentiments and topics shared in that group. The interaction with internet memes relies on emergent common ground in a large degree. The territory in which meme users operate is vastly unknown, unless they post their meme in a peer-group specific forum with very strongly defined common interests. In global interaction, there is no known or reliable cultural background to operate upon. The material that can be used for meme creation is not limited to language or any other shared symbolism, so the signification itself explores new territories. While there are occurrences of many languages in online communication, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is the language that is most used on the Internet. People from various linguistic backgrounds and therefore different degrees of English proficiency use ELF to make contact with others. Memes are created in the hope of meeting with response “out there” and catching on with others. They are generally made from the user’s own cultural viewpoint and out of their own egocentric account of what is interesting or witty or topical, and there is no guarantee for any communicative success. In contributing to online communication, users need to be flexible and willing to adapt to others’ backgrounds and different vantage points for interpretation (Sangiamchit 2017: 350 354). Common Ground in Linguistics and Internet Pragmatics With memes, individuals take part in a communicative activity of bending the limits of form and content, finding new forms of expression, and being part of an emergent culture. The joint creation and discovery of emergent common ground is the very experience that meme users are looking for. Emergent common ground is a motivating force that drives communication, ignites community spirit, and enhances individuals’ identity. This chapter has exemplified this effect using memes whose popularity peaked in summer 2020. Even though these memes are shown in isolation and without any surrounding interactive response, it could be shown that memes provide a means of expression for spontaneous and personal reactions to individual or global contemporary issues and grievances. The expressive force has the potential to resonate with other interactants within the scope of the topic of the meme and the forum that it was posted in. Internet memes also provide a means of expressing sentiments that may be unpopular or even taboo outside the in-group, whereas support and understanding can be found among people who “get” the meme. Thus, emergent common ground is also a way of confirming the shared basis, i.e., the friendship or group commitment, as the new ways of expression rely on shared experiences and sentiments: only with such a strong basis it is possible to deviate from mainstream code and trust that understanding will still be reached. This chapter has demonstrated that the theory of core and emergent common ground can be utilized beyond the realm of linguistic communication within and across cultures. A view from internet pragmatics, exemplified by an analysis of core and emergent common ground in internet memes, is a multidimensional, multimodal, and after all multicultural perspective toward communication. 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Websites (retrieved on October 2, 2020) knowyourmeme.com: https://knowyourmeme.com stayhipp.com: https://stayhipp.com/internet/memes/leonardo-dicapriolaughing-django-unchained-memes/ 273 11 Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective Grace Qiao Zhang 11.1 Introduction This chapter presents a comprehensive review of vague language studies from a pragmatic perspective, particularly the pragmatic role it plays in intercultural communication. It includes a theorization of vague language, its linguistic categories and pragmatic functions, vague language use in intercultural communication, and suggestions for future research. Vague language plays a crucial role in intercultural communication and its pragmatic functions, such as mitigation, politeness, and self-protection, form an important part of the strategic moves used in effective language interactions. This chapter is a survey of vague language (VL) from the perspectives of pragmatics and, in particular, intercultural pragmatics. It serves as a guide for understanding the concepts and characteristics of VL, demonstrated by discussing relevant discourse studies. The discussion involves the theoretical frameworks and features of VL, which are illustrated by examples and research drawn from intercultural corpora. An expression is vague when it conveys the same proposition as another expression arising from intrinsic uncertainty (Channell 1994: 20). For example, many and a lot convey a similar quantity and there are no clearcut boundaries between them. In the sentence, “Many friends attended her birthday party,” how many is many? 20, 100 or 200? Our interpretation of many can vary from individual to individual (e.g. our expectation of many may be higher when the birthday girl is popular), and from context to context (e.g. our expectation of many may be higher when the birthday party is held in a mansion rather than in a one-bedroom apartment). A vague word brings uncertainty into language (Lakoff 1973). For example, in “She kind of loves him,” the vague word kind of makes the sentence less I thank the anonymous reviewer and Professor Kecskes for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have been incorporated into this chapter. Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective certain, indicating that she only loves “him” to some degree. Without kind of, the meaning of the sentence would have been certain. There are different types of VL, including approximators (Channell 1994; e.g. about 200, 8 or 9), vague quantifiers (Ruzaitė 2007, e.g. many, a few, few), placeholder words (Channell 1994, e.g. thingy, whatsisname), vague category identifiers (Jucker, Smith, and Lüdge 2003; e.g. and things like that, or something), general terms (Koester 2007, e.g. things, something, and stuff), intensifiers (Bradac et al. 1995; e.g. very, extremely), softeners (Holmes 1990; e.g. sort of, a bit), and epistemic stance markers (Cotterill 2007; e.g. I think, perhaps). VL consists of fluid, stretchable, and strategic utterances (Zhang 2015), including “inexplicit expressions, which are used elastically to enrich communication” (Sabet and Zhang 2015: 1). VL is employed primarily by choice (Cutting 2007: 6) and is used purposely and unabashedly (Channell 1994). VL is a “hero” in communication rather than a “villain” because of its effectiveness (Zhang 2015: 217). Although VL is an inseparable part of human communication, it has long been marginalized (Channell 1994). The study of VL is a relatively new field of inquiry and concerns the way in which the vagueness of language functions in communication. VL highlights a different way of thinking about language use, by illustrating how interlocutors function when they do not have precise language at their disposal and the way in which they employ VL as a strategic tool for communicative purposes. In intercultural discourse, VL studies investigate how interlocutors operate when they have less common ground linguistically and culturally. The field of VL in pragmatics has developed over the last thirty years, with one early work being Channell’s (1994) seminal research. She states that VL is a crucial part of our communication because of its mitigating pragmatic function. She also argues that “language users plainly have no particular difficulties with vague language. Human cognition is well set up to process vague concepts” (Channell 1994: 195). Further studies have demonstrated the pragmatic roles that VL performs in various discourses, including in classrooms, hospitals, courtrooms, offices, and conferences (Cutting 2007). A systematic conceptual framework with a pragmatic orientation, elasticity theory, has been developed by Zhang (2015) to theorize the operation of VL (see Section 11.2.3 for details). However, academic studies on VL from an intercultural perspective are still few and far between. This chapter’s contribution to the book (Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics) is that it presents a pragmatic account of what VL is and how it is communicated in intercultural discourse, and thus provides an important contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics. This chapter consists of the following sections: the theoretical foundations of VL research; the characteristics of VL, including the linguistic categories and pragmatic functions of VL; research works in intercultural discourse; possible directions for future research; and various resources. 275 276 GRACE QIAO ZHANG 11.2 The Theoretical Foundations of Vague Language This section discuses three relevant concepts in the theorization of VL: Gricean conversational maxims (Grice 1975), Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995/1986), and elasticity theory (Zhang 2011, 2015). Grice’s theory explains why VL exists in communication (adhering to Gricean maxims) and Relevance Theory conceptualizes the relevance of VL to our use of language. Zhang’s elasticity theory has been devised specifically to explain VL/elastic language (EL) systematically, paying attention to linguistic, pragmatic, and cultural specificities. The principles of these theories can be used to explain VL from three different perspectives. 11.2.1 Gricean Conversational Maxims Even though the conversational maxims proposed by Grice (1975) describe how effective communication can be achieved, rather than being directly concerned with VL, they can still be used to explain its use. He advanced four maxims: Quality (be truthful), Quantity (be as informative as is required), Relevance (be relevant) and Manner (be clear, brief, and orderly). Channell (1994: 33) describes an example in which she, having been asked when she would be home from work, provides the answer about six o’clock. This vague expression indicates that she is unable to offer a more precise time because of her workload and traffic conditions, and the hearer infers this as such. Channell argues that her vague but truthful reply observes the Maxim of Quality when precise information is unavailable. Her argument is in line with Rowland (2007: 84) who states that, in some cases, while the Maxim of Manner is not observed when using VL, the Maxim of Quality can be adhered to, that is, even though about six o’clock may not be a clear and brief answer compared with six o’clock, it nevertheless describes the truth. Being precise is not always the best option, as it often causes loss of clarity and wastes time. Therefore, “one should never try to be more precise than the problem situation demands” (Popper 1992: 24), which adheres to the Maxim of Quantity do not say more than you need to. The use of VL is often acceptable in situations where precise information is not required. If the maxims are flouted, for example when a person says they are in their 60s when asked their age, it may indicate some form of conversational implicature (e.g. they are unwilling to disclose their precise age), which is “not carried by what is said, but only by the saying of what is said, or by ‘putting it that way’, and there is an indeterminacy in working out which implicature it actually is from a list of possible implicatures” (Grice 1975: 58). Often, flouting the maxims implies a lack of either information or commitment from the speaker (Rowland 2007: 83). Flouting the maxims has a deeper meaning in communication. The following example Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective demonstrates that, in an intercultural interaction, the speakers’ use of VL can be explained in terms of the Gricean maxims. (A: Hong Kong Chinese, female; B: native English speaker, male) 1 A: What’s the price that you bought per per square [per square feet? 2 B: [four 3 B: About four thousand eight four thousand nine, nearly four nine. 4 A: Four nine per square feet you mean? 5 B: Yea. (cited in Cheng and O’Keeffe 2015: 366; taken from the HKCSE compiled by Cheng et al. 2008) In turn 3 Speaker B uses the approximation, about 4,800 or 4,900, nearly 4,900, indicating that B believes precise information is unnecessary. This choice appears to flout Grice’s Maxim of Quantity (“make your contribution as informative as required”). The precise information is requested in turn 4, where Speaker A asks for a precise number, which is confirmed by B in turn 5. When Speaker B chooses VL, B assumes “shared broader social and cultural knowledge as well as the immediate local context of the interaction” (Cheng and O’Keeffe 2015: 366) with Speaker A. However, Speaker A prefers to be given precise information. The two understand each other and cooperatively exchange information, and therefore their exchange is successfully conducted in the end. 11.2.2 Relevance Theory The use of VL follows the relevance principle proposed by Sperber and Wilson ([1986] 1995). According to this theory, human processes “are geared to achieving the greatest possible cognitive effect for the smallest possible processing effort” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: vii). During an interaction, the hearer expects that the information provided by the speaker should be of a high enough level of relevance to warrant his or her attending to the stimulus, that is, the aim of the speaker is to achieve successful communication (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 270). Therefore, the understanding between the two parties enables the ongoing communication. The concept of “loose talk” proposed in Relevance Theory relates to VL. Loose talk marks “a discrepancy between an utterance and a thought the speaker has in mind. The marker indicates to the hearer that he should not process the utterance in the most literal sense” (Jucker et al. 2003: 1766), and “the meaning the speaker wants to convey is not sufficiently covered by an available word” (p. 1748). Zhang (2015: 51) poses this question: if someone in the street asks you, “What time is it?” and if the time is 8.01 a.m., do you say 8 a.m. or 8.01 a.m.? She argues that the former is sufficient to adhere to the general principle of Relevance Theory: the round number 277 278 GRACE QIAO ZHANG serves the purpose and costs both the speaker and the hearer minimal production or processing effort. On the other hand, the precise information of 8.01 a.m. is more truthful, but less relevant, than the approximate time. In Relevance Theory, the “loose use” of language or “loose talk” is an approximate use of language. Words have both a strict and a general sense (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Wilson and Sperber 2012), and loosely used expressions tend to “have sharp conceptual boundaries, frequent loose interpretations” (Wilson and Sperber 2012: 20). For example, 8 a.m. has a strict/literal sense (exactly 8 a.m.), as well as a general/nonliteral sense (about 8 a.m.). When 8 a.m. is used in a nonliteral sense, it is a loose use of language, that is, 8 a.m. has an exact sense but a loosely interpreted meaning. VL, on the other hand, does not have a strict sense, only a vaguely interpreted meaning. In language use, VL is more relevant than exact language (e.g. about 8 a.m. vs. 8 a.m.), as it is “easier to process and makes fewer demands on the hearer; it is probably also the case that a speaker may choose to use a greater amount of VL to make the discourse easier for the hearer(s) to understand” (Cheng and Warren 2001: 93). VL is preferred over precise language as the former may “provide access to more relevant contextual assumptions for the hearer . . . more efficient in the sense that it yields the same contextual assumptions for lower processing cost” (Jucker et al. 2003: 1765). It takes less effort to process non-exact numbers than exact numbers (Moxey and Sanford 1993). However, opposing voices would argue that VL requires more effort to interpret (Wardhaugh 1985; Tannen 1989; Mortensen 1997; He 2021). Thus, further studies are required to examine the issue of whether VL is user-friendly. However, Relevance Theory is an overgeneralization and lacks “an integrated view” when explaining how utterance meaning is realized (Aijmer 2013: 11). Consideration needs to be paid to related factors, such as time, different text types, politeness principles, and appropriateness conditions, which are “specific to a particular culture or society, region, social situation, historical period, etc.” (Aijmer 2013: 12). While Relevance Theory is successful in explaining VL through the lens of the cognitive paradigm of language use, it is limited when providing a pragmatic account of how VL behaves in talk-in-interaction (Zhang 2015). This limitation has been overcome by Zhang’s elasticity theory, which was specifically developed to provide a comprehensive explanation of the VL system and its use (see Section 11.2.3 below for further details). 11.2.3 Elasticity Theory Prior to Zhang’s elasticity theory (2011, 2013, 2015), no well-developed theory had been advanced specifically for VL (Ruzaitė 2007: 13). Zhang prefers to use the term elastic language instead of VL, because of the latter’s negative connotation of “vagueness” (Channell 1994; Cutting 2007), Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective whereas the term elastic highlights the positive and strategic role of VL. Zhang defines elastic language as a language whose interpretation can be “stretched or shrunk according to the strategic needs of communication” (Zhang 2013: 88). For convenience, the two terms (EL and VL) are used interchangeably in this chapter. Elasticity theory views VL as a springy language, and the metaphor of a slingshot is used to describe elasticity. The understanding of VL can be coconstructed among the interlocutors, as VL is stretchable as well as negotiable (Zhang 2011: 573). Elasticity is pragmatically and intentionally indexed through VL (Zhang 2015: 58). The emphasis here is that elasticity concerns the pragmatics of VL use. Four maxims are initially proposed: go just-right (“provide the right amount of information”), go general (“speak in general terms”), go hypothetical (“speak in hypothetical terms”), and go subjective (“speak in subjective terms”) (Zhang 2011: 578 579). Take the “go general” maxim as an example: Crystal and Davy (1969: 211) state that “there are many words and phrases which are useful in law simply because they are so general.” This can be illustrated by considering a court testimony given during the 1996 civil trial of O. J. Simpson, cited in Janney (2002: 464). This involved a conversation between the plaintiffs’ attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, and Simpson, regarding telephone calls made by Simpson from Chicago to Los Angeles the day after the murders. Petrocelli asked Simpson who he had called, but instead of giving a specific name, Simpson replied with “I don’t know. I was trying to call everybody.” In this case, everybody is a general term and its use can be explained by the “go general” maxim, enabling the speaker to avoid directly answering the question with the assistance of generality. Zhang (2015) further develops and elaborates on the theoretical framework of elastic language, as the realization of a main maxim and four specific maxims. The main maxim is to stretch language elastically in discursive negotiations to achieve communicative goals, which is manifested by four specific maxims. The four specific maxims that were initially detailed in Zhang (2011) have since been updated in Zhang (2015: 63): go approximate (elasticize in approximate form, e.g. many, a few, about 20), go general (elasticize in general form, e.g. and stuff like that, things, stuff), go scalar (elasticize in scalar form, e.g. very, a bit, many, few) and go epistemic (elasticize in hypothetical and subjective form, e.g. possible, could, might, I think). Zhang points out that the earlier version of the “go just-right maxim” is too general, and therefore it has been divided into two specific maxims, “go approximate” and “go scalar.” It is important to note that these maxims “are not rules; rather they are tendencies, offering guidance” on the possible strategies for VL use (Zhang 2015: 65). It is also possible for overlapping to occur between maxims. The above maxims have been empirically demonstrated in various discourses, such as political discourse (Parvaresh 2018), online medical 279 280 GRACE QIAO ZHANG discourse (Tseng and Zhang 2019), institutional discourse (Zhang 2015), and educational discourse (Sabet and Zhang 2015). These studies all show that VL has been used to serve a wide range of pragmatic functions. Glinert (2010) provides a good example of how VL can play a crucial role in international negotiations. He shows that, in 1999 and 2001, during two Sino-American crises, the use of elastic words in Chinese English translations “stretched the ‘rubber band’ between West and East cultures” and helped to reach a resolution (Glinert 2010: 57 58). During the 2001 crisis, China demanded a full apology from the United States for entering Chinese territory without authorization, which led the United States to issue a statement in English together with a Chinese translation. The US version included the words “We’re very sorry” (no admission of wrongdoing). However, the translation version issued by the Chinese government used “we apologise” (an admission of wrongdoing). In this way, both sides were able to please their respective domestic audiences, thus giving each other a way out of the crisis. According to Zhang (2015), a typical characteristic of VL is that it works effectively on a continuum of polarities (soft and tough, firm and flexible, cooperative and competitive), particularly competitive types (e.g. confronting, evading) which until now have been largely overlooked. Elasticity theory consists of three principles which are used to explain VL: fluidity (a matter of degree, overlapping and context-dependency), stretchability (stretching upwards, downwards, and sideways to meet communicative needs), and strategy (serving strategic purposes through the use of VL pragmatic functions). These principles inform linguistic behavior and practice in that interlocutors deliberately stretch VL in a “more-or-less” fashion; VL is “inherently, purposely, and strategically fluid and stretchable” (Zhang 2015: 57). There is an interconnection and complementarity between the three principles: fluidity is the basis, stretchability is the means, and strategy is the end (Zhang 2015). It is a balancing act when one stretches VL, as stretching words too far can lead to deception (Sabet and Zhang 2015), although there may be situations where VL is deliberately used for deception. Interlocutors often utilize the inherent vagueness of language for particular communicative purposes (Channell 1994: 97). Interpretations of VL “are expected to be different and approximate due to contextual factors, but good enough to carry on communicating” (Zhang 2015: 58). Elasticity is manifested through lexical realization and pragmatic strategies. In her analysis of elasticity, Zhang (2015: 61) finds four lexical categories: approximate stretchers (e.g. a few), general stretchers (e.g. things), scalar stretchers (e.g. very, a bit), and epistemic stretchers (e.g. possible, I think). In addition, a vague word can be placed in three different positions when combined with other words: preceding (e.g. almost 10), in the middle (e.g. 10 or 20), and succeeding (e.g. 10 or so). Zhang also summarizes six pragmatic functions that VL can perform: just-right elastic (to Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective provide the right amount of context-appropriate information), mitigating elastic (to soften the tone of speech for politeness), rapport elastic (to establish a relationship between interlocutors), intensifying elastic (to strengthen the tone of speech), self-protection elastic (to prevent being wronged, challenged, or refuted), and evasive elastic (to deliberately withdraw information). Elasticity theory can be applied to intercultural communication. The difference between intercultural and non-intercultural communication is that, in formal discourse, interlocutors share less common background. The interactions between speaker and hearer are based on their shared knowledge, and elasticity is specific in the sense that there may be some crosslinguistic and cross-cultural VL discrepancies (Zhang 2015: 58). The elasticity framework makes “a great contribution to the field by filling a significant theoretical gap” (Parvaresh 2017b: 115) and encourages in-depth studies of VL pragmatic functions in different types of discourse, even crosslinguistically (Mulder et al. 2019). It is anticipated that the theory of elasticity can be applied to a wide range of discourses where VL plays a role. In addition to the three theories reviewed above, other frameworks can also be adopted to explain the use of VL, for example Mey’s (2001) pragmeme theory (see Parvaresh 2017a for more details). 11.3 Linguistic Categories and Pragmatic Functions of Vague Language This section surveys the linguistic categories and pragmatic functions of VL. Five linguistic categories of VL will be discussed: approximators and vague quantifiers, vague category indicators, general terms, scalar terms, and epistemic stance markers. The first category is widely recognized to be prototypical VL, which can be “replaced by a more precise item” (Ruzaitė 2007: 38). The first three categories have propositional content (Biber et al. 2010: 966) and referential boundaries, but, in contrast, the last two categories have more of a pragmatic non-absoluteness (Prince et al. 1982). This distinction is meant to be only a guide and should not be taken to be a categorical rule. Two paradigms are used for the lexical classification of VL: liberal and conservative (Zhang 2015: 35). According to Zhang, the former embraces an open set of VL, and considers almost every lexical item in language to be a vague item: vague nouns (e.g. hill), verbs (e.g. walk), and adjectives (e.g. hot). The latter views VL as a closed set and excludes vague nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Cheng 2007). Most researchers adopt a conservative approach to the study of VL. 281 282 GRACE QIAO ZHANG There are six primary pragmatic functions of VL (Zhang 2015: 38): conveying the right amount of information, mitigation, solidarity, strengthening, self-protection, and withholding information. The elastic nature of VL enables it to perform a wide range of pragmatic functions, and it is therefore more versatile than precise language (Jucker et al. 2003; Ruzaitė 2007). Tentativeness is the main feature of VL (Tausczik and Pennebaker 2010), and so it is particularly well suited to those situations when speakers wish to express uncertainty. 11.3.1 Linguistic Categories In her seminal work, Channell (1994: 18) lists the following three general types of VL: 1. Vague additives: a vague word + a non-vague word a vague reading. This type of VL has two subcategories: approximators (e.g. about 20) and vague category identifiers (e.g. apples and oranges and things like that). 2. Vague words: placeholders (e.g. whatsit, thingummy) and quantifiers (e.g. loads of, heaps of). 3. Implicatures: vagueness implied by a non-vague expression. For example, a friend invites you to dinner at 6 p.m. The time appears to be a precise number, but in a practical sense 6 p.m. is a vague number here. You can arrive at exactly 6 p.m. or at around 6 p.m. If you arrive at 6.10 p.m., your friend would not consider this to be late. Channell’s three categories of VL have since been further developed. Although differences exist among scholars, this chapter introduces the five main categories summarized by Zhang (2015): approximators and vague quantifiers, vague category indicators, general terms, scalar terms, and epistemic stance markers. (1) Approximators and vague quantifiers (Zhang 2015) refer to unspecified numbers and quantities (Crystal and Davy 1979; Carter and McCarthy 2006). Approximators refer vaguely to numerical amounts, times, or dates (Koester 2007) and are used when precise numbers are not required or are unavailable (Zhang 2015). They take the form of an approximator (e.g. nearly) + an exemplar number (e.g. 10), for example, approximately 10, 10 or 20 (two exemplar numbers), 10 or so, almost 10. Some approximators are termed “partial specifiers” (Channell 1994: 62), e.g. more than 10 or less than 10. This type has an exact limit, for example the number 10 is the lower limit for more than 10 and the higher limit for less than 10. In contrast to approximators, vague quantifiers (e.g. many, a few, few) refer to non-numerical quantities (Channell 1994; Ruzaitė 2007). They are similar to approximators in that “vague quantifiers are used when speakers have no need to be precise or have no precise information to Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective offer” (Zhang 2015: 29). Vague quantifiers can indicate implicature (Channell 1994), for example, many might signal popularity (Jucker et al. 2003). Comparing “Many students attended her class” with “68 students attended her class,” the precise number 68 does not appear to indicate anything other than the exact number of students. However, many can indicate the popularity of the teacher. Moreover, vague quantifiers can each have a different focus of attention (Moxey and Sanford 1993). In “Few mothers like that pediatrician, so they go to another one,” they refers to those mothers who do not attend “that pediatrician.” On the other hand, in “Many mothers like that pediatrician, because they think that the pediatrician is very thorough,” they refers to those mothers who do attend “that pediatrician.” Thus, many and few each generate a different focus of attention. Vague quantifiers are a loose use of language, not a literal use, and they ensure that conversational contributions are more economical and, hence, more relevant (Jucker et al. 2003: 1761). Thus, literal and nonliteral senses appear to be one of the traits of nonvague and vague expressions, respectively. (2) Vague category indicators (Zhang 2015: 30) refer to indicators which vaguely highlight a category, for example, “In libraries you can borrow books, journals and things like that.” Here, and things like that is a vague category indicator pertaining loosely to a category exemplified by book and journal, as these two are prototypical of this category. One requirement of being an exemplar is that it is neither too general nor too specific. For example, in “He bought furniture/a chair/a kitchen chair or something,” furniture is too general (uninformative), but kitchen chair is too specific (the least suitable), and therefore the best exemplar is chair (neither too general nor too specific) (Channell 1994: 142). An appropriate degree of generality is the key issue when choosing an exemplar. There are two basic forms of vague category indicator: conjunctive (and) and disjunctive (or), for example, “I bought apples, oranges and/or things like that.” The use of a vague category indicator increases the efficiency of the language used because a long and exhaustive list is not then provided. This type of expression is an example of a coconstructed formulaic expression (Simpson 2004), which requires the speaker and the listener to share common background and knowledge (Aijmer 2002). Indicators are also used because of lexical gaps (Channell 1994) to mark in-groupness (Aijmer 1985) and suchlike. (3) General terms (Zhang 2015: 31 32) are defined as “vague words used to refer to entities” and are exemplified by bit in “the extra bit” (Koester 2007: 45). They are “totally vague,” in that they do not even have a core meaning (Crystal and Davy 1979: 112), and enable the speaker “to refer to an entity or a person without knowing exactly which ‘name’ would be the best word to use” (Yule 1996: 18). General terms tend to be nouns or indefinite pronouns, including things, something and stuff. 283 284 GRACE QIAO ZHANG They are also used as a “placeholder” for a noun or name, for example thingy, whatsisname, whatsit and what-do-you-call-it (Channell 1994: 158 161). Vague terms in this category are very general in nature, with some terms being more general than others. A general term is characterized by the fact that it, in itself, does not provide much referential content. Instead, it is up to the hearer to infer the referent (Clark and Wilkes-Gibbs 1986). Contextual information and shared common ground between the speaker and the hearer are key for the effective transfer of information when using a general term. One important function of a general term is to indicate a speaker’s negative tone (Jucker et al. 2003), with other functions including the avoidance of impoliteness and the creation of solidarity (Zhang 2015). These functions can be versatile and complementary. (4) Scalar terms include both intensifiers and softeners (Zhang 2015: 32 33). Scalar terms increase or decrease the strength of a statement. An intensifier strengthens the degree of a property indicated by an expression and is normally a relative adjective or adverb (Cruse 2006), with typical examples being very and extremely. Intensifiers are also called boosters (Holmes 1985, 1990; Hyland 1998b, 2000) or emphasizers (Quirk and Greenbaum 1973). For example, when very is used to modify happy, very happy becomes more specific than happy by narrowing down the interpretation of happy and providing more information. Therefore, very actually makes happy appear less vague (Channell 1994). However, this view is not shared by other researchers, such as Cheng, who argues that “all items constituting scalar implicature are vague and only understood within an assumed shared understanding of approximate parameters in a particular context” (2007: 167). In her view, the use of very in very happy is vague because it is unspecified or underspecified. Intensifiers are not as well recognized as vague expressions as the other categories discussed in this chapter. In contrast to an intensifier, a softener weakens the degree of the property being indicated by an expression and is exemplified by sort of and kind of (Holmes 1990). It is also known as a downtoner or hedge (Lakoff 1973; Hyland 1998b) or a compromiser (Bradac et al. 1995). The use of a softener serves a number of purposes, including when the speaker is unsure about the aptness of what s/he has said (Kay 2004), and as a marker of group identity, common ground, and an informal style (Aijmer 2002). These expressions can have multiple functions: for example, in “The cake is a bit too sweet for me” (used with an adjective), a bit functions as a softener for politeness purposes, but in “Please add a bit of sugar” (used with a noun), a bit is a vague quantifier. Gender differences are also observed when using scalar terms: men tend to use fewer intensifiers (e.g. very) than women (Wright and Hosman 1983). When women talk to other women, more intensifiers tend to be used, but more hedges (e.g. a little) tend to be used when Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective talking to men (Bradac et al. 1995). As stated by Zhang, “women are more emphatic when dealing with women, but less assertive when dealing with men” (2015: 42). Further studies are needed to investigate whether men behave differently when talking to men or women. (5) Epistemic stance markers (Zhang 2015: 33 35) are used to “express the speaker’s judgement about the certainty, reliability, and limitations of the proposition; they can also comment on the source of the information” (Biber et al. 2010: 854). This category includes probably, might, would, could, according to her, I think. They are used as “a means of offering an idea without the obligation of commitment to its truth” (Rowland 2007: 86), that is, they mark the speaker’s uncertainty and indicate a lack of commitment to the information being provided by the speaker (Zhang 2015: 33). I think is also called a subjectivizer, highlighting that “it is my subjective opinion” and lessening the assertive tone of the utterance (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper 1989). The main purpose of using an epistemic stance marker is to make a shield for self-protection (Prince et al. 1982). According to them, there are two types of shield: “plausibility shields” (e.g. probably, could, would, seem to, I think) and “attribution shields” (e.g. presumably, according to her) (Prince et al. 1982: 89). These two types of shield focus on different aspects, namely concerning self and concerning others. 11.3.2 Pragmatic Functions 1. Conveying the right amount of information. VL is used to “provide unspecific and right-amount information when precise information is not needed or unavailable” (Zhang 2015: 44). Channell (1994: 173) states that “one possible use of vagueness is to tailor an utterance such that the right amount of information is given.” This function follows Grice’s (1975) Maxim of Quantity: providing an appropriate amount of information as required, no more and no less. It also strategically avoids “saying something for which there is little or no evidence” (Parvaresh and Zhang 2019: 46), which adheres to Grice’s Maxim of Quality (see Section 11.2.1 for details). VL is used “particularly on occasions when the speaker believes something is too complicated” (Parvaresh and Tayebi 2014). For example, John does not know exactly how many chickens there are on his father’s farm, and so he says “I think there are about 200 chickens on my father’s farm.” John uses I think to indicate that he is unsure, and about 200 to convey a vague number. Given that John does not know the precise information, VL offers a way of presenting it in an unspecified fashion. Given the circumstances, John provides the right information with the help of VL. What enables the use of VL is that “hearers are often not aware of the lack of precise information” (Channell 1994: 194), and this function does not interrupt the smooth flow of the conversation (Shirato and Stapleton 285 286 GRACE QIAO ZHANG 2007). VL also tends to be used when one is discussing the beliefs and plausible reasoning of other individuals and where maintaining scientific integrity requires speakers to realistically provide “scholarly orderliness in their representation of knowledge” (Prince et al. 1982: 96). In other words, the speaker using VL needs to adhere to Grice’s Maxim of Quality (see Section 11.2.1 for details). 2. Mitigation. VL is used to “soften the claim of an utterance, to convey politeness and the like” (Zhang 2015: 44), or to “minimize imposition and attenuate negative discursive moves, such as complaint or criticism” (Zhang 2011: 576). VL can resolve conflicts and strategically manage tensions (Trappes-Lomax 2007). It acts to decrease the negativity of impolite utterances (Fraser 1980; Caffi 1999) and reduces the force of a confrontation (Terraschke and Holmes 2007). VL is predominantly used as a politeness strategy (Stubbs 1986), which is the most efficient form of polite communication (Jucker et al. 2003). Given the implicit nature of VL, it is well suited to serving politeness. VL serves face wants (Channell 1994; Stubbs 1996) and avoids conflict and offense (Leech 1983; Brown and Levinson 1987; Lakoff 1990). VL serves face wants in three respects: personal (self), interpersonal (others), and interactional (misunderstandings and misalignments) (Trappes-Lomax 2007). VL can save one’s face, particularly one’s public self-image (Brown and Levinson 1987); therefore, VL plays an important role in maintaining interpersonal relationships (Ruzaitė 2007). It allows us to speak indirectly, thereby maintaining relationships, by ensuring that everyone is comfortable, and awkwardness is kept at bay (Pinker 2011). For example, the following is a conversation between a supervisor and his Ph.D. student: PH D S T U D E N T : How is my draft research proposal? SU P E R V I S O R : Well, it is not bad, the methodology part needs a little bit more work. The supervisor does not want to sound too authoritative or harsh, so he uses a little bit to tone down his suggestion that the student’s writing needs further improvement. It can therefore be seen that VL can “help to soften what is said” (Carter 2003: 11). If the above sentence did not use VL, “The methodology part needs more work” would sound rather blunt. The syntactic position of a word can also determine its pragmatic function. For example, the epistemic stance marker I think can be placed in either the clause initial, middle, or final positions. I think tends to serve a mitigating function when it is used in the clause-final position (Biber et al. 2010). However, the situation is not so clear when I think is used in the other two positions. 3. Solidarity. VL can be employed to show solidarity with an addressee (Brown and Levinson 1987) and can elicit rapport between speaker and Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective hearer, building informality and intimacy (Cutting 2007; Zhang 2015). This function of VL focuses on the relationship between the interlocutors. VL stresses in-group membership and social similarity (Aijmer 2013). For example, during a departmental meeting at an Australian university, the Head of Department might say: “Academic staff are encouraged to apply for research grants such as the ARC grant and things like that.” In this case, ARC refers to the Australian Research Council, and things like that is a vague category indicator. By using this indicator, the speaker assumes common knowledge shared by all the staff members present. Whether VL can perform as a solidarity marker is greatly dependent on the condition that the interlocutors share background knowledge (Channell 1994; Koester 2007; Terraschke and Holmes 2007), that is, shared background knowledge is essential for the interpretation of VL (Spencer-Oatey 2000). In the above example, staff members all need to know what the ARC grant refers to and, more or less, what is included in the category “ARC grant and things like that.” This example illustrates that VL is a marker of ingroupness (Cutting 2000; Carter and McCarthy 2006), where a “social group sharing interests and knowledge employs non-specificity in talking about their shared interest” (Channell 1994: 193), for otherwise successful communication could be problematic. VL highlights the collaborative nature of VL (Evison, McCarthy and O’Keeffe 2007) and is often associated with informal conversational settings (Crystal and Davy 1979; Channell 1994; Carter and McCarthy 1997; Jucker et al. 2003). While VL can be used in formal settings, it is more often used in informal settings (Rowland 2007). By examining a corpus of informal conversations between Germans and New Zealanders, Terraschke and Holmes (2007) find that and something like that is a pragmatic device used for building rapport. 4. Strengthening. VL can be used to “strengthen the claim of an utterance or the intensity of an argument” (Zhang 2015: 44). It can increase the tone of an utterance and magnify a proposition, which is manifested by the use of intensifiers, typically adverbs (Parvaresh and Zhang 2019). This strengthening function enables speakers to “head off conflicting views and express their certainty in what they say” (Hyland 2005: 52), which highlights assertiveness and leads to a persuasive function (Channell 1994; Hyland 1998a). The strengthening function of VL can enhance the power of persuasion. As opposed to the mitigation function of VL, the strengthening function increases the illocutionary force of VL (Zhang 2011). For example, in “I like this new book very much,” very much is used as a booster to push the degree of liking upwards, although in an approximate manner because of the vague nature of very much. In this way, extremely, a lot of, and suchlike have a similar function to very much. Multal quantifiers (e.g. a lot, many) can also perform a strengthening function, as they convey a large quantity or long 287 288 GRACE QIAO ZHANG periods of time; they “do not simply refer to an amount of certain objects, but put a special emphasis on the hugeness of the amount under discussion” (Ruzaitė 2007: 87). Vague items, such as a lot, can serve more than one function (e.g. vague quantifying, strengthening). The common perception that VL tends to be a softener, rather than a booster, has meant that its strengthening function has been acknowledged and studied less. However, Parvaresh and Tayebi (2014: 576) argue that the “single, confident voice” expressed by boosters does not render these expressions any less vague, that is, both softeners and boosters can be vague and serve pragmatic functions in their own way. 5. Self-protection. VL is used to “express a cautious and uncommitted attitude to a claim the speaker makes, to shield self from vulnerability and being wrong” (Zhang 2015: 44). Given the nature of VL, it would appear to be the perfect choice for serving the function of self-protection. Its imprecision and lesser degree of assertiveness enable VL to be used as a defensive device, protecting the speaker from being challenged and/or refuted (Jucker et al. 2003). For example, “She could be the one who took your book,” where could indicates the non-commitment of the speaker, and shields the speaker from liability if the utterance turns out to be incorrect (Matthews 1997). Could is one of the epistemic stance markers (see Section 11.3.1 (5) for details) that are widely recognized to be a useful device for self-protection (Kärkkäinen 2007). In addition to epistemic stance markers, other types of VL can also serve the function of selfprotection, for example, about, some, and suchlike. As proposed by Ruzaitė (2007: 158), self-distancing is a similar function where the speaker indicates his or her non-commitment to the truth of what is being claimed by distancing themselves. Zhang (2015: 42) explains that VL is preferred because it can shield the speaker from being on the record as wrong, and “precise language cannot be ‘unsaid’, and backs the speaker into a corner.” 6. Withholding information. When the speaker does not want to disclose certain information, VL can be used to deliberately withhold information (Channell 1994). This is also noted in Ruzaitė (2007: 48): “vague expressions are frequently employed when speakers want to manipulate the amount of information they provide.” VL tends to be “used by people who are known to have the exact information” (Cheng and Warren 2001: 98), indicating that people can be evasive for a number of reasons. For example, when being asked by a friend’s mother if her daughter is dating, Mary replies with maybe. Mary is fully aware that her friend is dating but is unsure whether it is her place to tell anyone else, therefore Mary uses VL to withhold the information. Chase (1950) finds that, during exams, students tend to use VL rather than categorical assertions in an attempt to cover up their weak points to avoid marks being deducted. In this case, “VL functions as a device to evade some sort of unfavourable situation the speakers find themselves in” (Zhang 2015: 43). VL is chosen to withhold information Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective because it can blur boundaries and provide the flexibility that the speaker requires. Channell (1994: 4) notes that VL “is part of our taken-for-granted world, and that normally we do not notice it unless it appears inappropriate for example, when someone seems to be deliberately withholding information.” However, the listener often does not know when the speaker is withholding information, as it is not in the speaker’s interests to divulge this fact. The withholding of information might be viewed differently depending on the speaker’s or listener’s point of view: it might be desirable for the speaker, but not necessarily so for the listener (Parvaresh and Zhang 2019). Therefore, this function of withholding information might not be welcomed by listeners. Withholding information is a competitive and divergent language move, where the speaker “deliberately avoids conveying correct/accurate information to manipulate the situation to the speaker’s advantage” (Zhang 2011: 577). Overuse of VL can be confusing and non-informative (Ruzaitė 2007), but as Zhang (2015) points out, this disadvantage applies to only the hearer because, for the speaker, VL is a useful weapon to meet situational needs. The realization of competitive tactics by using VL tends to be overlooked. Zhang (2015) highlights this aspect because it is an important part of communication. Zhang (2020) discusses cases where VL is challenged and concludes that VL needs to be used appropriately, otherwise it can lead to miscommunication. Channell (1994: 3) also argues that VL “is neither all ‘bad’ nor all ‘good’. What matters is that VL is used appropriately.” Of the six commonly used VL functions discussed above, some are information-focused (e.g. “provide the right amount of information”), while others are interpersonal-focused (e.g. “solidarity and informality”). This list of six functions is not exhaustive: see, for example, Ruzaitė (2007) for further VL functions. 11.4 Vague Language in Intercultural Interactions Intercultural interactions refer to exchanges between interlocutors who have different first languages and who are generally from different cultures, with these interlocutors communicating in a common language (Kecskés 2014). Given their differences in first language and culture, in intercultural communication vagueness is an important issue for interlocutors who need to find shared knowledge. This section presents research findings that detail the use of VL in intercultural discourse, where the focus is on how interlocutors successfully interact when using VL. The findings show how language users with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds negotiate and co-construct their communication using VL. 289 290 GRACE QIAO ZHANG 11.4.1 Zhang’s (2015) Work on VL in L1 and L2 Intercultural Communication Zhang’s (2015) study on VL is based on a large institutional corpus. A small part of her project and the reported findings, drawn from intercultural discourses, are discussed in this section. Zhang examines encounters between Australian custom officers (L1 English speakers) and passengers (L2 speakers) at various international airports in Australia. She finds that the participants in her study use VL in various ways and for various purposes, carrying out communicative tasks that precise language would be unable to do. In her study, L1 and L2 speakers use VL at similar overall rates, but prefer different types of EL, which is taken to “indicate preference rather than ‘appropriate’ use” (Zhang 2015: 208). This supports the work of Metsä-Ketelä (2006), in that lingua franca speakers use words in a way that differs from the standard or native use of the expression, but this does not necessarily result in communication breakdown. As expected, it is found that L1 speakers use a wider range of VL, for example they use all four hedges (could be, probably, maybe, and possibly) more evenly than the L2 group (L2 speakers use maybe much more frequently than the other three hedges). This finding can be attributed to the limited language competence of L2 speakers, which prevents them from managing many different forms of language (Zhang 2015). Zhang’s study explores the interactions between native speakers of English and native speakers of Chinese, but further studies are needed to determine whether Zhang’s findings apply to other languages. 11.4.2 Cheng’s (2007) Work on VL across Spoken Genres in an Intercultural Hong Kong Corpus By using the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE), Cheng (2007) investigates how VL is used in an intercultural context. The participants include Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English. The data consist of four spoken genres: naturally occurring conversations, academic discourses, business discourses, and public discourses. Cheng (2007) examines the use of VL containing very, more, some, much, many, quite, most, lot, few, bit, something, things, kind of, and about and finds that the discourse type, rather than the speaker group (Hong Kong Chinese or native speaker of English), determines the type of VL employed and the frequency with which each type is used. The corpus shows that conversations use more VL than public speeches, a finding that may be associated with the type of speech event (monologue vs. dialogue). This is in line with Zhang’s (2015) work: she finds that interlocutors employ more VL in dialogues than Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective in monologues. In addition to the frequency of VL, Cheng also finds that different genres tend to attract different forms of VL, when serving similar functions. Take something as an example: it is used primarily in conversations, then in decreasing order in business discourses, academic discourses, and public speeches. Those engaging in conversations are more than four times likely to use something than those engaging in public discourse (Cheng 2007). The reason why VL is least popular in public discourses could be due to their formal nature, whereas VL tends to be used in informal situations, as discussed in Section 11.3.2 (3). While Cheng (2007: 179) finds that the frequency of vague items is 175.8 per 10,000 words, real-life communication is given little coverage in English as a Foreign Language textbooks in Hong Kong, revealing a “big gap in both the teaching guidelines and examples in the Hong Kong textbooks surveyed.” Cheng states that the advice given against the use of VL is mistaken, as her work clearly demonstrates that VL is used widely in various discourses, and “the view that VL impairs communication needs to be replaced with the view that it facilitates communication when used appropriately in context” (2007: 178). Thus, Cheng calls for a change to the way in which EFL education is considered. Cheng (2007) raises the question: if L2 students are unable to learn VL from their textbooks, where else can they learn how to use VL in a similar way to native English speakers? She further argues that when learners are being taught VL, they need to know in which situations VL can be used appropriately, given that “VL’s role in hedging, boosting, and sustaining relationships through asserting shared understandings, the maintenance of face, and communicating informality and formality by means of VL choices, is indispensable. Textbooks need to both include VL and indicate the ways in which its use is context-specific” (2007: 179). It is clear, therefore, that VL education has some way left to go. Using a similar corpus to that studied by Cheng (2007), Drave’s (2002) work on VL is based on intercultural conversations selected from the Hong Kong Corpus of Conversational English (HKCCE, for details see Cheng and Warren 1999). The thirty hours of naturally occurring data consist of conversations in English between native speakers of English and native speakers of Cantonese. While both groups used similar VL types, the native speakers of English employed more VL than the native speakers of Cantonese, and they also used VL more for affective and interpersonal purposes. This may be, as Drave speculates, attributable to the fact that the native speakers of English were more skilled users of the language and, therefore, were able to make full use of English VL. 291 292 GRACE QIAO ZHANG 11.4.3 Terraschke and Holmes’ (2007) Work on VL in Intercultural Communication Drawing on an intercultural corpus of Germans and New Zealanders, Terraschke and Holmes (2007) investigate how vagueness is manifested through general extenders. General extenders are also known as vague category indicators (see Section 11.3.1 for details). They are pragmatic devices, and “serve referentially as expressions of vagueness, and interpersonally to build rapport, and which conform to a specifiable structural pattern” (Terraschke and Holmes 2007: 201). A general extender is exemplified by and things like that and or stuff. The corpus consisted of informal dyadic interactions. While topic suggestions were provided, the participants were free to talk about anything they liked. The researchers were not present for the recording, to encourage informality. Communication was in English between a group of native speakers from New Zealand and a group of nonnative speakers of English whose L1 was German. Native and nonnative groups appear to use a variety of VL interpersonal functions in a comparable range. The study finds that general extenders serve politeness functions and contribute effectively to the softening of a complaint or criticism. This is in line with Koester’s (2007) work, in which general extenders are used to mitigate potentially face-threatening acts, an important aspect of successful communication. It is important that learners of English understand the politeness function of VL, in order to enhance their sociopragmatic knowledge of interpersonal interaction in intercultural discourses. VL is the mark of more skilled users of language (Carter and McCarthy 2006; Mumford 2009). Hu and Cao note that “skillful manipulation of hedges and boosters” signals one’s “epistemic stance towards propositional content”; and marks her/him “as a competent member of the discourse community” (2011: 2796). Terraschke and Holmes conclude that “knowing how to avoid being too precise is a very useful skill for a second-language learner. This approach has proved very successful and has potential for expansion to a wide range of socio-pragmatic features” (2007: 216). The sociopragmatic competence of VL use is an important dimension for researchers to explore. In addition to the above three case studies, other researchers have shown that VL works effectively for speakers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Metsä-Ketelä (2006) investigated dialogues conducted between international students (L2 speakers of English) and academic staff (L1 speakers of English), and examined how the speakers of English as a Lingua Franca used general extenders in academic contexts. She finds that general extenders do not result in communication breakdown between interlocutors with limited common ground; rather, they are able to use VL as a strategy to show politeness. This study suggests that L2 speakers who employ general extenders have the capability to convey Vague Language from a Pragmatic Perspective pragmatic meaning and intent. Similarly, VL is also found to serve politeness and accountability functions (as in justifying tasks that are not completed) in intercultural workplaces (Chefneux 2012) and classrooms (Ortaçtepe and Okkalı 2021). Cheng and Warren (2001: 81) argue that VL “facilitates rather than hinders successful communication in intercultural conversations,” a point that is also made in Jucker et al.’s (2003) work, where “interlocutors generally do not have problems in understanding vagueness. They are apparently able to find an interpretation, which they consider good enough for the purposes of the conversation” (Jucker et al.’s 2003: 1766). Evidently, VL plays an important role in both intercultural and other types of communication. 11.5 Possible Directions for Future Research Wardhaugh (1993: 181) predicts that “vagueness rather than precision will prevail.” It is important to have a comprehensive account of VL to ensure that VL communication is as effective as possible, and therefore the future research of VL should consider at least the following three dimensions. Intercultural dimension: VL is a relatively new field and, thus, limited resources on the use of VL in intercultural communication currently exist. Further research in this field is therefore needed. The use of VL is an integral part of intercultural communication and is possibly derived from the limited common ground between interlocutors. VL communication, such as general extenders (e.g. and things like that, and all that), requires the shared background of the interlocutors (Spencer-Oatey 2000; Aijmer 2002, 2013). One research direction is to compare VL use in an intercultural group with a limited shared background to that in an intracultural group with a shared background, to determine the similarities and differences in their use of VL. It would be less beneficial to merely examine VL use in an intercultural communicative context without investigating how cultural differences influence the use of VL. We need to consider both “intercultural” and “communication” aspects to be able to explain the linguistic phenomena that are reflected in intercultural interactions and, in particular, how they are connected to VL. Other possible research questions include: Are the intercultural differences in VL use due to social or innate factors? Is vagueness in intercultural communication inherent or developmental? Social dimension: The potential for cross-cultural contrast and the misinterpretation of VL is obvious, and thus interlocutors in intercultural discourses need to find common ground in order to ensure that they understand each other and can overcome possible sociocultural misunderstandings. VL could be examined to “evaluate successful communication in terms of both the wider and the immediate context of interaction” (Cheng 2007: 179 180). Intercultural studies have been conducted on the 293 294 GRACE QIAO ZHANG functions of VL in the immediate interactional context. Further studies on the use of VL in intercultural discourses are needed to determine the impact of wider social meaning on the use of VL (e.g. imposition, facework), as well as the impact of social factors, such as the social distance between the interlocutors and their status and power relations. VL could also be analyzed in terms of the gender, age, and social background of the interlocutors. Prosodic dimension: Culture may influence the use of prosody. Few studies have been undertaken into the prosodic analysis of vagueness, let alone investigated how different cultures could have an impact on the use of prosody in VL. Some studies have considered this aspect: for example, Warren (2007) examines the relationship between discourse intonation and VL. Topics in intercultural discourse that could be explored include the different cultural interpretations of silence, the rise and fall of voice, and the pattern of stress in VL use. References Aijmer, K. (1985). 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(2013). The impact of touchy topics on vague language use. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 23, 87 118. Zhang, G. (2015). Elastic Language: How and Why We Stretch Our Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zhang, G. (2020). Vague language challenged: Australian customs encounters. International Review of Pragmatics, 12(1), 107 134. Additional Resources Theoretical frameworks relevant to VL: Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41 58. Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. [1986] (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Zhang, G. (2015). Elastic Language: How and Why We Stretch Our Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seminal work on VL: Channell, J. (1994). Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. VL works from the perspective of pragmatics: Cutting, J. (2007). Vague Language Explored. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hyland, K. (1998). Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jucker, A. H., Smith, S. W., and Lüdge, T. (2003). Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 35, 1737 1769. Parvaresh, V. (2018). “We are going to do a lot of things for college tuition”: Vague language in the 2016 US presidential debates. Corpus Pragmatics, 2 (2), 167 192. Parvaresh, V. and Zhang, G. (2019). Vagueness and elasticity of “sort of” in TV discussion discourse in the Asian Pacific (Special issue). Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 29(1), 1 132. Ruzaitė, J. (2007). Vague Language in Educational Settings: Quantifiers and Approximators in British and American English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Sabet, P. and Zhang, G. (2015). Communicating through Vague Language: A Comparative Study of L1 and L2 Speakers. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 299 300 GRACE QIAO ZHANG Zhang, G. (2011). Elasticity of vague language. Intercultural Pragmatics, 8, 571 599. VL works in intercultural pragmatics: Cheng, W. (2007). The use of vague language across spoken genres in an intercultural Hong Kong corpus. In J. Cutting, ed., Vague Language Explored. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 161 181. Cheng, W. and Warren, M. (2001). The use of vague language in intercultural conversations in Hong Kong. English World-Wide, 22(1), 81 104. Terraschke, A. and Holmes, J. (2007). “Und tralala”: Vagueness and general extenders in German and New Zealand English. In J. Cutting, ed., Vague Language Explored. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 198 220. 12 Humor in Intercultural Interactions Kerry Mullan and Christine Béal 12.1 Introduction The purpose of analyzing interaction in naturally occurring conversation is to determine how participants behave during certain encounters. From the more specific point of view of cross-cultural comparison, the objective is to illustrate how participants from different languages-cultures interact in similar situations and how the differences observed may be, ultimately, a source of problems in intercultural communication (see Kaur, Chapter 13, this volume). Some aspects of language use may be easily identifiable, but others may be more diffuse and yet affect the exchange in deep, even if somewhat indirect, ways. This is the case with the expression of emotions (see Alba, Chapter 7, this volume) or humor (this chapter). Humor is a discursive phenomenon that can be “superimposed” onto almost any type of interaction and is omnipresent in everyday conversation. At the same time, it is always intricately linked to the context in which it occurs and embedded in culture. Humor fulfills a large number of pragmatic functions beyond the surface-level objective of creating a lighthearted mood or making others laugh; in many cultures, it is one of the ways of managing personal relationships smoothly. As a result, participating in conversational humor is one of the most difficult skills to master in a second language. All of this makes it a particularly relevant area of investigation in relation to intercultural communication. It is important to point out that the analysis of conversational humor i.e. humor that occurs spontaneously in conversation faces many theoretical and methodological issues which have been well known for at least the past twenty years (Norrick 2003). Initially, researchers in the field tried to tackle these within a same language-culture. Some of them then started to extend their studies to the comparison of conversational humor in different languages (cross-cultural analysis), and in the last few years, there has been increased interest in humor in intercultural situations 302 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL (see Sections 12.2 and 12.4 for details). These new fields present added challenges. The authors of this chapter argue that in order to analyze the many facets of humor in these particular contexts, it is necessary to start by placing the study within the broader framework of the cross-cultural and intercultural approaches to verbal interaction in general. Adjustments to the methodology can then be made and specific analytical tools developed to meet the specific needs of this complex area of investigation. The chapter is divided into four main sections: the first (12.2) introduces the cross-cultural approach and presents a model to describe the link between everyday “ways of speaking” and cultural values. The model includes five levels of increasing abstraction to account for this intricate relationship, and makes specific reference to how conversational humor fits into each level: the linguistic description of discourse in interaction; the identification of preferential choices and conversational style of each language-culture; an explanation of interactional behavior through the notion of “communicative ethos”; a wider frame of cultural values; possible sources for the ethos and cultural values in question. The second section (12.3) starts with the definition of conversational humor (within the wider category of humor in general) and a discussion of the issues that the comparative point of view adds to the description of humor in interaction (first level above). The authors briefly present four dimensions identified in their previous work (Béal and Mullan 2013 inter alia) to select the most relevant “yardsticks” for the comparison of humor from cross-cultural corpora: the speaker/target/recipient interplay, the linguistic and discursive strategies, the different pragmatic functions, and the interactional dimension. The inclusion of humorous examples to illustrate these dimensions supports the preferential choices and the underlying communicative ethos and cultural values referred to above. The third section (12.4) describes the intercultural situation and the first language (L1)/second language (L2) speakers’ relationship. It shows that, although cooperation between interactants is usual, instances of miscommunication and misunderstandings, with their sometimes unfortunate consequences, can occur. An important objective of intercultural analysis is to identify sources of problems between speakers of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Four main ones are discussed: inadequate linguistic skills, pragmalinguistic transfer, underdeveloped sociopragmatic competence, prejudices and stereotypes. These actually match to a large extent the five levels described in the first part. Intercultural conversational humor is shown to be no different from the rest of intercultural conversation when it comes to these potential mishaps. The final section of the Chapter (12.5) analyzes by way of illustration some representative examples of intercultural humor: on the one hand, humor based on the intercultural situation (such as joking openly about linguistic difficulties) and on the other, examples of L2 speakers’ failure to Humor in Intercultural Interactions produce, recognize, or understand humor because of one (or more) of the sources of miscommunication previously described. 12.2 The Cross-Cultural Approach In this section, we argue that in order to compare how speakers use humor spontaneously in the course of daily conversation in two different cultures, it is first necessary to place the study within the broader framework of the cross-cultural approach to interaction. Conversational humor is but one of a number of linguistic and discursive phenomena that can be analyzed using this approach. This implies a number of hypotheses and a resulting methodology. The cross-cultural approach to discourse and interaction started in the early 1980s and has been evolving and expanding ever since. From a chronological point of view, and in very broad brushstrokes, it could be said that, initially, it focused on the comparison of specific, neatly circumscribed language phenomena such as terms of address (Braun 1988) or speech acts. For example, the seminal work of the Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Project started in 1982 compared the formulation of requests and apologies in seven languages. The results were presented and discussed in Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). At that point, the methodology often relied on questionnaires. The focus then moved on to authentic conversation and “conversational routines” that could unfold over several turns. Greeting rituals and compliments, for example, were analyzed in-depth, revealing the existence of underlying “cultural scripts” (Wierzbicka 1991; KerbratOrecchioni 1994). While this type of study continued to be productive (see, for example, Holmes 2019 on responses to compliments in Spanish and English), more general discursive strategies also came under scrutiny for comparison (including, in the last few years, the use of humor). They revealed the existence of different “conversational styles” that could be traced back to different cultural backgrounds (Tannen 1984). In the last three decades, a wide range of private and professional social situations have been investigated cross-culturally, focusing on various aspects of language use. (Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to give an overview of this rich, multifaceted area of research.) Our purpose in this section is to offer an integrated introductory view of the field that will help piece together the various parts of the cross-cultural puzzle and make sense of the whole. It can also be used as a guideline for further research. The basic assumption common to all studies using the cross-cultural approach is that there is a link between everyday “ways of speaking” and underlying cultural values. We argue that a model is needed to describe this complex relationship. The model presented here consists of five levels of increasing abstraction, going from the description of speakers’ language 303 304 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL use to means of accounting for their choices in terms of their cultural background. In the ensuing pages, we describe each of the levels, both as an overall way of proceeding and with specific reference and applicability to the analysis of conversational humor. We will use some examples from our own work to illustrate the method, incorporating other studies that are particularly representative of research undertaken at each level discussed. 12.2.1 The Linguistic Description of Discourse in Interaction This is the level at which the data collected in both languages (usually some form of everyday conversation or encounter) is described using the tools of linguistics, pragmatics, and discourse or conversational analysis. The corpus has usually been collected according to a previously chosen topic of research. It may consist of a series of naturally delineated relatively short exchanges (e.g. “purchases in local shops” or “making a dental appointment”), or it may need to be segmented into more manageable units if the recordings cover a longer time span (e.g. a whole classroom session, a visit at a friend’s house). In the latter case, identifiable activities or themes discussed usually serve as guidelines for the segmentation. If dealing with a visit between friends, for example, the flow of conversation may be segmented into greetings and opening rituals, offering food and drinks, sharing news, telling anecdotes, leave-taking, and so forth. For any given type of exchange, the linguistic behavior of the speakers can be described using the analytical tools mentioned above. The analysis may include lexical choices, including degrees of formality or informality, terms of address, the kind of speech acts and politeness strategies used, conversational routines or how speakers construct interaction (overlaps, repairs, etc.). In other words, the way speakers are “packaging” their message for each other can be described in great detail and from various angles. However, the phenomena observed in any single specific encounter do not allow the researcher to draw any conclusions about any kind of pattern or expected linguistic behavior for this type of exchange. For example, if, when analyzing the first of a series of front-door rituals, one notices that the guests or the host make a little joke about the arrival time, it may be purely idiosyncratic behavior. It is only after a substantial number of similar examples have been collected that a pattern may be discerned, in other words, that “preferential choices” are identified. And if one is comparing these with a similar type of interaction in a similar context in another language-culture, the first clues about cultural differences may appear (Béal and Traverso 2010 on French and Australian English in social visits). This is the focus of the second level described below. Humor in Intercultural Interactions 12.2.2 The Identification of Preferential Choices and Conversational Style of Each Language-Culture This second level is where patterns of language use begin to emerge following the careful analysis of a significant number of exchanges of the same type, when it becomes obvious that speakers favor certain ways of wording certain speech acts, for example, or feel compelled to say certain things at a certain point. In other words, implicit communicative rules are at work. By way of illustration, let us go back briefly to front-door rituals at the beginning of social visits. The above-mentioned study conducted on an Australian corpus of visits showed a recurrent feature in the first few minutes of the encounter, that is to say, comments about the time of arrival, i.e. being either early or late. These comments by the visitors regularly took the form of excuses and/or jokes. The hosts in turn always accepted these apologies but also seized the opportunity to tease (in the sense of uttering a mocking comment on the topic), sometimes leading to ongoing animated banter. This form of almost ritualized exchange appeared to be the preferred way for Australians to deal with their worrying about the appropriateness of their time of arrival. It also highlighted the role of conversational humor as a preferential choice to deal with uncomfortable moments. At that level, from a cross-cultural perspective, the preferential choices observed in a given language-culture can be compared with those of another in similar settings and types of interaction. Carefully collected data chosen to be otherwise similar in every way is the key to revealing cultural differences in communicative behavior. Two matching corpora are needed for the comparison to be operational. In the Australian/ French study on social visits, the two corpora were recorded in similar urban environments, with participants from a similar age group and socioeconomic background. The analysis of the French corpus showed that the comments revolving around punctuality were a lot less prominent in the French openings. Lateness was mentioned fleetingly, if at all, or an implicit excuse was formulated through some kind of justification. The hosts also accepted these excuses implicitly or brushed them aside. The question of punctuality was de-emphasized altogether. An important feature of the front-door ritual in one culture (a “preferential choice”) was almost nonexistent in the other. This notion of “preferential choice” may be applied to the whole range of observable linguistic and discursive phenomena mentioned in the first level above. Preferential choices are not hard-and-fast rules; they are best described in terms of general tendencies or expected behavior, or what is considered a “normal” way of expressing oneself in a given community. The sum total of preferential choices in many different contexts defines the “conversational style” or “communicative profile” of a given group of 305 306 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL speakers (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2005: 305). Linguists have been describing many of the preferential choices and/or overall conversational style of different language-cultures since the early 1980s (Tannen 1981, 1981b, 1983 on turn-taking in New York Jewish conversational style; Holmes 1990 on apologies in New Zealand English; Goddard 2002 on directive speech acts in Malay). They have also compared them cross-culturally (Wierzbicka 1985a on speech acts in Polish and Australian English; Chen 1993 on responding to compliments in Chinese and American English; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1994: 288 296 on variations in complimenting rituals across a range of cultures; Katsiki 2000 on well-wishing in French and Greek; Mullan 2010, 2012 on expressing opinions and disagreeing in French and Australian English; Béal and Détrie 2013 on terms of address use in French and Australian English). Various volumes collecting contributions contrasting languages from several parts of the world have also been published (Oleksy 1989; Traverso 2000; Béal 2002; Auger, Béal, and Demougin 2012; Claudel et al. 2013; Peeters et al. 2013; Kerbrat-Orecchioni 2014). Identifying specific features of conversational humor is also part of this approach, either in relation to one language (Haugh 2014; Sinkeviciute 2014; Stallone and Haugh 2017) or cross-culturally (Shardakova 2012; Haugh and Weinglass 2018; Holmes 2019; Keating 2021). However, as will be pointed out in Section 12.3, the comparison of conversational humor involves specific challenges linked to the fact that it is not a separate activity in itself, but an interactional practice potentially accompanying almost any kind of exchange in any context. 12.2.3 An Explanation of Interactional Behavior through the Notion of “Communicative Ethos” The first two levels are essentially descriptive ones. The third level is interpretive. Its objective is to try and explain where the observed communicative rules come from. When several different types of interaction have been analyzed in a given language, it usually appears that many of the preferential choices made by native speakers can be explained in terms of some underlying cultural logic. The idea of an interdependence between language and culture goes back to the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, which assumed that speakers’ vision of the world was conditioned by the lexical and grammatical categories of language. The cross-cultural approach to interaction takes a partly similar but much more moderate stance, focusing on language usage rather than the structure of language. It is based on the observation that the various implicit rules followed by participants, far from being haphazard, tend to converge and form a system. In other words, any given group of speakers’ conversational style or communicative profile reflects the communicative values of the culture they belong to. For example, KerbratOrecchioni (2002: 47) points out that an asymmetrical use of terms of Humor in Intercultural Interactions address and greeting rituals combined with an unequal distribution of turn-taking and one-sided use of highly ranked politeness strategies characterize a hierarchical culture in which the display of one’s rank in society is seen as appropriate behavior. The term “communicative ethos” is an abstract notion. It refers to the values underlying the social rules governing interaction in a given culture. These rules reflect the ideas the culture in question harbors about the appropriate way for speakers to interact in various contexts of everyday life. The term “ethos” highlights the idea of a value system, while “communicative” specifies that the values under scrutiny are those with a more or less direct influence on language use and communicative strategies. Irvine (1992: 261) stresses that the objective is not to link the observed linguistic phenomena back to some kind of socioeconomic structure but to a kind of linguistic ideology that “mediates between forms of speaking and conditions of social life in a complex way.” Although it is not always easy to separate the communicative ethos from other cultural values, it can be described as the values which have a regular impact on ways of speaking and therefore are the most relevant to the objective of comparison: some cultures value modesty and deference, while others favor an egalitarian attitude, some tend to do a lot of facework and seek consensus, while others may be more confrontational, some will prefer tact over frankness or the other way around. However, the communicative ethos stems from culture in the wider sense of the term, and so, given that the same language can be shared by partly different cultures (e.g. British speakers of English, Americans, Australians, and South Africans or Spaniards and Mexicans), differences may appear in the communicative ethos of these communities (Renwick 1983; Herbert 1989; Haugh and Weinglass 2018; Filani 2021). Most, although not all, of the analyses adopting the cross-cultural approach to interaction go beyond the first two levels with a view to elucidate at least some aspects of the underlying ethos. To name but a few: Wierzbicka (1986) on diminutives, fixed expressions, and specific speech acts in relation to Australian cultural values; Wierzbicka (1991) on various aspects of cross-cultural pragmatics and different values in a number of languages; Stollznow (2003) on deprecatory language and the Australian ethos; Reiter and Stewart (2008) on the customer/shopkeeper relationship seen from a Scottish and Uruguyan perspective; Béal (2010) on turn-taking, conversational routines, and directive speech acts in relation to the French and Australian English ethos; Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2012) on the extent to which terms of address may reflect the construction of interpersonal relationships in a given society. Given how many forms of speaking seem to be correlated with aspects of the communicative ethos, one can surmise that a language practice as intrinsically linked to interpersonal relationships as conversational humor should also be partly culture driven. A number of relatively recent studies on conversational 307 308 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL humor attempt to link specific forms or aspects of humor to cultural expectations: Goddard (2006, 2009, 2017), Haugh and Bousfield (2012), Béal and Mullan (2013, 2017), Mullan and Béal (2018); Mullan et al. (2020). 12.2.4 A Wider Frame of Cultural Values The fourth level is the level of cultural values in the broader sense of the term. It includes the communicative ethos but also many other values having an impact on various aspects of social life. Culture, from this point of view, is considered in its anthropological and sociological dimension. Cultural traits are seen as a collective phenomenon that is learned, not inherited, and shared by community members. They are transmitted from one generation to the next through upbringing and ongoing life experience. Many studies on intercultural communication, especially those dealing with intercultural management, tend to focus entirely on this level, bypassing, so to speak, the question of language and discourse practices. The methodology used is also different, often relying on field survey and questionnaires. Researchers in this line of thinking consider culture as a form of “software of the mind” that predetermines patterns of thinking, at least to a certain extent. These “mental programs” (Hofstede et al. 2010: 4) are acquired within the social environment in which one grew up, and most of the time they are good indicators of how a person is likely to react and behave, given their past and where they come from. The aim of such studies is to identify the key values defining national cultures. Another question is that of the universality (or not) of such values and their relative importance from one culture to the next. Although different researchers may focus on a slightly different range of cultural traits (D’Iribarne 1989; Hall and Hall 1990; Schwartz 1994, 2006; Hofstede et al. 2010), a number of similarities emerge. Among them are the notions of equality in society, the relative place of the individual and the collective, the avoidance of uncertainty, modesty, and assertiveness, the importance granted to subjectivity and emotions, to name but a few. There are, of course, various subgroups within a given culture, not to mention the individual dimension of personality. However, belonging to a culture means understanding it and sharing many of its codes with other members. It allows one to anticipate what is expected of oneself and how others are likely to react. By comparison, many of these codes will remain beyond reach to an outsider. Some of the cultural values have a direct and overall impact on the communicative ethos (they affect most ways of speaking most of the time), others may influence verbal social exchange in an indirect way, only in specific contexts. Suppose punctuality is a prized value in a given culture, for example. In that case, it may become a topic of conversation in some circumstances, as in the aforementioned case of greeting rituals in social visits among Australians. Most Humor in Intercultural Interactions importantly, cultural values have an influence on social behavior in general, lifestyle choices, and even on the overall social organization of society, institutions, and corporations. This fourth level goes beyond the domain of linguistics, encompassing people’s motivations and social behavior as well as their communicative and discourse strategies. It is nonetheless of great interest to the linguist because it provides a better understanding of some of the communicative rules that speakers abide by. In the case of conversational humor, the kind of topics one can joke about and the circumstances in which it is appropriate to do so are clearly dependent on the values promoted by the cultural background. 12.2.5 Possible Sources of the Ethos and Cultural Values under Scrutiny The basic needs of human beings to live, associate, and communicate smoothly with one another mean many similarities can be found in the cultural values of different societies. Some of them may indeed be universal (like the concept of face-saving, Brown and Levinson 1987). However, the extent to which some values prevail or are underplayed, how they manifest themselves, and the consequences for how people deal with each other vary to a great extent. The fifth and last level investigates the possible causes for such observed differences in basic value systems. Collecting relevant data in this field requires large-scale surveys involving whole teams of researchers. Some of the best-known studies come from social psychologist Hofstede and his collaborators (Hofstede et al. 2010) and from the international network of the World Values Survey (2020) coordinated by political scientist Ronald Inglehart. Usually based on questionnaires, they investigate belief systems in relation to economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being. The link between cultural values and various kinds of possible explanations for their origin is often speculative and very hard to prove. It is even more difficult to find a direct link with forms of talk. Mostly, it is the role of the context in its economic, religious, and political aspects as well as the role of past history that are called upon to explain the current state of affairs. Correlations have been found between affluent industrial societies and individualism vs. the solidarity of poor rural economies. Confucianism is seen as a common denominator unifying many different countries of Southeast Asia. Revolutions may impose a change of values reflected in the organization of society, often enforced through new language use (lexicon, terms of address, and rituals). A distant past may even be felt all the way to present days: Bollinger and Hofstede (1987: 90) point out the heritage of the Roman Empire for the Latin countries of Europe, which still manifests itself in the form of a more 309 310 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL pyramidal social organization than in the northern and Scandinavian nations. All of these insights may be useful to the linguist (and the learner of a second language) to better understand the phenomena observed. One can see how the variables mentioned above can influence the way societies organize themselves and how, in turn, that organization is bound to have an effect on the conversational style of speakers. Shardakova (2012: 225), investigating humor by Russian and American English speakers, wrote that “the collected data revealed that regardless of individual variations, there clearly exist culturespecific humor styles and corresponding playful identities.” No doubt such playful identities (and their overall social identities) are largely shaped by the vastly different contexts in which Russians and Americans live their daily lives. However, one needs to be extremely careful before making any kind of extrapolation because of the many factors coming into play in interaction. In conclusion: in order to study conversational humor across two or several languages, it is necessary to adopt the cross-cultural approach described above. In other words, one needs to start from recorded spontaneous talk, collect a suitable number of comparable examples, find the appropriate linguistic tools to describe them, identify speakers’ preferential choices, and link them back to the underlying communicative ethos. However, as we will show in the next section, researchers face a number of specific issues when tackling conversational humor, at the level of both data collecting and discursive and interactional analysis. 12.3 Conversational Humor within the Cross-Cultural Approach 12.3.1 Definition of Conversational Humor There are many definitions of humor in the literature, but we adopt the two most suited to conversational humor. Like Charaudeau, we believe that there is an element of surprise or incongruity at the core of all humor, what he refers to as a “vision décalée du monde” (“a quirky, incongruous look at the world”) (2006: 23). In addition, when we consider conversational humor, in particular, one of the most useful and widely quoted definitions is that of Holmes and Marra (2002: 67): “[h]umorous utterances which are identified by the analyst, on the basis of paralinguistic, prosodic and discursive clues, as intended by the speaker(s) to be amusing and perceived to be amusing by at least some of the participants.” Following the principles of Conversation Analysis, humorous utterances are understood here as Humor in Intercultural Interactions an unbroken stretch of speech uttered by one person (regardless of any interjections or backchannels uttered by an interlocutor). As explained earlier, comparing conversational humor cross-culturally requires various levels of analysis, such as the linguistic description of the interaction, the identification of preferential choices, and matching these with the underlying communicative ethos and cultural values. However, this is harder to achieve than for other more clearly delineated areas of interaction, at the level of both data collection and linguistic description. Specific exchanges such as greetings, leave-taking, and compliments, or speech acts such as requests or apologies are easy to isolate for the sake of comparison, but conversational humor is not an activity in itself; it is more like a tone or a mood superimposed onto any other kind of ongoing exchange. Therefore, while one must obviously collect examples of humor from comparable corpora, they may not appear to be very “comparable” at first sight. Owing to their variety and complexity, the first descriptive level is not straightforward. To deal with this challenge, the following model with specific analytical tools was created. 12.3.2 A Four-Dimensional Model for a Cross-Cultural Analysis of Conversational Humor This four-dimensional model first appeared in Béal and Mullan (2013), where it is presented in more detail. This and subsequent research (Béal and Mullan 2017; Mullan and Béal 2018) explained the difficulties of trying to categorize humor with its existing array of labels and approaches, leading to the design of a model which enables a precise cross-cultural comparison of conversational humor. Fundamental to this model are four dimensions which we argue are present in any occurrence of humor. In the interests of space, we will present the model rather briefly here, followed by two illustrative examples of humor.1 The examples are taken from comparative corpora of semi-structured interviews with French and Australian participants, as described in Mullan (2010, 2020).2 Dimension 1: The Speaker/Target/Recipient Interplay Most humorous utterances involve a target someone or something the humor is aimed at. The target may be the speaker (self-oriented), the addressee (recipient-oriented), a third party who may or may not be present (third-party oriented), or non-specific, where the aim of the humor appears 1 The examples are illustrative in the sense that they concentrate into a single extract several of the characteristic features identified across the overall collection of examples. 2 Readers are referred to these publications for detailed information regarding the corpora. 311 312 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL to be solely to entertain and does not require a particular target.3 The interplay between the speaker, target, and recipient is always revealing. Dimension 2: The Language Dimension This refers to the actual linguistic and/or discursive devices used by the speakers to actually produce humor. One or both types can appear in any one utterance: • linguistic play: e.g. play-on-words, play on sounds of words, putting on an accent or a funny voice; borrowing words from other languages; exaggeration and understatement. • discursive strategies: e.g. implicit references; incongruous images/situations; personification of plant, animal, or inanimate object; distortion of reality (of self-image, situation, participants); internal logic (absurd humor, often with escalation and/or co-construction by two or more participants). Dimension 3: The Different Pragmatic Functions Humor can have various pragmatic and interpersonal functions, such as creating or maintaining connections between speakers, and performing face management, e.g. where humor threatens the speaker or another’s face; where it is used to repair a real or potential threat; or where it is used in self-defense to manage a perceived face threat. Dimension 4: The Interactional Dimension The interactional dimension focuses on the co-construction of the sequence of humor, whether humor is initiated in the first turn, used in response to a previous turn (second turn of an adjacency pair), and/or in the construction of a collaborative humorous scenario (often absurd or “fantasy” humor). We will now analyze all the dimensions in the following examples of humor. The first example comes from a conversation between two native French speakers. Bernadette has just been talking about how she speaks French to her one-year-old Australian niece. (1)4 Corpus Mullan (2010, 2020) Céline: [en Au]stralie ils aiment bien tout ce qui est français Bernadette: ah ils adorent les Français [les Australiens c’est formidable] Céline: [hein c’est marrant hein?] ouais Int: ouais Céline: ouais 3 Play on the sounds of words, for example, often fall into this category of humor just for the sake of it. 4 See Appendix for transcription conventions. Humor in Intercultural Interactions Bernadette: oh là là ça fait un effet bœuf hein d’être français Céline: oui oui tout de suite ha Paris [@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@] Bernadette: [ah oui Paris voilà exactement @@@] la France Paris Céline: [ouais] Int: [ouais] Bernadette: vous allez pas peut être voir autre chose que Paris? Céline: @@@@ Bernadette: parce que il y a des belles choses aussi à voir [en France] Céline: [quelquefois oui] ils vont jusqu’à dans (.) sur la [Côte d’Azur] Bernadette: [oui sud de la] [France] Int: Bernadette: [ouais] ah oui c’est ça Monaco Cannes [casino ???] Céline: [mais quand moi par exemple je dis] que je viens de Lille alors là personne connaı̂t [@@@] Bernadette: [alors là @@@@] Int: Céline: [@@@@] ah y’a y’a quelque chose au dessus de Paris? ah bon @@ [@@@@@@] Bernadette: [exactement] la France c’est la tour Eiffel Céline: mm [oui] Int: Bernadette: [oui] c’est tout ce qu’ils connaissent Int: oui Bernadette: et le sud [de la France] Céline: [et le sud ouais] Bernadette: la Normandie Céline: la Normandie aussi c’est [vrai . . . ouais . . . ouais] Bernadette: [la Normandie et les bons vins] de Bordeaux [@@] Int: Bernadette: [mm] ça il y a pas [de] Int: [ouais] Bernadette: problème le vin et on peut les brancher sur les vins Céline: ouais Bernadette: ils sont (.) y ils connaissent bien (.) Céline: mm (.) mais ils aiment bien ouais tout ce qui est français et tout ça c’est marr[ant] Bernadette: [les] escargots de Bourgogne mon dieu qu’est ce que j’en ai entendu parler Céline/Int: Bernadette: @@ [@@@@@@@@@@] [quand je leur ai dit que] il y avait que la sauce qui avait du goût um (.) et que che que l’escargot c’était du chewing gum [@@@@@@@@@@] 313 314 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL Céline: Bernadette: [@@@@] ils étaient pas très contents @@ ils vont payer une fortune dans les (.) dans des [restos] Céline: Bernadette: [mm mm] ici pour manger les escargots (.) [alors que] Céline: [oui c’est vrai que c’est que] (.) finalement [c’est la sauce hein] Bernadette: [c’est la sauce hein] qui est bonne [@@@] Céline: [@@@] Céline: [in Au]stralia they love everything French Bernadette: ah they love the French [Australians it’s wonderful] Céline: [yeah it’s funny isn’t it?] yeah Int: yeah Céline: yeah Bernadette: oh yeah it makes an impression being French Céline: yes yes straight away oh Paris [@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@] Bernadette: [oh yes Paris that’s it exactly @@@] France Paris Céline: [yeah] Int: [yeah] Bernadette: aren’t you maybe going to see anything other than Paris? Céline: @@@@ Bernadette: because there are also lovely things to see [in France] Céline: [sometimes yes] they go down (.) to the [Côte d’Azur] Bernadette: [yes south of] [France] Int: Bernadette: [yeah] oh yes that’s it Monaco Cannes [casino ???] Céline: [but for example when I say] that I come from Lille nobody knows it [@@@] Bernadette: [course not @@@@] Int: [@@@@] Céline: oh is there is there anything north of Paris? oh right @@[@@@@@@] Bernadette: [exactly] France equals the Eiffel Tower Céline: mm [yes] Int: Bernadette: [yes] that’s all they know Int: yes Bernadette: and the south [of France] Céline: [and the south yeah] Bernadette: Normandy Céline: Normandy too that’s [true . . . yeah . . . yeah] Humor in Intercultural Interactions Bernadette: [Normandy and good wine] from Bordeaux [@@] Int: Bernadette: [mm] there’s [no] Int: Bernadette: [yeah] problem there you can always get them interested in wine Céline: yeah Bernadette: they are (.) th they know {them} well (.) Céline: mm (.) but they really like yeah everything French and all that it’s fun[ny] Bernadette: [snails] from Burgundy my God, how much have I heard about them Céline/Int: Bernadette: @@[@@@@@@@@@@] [when I told them that] only the sauce has any taste erm (.) and that che that the snail was like chewing gum [@@@@@@@@@@] Céline: Bernadette: [@@@@] they weren’t very happy @@ they pay a fortune in (.) in [restaurants] Céline: Bernadette: [mm mm] here to eat snails (.) [while] Céline: [yes it’s true that it’s only] (.) the sauce [when all’s said and done isn’t it] Bernadette: [it’s the sauce isn’t it] which is nice [@@@] Céline: [@@@] We will first present a linguistic description of this interaction (level 1) according to the above-mentioned four dimensions. The humor in this extract is aimed at an absent third party, namely Australians and their stereotypical ideas and limited knowledge of France, culminating in a slightly mocking reference to them raving about and paying a lot of money to eat something that is largely overrated, at least in Bernadette’s view. Nevertheless, the speakers display an affection for this Australian love of France and all things French, and overall, the teasing is gentle rather than biting. In addition, Céline directs some humor at her own city Lille, which she hints is so insignificant that no Australian has ever heard of it. In terms of the language dimension, we primarily see discursive rather than linguistic devices in use here: implicit references and a shared experience of Australians typically reducing France to Paris and possibly a few other well-known cities, wine, and snails; and the incongruous image of snails actually having the taste and texture of chewing gum. There is one linguistic device where Bernadette says mon Dieu (“my God”) when referring to how often she has heard about snails from Australians. This exaggeration successfully triggers laughter from both her interlocutor and the interviewer. The pragmatic 315 316 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL function of the humor here is clearly to create a connection between the speakers, both young French women living in Australia, who have just met some forty minutes earlier for the purposes of this interaction. Interactionally, Céline’s initiation of humor about Australians thinking France means Paris is in response to Bernadette’s statement that being French makes an impression on Australians. Bernadette agrees and then adds to it by pretending to ask Australians if they intend to see anything other than Paris. Céline then goes on to mock the fact that no Australian has heard of the city she comes from, and that they are surprised to discover there is anything north of Paris. It is Bernadette who shortly afterwards makes the humorous utterances regarding Australians liking wine and snails. The humor is constructed equally by both participants. In terms of preferential choices and conversational style (level 2), a tendency toward (absent) third-party-oriented humor and gentle teasing has been identified in our earlier work on social visits in France (Béal and Mullan 2013, 2017). What is interesting here is that these participants had only just met for the first time but still display these cultural preferences in their use of humor. Both participants also display other cooperative interactional strategies (such as repeating, agreeing with, and/or adding to what has just been said) to enhance the atmosphere and create a connection with each other. The joint laughter and enjoyment on the part of both interactants also support what has been found previously for French humor among friends, i.e. showing one’s positive feelings toward one’s interlocutor, at the expense of outsiders if necessary (Béal and Mullan 2013). These preferences correspond with what has been said before about French communicative ethos and cultural values (levels 3 and 4), notably the importance for French speakers to be engaged and animated in conversation, and the positive value attributed to expressing one’s emotions (Béal 2010 inter alia; Mullan 2010 inter alia). The second example comes from the corresponding Australian English corpus. The participants are discussing what they would miss about Australia if they went overseas for a long time. (2) Corpus Mullan (2010, 2020) Fiona: I’d miss the open ni open mindedness of Australia too I think because we’re so plural s like (.) because there’s so many different cultures that we’re quite open to all sorts of things and I think like feminism here’s quite progressive compared with a lot of countries (.) like where there’s so much diversity I think people are just more open minded? = Lisa: = I think you’d miss that even if you moved to the country in Australia Fiona/Int: @@@@@@@@@ Humor in Intercultural Interactions Again, we will first describe the interaction as per the four dimensions. This is an interesting and complex example in that the target is simultaneously self-, recipient-, and other-oriented. It is self-oriented in the sense that Lisa is Australian and therefore part of the larger group the humor is aimed at; it is other-oriented in that Lisa is making a distinction between urban and regional Australia, and situates herself as being in the first category; and it is also recipient-oriented because Lisa is correcting Fiona by suggesting that she doesn’t need to leave the country to lose all the positive things she has just mentioned, because they exist only in urban Australia. The actual humor can be found in the implicit reference to country Australia as being as different from urban Australia as another country entirely. While it might initially appear to be an incongruous image, in fact, this difference between urban and regional Australia is well known; it is the quick-witted response that takes Fiona and the interviewer by surprise and creates the humor. The fact that this utterance has multiple targets means that it has multiple pragmatic functions too. The recipient-oriented element of the humor is somewhat facethreatening to Fiona as she stands corrected, but at the same time, Lisa is creating a connection with Fiona by recognizing her as a fellow city-dweller and Australian who will appreciate the implicit reference here. The humorous utterance is in response to Fiona’s previous (non-humorous) turn but is not built on further. What we see in this extract is recipient-oriented humor, threatening the speaker’s face for the sake of humor, while at the same time the slightly mocking self-oriented nature of the humor is consistent with the Australian cultural ethos of not “big-noting oneself”5 and not taking oneself too seriously both of which were found to be preferential choices in Béal and Mullan (2013, 2017). Making short quips such as this one has also been found to be a feature of Australian humor, as outlined in Mullan and Béal (2018). This analysis of two comparative examples demonstrates how taking these dimensions into account allows us to accurately describe the interaction by teasing out the various strands that make up humorous interaction. This allows us to identify preferential choices and conversational styles across each language-culture (levels 1 and 2 of the cross-cultural approach outlined above in Sections 12.2.1 and 12.2.2) and interpret the corresponding underlying ethos and cultural values (level 3 referred to above). We now turn from the cross-cultural to the intercultural approach. 12.4 The Intercultural Approach In the same way that the comparative study of conversational humor needed to be put in the broader framework of the cross-cultural approach 5 An Australian expression meaning “boasting” or “singing one’s own praises.” 317 318 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL to interaction, humor in intercultural situations needs to be considered as just one particular aspect of interaction in intercultural encounters. Therefore, the methodology described here will employ the same analytical tools used for intercultural exchanges in general, with some adjustments for the specific case of humor. The intercultural situation can be described as one in which at least two participants with different native languages and cultural backgrounds are talking to each other using either the native language of one of the two or a third language used as a lingua franca (the latter case will not be discussed in this chapter). Depending on how fluent the speaker not using her/his native language is in the second language and how familiar s/he is with the cultural background of the other person, various types of communication problems may occur. This usually is the focus of work on intercultural encounters. It involves identifying the problems and analyzing how they are being dealt with by the participants. Two different kinds of interactional situations are under scrutiny: those in which the interlocutors collaborate to resolve the difficulties, in which case the study may focus on the strategies used by speakers to help each other, and those in which these difficulties lead to a breakdown of communication through misunderstandings and/or frustration. In this latter case, the study deals with identifying the sources of miscommunication and unraveling the dynamics of the misunderstandings. It seems fair to say that the collaborative situations occur mostly in circumstances in which the second language speaker is a learner and recognized as such: that is to say, the language classroom, the linguistic immersion stay in a host family, or people with an interest in foreign languages who have befriended each other. Various collaborative strategies may be used, and humor can actually be one of them. In the next section, we will show examples of how, in such a context, humor can be used as a face-saving device for the learner in trouble. However, the second type of situation seems more common: most people who have to express themselves in another language do so in ordinary everyday circumstances, and their interlocutors may not be particularly aware of issues in second language learning. Moreover, even if the second language speaker is quite fluent, uncomfortable moments and various forms of misunderstandings can frequently be observed. The hypothesis is that these are the results of two incompatible sets of communicative rules coming into contact, thus accidentally being revealed (Gumperz and Roberts 1979; Tannen 1981; Scollon and Scollon 1995). Misunderstandings are often a crucial starting point in the analysis of intercultural situations as they point toward differences in communicative rules not previously identified by the analysts. As was pointed out in Sections 12.2.2 and 12.2.3, each language has its own preferential choices and communicative ethos, which seem perfectly normal and natural to the native speaker, to the extent that monolingual Humor in Intercultural Interactions speakers may be completely unaware that they are not universal. Second language speakers themselves are rarely fully aware of the implications of their language usage. In the intercultural encounter, each of the participants tends to behave as s/he would in her/his own language-culture and tends to judge the other person through her/his own cultural grid. Their use of the language reveals their own cultural values, as Wierzbicka points out: “Languages differ from one another not just as linguistic systems but also as cultural universes, as vehicles of ethnic identities” (1985b: 187). On the interactional level, the intercultural misunderstanding can be described in terms of a gap between the intention of the speaker and the interpretation by the addressee. It is rarely the content of the utterance per se that is the problem, but what the metamessage seems to be in terms of the speaker’s attitude. The areas of interpersonal relationships and politeness are particularly sensitive from this point of view. As we will see in the next section, humor is another area of language use that is particularly difficult to master in another language-culture. To a large extent, the purpose of analyzing intercultural communication is to identify the sources of miscommunication and the areas of language use where it occurs. If one assumes that all participants are speaking in good faith and that the problems encountered are linked to the way the L2 is used (or understood), it means that second language speakers are likely to trigger most misunderstandings,6 either because of the way they “packaged” their message or the way they “deciphered” what was being said to them. All areas of language use are potentially concerned: choice of lexicon, speech acts, terms of address, and even the turn-taking system. Four potential sources of miscommunication have been identified. 12.4.1 Inadequate Language Skills This refers to errors linked to the mastery of the second language linguistic system: vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. Unless the overall language skills are really very poor, these are not the most common sources of miscommunication. This is because these errors are readily recognized as such by the native interlocutor. They usually do not really affect the literal meaning of the utterance nor its pragmatic dimension. Some areas of grammar, however, can be more problematic because they do have a strong link with pragmatics: English is notoriously “difficult” for many foreigners when it comes to mastering question-tags or selecting the appropriate form among the many options for expressing requests (Béal 2010: 42), with the potential risk, for the L2 speaker, of unwittingly appearing gruff or impolite. 6 We are talking here specifically about intercultural misunderstandings, as separate from ordinary misunderstandings that can happen even between people sharing the same language and cultural background. 319 320 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL Regarding conversational humor, what obviously comes to mind are cases of double meanings, and how not having the necessary vocabulary skills may stop a participant immediately partaking in the general fun, but the consequences are minimal in terms of interpersonal relationships. 12.4.2 Pragmalinguistic Transfer Pragmalinguistic competence can be described as the capacity for L2 speakers to make the same linguistic preferential choices as native speakers most of the time. The L2 speaker who lacks this competence tends to transfer from the mother tongue to the target language utterances that may be semantically/syntactically equivalent but inappropriate in the context or may imply some kind of value judgment or attitude in relation to the addressee. These were first identified by Thomas who coined the term “pragmalinguistic transfer” (1983: 101). They are a frequent cause of tension between people from different cultural backgrounds. In a study run in a French company operating in Australia (Béal 2010: 316 324), French managers were resented by employees for the way they gave their instructions, which came across as arrogant. It turned out they were translating from the “normal” French way, using a number of linguistic strategies such as the future tense (“you will do X”) and impersonal phrases (“it has to be done”), which are felt to be “neutral” in a French context, but which were perceived more like authoritarian commands by the Australians. Pragmalinguistic transfer can also happen at the level of decoding: in this case, the L2 speaker does not understand what is “meant” by what is said. In relation to humor, this is one of the mechanisms that is often behind L2 speakers feeling offended by comments meant to be funny: Hofstede et al. (2010: 214 215) reports a very telling example between a Dutch and an Indonesian manager in a multinational company. The Dutch manager, popping into his office to retrieve some documents, finds his colleague in the process of borrowing a chair for a meeting happening next door. He picks up his papers, and as he is leaving, he playfully calls over his shoulder, “You’re on a nice stealing spree, Markus?” Except Markus takes it literally. He does not see the tale-tell signs in the wording that signal this is meant in jest. In other cases of misunderstanding, however, a further layer needs to be taken into account in order to get to the bottom of the communication failure: sociopragmatic competence. 12.4.3 Underdeveloped Sociopragmatic Competence Sociopragmatic competence can be described as the capacity to factor in the cultural values of other participants in social encounters and to behave accordingly. When this competence falls short, the interaction can end up in conflict according to how the interactants assess the situation and their Humor in Intercultural Interactions role in it how they feel they are being treated or ought to be treated. In other words, in a pragmalinguistic transfer, the speaker is not aware that a given turn of phrase has different implications in the two languages, but in a sociopragmatic conflict s/he refuses to acknowledge that there may be a problem using it because it in fact reflects her/his own cultural values. S/he may even refuse to use the appropriate phrase instead: a good example is that of the above-mentioned French managers. Some of them, once the “errors of their ways” had been pointed out, still objected to using expressions like “would you mind” (the most common way of wording a request in Australia) toward their subordinates because they felt they would be “sabotaging their own authority.” Sociopragmatic conflicts often involve issues revolving around respect, deference, and self-image. Conversational humor in intercultural settings can easily lead to sociopragmatic conflict because humor is sown into culture, which may not be shared by all interactants. Furthermore, humor is frequently triggered by some (more or less conventional) transgression of social rules or taboos. To go back to the case of Markus, for example, teasing and mock insults are also an important feature of humor in many Anglo-Saxon cultures (Goddard 2006; Haugh and Bousfield 2012; Haugh 2014). Markus’ misreading of his Dutch colleague’s tease on the pragmalinguistic level is compounded by his belonging to a culture in which status is sacred: for him, there is no such thing as a “friendly insult” and stealing is no laughing matter. Hofstede reports that it took them forty-five minutes to resolve the misunderstanding. 12.4.4 Prejudices and Stereotypes The first three sources of miscommunication described above are variations on a clash between rules of communication steeped in cultural values. Another ingredient may add to mutual misinterpretation: the role of prejudices and stereotypes in assessing an interlocutor’s linguistic behavior. Based on features considered typical of a social group’s belief system or behavior, prejudices and stereotypes are a form of generalization and simplification which can be superimposed on the interpretation of individual talk. In other words, regardless of what the other person actually says, it becomes reinterpreted in the light of the prejudice or stereotype. This applies, of course, between groups within the same culture but is especially common between people from different nations. Tannen (1986: 74 92) initially coined the term “reframing” to describe the misinterpretation of a speaker’s intention in relation to male female misunderstandings. It was subsequently applied to intercultural communication by Scollon and Scollon (1995: 67). It is the interpretation of the metamessage which is affected by the “reframing”: what the speaker’s attitude or motivation was in saying what s/he said. For example, if the 321 322 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL speaker belongs to a group which is reputed to feel superior, a piece of genuinely friendly advice may end up being considered as a manifestation of condescendence. To unravel such misunderstandings, the analyst can use a number of clues identified over a number of turns: in the initial statement, a “trigger” may sometimes be identified in the form of the choice of a particular word or utterance (possibly a pragmalinguistic transfer) that may play into the addressee’s bias. In the response, stereotyping can often be traced back to a generalizing statement (“Isn’t that typically French!”), and finally, the initial speaker, feeling “misunderstood,” often feels the need to try and explain what s/he meant, which may or may not work. Conversational humor in intercultural settings is equally at risk from mutual stereotyping. It is a dimension that must not be neglected, especially when the attempt at humor fails or someone ends up feeling offended, as we will see in example (6) below. The analysis of conversational humor in an intercultural context faces the same challenges as that of intercultural conversation in general. The potential sources of tension and misunderstandings identified relate to a large degree to the levels of communication presented in the first part of the chapter: the use of the language itself, the preferential choices, the cultural values, but, whereas within the same culture these are shared by speakers of the community, they may clash in the intercultural encounter. Inadequate language skills, pragmalinguistic transfers, and limited sociopragmatic competence all add up to potential miscommunication. To this must be added preconceived ideas that different cultural groups may harbor about each other. In the next section, we illustrate this approach with a detailed analysis of some examples of intercultural humor. 12.5 Conversational Humor in Intercultural Situations The final section of this chapter comprises examples of successful and unsuccessful humor to illustrate elements of the preceding discussion. These include humor based on the intercultural situation and L2 failure to recognize or understand humor. The examples are taken from two comparative corpora in French and Australian English: the workplace in Australia with French and Australian employees detailed in Béal (2010),7 and the aforementioned semi-structured interviews with French and Australian participants in Mullan (2010, 2020). In the interests of space, when analyzing the examples, we will refer only to the first three dimensions of our model (speaker/target/recipient interplay; language dimension; pragmatic functions) to determine whether the intercultural humor is successful, or if not, why not. 7 See this publication for more information on the corpora. Humor in Intercultural Interactions The first example takes place in the workplace. Two (male) colleagues are discussing a loan (in English), and the French speaker uses the wrong word. The humor revolves around the linguistic difficulties. (3) Corpus Béal (2010) Fr: yeah of course the money but at least I suppose they are er: solvable/ Aus: solvable/ Fr: ((hesitates)) solvable Aus: what do you mean? Fr: you can pay or you can afford to pay Aus: oh: soluble (.) in water ((they both laugh)) Aus: yeah they’re solvent Fr: so:lv Aus: solvent Fr: yeah in French it’s solvable The French speaker uses the word solvable, a false friend which is not appropriate in the context of the discussion, and the Australian colleague does not understand what is being referred to. When the French speaker offers an explanation involving payment, the Australian understands that his colleague means “solvent,” but deliberately proposes a similar but incorrect word (soluble) to tease him. The recipient-oriented humor works as a face-saving device here,8 and the shared laughter indicates that despite being the target, the French speaker sees the funny side of his incorrect word as well as appreciating the linguistic play. The Australian then offers the correct word, which the French speaker attempts to repeat before giving the French equivalent. The French speaker then offers the French word, undoubtedly as another face-saving device to defend his original choice. The humor is based on the intercultural nature of the exchange itself and is used to resolve linguistic difficulties successfully. The next example reveals a similar use of humor to successfully deal with a linguistic error in an intercultural encounter, which a French speaker made in her first language. (4) Corpus Mullan (2010, 2020) Fr: quand j’étais euh (.) ici par exemple si on va dans une soirée ou dans un repas et on connaı̂t pas les gens on va s’introduire hein (.) on va se £‘fin pas (.) on va se présenter pas s’introduire (.) on va se [présenter]£ Aus:/Int: Int: 8 [@@@@] c’est du franglais ça See Vincent Durroux et al. (2020) for more examples of humor used as a face saving device to deal with second language difficulties. 323 324 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL Fr: je l’ai dit plein de fois en France et ça fait rire parce que ça a une connotation un peu sexuelle donc Aus/Int: @@@ Fr: when I was er (.) here for example if you go to a party or a dinner and you don’t know the people there you just {insert} yourself (.) you in £well not (.) you introduce yourself not {insert} yourself (.) you introduce [yourself]£ Aus:/Int: [@@@@] Int: that’s franglais that is Fr: I’ve said it loads of times in France and it makes {people} laugh because it’s got a bit of a sexual connotation so Aus/Int: @@@ Here the French speaker corrects her own mistake with a smiling voice and self-oriented humor to save face for using the incorrect verb: s’introduire means something more like “to insert oneself” in French, instead of the correct se présenter (literally “to present oneself”), when she means “to introduce oneself.” This is a frequent error on the part of English speakers learning French and French speakers influenced by English and would have been recognized as such by all three participants. This shared intercultural knowledge would have enhanced the humor in this exchange. Example (5) shows what happens when a pragmalinguistic transfer causes the humor to fail. The speakers here have been discussing what they see as the main differences between Australians and French speakers (and their respective countries) for half an hour. Shortly prior to this excerpt, the Australian (Darren) had been talking about telling friends if they were annoying you. The interviewer then asks both participants whether they think it is better to be honest or polite. (5)9 Corpus Mullan (2010, 2020) Aus: je crois qu’il faut (.) il faut trouver un peu un (.) un équilibre entre les deux Int: mm mm = Aus: = parce qu’il est possible de (.) de communiquer un message sans être impoli . . . Fr: Aus: [mm] c’est- je crois que c’est vrai que les Australiens (.) ont une euh (.) des difficultés d’être complètement honnêtes en disant ce qu’on ce qu’on pense comme ça {et} que les Français ont une . . . (1.0) £une aptitude euh des fois É::tonnante [pour dire exactement ce qu’ils pensent]£ Int: [@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@] Fr: Aus: [ah oui?] ah ouais (.) et alors d- les gens qui viennent des d’un d’une culture anglosaxonne ??? ah bon! ça peut être ça (.) peut être une surprise 9 Edited for brevity and clarity. Humor in Intercultural Interactions Aus: I think you need to (.) you need to find a bit of (.) a balance between the two Int: mm mm = Aus: = because it’s possible to (.) to communicate a message without being rude . . . Fr: Aus: [mm] it’s- I think it’s true that Australians (.) find it er (.) difficult being completely honest saying what they(we)10 what they(w)e think like that {and} that the French have a . . . (1.0) £a er sometimes A::stonishing aptitude [for saying exactly what they think]£ Int: [@@@@@ @@@@@@@@@@@] Fr: Aus: [oh yes?] oh yeah (.) and so p- people who come from from a from an Anglo-Saxon culture ??? oh right! It can be it (.) can be a surprise Darren answers first, saying that he thinks it’s better to find a balance between honesty and politeness and that one can avoid being rude. He admits that Australians often find it hard to say what they think, and then uses humor to try and soften the blow of his face-threatening assessment of the French in this regard. His smiling voice, one-second hesitation before delivery, hesitation marker (er) and then emphasis and elongation of the first letter of étonnante (astonishing) all frame this as humorous. The linguistic device of exaggeration (“astonishing aptitude”) and the incongruous image of impoliteness (or at least an Australian understanding thereof) turned into an art form combine to create the humor here. The interviewer (also Australian) appreciates this and laughs, but the French speaker (Carine) does not find this funny, saying only “oh yes?” The expression aptitude étonnante is what causes the problem. The intended pragmatics of the exaggeration has not translated well into French: étonnante could also be translated as ‘surprising’ here, and perhaps comes across as more of a simple statement to Carine, who appears to react with genuine surprise. Not long after this excerpt, the interviewer asked the participants whether they were aware that French speakers could come across as rude to Australians and that Australians could appear insincere or hypocritical to French speakers. Darren did, but Carine did not, which further clarifies the respective contexts for each of the participants during the above exchange. Carine then asked Darren for an example of this rudeness, whereupon she conceded that the French speaker in question had not been very tactful. She went on to say that 10 The third person singular subject pronoun in French has a number of possible translations depending on the context, including: “one,” “we,” “people,” “someone,” or the impersonal “they/you.” 325 326 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL she thought that honesty was more a question of personality rather than culture, however, and that telling someone that they are badly dressed is the kind of thing you can tell someone you know well.11 The fact that Carine assumes that this is the kind of thing one can tell somebody one knows well in any culture demonstrates to what extent sociopragmatic norms are embedded into one’s cultural ethos. The following example shows how humor can also succumb to sociopragmatic failure.12 The brief exchange takes place during an informal chat between a French manager (Fr1), and his Australian and French employees. The Australian has just come back from a long weekend. (6) Corpus Béal (2010) Aus: do you mind if I take another couple of days off er: Thursday or Friday off at the end of this week? Fr1: ((stunned silence)) Fr2: you’re cheeky ((laughter)) The Australian’s question is delivered deadpan, to all appearances a serious request for more leave in the same week. The French colleague realizes this is meant as a joke, however, and reacts before the manager, who is taken aback by the impertinence of this employee who has just had some time off. As well as being momentarily fooled by the Australian’s dry delivery, the French manager is probably not used to being teased by a subordinate, the notion of hierarchy being more sacred in French culture than in Australia. He does not expect to be on the receiving end of such “disrespectful” humor in this context and does not immediately recognize the request as something so outrageous that it could not possibly be intended to be taken seriously. There is a clear mismatch here between both the French/Australian communicative ethos and the respective cultural values, causing the sociopragmatic failure of the humor. The deadpan delivery of the humor (or “deadpan jocular irony,” Goddard 2006) is a recognized code among Australians but can be difficult to detect and understand in other cultures where it is not practised much, or at all. It is necessary to expect and recognize this type of humor to be able to appreciate the outrageousness of the utterance, which, for Australians, is what signals that this is intended as a joke. In addition, a French 11 See Mullan (2010: 198–201) for a detailed discussion of this example. 12 Another example of failed humor due to sociopragmatic difference between a German and an Australian is outlined in Béal and Mullan (2017: 33). There is also an interesting anecdote recounting an instance of failed humor between an Australian and an American – both native English speakers, but with different sociopragmatic norms. Humor in Intercultural Interactions employee would not usually be able to make such an impertinent joke with a manager (note the reaction of the French colleague, “you’re cheeky”), so the boss does not understand what is happening here. This example bears similarities to the aforementioned example with Markus and the Dutch colleague, in terms of the deadpan delivery as well as in the sense that it was unthinkable that an Indonesian colleague would have said something like that. One final additional factor may have come into play here, and this is the fact that “Australia was once known as the land of the long weekend” (Schultz 2014: 7), where people were said to finish work exactly on time, if not early, and went to the beach, football, or the pub on the way home. While this cliché has changed rather in recent years, at the time of this recording, it would have been more widespread, especially among European expatriates, as is the case here. We cannot be sure, but it is possible that the Australian was also playing up to this stereotype with his cheeky request. This would also fit in with the Australian ethos of not taking oneself too seriously (Goddard 2009). The above examples illustrate how intercultural conversational humor faces the same challenges as intercultural communication (language, preferential choices, cultural values), where inadequate language skills, pragmalinguistic transfer, and/or limited sociopragmatic competence can lead to misunderstandings. The humor can either be the cause of the misunderstanding or lead to its successful resolution. 12.6 Conclusion In this chapter, we have shown that the analysis of conversational humor from a cross-cultural or intercultural approach needs to simultaneously tackle the issues linked to the comparison of interaction in different languages, to the specific dynamics of intercultural communication, and to the peculiar place that humor occupies in verbal interaction. A five-level model was introduced to describe and connect observable forms of speech to underlying communicative ethos and cultural values. Conversational humor was shown to make the collection of comparable examples especially delicate because of the way it is intricately entwined in other verbal activities. In order to deal with this problem, a method was devised for teasing out the various strands that make up humorous interaction and turning them into comparable components. Some representative exampIes were presented and analyzed by way of illustration of the method. In relation to the intercultural approach, we showed that the two main issues were identifying strategies for cooperation and 327 328 KERRY MULLAN & CHRISTINE BÉAL unraveling misunderstandings. Four potential sources of miscommunication were discussed, and conversational humor in an intercultural context was shown to be particularly at risk of failing or even causing offense. Some authentic examples were used to make the point. Overall, the cross-cultural and the intercultural approach to the analysis of conversational humor must be seen as complementary rather than distinct, a good understanding of each separate culture’s communicative ethos and cultural values being essential to investigate intercultural situations. 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I found that even in places where the new group I met spoke my first language (L1), Spanish,1 I had to learn new ways of communicating with the locals when dealing with important emotional events such as the death of a person, the wedding of a friend, or the birth of a child. As a young person, I found it curious, for instance, to see how people celebrated “el Dı́a de los Muertos” (Dead People’s Day) so joyfully in Mexico, or how people could tell jokes and even eat at funerals in the USA. Another example of an observation that gave me food for thought was that, in situations where someone told me a piece of good news about themselves, I would say in Spanish something in the fashion of ¿Enserio? ¡No me digas! ¡Ay, qué bien! (Really? You don’t say! Oh, that’s good!) expressing my positive surprise and good feelings. But when comparing my reaction with that of my British friend Suzanne in similar situations, the fact that, in most cases, she would simply react by saying Oh! was an eye-opener for me. I thus realized that if I wanted to emotionally connect with the particular people or group in question, I had to learn new relational skills and strategies and make an effort to feel and talk the way they did, so I would not sound inappropriate when expressing or describing my or other people’s emotions. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor J. Lachlan Mackenzie, for his valuable suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for her/his useful comments, which undoubtedly helped refine and improve the last version of the chapter. 1 In theory, we could here speak of “intracultural” and not intercultural communication. Still, as Kecskes (2020) explains, the line between these two types of communication is rather fuzzy, and their relationship is better seen as a continuum than as a dichotomy. See also Section 13.2.2. Emotion in Intercultural Interactions As a linguist and discourse analyst, these experiences led me to think that in the same way as speakers develop grammatical competence, they also develop an emotional competence that I simply define as the ability to express and talk about emotions appropriately (i.e. according to the situation and context) in a given language and/or culture or subculture. Emotional competence forms part of the wider socio-cognitive and sociopragmatic competence any speaker of a language possesses. Speakers need to become “emotionally literate” if they want to function appropriately in a given language, culture, or community of practice. Thus, when learning a second (or third, fourth, etc.) language or dialect, interesting research questions would be: Can we become emotional bilinguals or multilinguals? If so, can we say that we are emotionally bilingual just by reading about the emotional concepts and practices of the culture in question, or do we need to really feel and experience emotions within the corresponding culture to understand its speakers’ emotional behavior and be able to use the appropriate emotional kind of discourse? Bosque (2010, 2016) discusses this topic when comparing the concept of vergüenza in Spanish with those of shame and embarrassment in English, and he concludes that in order to understand the terms used to describe emotions, one should look into the subjective and social features of their description for their accurate conceptualization. Therefore, it will be difficult for a speaker to understand and enact a given emotion concept in a culture other than her L1 culture if she does not have an equivalent term in her L1 and has not experienced it before (a phenomenon labeled as hypocognition by Levy 1973), even if she can read about its lexical meaning in a dictionary. Studies such as those found in Thompson and Alba-Juez (2014) or Mackenzie and Alba-Juez (2019) have demonstrated that stance and emotion are dynamical systems of language that form part of all discourse types and therefore are crucial in any kind of exchange, including intercultural interaction. Haugh (2017: 10) also argues that emotion is a key topic in intercultural pragmatics. One well-known aspect that has been the focus of many studies (cf. Wierzbicka 2003; Chang and Haugh 2017) is the fact that some “emotional dissonance” may be experienced in such encounters, as a result of a mismatch between a speaker’s “normal” emotive behavior and that which she is expected to enact in the particular intercultural situation. However, as Ten Thije (2006) argues, intercultural communication is not all about misunderstandings and pragmatic mismatches. Kecskes (2020: 19 21) points out that new ways of conveying emotional meaning are co-constructed and agreed in these types of encounters, which are based not only on prior universal shared knowledge and the constraints of societal conditions but also on the speaker’s and hearer’s egocentrism, i.e. the free expression of their own goals, 335 336 LAURA ALBA JUEZ intentions, or desires as recognized in the flow of interaction. Thus, intercultural communications have the potential to enrich the linguistic systems of the interlocutors by creating new discursive structures and contributing to the creation of new discursive intercultures. Considering all of the above, in this chapter, I approach the expression of emotion in intercultural communication as a pragmatic dynamical process that shows the interaction brain-bodies-world (cf. Van Gelder 1998; van Geert 2008; Gibbs 2010; Alba-Juez and Alba-Juez 2012; van Geert and Verspoor 2015), as is also the case with other kinds of communication. Different languages and cultures may differ or not in their linguistic expression of emotion, display rules (Ekman and Friesen 1975), or affective practices (Wetherell 2012), all of which may affect intercultural communication. In the present discussion and analysis, I argue in favor of a comprehensive, socio-cognitive (e.g. Kecskes and Zhang 2009; Kecskes 2010) and sociopragmatic (Leech 1983, 2014) approach to the study of emotion in intercultural communication, within which the scrutiny of aspects of the communicative process such as (im)politeness, egocentrism, salience, expectations, emotional intelligence, or emotional implicatures2 (Schwarz-Friesel 2010, 2015) is of paramount importance. To illustrate my approach, I will make an analysis of different intercultural exchanges, one of them taken from my own experience in real life, and the others from the autobiographical film Un franco, catorce pesetas, in which its director, Carlos Iglesias, shows and transmits his emotions and those of his family when, as a child (in the 1960s), he emigrated from Spain to Switzerland (Section 13.3). The main research questions concerning intercultural interactions I address in the analysis are as follows: • How can people show emotional competence? • At what linguistic levels may we find emotive language? • How can interlocutors resolve emotional issues and possible emotional pragmatic mismatches? • What kind of expectations about emotive behavior may interlocutors have? • How might the social intercultural context affect the inferences (such as emotional implicatures) speakers make? But before the analysis, I deem it necessary to define some terms and outline some of the main approaches to the study of emotion in language, to which I now turn. 2 Emotional implicatures are implicatures about the emotions of the speaker that are substantiated to a certain extent by culturally shaped encyclopedic knowledge. Emotion in Intercultural Interactions 13.2 Some Theoretical Considerations 13.2.1 Emotion in Intercultural Discourse To describe and analyze emotion in discourse has proved to be a very challenging task because of its complexity and dynamism. A sociocognitive/sociopragmatic discourse approach to emotion entails a multimodal exploration of the phenomenon, attempting to contemplate as many of the (linguistic, social, cognitive, etc.) variables affecting it as possible. As I have noted in previous work (e.g. Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019; Alba-Juez 2021), in most definitions of emotion, within the fields of both linguistics and psychology (cf. Frijda 1998; Myers 2004; Martin and White 2005; Schwarz-Friesel 2015), the concept of evaluation or appraisal is always presented as having an intimate relationship with that of emotion. However, as shown in Alba-Juez (2018), evaluation and emotion are not the same phenomenon, and for that reason I consider the emotive function of language worth studying in and of itself, as an aspect of language and communication that is rich in (socio) pragmatic meanings and which therefore affects the discourse situation in very deep and subtle ways which are not necessarily identical with those related to evaluation. I will take Alba-Juez and Mackenzie’s (2019: 18) definition of emotion in discourse as a point of departure for the analysis of emotion in intercultural discourse: we view emotion as a (dynamical) system of language which interacts with the system of evaluation but whose main function is the expression of the speaker’s feelings, mood, or affective experience. It is a multimodal discourse process that permeates all linguistic levels. It manifests itself in nonverbal ways, presenting different stages and forms (influenced by variables such as pragmatic expectations or common-ground knowledge) according as the discursive situation and interaction changes and evolves. Thus, I view emotion in discourse as a process that changes and has different stages and forms, not only along the history of a given group or culture, but also within the course of a single interaction. And I should add that in the case of intercultural communication, the complexity and dynamism of the emotion processes that transpire in language may be magnified. Many an author (e.g. Damasio 2018) has seen emotions as instruments of and motivators for culture. The inevitable question has been raised among these scholars as to whether human emotions are universal or culturespecific. Bateson (1975), Trevarthen (1979),3 or Lakoff (1987), for instance, 3 Bateson’s (1975) and Trevarthen’s (1979) studies on developmental pragmatics have focused on so called protoconversations, which are thought to be a universal feature of infant–caregiver interaction involving a range of affect, emotion, social expectations, and rounds of vocal turn taking. 337 338 LAURA ALBA JUEZ emphasize the relevance of universal constraints, but other authors, such as Geeraerts and Grondelaers (1995) or Wierzbicka (2003), focus on cultural differences. In this respect, my work on the topic is more in line with Foolen (2017: 4), who argues that as far as emotion is concerned, the relations between language and culture “are manifold and multidimensional.” I firmly believe that extreme positions (based on a onedimensional universalism-relativism dichotomy) do not offer a complete picture of human emotion which appears to be far more complex than other animals’ emotion precisely because of the observable fact that humans can express and talk about emotions in a rather sophisticated way that is unique to their species. And because of this complexity, the phenomenon calls for a complete sociopragmatic exploration, scrutinizing and including as many variables as possible. But to explore emotion across cultures, it is important to first define what we mean by “culture.” The concept is certainly a very slippery one, not at all easy to define. What Do We Mean by “Culture” and “Intercultural Communication”? As Piller (2012: 4) notes, many a person struggles to answer the question “What is your culture?” because among other things, people understand the concept of culture in different ways. Are we supposed to understand culture as a nation? An ethnicity? A language? A religion? A community of practice? Or even a profession or a gender? Undoubtedly, globalization has had an impact on the static view of the concept. I myself find it very difficult to answer that question, for I would have to say that I was born in Argentina from Spanish parents who kept and transmitted their European Spanish values to their four children (three of whom had been born in Spain before emigrating to Argentina). But then life took me to other countries, such as Mexico, the United States, and the UK, to end up living in Spain for many years now, so in fact I cannot accurately say what “my culture” is, for I believe I have acquired linguistic expressions, customs, and ways of looking at the world from each and every one of the countries, cities, and groups I have formed part of in all these moves. And my case is not an exception. It is important, therefore, to bear in mind that the concept of “culture” is a human construct, and that reality is more complex than a construct. It is not difficult to perceive that within what might be considered a macroculture such as US culture, for instance, there are numerous microcultures that vary widely in terms of speakers’ emotional behavior and values (among other things). It is very common to hear, for instance, people talking about the differences in cultural expectations (many of which are related to emotional behavior) between the northern and the southern states of America. Holliday (1999) speaks of “big culture” based on ethnicity and argues for a shift of focus to “small culture,” which is in 13.2.2 Emotion in Intercultural Interactions turn inspired by the concept of community of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992), which he defines as “relating to cohesive behavior in activities within any social grouping” (1999: 241). This is a useful distinction, but it is not free of analytical problems: we would all agree that the American culture could be considered a “big culture” but . . . can we say that it is based on ethnicity? Certainly not, and for that reason it seems better, as Holliday remarks, to focus on small cultures, where more variables can be controlled in their analysis, consequently yielding more reliable results. In a similar line of thought, Scollon et al. (2012: 277) argue that there is practically no dimension on which one culture could be “clearly and unambiguously distinguished from another,” which constitutes an analytical obstacle. For this reason, they introduce the concept of discourse systems, defined as complex systems which interact with one another and in which each speaker participates throughout her life. These systems adopt a given discursive manner of expression, including the social values and practices of the group in question. However, the systems will differ for every speaker, who will have a sense of stable identity even when navigating across and within all of them (the discourse systems of their country, gender, work, hobbies, language, etc.). Scollon et al. (2012: 278), then, prefer to avoid the term intercultural communication in favor of interdiscoursesystem communication. As the reader may have inferred by now, in this chapter, I use the term intercultural communication/interaction, but I do not refer to any strict definition in terms of nations, race, etc. My thoughts about the matter are more in sync with those of Scollon et al. (2012) and in line with a sociopragmatic approach, which has to consider many more variables than the linguistic code or the ethnicity of the speakers. Also, and as Kecskes (2020) notes, “cultural constructs and models change diachronically while cultural representation and speech production by individuals change[] synchronically,” and so “intercultures are ad hoc creations” which are produced in a communicative process in which cultural norms and models from prior experience “blend with features created ad hoc in the interaction in a synergetic way.” The view of interculturality adopted in this work also follows Kecskes (2014) in this respect and can be considered within the wide scope of intercultural pragmatics, which according to Haugh (2017: 1) “involves, broadly speaking, the application of theories and methods from pragmatics to the analysis of the role of language in intercultural interactions.” Kecskes (2004, 2011, 2014 and 2020) defines intercultural pragmatics as “a relatively new field of inquiry that is about how the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures” (2020: 1). This definition is also valid for the kind of study carried out in this chapter, although I would like to qualify it by saying that in intercultural interactions the interlocutors do 339 340 LAURA ALBA JUEZ not necessarily have to have different first languages, as will be argued and shown in the first analysis made in Section 13.3. 13.2.3 Emotion Approaches and Studies as Seen from the Prism of Intercultural Pragmatics In previous work (e.g. Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019; Alba-Juez 2021), the tenets of the main approaches to emotion were delineated within the broad field of linguistics, drawing at the same time from other disciplines. My approach has always been a discursive, socio-cognitive and sociopragmatic one that welcomes interdisciplinarity and therefore takes into account the findings of other disciplines, such as neurology, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, or linguistic anthropology. In the present study, the focus is placed on certain aspects of these approaches that affect the interpretation and analysis of intercultural interaction. Both in Darwin (1872) and in later theoretical proposals about the nature of emotions in animals (see Watson 1930; Parr 2001; Bekoff 2007), it is argued that emotions serve a communicative function whose expression both verbal and nonverbal accounts for an outward communication of an inner state. As noted above, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (2018) also points out the importance of emotions as instruments and motivators for culture, and it is in great part through language that the outward communication of our inner states and their cultural instrumentality is carried out. Indeed, as the cognitive-linguistic approaches to emotion have made clear, language is no longer thought to be a means for a totally objective representation of reality; researchers now assume that through language we express intersubjective meanings and a kind of “correlational truth” in which the expression of emotion plays a fundamental part (Lüdtke 2015). Kecskes’ (2019: 489) view of intercultural interactions seems to be in sync with Lüdtke’s basic assumption, for he argues that “pragmatics is invigorated rather than impoverished in intercultural communication,” in the sense that “a new type of synchronic events-based pragmatics is co-constructed by interlocutors.” Thus, it could be said that in intercultural communication, as in other types of interaction, the interlocutors create their correlational truth by constructing their temporary frames, formulas, and norms for their discursive performance in general and their expression of emotion in particular. Different schools of thought have approached the phenomenon of emotion from different perspectives, this difference is also shown in how they understand intercultural communication. Within cognitive linguistics (see Foolen 2012), emotion is viewed as a system of knowledge that interacts with language. Foolen (2017), for instance, observes that the emotional associations people make with some words in a certain culture tend to be the same for the different people in that culture. Thus, words such as criminal or terrorist tend to have a negative valence in most social groups, while others such as love or friendship are normally perceived as Emotion in Intercultural Interactions emotionally positive. However, some of these terms may change their polarity depending on the discourse system in which they are used. For instance, the nominal phrase black cat or Friday 13th may evoke or elicit different emotions in people belonging to the same broad culture, depending on whether they are superstitious or not. Indeed, the prototypical example of variation and difference in the expression of emotion is normally illustrated at the lexical level, where we find emotion terms in certain languages or cultures that do not have an exact equivalent in other languages. By way of example, Milan Kundera (1980) explains that the Czech term Litost has no equivalent in any other language, and so in order to express its meaning in English, for instance, one would have to use a more sophisticated and complex noun phrase, namely “a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one’s own miserable self . . . followed by a desire for revenge” (Kundera 1980: 121 122). One should consider, however, that as Pinker ([1997] 2015: 365) notes, cultures surely differ in the way their members express, talk about, and act on various emotions, “but that says nothing about what their people feel,” the evidence suggesting that “the emotions of all normal members of our species are played on the same keyboard.” Indeed, Ekman ([2003] 2007) shows that cultures differ the most in how emotions are expressed in public, but in an experiment in which he secretly filmed the expressions of American and Japanese students as they watched some gross-out material, it was shown that if the experimenter was in the room, the Japanese students smiled politely during the scenes in which the Americans showed horror, but when they were alone, the Japanese subjects were as horrified as the American ones. Emotion permeates all levels of linguistic expression, and it can therefore be found not only at the lexical level, but also at the phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels, where its expression may vary or not from one culture to another. In fact, not everything is different in the realm of the expression of emotion across cultures: one way in which some linguists (See Schnoebelen 2012; Alba-Juez & Martı́nez Caro 2017, Martı́nez Caro & Alba-Juez 2021) have found emotion is similarly expressed in at least some languages is through the use of insubordinate constructions (Evans 2007). Emotion is here encoded at the syntactic level, which in turn affects the pragmatic dimension because these constructions have been conventionalized and pragmaticalized into emotionally charged constructions. Evans (2007: 367) defines insubordination as “the conventionalized main clause use of what, on prima facie grounds, appear to be formally subordinate clauses.” Thus, we find insubordinate constructions such as (a) or (b) where the if-clause (protasis) functions independently of any apodosis or matrix: (a) If only I could talk to her! (b) As if you didn’t know it! 341 342 LAURA ALBA JUEZ It has been observed that these constructions fulfill an emphatic and expressive function that makes them differ from their counterpart in dyadically dependent clauses.4 So for instance, (b) has a clear emotionally evaluative and emphatic content (which, depending on the context, could imply some kind or reproach or even anger on the part of the speaker) that its dependent counterpart (c) would not normally have (at least to such a degree): (c) You acted as if you didn’t know it. This also happens across other European languages such as Spanish (cf. Actuaste como si no lo supieras vs. ¡Como si no lo supieras!) or some Native American languages such as Navajo, in which, for instance, the subordinate and normally nonevaluative marker go appears in insubordinate constructions to mark emotional evaluation and background information (Schnoebelen 2012: 12). Within Systemic Functional Linguistics, emotion has been approached entirely through the study of the Appraisal systems (Martin and White 2005). Appraisal is conceived as a discourse semantic system which includes three interacting domains: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT, and GRADUATION (2005: 35). AFFECT constitutes one of the three subsystems of ATTITUDE, together with JUDGMENT and APPRECIATION. Thus, in the Appraisal framework, emotion is not defined outside the scope of its evaluative potential, and there is no special focus on the differences that might be encountered in its expression across cultures. For this reason, some attempts have been made to refine the Appraisal model, in particular the subsystem dealing with emotion, i.e. AFFECT (see, e.g., Thompson 2014; Castro et al. 2019), and some authors (see Xinghua and Thompson 2009; Wu 2018) have applied the theory in cultural contrastive studies. Xinghua and Thompson examine and compare students’ argumentative writing in Chinese and English, and their results show that there are roughly similar patterns in the use of APPRECIATION items but clear differences in AFFECT and JUDGMENT, the use of these two resources being less frequent in Chinese, where the disclosure of emotions and the expression of direct ethical or moral judgments tends to be avoided. Wu (2018) compares the East vs. West online tourism marketing methods of two official websites, one of them in Hangzhou, China and the other in London, UK, based on the use of the Appraisal resources available in Chinese and English, respectively, to show that both differ significantly in their marketing methods (and consequently appeal to different feelings or emotions in their prospective clients). Hangzhou relies on history and authoritative words (appealing to respect and the appreciation of historical values) while London promotes the city by foregrounding its attractions (appealing more to joy and the feeling of well-being).5 4 For the concept of dyadically dependent clauses, see Sansiñena et al. (2015). 5 However, I believe that the conclusions drawn from the results of these two places (London and Hangzhou) cannot be generalized for such broad communities of practice as “Chinese and English”, let alone “East vs. West.” Emotion in Intercultural Interactions From a psychological perspective, Pinker ( [1997] 2015: 373 374) writes of emotions as “mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals” which, once activated by a propitious moment, trigger the cascade of subsequent subgoals that we call thinking and acting. Because of this fact, Pinker explains, in the same vein as Lüdtke (2015), that “no sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa.” From an anthropological perspective, recent research supports the idea that cultural forms and affect mutually constitute one another (see Urban and Urban 2020). For instance, Eisenlohr (2010) describes how performers of Mauritian Muslim devotional poems identify with the first-person pronouns I or my in the poems, rekindling the effect of the original poet and simultaneously unlocking it for other participants. All in all, it can be said that the topic of emotion in language and discourse has been studied from various (linguistic-pragmatic, psychological, philosophical, anthropological, social-communicative, etc.) perspectives, such as those of interdiscourse communication (Piller 2012), sentiment analysis (Taboada 2016), Relevance Theory (Blakemore 2011), developmental pragmatics (Bateson 1975; Trevarthen 1979), or emotiology (Shakovsky 2016). But some approaches (cf. those shown in Ellsworth and Scherer 2003; Härtel and Härtel 2005; Matsumoto et al. 2007; Wetherell 2012; Piller 2012; Filani 2021; De Gelda 2016; or Dewaele 2018) have put more emphasis on pragmatic intercultural factors than others. Dewaele (2018), for instance, makes both a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of data collected via an online questionnaire for couples who were in an intercultural relationship, and he found that these couples often had to face serious and totally unexpected pragmatic challenges, most of which were attributed to linguistic, pragmalinguistic, and sociopragmatic issues. An important additional finding of this study was that participants with higher scores on Emotional Stability and higher levels of education reported fewer difficulties in reaching emotional concordance with their partners. Quantitative studies on cultural differences normally assume that culture affects our disposition and goals, as is the case with Hofstede (1995), Kozan and Ergin (1998), or Weaver (1998). This kind of study can be useful in terms of what to expect regarding cultural differences in emotional experiences and their reporting, but as Härtel and Härtel (2005) point out, it can be misleading because in the ease of making statistical comparisons of frequency counts, researchers may overlook the fact that “understanding how culture influences emotion processes requires examining such processes using a cultural lens appropriate to the given cultural context” (p. 686). And this is precisely what Pacheco Baldó (2020) warns us about in her study of American individualism and masculinity, whose results throw light on the importance of context and the communicative situation, by showing that the discourse used in nursing homes in America opposes the 343 344 LAURA ALBA JUEZ individualist and masculine values and emotional responses that are usually associated with American culture. Some other studies have given special attention to certain culturesensitive discursive practices that are based on cultural expectations (Summerfield and Egner 2009;6 Escandell-Vidal 20177) and may trigger emotional implicatures (Schwarz-Friesel 2010). Dewaele’s (2013: 210) quantitative analysis, for instance, reveals that the practice of codeswitching in multilingual contexts is most frequent when talking about personal or emotional topics with known interlocutors but is significantly less frequent when talking about neutral topics to strangers or to larger audiences. Display rules (Ekman and Friesen 1975), i.e. culture-dependent rules that are learned at a young age, have to do with the way one should express certain emotions and to what extent. Authors such as Matsumoto et al. (2005) show that display rules are related to the expressive component of emotion regulation. These rules are closely connected to cultural rules of politeness (Alba-Juez 2021), inasmuch as they are normally used to save face by protecting one’s feelings or those of another person, and consequently they are associated with expectations about how others will emotionally act and react (e.g. expressing grief when someone dies). The related cultural concept of ritual frames correlates with both politeness and the expression of emotion, for these frames are associated with conventionalized expressions (Terkourafi 2001) which, according to Kádár and House (2020), are deployed in settings where it is important to show awareness of rights and obligations, and therefore they may have a different emotional scope in different groups or cultures. This is shown, for instance, by Kádár and House (2020) in a contrastive analysis of the functions of the “ritual frame indicating expression” (RFIE) please in English and the RFIE qing in Chinese, whose results showed important pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic differences between them. Another sociopragmatic aspect that is worth studying in terms of intercultural communication is humor, for it displays characterizing features and styles in the interactions of different groups or cultures, and it fulfills important and complex functions having to do with emotional behavior, such as building solidarity, holding groups together, helping people “feel included” and thus reinforce group membership. These are aspects shown by research such as Marra and Holmes’s (2007) study of multicultural environments at different workplaces in New Zealand. It became clear to these authors that the ability to handle humor was a crucial sociopragmatic skill within these communities, precisely because acquiring this 6 Summerfield and Egner (2009: 403) define expectations as “brain states that reflect prior information about what is 7 Escandell Vidal (2017: 493) argues that “expectations are the cognitive, internalized image of the general prototype for possible or probable in the 2020 sensory environment.” each situation” and “they lie at the heart of what we perceive as normal, ‘smooth interaction.’” Emotion in Intercultural Interactions skill will help members of other cultures or immigrants to join such communities of practice and be accepted in them. Many other studies on cognitive and sociopragmatic elements related to intercultural emotion could be referred to and discussed here, such as the emotional implications of the use of taboo language (see Dewaele 2016) or ritual cursing (see Labov 1972; Kádár and Szalai 2020), the possible crosscultural differences in emotion perception (see Hareli et al. 2015), the attitudes of some groups toward the culturally different (see SpencerRogers and McGovern 2002) or the expression of emotion according to gender (see De Gelda 2016). For reasons of space, however, I will not elaborate on these topics, although some of them will be brought to the spotlight as a result of the sample analysis presented in Section 13.3, to which I now turn. 13.3 Sample Analysis: Emotion in Intercultural Discourse In this section I will focus on the analysis of intercultural interaction from a socio-cognitive and sociopragmatic perspective. As practical examples, I have chosen an instance of an intercultural interaction taken from real life in (1), and the intercultural interactions which take place in some scenes of the Spanish movie Un franco, catorce pesetas in (2), (3), and (4). The interaction I analyze in (1) below can be characterized as intercultural even though the interlocutors speak the same broad language (Spanish), because, among other things, they speak different varieties of Spanish and come from different countries (Spain and Argentina). Here the variables “country” and “variety of Spanish” (as well as others such as the interlocutors’ previous experience with people from Argentina or Spain), more than L1, are crucial for the intercultural emotional interaction that takes place. In such cases, the “different first languages” in Kecskes’ (2020: 1) definition would be the different varieties of the same L1, which would correspond to different subcultures within the broader culture of (in this case) the Spanish-speaking world. Let us now examine the exchange, recorded from my personal experience, on an occasion when two of our Argentinean friends (F and S) came to visit us at our beach house in the province of Valencia, and my husband and I took them to eat out at a (supposedly) Argentinean restaurant. (1) F: Waiter: (To the waiter) ¿Qué incluye el asado, aparte de carne? (What does the barbecue include, apart from meat?) Embutidos (pronounced with a heavy Peninsular Spanish accent). (Approx: Sausages) 345 346 LAURA ALBA JUEZ F: Waiter: F: ¿Qué tipo de embutidos? (What kind of sausages?) ¡Pues embu\tidos! (showing with his falling intonation that there was no need for further explanation) (Well, \sausages!) (Rolling his eyes and then staring at me in bewilderment) OK . . . está bien. (OK . . . It’s fine.) The immediate reaction of F after the waiter left was to ask us why it was the case that all Spanish waiters were always angry and did very little to please their customers, showing little cooperation and being very blunt and dry in their responses. This in turn caused some hard feelings in our friend, who felt offended by the (supposedly impolite) treatment he had received. If we analyzed this exchange by looking strictly into the language used, we would completely miss the emotive content of the exchange. In order to understand its emotive load, we need to analyze and consider not only the language but also the socio-cognitive and sociopragmatic variables of this intercultural encounter such as the following: • The fact that F thought that this being an Argentinean restaurant, he would be speaking the same dialect as his interlocutor (when in fact it turned out to be the case that the new owners of the restaurant were Spanish and not very acquainted with Argentinean cuisine). • The term embutidos does not have exactly the same meaning and connotations in Argentina and Spain, especially when talking about the Argentinean dish par excellence, the asado (Argentinean barbecue), where in fact one would not be using the term embutidos, but chorizos (red sausage) and morcillas (blood sausage) together with achuras (innards), the latter not entering within the scope of embutidos. In this exchange, F wanted to know precisely if the barbecue included, as is the tradition with Argentinean barbecues, both the sausages and the innards (but the waiter did not understand this expectation of F’s, probably because his mental model did not adjust to that of F’s at that moment). • F had certain expectations about the shared cultural knowledge regarding Argentinean barbecues with the waiter that were not met, and he interpreted this ignorance as a lack of politeness showing a special kind of emotion (anger). • When commenting about the (supposed) anger of Spanish waiters, F did not consider that Spaniards’ politeness strategies in service encounters tend to be much more direct, as opposed to those of Argentineans. Bald on record comments in service encounters (many times accompanied by a falling intonation, in this case giving a “cut and dry” impression to an Emotion in Intercultural Interactions Argentinean, who would rather use a rising intonation in similar cases) are not generally considered rude but natural and appropriate in Spain, where on the contrary, “beating around the bush” and not getting to the point is what might be regarded as rude. • The emotional implicature that “waiters in Spain are angry” is here to be considered an “audience e-implicature,” to use Saul’s (2002) term and her distinction between utterer and audience implicatures. Audience implicatures are conversationally implicated inferences that are recognized by the addressee but not necessarily implicated by the speaker, which seems to have been the case in this exchange. • The waiter did not seem to notice that F was upset by his behavior, which may be an indicator of a certain “emotional illiteracy” regarding Argentinean culture on his part. As can be deduced from this brief analysis, the variables that can help us to analyze the affective experience in intercultural encounters are to be found not only in the vocabulary or language used (taking into account other linguistic aspects such as the intonation used), but also in sociocognitive and sociopragmatic variables such as the emotional implicatures triggered, the rules of politeness in one (sub)culture and the other, or the body language, the expectations, the mental models and the “emotional (il)literacy” of the participants. The next examples of intercultural communication, taken from the film Un franco, catorce pesetas, present a great variety of intercultural exchanges depicting a historical and sociocultural moment in the history of Spain when, under Franco’s dictatorship in the 1960s, the so-called industrial reorganization caused many workers to lose their jobs and forced them to emigrate in search of a better way of life. In this autobiographical film, its director, Carlos Iglesias, tells the story of his father (Martin, the protagonist) as an immigrant who settles in a beautiful town in Switzerland. Martin, his wife Pilar, and their son Pablito (who in real life is Carlos Iglesias) lived with Martı́n’s parents in a basement apartment in Madrid that came with their job as superintendents of the building, which was not enough to make ends meet. Unable to obtain a work contract from the Swiss Consulate, Martin and his friend Marcos decide to go to Switzerland anyway, pretending they are tourists to get past the border police. Later, his family will come to settle down with them there, and Pablito will experience drastic changes having to do with a new way of life in a different country and culture, learning a different language (Swiss German). The many and rich intercultural exchanges depicted in the movie present the cultural clash between people coming from a country that at the time was backward and poor, and the people in a more modern, richer, and advanced country. But as these encounters evolve, the participants acquire both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence in 347 348 LAURA ALBA JUEZ the new culture, which includes the emotional competence that leads them to accept and appreciate the values and way of life of their new interlocutors. This is a process in which we see them constructing their own temporary frames, formulas, and norms for communication in general and for the expression of emotion in particular, leading them to face new ways of experiencing emotive circumstances and enabling them to open their minds and heart to a different, but equally valid way of life. Let us now analyze three scenes of the film. (2) Scene 18 This is one of the first scenes of the movie, in which Martı́n and his friend have just arrived in Switzerland, and we see them on a train watching a couple kissing each other in the seat behind them. They just stare in astonishment, and the only verbal expression we hear is an emotive interjection from Marcos, namely ¡Joder! (Fuck!). Here, both their verbal and body language show one of the first emotional and cultural misattunements they experience, which involves several socio-cognitive and sociopragmatic variables, such as the use of taboo language in an emotive interjection (at the lexical linguistic level), their facial expression showing surprise, jealousy, embarrassment, and pleasure at the same time, their expectations, their sense of humor (they both giggle at this sight), or the emotional implicatures triggered. This simple scene, almost devoid of verbal expression, depicts how for these Spanish men in the 1960s, coming from Franco’s dictatorship and obscurantism, a couple kissing in a public place was beyond their cognitive frame and was considered something too liberal and even immoral. Spaniards at that time were not supposed to express feelings of love let alone emotions involving passion or lust in public, and therefore there was emotional dissonance as a result of a mismatch between the Swiss couple’s emotional behavior and these Spanish immigrants’ (cognitive, cultural, and moral) expectations as to what kind of emotions one is supposed to enact and display in a public situation. Expectations are key to the analysis and interpretation of discursive emotion, because, among other things, they help trigger the emotional implicatures of the situation. In this particular case, Martı́n and Marcos’ cultural encyclopedic knowledge did not include the display of passion by a couple in public places, and therefore the emotional implicature triggered by both their verbal and their nonverbal behavior is that they feel embarrassed and surprised at the same time because the Swiss couple’s behavior did not fit within their mental model or “k-device.”9 8 The link to the first part of this scene has been removed from YouTube and is not available now on the Internet, but it is explained here for its comprehension. 9 Van Dijk explains that the k device is the knowledge device that calculates at each moment what my interlocutor “knows or does not know, or wants to know, or what do I now know, and so on” (Andor 2018: 138). Emotion in Intercultural Interactions Other cultural mismatches are depicted in the same scene immediately after (www.youtube.com/watch?v G8x7TjG4m00), when both Martı́n and Marcos throw the paper bags in which they had kept their sandwiches on the floor, and a lady who was sitting across them, with a kind smile on her face, gets up from her seat to pick up the bags and throw them in the garbage container beside their seats. Martı́n and his friend look at her in bewilderment, not understanding why she was doing such a thing. Martı́n asks Marcos “¿Qué ha hecho?” (What has she done?) showing complete ignorance of certain social and politeness rules, precisely because these were not observed in the Spain of the 1960s. Rules of politeness and relational work are also crucial when interpreting the emotive expression of the interlocutors, because the use of these rules is strategic and has an intimate relationship with the emotional intelligence and empathy of the participants (Alba-Juez 2021). In intercultural exchanges, these rules have to be reconsidered and reconstructed in the pursuit of mutual comprehension, something that we can appreciate in the smile of the lady when she picks up the bags from the floor and puts them in the container: instead of telling them this is not appropriate in Switzerland, she shows she understands their ignorance of Swiss civil behavior by compromising and teaching them their rules by means of her (kind) action. As the director of the film has expressed in many an interview, his main aim in producing it was to show his deep feelings and those of his family when they emigrated from Spain to Switzerland, and in this scene, as well as all throughout the movie, both linguistic and nonlinguistic variables of the context are masterfully combined in order to reach such an aim. Scene 2 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9S0EKX3tQQ) (Min. 0:00 – 0:53) Scene 2 shows how the participants (Hanna, Martı́n and Marcos) make efforts to accommodate to one another according to their own cognitive frames. Hanna, the owner of the hostel where Martı́n and Marcos are staying, after realizing that they do not speak German, starts using Italian as their lingua franca, evidently thinking that they will understand Italian better, considering both Italian and Spanish are related languages. In so doing, Hanna shows great empathy for her guests, although at some moments, she reveals a bit of impatience and annoyance because they do not understand much of her Italian either. Their interaction in this scene is very revealing, not only about Hanna’s emotions but also and especially about Martı́n’s feelings for Hanna from the very beginning; something that in this scene is shown by using taboo language and humor with his friend Marcos once Hanna leaves the room. Here is a transcription of the scene: 349 350 LAURA ALBA JUEZ (3) Hanna shows Martı́n and Marcos to their room at her hostel. Hanna (in Italian): È bella? (Is it beautiful?// Do you like it?) (Marcos and Martı́n look at each other as if they didn’t understand, but then they realize what she means) Marcos: Ah, sı́, sı́! (Oh, yes, yes!) Martı́n: Ah, sı́, sı́, es bella. Muy bonita; la habitación es muy bonita. (Oh, yes, yes, it’s beautiful. Very nice; the room is very nice.) Hanna (trying her Spanish): Ah! Bonita? (with a German accent) (Marcos nods) Martı́n: Uh-hum. Hanna (in Italian): Mi piace molto lo spagnolo, ma non lo parlo. (I like Spanish very much, but I can’t speak it.) Martı́n and Marcos look out the window. Hanna (in Italian and then German): Allora, ci vediamo dopo. Es ist gut? (Then, see you later. Is that fine?) Martı́n: Emm.. nosotros no entendemos. (Ermm . . . we don’t understand.) Marcos: No. Hanna (in Italian): (she sighs) . . . Ciao? (waving her hand) (. . . Good-bye?) Martı́n: Ah, ciao! (Ah good-bye, good-bye!) Marcos: Ah, sı́; ¡adiós! (Ah! yes, Good-bye!) Hanna (in German and then Italian): Gut! . . . A te! (Good! . . . To you!) Martı́n: Ciao, ciao! (Good-bye, good-bye!) Hanna leaves the room Martı́n (to Marcos): Qué, ¿te gusta? (What, do you like (it)?) Marcos: Está muy bien. (It’s very good.) Martı́n: [ ] ¿Y la habitación? Emotion in Intercultural Interactions Marcos (giggling): Martı́n: (And the room? with a naughty expression on his face) ¡Qué jodido! (Ha, ha! You fucking bastard!) /\¡Joder! (Fuck! showing admiration for Hanna’s beauty) As can be seen, in spite of their ignorance about the German and Italian languages, Martı́n and Marcos manage to communicate with Hanna at a basic level, and when they express liking in front of Hanna, they use literal language, saying directly that they like the room and that it is nice, in order to please Hanna and answer her question. However, when they both interact in their native language, the use of irony, humor, and inference (to be drawn, among other things, from his use of the expletive ¡Joder! with a raising-falling intonation) are the resources that Martı́n uses to express his liking and already tender feelings for Hanna. This is in sync with Kecskes’ (2019: 492) observation that in intercultural interactions, interlocutors “attempt to stick to words and expressions whose literal meaning is based on universal encyclopedic knowledge rather than conceptually culture-specific knowledge.” However, and as Kecskes also points out, this does not mean that pragmatics is impoverished. On the contrary, we observe in this intercultural scene that interlocutors rely partly on the pragmatics of the lingua franca they are using to co-construct their new type of pragmatics prompted by the actual situational needs. Thus, for the development of their emotional competence in the foreign culture, the interlocutors (Hanna, Martı́n, and Marcos) in this scene make use not only of their basic interactional skills and their knowledge of German and Spanish (respectively), but also the pragmatic knowledge of the common language used (Italian) in order to create their own ad hoc pragmatic emotional knowledge and strategies. And in fact, if we consider the evolution of the characters throughout the film, it is observed that the more they interact with one another, the more they create norms and conventions that make their communication and emotional understanding smoother and easier. Scene 3 (www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9S0EKX3tQQ) (Min 1:55 – 3:26) In Scene 3 we find Martı́n and Marcos using all kinds of gestures to show her that they find the bed uncomfortable because it has no blankets, and Hanna explains to them graphically (by means of gestures and getting herself under the quilt) the way in which they are 351 352 LAURA ALBA JUEZ supposed to sleep, with the quilt on top, not using it as a mattress (as they had done the night before). At this point we can see Hanna getting a bit emotionally upset at their ignorance of everything, and when she is leaving the room Martı́n calls her, to engage in the following interaction: (4) Marcos: Martı́n: Hanna: Martı́n: Hanna (in Italian): Martı́n: Hanna (in Italian): Marcos: Martı́n: Hanna (trying her Spanish): Martı́n: Hanna (in Spanish and then Swiss German): Martı́n, lo del desayuno (Martin, tell her about breakfast) ¡Ah, Ana, Ana! Ja, Hanna (correcting Martı́n’s pronunciation of her name) Bueno, sı́, Hanna. Eh . . . ¿Cuánto cuesta café, y té . . . ? (making gestures as if drinking coffee) (OK, yes, Hanna. Erm . . . Literally: How much cost coffee, and tea . . .) Quanto costa? (How much is it?) Sı́ (Yes) Eh . . . colazione? (Eh . . . breakfast?) Colazione no, eh . . . bollos, desayuno . . . (Not “colazione,” but buns, breakfast . . .) Café, té, por la mañana . . . comida (Coffee, tea, in the morning . . . food) café, mañana? GRA:TIS!! (Coffee, morning? FREE:!!) ¡No puede ser! ¿Café gratis? (That can’t be possible! Free coffee?) JA:! CAFÉ GRA:TIS!! Isch guet; Versteh ich. (YE:S! FREE: COFFEE! It’s fine; I understand.) This dialogue shows how the fact of having free breakfast at the hostel was not in our Spanish men’s mental frame, and therefore instead of responding emotionally by showing gratitude, Martı́n reacts in astonishment, thinking this could not be true. Once more, Hanna seems to be a bit annoyed at their reaction, as it does not agree with her expectations. She shows this at the linguistic phonological level by raising her voice and lengthening the vowel “a” in the word gratis first and then in her entire last reply, which includes some words in German, all of which shows that she is a bit irritated, though not Emotion in Intercultural Interactions uncomplimentary (JA:! CAFÉ GRA:TIS!! Isch guet; Versteh ich.). However, as time passes we again see them reaching a common understanding which has been co-constructed, and we watch Martı́n in the subsequent scene praising Hanna’s breakfast and food by just saying “Hanna, Gut!!” in German (Min 3:20) and sending her a kiss with his hand at a distance, showing his emotional positive appreciation for her and for the way he and his friend are being treated at the hostel. Indeed, the analysis of the different scenes along the whole film shows that the characters convey emotional meaning based not only on prior universal shared knowledge, but also and mainly on their egocentrism or free expression of their own goals and desires in the flow of interaction. In this way they create their own new discursive interculture (Kecskes 2020: 19 21), based on their (great or scant) knowledge of Spanish, German, and Italian, together with the mutual knowledge of one another’s motivations and intentions, acquired in the course of their frequent intercultural interactions. It is evident that the interlocutors in these rich intercultural exchanges use a variety of strategies to communicate, including the use of emotive words or interjections in their L1s or in the chosen lingua franca, the management of some prosodic features (lengthening of vowels, a given intonation, etc.), the use of gestures and body language, the triggering of emotional implicatures based on their mutual expectations, or the creation of their own interlanguage and interculture, among many more. In subsequent scenes (which cannot be analyzed here for space reasons), we see Martı́n gaining emotional linguistic and sociopragmatic competence in different areas, for instance, when learning and enjoying the fact that women can ask men to dance at a party and that they can take the lead in sexual matters (something unthinkable in 1960s Spain), or when at the end of the movie Martin comes back to Switzerland (after having returned to Spain) and controls his deep emotions but at the same time lets them show when learning that Hanna has a daughter that is most probably his, accepting Hanna’s liberal and even humorous approach to it (she neither expresses nor shows any resentment or hard feelings for him, who always stayed with his wife). At that point, Hanna and Martı́n had gained not only linguistic comprehension of each other but also a deep emotional understanding of each other’s cultural and individual values. 13.4 Conclusions and Further Research In this chapter, I have presented an overview of different studies and approaches to the study of emotion in intercultural interaction, and 353 354 LAURA ALBA JUEZ I have argued in favor of a comprehensive socio-cognitive and sociopragmatic approach to the phenomenon, within which the analysis of aspects of the communicative process, such as relational work, egocentrism, expectations, or emotional implicatures, needs to be considered and assessed in addition to the mere linguistic analysis. For the sake of illustration, I have analyzed samples of intercultural encounters both in real life and in fiction, the latter pertaining to an autobiographical film that depicts the true story of a Spanish family that emigrates to Switzerland in the 1960s, and that clearly shows how people can gain (linguistic, cultural, and personal) emotional competence through their engagement in cultural interaction. The research questions posed in the Introduction have been addressed in Sections 13.2 and 13.3 by showing that emotional competence can be expressed at all linguistic levels. Furthermore, it very frequently goes beyond the words used, into the realm of paralinguistic features and extralinguistic behavior. The analysis of the examples in Section 13.3 has helped us explore some aspects of these questions, such as the kinds of expectations interlocutors may have in intercultural interactions or the kinds of emotional inferences they may trigger with their (inter)language among other things. Needless to say, not all possible and existing variables have been analyzed and considered here, and therefore there is a wide variety of aspects of, or approaches to, intercultural emotion that could be scrutinized in further research. It would be useful, for instance, to study the process by which some emotive practices are born into a culture and selected for preservation, or the sociohistorical variables that affect the body language accompanying the verbal expression of emotion in a given culture as compared to others. Also, I am certain that including the notion of emotional competence in L2 pedagogical practice could be of great relevance for the students’ comprehension of intercultural interactions. Making the L2 student aware of aspects such as relational work, egocentrism, expectations, or emotional implicatures will undoubtedly result in a better cognizance and management of intercultural and multilingual situations. This would, in turn, enhance the transferability of intercultural communication research and provide actionable knowledge to lead language learning stakeholders toward better practices. Finally, I hope to have made the reader conclude, along with me, that in the fertile ground of intercultural communication research, the sky is the limit, and the more we research it, the more we will learn not only about language and culture, but also about the intricacies of human nature. Emotion in Intercultural Interactions Appendix Transcription Conventions . . . ➔ Short pause [ ] ➔ Longer pause Underlining ➔ High pitch a: / o:, etc. ➔ Lengthening of vowel / ➔ Rising intonation \ ➔ Falling intonation / \ ➔ Rising-falling intonation Overlapping talk. Two people speaking at the same time. CAPITAL LETTERS ➔ Stressed word or phrase References Alba-Juez, L. (2018). Emotion and appraisal processes in language: How are they related? In Gómez González, Mª de los Ángeles, and J. Lachlan Mackenzie, eds., The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 227 250. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns .296.o9alb. Alba-Juez, L. (2021). Affect and emotion. In Michael Haugh, Daniel Kadar, and Marina Terkourafi, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 340 362. Alba-Juez, L. and Alba-Juez, F. (2012). Identity, evaluation, and differential equations. Pragmatics and Cognition, 20(3), 570 592. 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Journal of Destination, Marketing and Management, 10, 164 171. Xinghua, L. and Thompson, P. (2009). University of Reading Language Studies Working Papers, 1, 3 15. 14 Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics Monika Kirner-Ludwig 14.1 Introduction Research methods within any given intellectual field or discipline commonly refer to such procedures that are systematically and aimfully employed as modes of investigating or inquiring about a study object of choice. This includes the appropriate obtaining of as well as analytical approaches to research-relevant data. Given that the present handbook is concerned with the multifaceted and highly interdisciplinary field of intercultural pragmatics (henceforth IP), this chapter on research methods essentially represents a hub among the here-assembled contributions: it intertwines with or closes contingent spaces between topics and issues discussed across the five strands this handbook is divided into. This being said, this present chapter does not only necessarily fall back on what has been established concerning the underlying theoretical foundations of the field and its methodologies as a whole, but also sets reference points to key issues in IP discussed throughout and beyond Part II. The methods surveyed in this chapter most of them of an empirical nature and concerned with qualitative data are essentially going to reappear in the subsequent parts of the handbook, i.e. in relation to interdisciplinary approaches (see also Part III), various types of communication and discourse (see also Part IV), and language learning (see also Part V). Seeking to ensure a balance navigating in between as well as in lockstep with other contributions to this handbook, specifics on and methods pertaining to ethnography and ethnomethodology, corpus linguistics, interlanguage pragmatics, and assessment/learning of pragmatic competence, and student-teacher settings in general will be left for other contributors to address in detail. As has been claimed, “[t]here have been a great variety of research tools, data collection methods, and data analysis used in intercultural pragmatics research” (Kecskes 2014: 219). A comprehensive overview of research methods in IP as well as a discussion and critical assessment of the 362 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG strengths and weaknesses of the most salient research methods applied within the wide-ranging context of the discipline will be offered here. The overarching question to guide us through the present chapter is: What are the most saliently trending research methods adhered to in current and recent research in intercultural pragmatics? The structure of this chapter is as follows: Section 14.2 offers a literature review that represents the baseline for the subsequent sections, providing a review of the literature that has specifically offered surveys of methods pertaining to issues in data collection and data analysis in pragmatics, IP as well as intercultural communication. Handbooks concerned with immediately neighboring disciplines, such as English as a Lingua Franca and second language pragmatics are also taken into account in order to contextualize various methodological issues. Section 14.3 then sheds light upon the most important notional decisions and working definitions that this chapter is committing to. Sections 14.4 and 14.5 are dedicated to the most salient methods adhered to in obtaining and analyzing IP-relevant data, with Section 14.4 focusing on introspective and intuitive research designs on the one hand and observational methods on the other. Section 14.5 attends to the wide array of task-elicited data types. Finally, before a conclusive outlook is offered in Section 14.7, Section 14.6 addresses aspects and issues pertaining to interactional analysis in IP research, focusing on conversation as well as discourse segment analysis. This narrow scope is chosen, as corpus methods and IP-specific issues in computer-mediated communication being the other prominent areas in data analysis in IP research (Kecskes 2014: 224) are discussed elsewhere in this handbook. 14.2 A Literature Review on Research Methods in (Intercultural) Pragmatics Overall, academic accounts specifically providing focused overviews on research methods within the field of pragmatics have not exactly been numerous. It seems that, oftentimes, explicit discussions and outlines of research methods in our discipline are confined to course books and introductions to pragmatics and pragmatic research (see also O’Keeffe et al. 2011),1 whereas more elaborate and specified studies tend to assume the methodological how-tos to be shared knowledge among their readership. Even most of the standard handbooks and readers on pragmatic fields, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) or intercultural communication (IC) tend to treat research methods in passing. In other words, they focus on pragmatic methodologies rather than methods proper (see, e.g., 1 O’Keeffe et al. (2011: 21ff.), for instance, discuss various data types (together with elicitation methods) under the umbrella of “elicited data,” i.e. discourse completion tests, role plays, interviews, and questionnaire data. Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics Horn and Ward 2004; Archer and Grundy 2011; Katsos et al. 2011; Allan and Jaszczolt 2012; Schmid 2012; Capone et al. 2013; Huang 2017; Cummins and Katsos 2019). Among those reference works that do address various forms of research methods, the handbooks edited by Senft et al. (2009), Norrick and Bublitz (2011), Herring et al. (2013), Culpeper et al. (2017), Barron et al. (2017), Jucker et al. (2018), Liedtke and Tuchen (2018), Taguchi (2019), and Jackson (2020)2 all feature chapters that explicitly address various methods and data types. Taguchi (2019), for one, dedicates space to data collection (Minh Nguyen 2019), mixed methods research (Ross and Hong 2019), and conversation analysis (Mori and thi Nguyen 2019). Other chapters focus on specific data types, e.g. elicited data (Félix-Brasdefer and Hasler-Barker 2017) or naturally occurring data (NOD) (Golato 2017). Some other chapters offer more comprehensive and contrastive overviews on data types of interest in pragmatics research as well as the advantages or shortcomings of collection methods. Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005), for instance, zoom in on empirical study designs featuring various kinds of elicitation tasks (e.g. production/multiple-choice questionnaires, rating scales, interviews, role-plays, and discourse completion tests). Golato and Golato (2013) offer a subsequent discussion of observational, elicited, and experimental data collection procedures (see also Bednarek 2011; Jucker and Staley 2017; Jucker 2018). Tuchen’s chapter (2018) offers a cross-section of methodological issues, ranging from introspection and performance data via conversation analysis to quite detailed accounts on experimental and corpus pragmatic methods. Jucker et al.’s handbook on Methods in Pragmatics (2018) features a chapter on observational data types and deals with elicited data collection methods that are discussed by Schneider (2018). Schneider (2018) concentrates in great detail on empirical and experimental methods, including corpus methods, production, and comprehension/judgment tasks. The latter is certainly the most extensive among the here-mentioned handbook-included accounts, offering not only a detailed survey of and elaboration on data collection methods, but also explicitly taking into consideration ethical issues. I use his chapter in particular as a springboard to providing an updated picture of relevant methods as well as recent literature on research methods.3 Outside the frame of handbooks but within specific subfields of pragmatics, only a small number of publications concentrate on methods of data 2 Note that Jackson’s handbook (2020) does not systematically address methods. However, some of the contributions therein do feature (relatively concise) subsections on research methods immediately pertaining to the issues and topics under discussion. 3 Among those handbooks concerned with immediately neighboring disciplines, such as ELF, second language pragmatics, see also Jenkins et al. (2018), and Culpeper et al. (2018) for explicit chapters dedicated to methods. Useful general and practical approaches to research methods in (applied) linguistics and (intercultural) communication are provided by, e.g., Dörnyei (2007), Tracy (2013), Heine and Narrog (2015), Paltridge and Phakiti (2015), and Hua (2016). See also Brinker et al.’s (2001) comprehensive handbook on contemporary research in linguistics of text and conversation. On research methods in the social sciences, see, e.g., Schlesewsky (2009) and Fielding et al. (2017). 363 364 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG collection and analysis. These include Culpeper et al.’s (2018) edited reader, which features three chapters on data elicitation methods, each one composed with an applied and tailored view toward eliciting production, comprehension, and specifically interactional data. With regard to experimental research methods in pragmatics, object-methodological accounts have been very scarce so far. The most relevant item to be mentioned there is the recent book-length account on Experimental Pragmatics by Noveck (2018). It features one chapter on experimental techniques saliently employed in the field. Furthermore, the works by Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2005: chapter 6), Golato and Golato (2013), Leech (2014: 47 260), as well as Roever’s chapter “Researching Pragmatics’” (2015) should be mentioned for the sake of both completeness and usefulness. Beyond these, it is particularly researchers in interlanguage pragmatics that we are indebted to for comprehensive reviews of research designs that have also been adopted and adapted into IP (see, e.g., Kasper and Dahl 1991; Bardovi-Harlig 1999b; Kasper and Rose 2002; Kasper and Roever 2005; Bebee and Cummings 1995; Kasper 2008; Trosborg 2010; Martı́nezFlor and Usó-Juan 2011). What most of these accounts have in common, though, is that they tend to focus on production rather than on comprehension data (see also Schneider 2018: 49), while, in addition, “a strong bias towards spoken language” is to be observed in the majority of these overviews (p. 49). Narrowing our focus down to IP, hardly any comprehensive groundwork has been done with regard to surveying, comparing, and assessing the dynamics of data and method trends in recent years. Neither in Kecskes and Assimakopoulos (2017), nor in Kecskes and Romero-Trillo (2013) are current or trending study methods addressed in isolation. The very few publications that have paved this particular track are limited to Kecskes’ chapters on methods of data analysis in his monograph Intercultural Pragmatics (2014) as well as in recent handbooks and volumes (2017, 2018, 2020). Even in these, however, no space is dedicated to exclusive discussions of data collection methods or research designs, which is a gap the present chapter seeks to fill. 14.3 Specifics on Notional Choices in this Chapter 14.3.1 On Research Methods Methods are usually distinguished according to data collection techniques and the kind of data obtained thereby.4 Commonly, the terminology 4 Bardovi Harlig (2010: 228), for instance, distinguishes production from non production tasks, with the former including any such tasks by which the participant produces primary data in oral or written form. Non production methods, on the other hand, require the participant to judge or assess, rate, sort, or interpret data that already exist. As I would argue, however, that there is no such thing as a “non production” task, I will not follow this terminology here. Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics chosen and this is true also of this chapter will reflect the researcher’s perspective and approach. Clark and Bangerter thus distinguish methods in terms of intuition, observation, and experiment, through all of which the researcher may seek to obtain data, i.e. intuitive, naturally occurring, and elicited, respectively (2004: 25). This chapter picks up the conventional distinction between intuitive/ introspective, observational and elicitation methods, I shall, however, add the subdistinction of observational versus extracted data so as to do justice to the fact that (natural and authentic) data can also be extracted (rather than observed), e.g. from online or print sources.5 This notional distinction is supported by other researchers in the field, such as Apresjan (2019). What is more, I propose an aimful distinction between research methods on the one hand and participant tasks on the other (see Figure 14.1), as there has been a strong tendency in pragmatics research overall to mesh these layers within research designs. A few remaining remarks are due to the highly evasive notion of “method” itself, which here incorporates procedures of data collection, processing, and analysis alike.6 I distinguish method from methodology, as the latter pertains to the rationale for any research approach to begin with (see also Jucker and Staley 2017). The present chapter solely focuses on methods and collected data,7 with all upcoming elaborations following the claim that only empirical data can be analyzed (see also Jucker and Staley 2017). What is more, methods are here understood as hypernymic to “tasks,” i.e. such assignments that study participants complete for the researcher so to obtain elicited data. Elicitation tasks may include comprehension and production tasks that are completed under low (e.g. discourse completion) to high interactional conditions (e.g. prompted discussions, role-plays). They may additionally be complemented by experimental components (e.g. eye-tracking, timed completion, manipulated scenarios) or introspective or intuitive tasks (e.g. verbal reports) so as to provide additional context for the researcher. Figure 14.1 visualizes the various interdependent layers woven into conventional research designs.8 To comprehensively answer the guiding question formulated in Section 14.1 above and to do so in line with IP research conventions, I will discuss and elaborate on the most relevant methods employed in IP by relying, first and foremost, on such studies that have been published in 5 This is the method that Jucker (2009: 1616) and Schneider (2018: 72f.) call the “philological method.” Jucker classifies it as a field method “because the texts searched have occurred naturally for a communicative goal and have not been elicited by investigators for research purposes” (Schneider 2018: 72f.). 6 On a highly insightful discussion of method as a lay notion as well as an academic one, see also Gülich (2001). 7 Non collected data, i.e. what Bednarek refers to as “non attested data” (2011), is here used to distinguish 8 The reader is also referred to Jucker and Staley’s continuum of data collection methods (2017: 406), which is partly systematically obtained data from mere introspective deliberations. based on Kasper and Dahl (1991: 217) and Leech (2014: 249). 365 366 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG Figure 14.1 Various interdependent layers woven into conventional research designs the Journal of Intercultural Pragmatics (JICUP, ed. I. Kecskes 2004).9 This focus will ensure that the reader of this chapter be efficiently and concisely provided with immediately relevant references and reference points. Data types will be described and discussed in relation to the specific methods used to collect them. 14.3.2 Preliminary Remarks on Desirable Data and Efficiency-ofObtainment Issues IP is inherently interested in interactional language data. Such data may be represented by merely all kinds of language use, i.e. spoken, written and computer-mediated (see Kecskes 2014: 219). It should be noted that the distinction traditionally being made between written and spoken data has been getting increasingly blurred with the rise of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and users’ range of possibilities to communicate both asynchronously and quasi-synchronously. 9 The journal’s output by the end of 2020 adds up to 358 papers in seventeen volumes. Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics Thus, considering that computer-mediated discourse (CMD) incorporates features of both written and spoken language use, it inevitably generates data types that may represent features of both means of communication.10 While that is an issue generating numerous implications for various strands of linguistic research, I agree with Jucker who claims that, in general, all data may be considered useful to a pragmatic study “as long as it was originally produced with a communicative end” (2009: 1616). Attending to the issue of authentic and naturally occurring data, it seems that most sociolinguistic and pragmatic scholars have agreed on natural discourse due to its untainted nature being the non-plusultra kind of data desirable for empirical research (Turnbull 2001; Martı́nez-Flor 2006; Félix-Brasdefer 2007; Bou-Franch and Lorenzo-Dus 2008; Bataller and Shively 2011; Golato 2017).11 It then lies in IP research’s nature that scholars tend to have a general preference for “authentic interactional data” (Sifianou and Tzanne 2010: 668), which is indeed widely affirmed (cf. Kecskes 2014: 224; Decock and Spiessens 2017; Keating 2021).12 The problem remains (for a chapter on methods like the present one in particular) that notions such as “natural data,” “naturally occurring data,” and “authentic data” are commonly applied in a highly synonymous and often unspecific manner.13 Overall, I agree with House (2018), who refers to authentic versus elicited data and qualitative versus quantitative research methods as “non-fruitful dichotomies,” suggesting that the shapes and channels of discourse nowadays require more relative and less absolute categorizations. This is in fact what Kasper and Dahl (1991: 217) proposed, too, in the form of a continuum reaching from elicited (i.e. non-authentic) to authentic discourse. I shall pick up this very idea in my approach to solve this terminological conundrum at least within the context of this chapter. This effort is in line with my belief that many of the established and muchdiscussed data collection methods should simply not be forced into one of two categories if they are bound to cross these borders in practice anyway. I define NOD by the fact that this category encapsulates data that are observed as featuring in non-elicited, internally controlled conversations (see Potter 2002: 541; Golato 2017: 21; 4.3 below). In contrast, elicited data are produced when certain features of interaction “are predetermined by the elicitation instrument designed by the researcher” (see Félix-Brasdefer 10 On a discussion of how digital data are to be distinguished from spoken and written data, see, e.g., Jucker (2018). 11 Originally, pragmatic research was employing and very much relying on “invented examples for its linguistic data,” prior to “gradually emerg[ing] as a more empirical discipline in its methodological orientation” and increasingly shifting towards a “practice of resourcing authentic language material” (Hoye 2008: 152). 12 This is despite the fact that, e.g., Bataller and Shively (2011) found more similarities than differences between elicited data and NOD (also, at the same time, debates are unceasing over the fundamental question of what actually constitutes “natural” language data (see also Golato 2017 for an overview)). 13 Also cf. “authentic discourse,” “authentic everyday speech,” “natural conversations” (Yuan 2001: 283f.). See also Gilmore (2007) for elaborations on at least eight different definitions of authenticity in data. 367 368 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG 2007; see also Section 14.5 below; Golato 2017: 22).14 I do not consider natural and authentic data to be the same but acknowledge that they are interdependent. While naturally occurring speech is inherently authentic, “an ideal authentic piece of spoken discourse would presumably reflect as many features of naturally occurring discourse as [possible]” (Al-Surmi 2012: 673f.). Thus, scripted telecinematic as well as literary discourse, for instance, are here considered authentic in the sense that such texts have been created for a native-speaker audience and cultural context primarily (Little et al. [1989] 1994; Kramsch 2010). This view is also backed by Bednarek (2018, 2010), Dynel (2015), and Rose (2001). A final issue to be addressed in immediate relation to desired data pertains to a researcher’s decision between a cross-sectional, longitudinal, and case study design. Apart from practical and logistical issues to be considered, certain scholarly preferences have emerged with regard to specific research aims and populations one seeks to have access to. For instance, longitudinal studies frequently occur in L2 specifically in study abroad contexts where a researcher has access to the same pool of participants over a longer period of time. Such work will usually result in developmental data points obtained (e.g. with regard to pragmatic routines and awareness, proficiency) as well as a high level of acquaintance on the researcher’s part with the participants’ backgrounds and linguistic behaviors. The latter is even more true of case studies, in which a researcher may work with data from few or even just one subject over some time.15 The downside then is that case studies can arguably “be very time consuming and do not necessarily provide comparable data” (Barron and Schneider 2009: 431). Cross-sectional study designs, in comparison, represent synchronic snapshots of pragmatic phenomena of interest, for instance speech act realization strategies by learners at different proficiency levels (see, e.g., Warga and Schölmberger 2007). As Rose points out for interlanguage pragmatics, “[i]deally, . . . research should routinely incorporate both [longitudinal and cross-sectional research]” (2000: 29), which is certainly a guideline that researchers in IP would theoretically side with, if it were not for practical objections saliently invoked. 14.4 Introspective and Observational Research Designs 14.4.1 Intuitive and Introspective Approaches Intuition and introspection apply to “approaches that do not analyze actual language data but work with reflections on language” (Jucker 2009: 1615).16 While IP research is very much represented by applied 14 For merely the earliest discussion of elicitation tasks in pragmatics, see Wolfson (1986). 15 See also van Lier (2005) on practical applications of the case study method in L2 research. 16 Jucker stresses that “[t]he term ‘introspection’ . . . has been used for a long time in the fields of cognitive psychology and (applied) psycholinguistics to refer to experimental methods, involving thinking aloud protocols and other Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics linguistic approaches, it also is, in general, not disinclined to introspective or intuitive approaches. In fact, the rising trend toward studies based on and targeting authentic or elicited data finds itself very much balanced out by research that proposes, introduces, discusses, and expands on methodologies, models, and frameworks, or presents pragma-philosophical deliberations (e.g. Davis 2018). Such papers stay mostly on a solely abstract level of argumentation, with many of them primarily or exclusively employing constructed examples to illustrate their points. Such intuitive and introspective baseline data are, however, usually integrated into a mixed design, i.e. combined with systematically observed or elicited data, with inter-raters being called in so to ensure reliability and validity of results and argumentation. It should be noted that the recruitment of inter-raters (and interannotators), when it comes to qualitative pragmatic research, is still relatively rare (or simply remains unaddressed, even when done).17 Particularly fine-grained research designs distinguish themselves in that they include detailed elaborations on their inter-rater measures. Studies by, e.g., Gabbatore et al. (2019), Ifantidou and Tzanne (2012), and Alcón Soler (2012) may serve as guiding examples here. 14.4.2 Field Methods: Observation and Extraction of Data The observation of subjects and the obtainment of NOD is what has conventionally been referred to as the “field method” (Clark and Bangerter 2004). It is “crucially depend[ing] on data that has not been elicited by the researcher for the purpose of his or her research project but that occurs for communicative reasons outside of the research project for which it is used” (Jucker 2009: 1615).18 In order to obtain NOD, a researcher may, for instance, employ field notes. To cite one example, González-Cruz, in her research on request patterns, collected a total of 100 naturally occurring requests over a period of two months, specifying that “[e]very time [they] heard a request made by anybody around [them, they] tried to either write it down immediately or memorize it, taking as many notes as possible about the situation” (2014: 556). A particularly intriguing case of observing and collecting NOD is Levinsen’s (2018) use of an authentic conversation (in several turns) written on the walls of a unisex bathroom at a university campus. The researcher states that he “witnessed the text unfold and took elicitation techniques” (2018: 5; cf. 1995). In pragmatics, however, introspection is generally understood as a subtype to intuitive knowledge (Schneider 1995: 606). 17 On applying inter rater agreement measures to examples as well as coding procedures, cf., e.g., Brezina (2018: 87–92) and Grisot (2017). 18 Note also that some colleagues claim that any such data may be considered “real” or “authentic” that is produced in the process of participants completing classroom tasks primarily meant to assess and improve their levels of language proficiency (see, e.g., Maíz Arévalo 2014: 206). 369 370 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG pictures of the conversation as it emerged, presumably between unacquainted toilet-goers” (p. 523). Service encounter interactions, too, serve as salient observational research contexts, representing goal-oriented, collaborative institutional discourse between usually unacquainted participants (see Drew and Heritage 1992). In IP research, the preference seems to be on face-to-face observational scenarios (see König and Zhu 2017), while some obtain data from telephone or email conversations (Kim and Lee 2017) as well as other computer-mediated types of communication (Feng and Ren 2020).19 The most significant drawback when it comes to collecting data through observation has been found to be the “lack of control of speaker and context variables” (see Blum-Kulka et al. 1989b: 13; Houck and Gass 1996: 47). Leung et al. (2004: 242) thus lament over the fact that “[w]orking with naturally occurring data is inevitably a messy enterprise.” What is more, various factors need to be considered determining the validity (Yuan 2001; Golato 2017: 24) and, overall, the reliability of observed data.20 This is particularly true for such observational designs that keep the researcher out of the equation as a participant observer.21 This being said, participatory or interactive observation is more and more emerging as the field method of choice.22 Particularly elegant are such research designs that allow the researcher to take on the role of a participant observer while actually being a genuine and authentic part of the NOD scenario to begin with, as, e.g., in meetings conventionally minuted or audio-recorded (see, e.g., Žegarac and Spencer-Oatey 2013). As mentioned above, I explicitly distinguish observed data from extracted data, as the former will usually be NOD, whereas the latter may or may not be. This conceptual distinction is supported by Schneider, for instance, who notes that corpus data do not all qualify as observational data. They are naturally occurring to the extent that their existence does not depend on a researcher. Yet there are significant differences between the data types included in machine-readable corpora, sometimes even in the same corpus (Schneider 2018: 50). Thus, while extracted data will necessarily be obtained in a written or transcribed form, these data points may have been spoken to begin with, which is an issue that needs to be considered.23 Extracted data points may be represented by quantifiable, large sets of materials (electronic corpora, also including lexicographical resources) just as much as by individual 19 While manual field notes have been a conventionally accepted technique, secret audio or video recordings of NOD are rare for ethical reasons mostly. On ethical and legal considerations regarding recordings, see, e.g., Murray (2001). 20 See also McKay and Hornberger (2005: 391–392) for a discussion of drawbacks. 21 See, e.g., Fox Turnbull (2011) and Moreland and Cowie (2016) on such study designs that equip the subjects themselves with, e.g., cameras for data collection (see also autophotography). 22 On the history and relevance of participant observation in anthropological and ethnolinguistic research, see, e.g., Saville Troike (2002) and Duranti ([1997] 2008). 23 Also consider any spoken electronic corpus consisting of interviews, group discussions, or TV news reports as well as authentic telecinematic conversations. Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics texts. This may include (but is certainly not restricted to) newspaper articles, multimodal data from websites, lifestyle weblogs, and online fora, or specific text types like electronic self-reviews. With computeraided research emerging, extracting authentic as well as naturally occurring data can nowadays be done in immensely efficient ways. 14.5 Task-Elicited Data Types Obtaining data by systematically controlling both setting and variables as well as by employing certain elicitation prompts to get a hold of the data of interest is a method widespread in IP as well as pragmatics research overall (see Clark and Bangerter 2004). As stated by Pulaczewska, “[e]ven the authors who realize the deficiencies of elicitation tasks view their use as inevitable in contrastive studies” (2013: 650). Turnbull (2001: 33) emphasizes that pragmatic elicitation techniques need to fulfill certain criteria in order to be considered both effective and appropriate: a good pragmatic elicitation technique . . . must generate data that are representative of structures of natural talk, whatever the fineness in level of analysis; it should allow researcher control and the possibility of manipulating variables of theoretical interest; it should be efficient in that many instances of the phenomena at issue can be generated easily; and it must be ethical. Note that collecting data under such conditions that confine subjects to an artificial and closed environment in order to cognitively “trigger ‘interpretable’ reactions” (Schlesewsky 2009: 170) may, by definition, be called “experimental,” which would then apply to the majority of methods under discussion here, i.e. ranging from questionnaires via interviews and roleplays to eye-tracking tests (see also Kasper 2008). The present chapter, however, explicitly distinguishes between (semi-)controlled (non-experimental) settings on the one hand (Section 14.5.3) and experimental settings on the other (14.5.4). This, is a notional decision in line with the trends of research foci in the field of (intercultural) pragmatics and particularly in acknowledgment of the field of experimental pragmatics (see Noveck and Sperber 2004; Meibauer and Steinbach 2011; Noveck 2018: chapter 4). While all elicitation methods have in common that they focus on obtaining data that will reflect subjects’ actual or intuitively preferred language use, experimental research designs additionally tend to target speaker intentions and cognitive processing during the completion of comprehension and production tasks, while employing some manipulative component. As such, experimental designs usually adhere to psycholinguistic methods. In the following subsections, I discuss intuitive and intro-/retrospectional tasks (14.5.2), elicitation tasks of various interactional complexity (14.5.3), and elicitation tasks performed under experimental conditions 371 372 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG (14.5.4). In Section 14.5.1, I offer a brief discussion of the notion and functions of questionnaires, frequently used as data collection tools. 14.5.1 Framing Remarks on Surveys, Questionnaires, and CASTs For at least two decades now, variations of the questionnaire tellingly called “the most celebrated and most maligned of all the methods used in crosscultural and interlingual pragmatic research” (Bardovi-Harlig 1999a: 238) have been the “dominating tool for gathering data” (Kasper 2008: 279). Given the technical affordances of our times, questionnaires may nowadays be created, distributed, completed as well as evaluated online. They may even be designed in a multimodal manner, containing, e.g., audiovisual rather than solely written material. This is very true for computer-delivered structured tasks (CASTs) as well, which have risen in salience in recent years (see, e.g., Sydorenko 2015; Timpe-Laughlin and Dombi 2020).24 Let me address a notional issue tied to survey and questionnaire, though, as these terms tend to be used in a highly synonymous and fuzzy manner. This is the case in particular where they are categorized as “elicitation methods” similar to interviews and discourse completion tasks (DCTs).25 It is certainly true that they may be used as a type of self-report method, posing a set of open questions and closed questions aiming at different kinds of meta-, comprehensive, intuitive, or elicited productive data. However, particularly when a questionnaire is merely used as a vehicle for presenting the participant with various kinds of tasks to be completed, referring to it as a method in its own right, lined up next to interviews and role-plays, seems both misleading and inaccurate. The same holds for the notion survey, which is frequently used as a synonym to questionnaire, respectively. This chapter uses the notion questionnaire in exclusive reference to its function as an instrument for elicitation. A questionnaire, in this understanding, is considered a vehicle supplying the actual task and designed to capture the desired kind of data (see also Kasper and Dahl 1991: 9), as such fulfilling the function of representing a direct line to elicited (e.g. through DCTs), intuitive (e.g. via ratings or open-ended productive tasks), or metadata.26 14.5.2 Intuitive, Self-Observational, and Retrospective Production Tasks While observation and extraction of data points, as described in Section 4.3, are exclusive to the researcher in a research design, introspection, intuition, and retrospection may happen on both ends. By that I mean 24 Also see. Martínez Flor and Usó Juan (2006) on CASTs. 25 Also note that DCTs have elsewhere been referred to as “questionnaires” (see Kasper 2008). 26 See, e.g., Wright (2005) on a discussion of software for and (dis)advantages of online survey research. Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics that the researcher may take a respective approach themselves, i.e. may choose intuition for making their argument, but as soon as deciding upon a non-introspective approach, their research design may well incorporate such tasks that require the participant to generate introspective, intuitive, or retrospective data. I consider such tasks productive and elicited, as they would not have been completed (and, thus, to be observed) without the researcher assigning them to their study participants in the first place.27 Among the most basic intuitive tasks are such that ask the participant to provide personal information, like age, gender, occupation, etc. In questionnaires, these tend to come as single-choice items. In multiple-choice or open response formats, questionnaires may present written tasks of various kinds, e.g. such that require the participant to share their personal assessment of an assertion or of one’s own or a peer’s work, one’s progress or behavior on a linguistic level. Specific tasks in this group include pragmatic assessment tasks often occurring in the format of appropriateness or acceptability judgment questionnaires.28 Open-ended question (naires), too, may be used to elicit rich introspective data but will usually require significantly longer and more complex coding phases and analytical procedures afterwards. A more sophisticated instrument to elicit productive intuitive and introspective data is the diary or verbal-report method, which requires participants to note down relevant anecdotes (e.g. on offensive and impolite incidents, see Tayebi 2018), or self-observational aspects (see, e.g., Cohen 1996). Kasper (2008: 297) calls these verbal reports or diaries “the least prestructured type of self-report” (see also Schneider 2018: 73). In IP research, retrospective verbal reports, retrospective interview tasks, and thinkaloud tasks have emerged as salient methods for monitoring and understanding learners’ development in pragmatic competence (see, e.g., Alcón Soler 2012). In complementation of participants’ diary documentations, some researchers additionally include their own field notes in the design as a backup and additional data source. As van Compernolle (2013: 71f.) observes, [t]he rationale behind collecting verbalization data comes from information-processing theory (Ericsson and Simon 1993): Information processed in short-term memory is open to conscious inspection during task completion and may remain accessible for a short period of time following the task. Coupled with learners’ responses to assessment items, verbal protocols can assist in 27 My notional choice seems to clash with, e.g., Bardovi Harlig’s default categorization of retrospective tasks as “nonproduction tasks” (2010: 228). 28 According to Kasper (2008) and Kasper and Dahl (1991), two different types of assessment data, i.e. pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic, are generally distinguished. 373 374 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG arriving at more fine-grained evaluations of pragmatic competence than are possible when performance data are considered alone. As has been emphasized, “[t]he use of introspective data . . . is a compromise between the use of DCT data, which is alleged to be unnatural, and naturally occurring data, which needs much time and many resources to collect” (Sharifian and Jamarani 2011: 232). Overall, though, using introspective data as complementation of, i.e. in triangulation with, elicited data has become the common practice (see, e.g., van Compernolle 2013: 76). 14.5.3 Production Tasks in More Controlled Settings As mentioned above, the focus of task-based elicitation of data is on production, thus, comprehension tasks are used relatively rarely in IP research overall (but cf. Takimoto 2009). My upcoming categorizations of various data-eliciting production tasks follow Schneider’s proposal of a “continuum . . . decreasing [in] interactionality and, at the same time, increasing [with regard to] researcher control” (2018: 58). Thus, the higher the level of interactionality in a production task, the more likely will it be found worthwhile to IP research. This being said, role-plays and DCTs (see Martı́nez-Flor and Usó-Juan 2011: 51) have consistently been ranking high in this regard, although recently it is also specifically interview data that has been rising in popularity. Given their saliency in IP research, DCTs, interviews, and role-plays are the three production tasks that will be discussed explicitly in the upcoming subsections. 14.5.3.1 Low-Interaction Tasks: Written and Oral DCTs Among the various kinds of tasks to elicit productive data that I would like to label as “low-interaction” are writing assignments, read-aloud tasks for intonation research, and elicited narratives. The most salient one (both on the metalevel as well as with regard to application), however, is the DCT, which, typically requires participants to produce (written or oral) utterances that (in the participant’s view) appropriately complete or complement the prompt provided by the researcher.29 This prompt generally is a description of a specific socioculturally embedded situation and introduces a (seemingly) authentic dialogue. As Mey puts it, “[t]his method basically consists in creating a (written) ‘role play’ situation” (2004: 39). The situational context provided in the prompt is deliberately construed so as to elicit the specific pragmatic aspect aimed for (often without the participant being aware of it in order to avoid bias).30 29 In her study on compliment discourse, Yuan (2001) employs an oral DCT, providing a detailed description of her administrative and logistical steps including set up, recordings, and additional methods applied (i.e. questionnaires). 30 In reverse discourse completion tasks (R DCTs), participants are usually provided with authentic utterances and are asked to reflect upon any such situations in which they would deem these utterances to be appropriate or expected (see Kanik 2016). Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics DCTs have been extensively used within the context of research on speech acts (see Blum-Kulka et al. 1989a), formulaic language (see, e.g., Kecskes 2000), and pragmatic knowledge (see Félix-Brasdefer and HaslerBarker 2017), with colleagues acknowledging this instrument’s timeefficiency, potential of cross-and interdisciplinary replicability, as well as the high level of variable control (see Houck and Gass 1996; Kasper and Roever 2005). As for the salient shortcomings of DCTs, these concern the unavoidable factor of artificiality entailed in presenting short written segments that are actually prompted and analyzed as if they were oral. In other words, participants’ “written responses may not exactly correspond to what they would actually say in the same setting under real circumstances” (Martı́nez-Flor and Usó-Juan 2011: 53).31 Yet, while many will concede that DCT responses may not adequately reflect natural speech, there seems to be a consensus that they do “accurately reflect the content expressed in natural speech” as well as “the values [and norms] of the native culture” (Beebe and Cummings 1995: 75; cf. Kasper 2008: 329). In response to such criticism mentioned above, DCTs have undergone numerous adaptive measures for aimful enhancement in recent years (e.g. content-enriched descriptions; see, e.g., Billmyer and Varghese 2000). In addition, more studies are creating DCTs on the basis of large spoken (authentic) corpus data. However, Cohen justly insists that, “while any enhancement may make the task more authentic, we must remember it is still a task attempting to simulate reality” (2004: 317). Therefore, DCTs are often triangulated with other methods or tasks, e.g. observation (see, e.g., Ogiermann 2008), role-plays (see González-Cruz 2014), or extraction. 14.5.3.2 Medium-Level Interaction Tasks: Elicited Dyadic Conversations Commonly, “elicited conversation” covers all such tasks in which “researchers specify topics, interactional goals or discourse roles” (Kasper 2008: 287; see also 5.3.3). I follow Schneider (2018: 62) in arguing that “[i]nterviews may be considered a subtype of elicited talk.”32 Given that interviews represent a continuously increasing type of elicited production tasks in IP research, they certainly deserve to be addressed in isolation. Interviews are usually conducted orally with the researcher eliciting data through verbal (sometimes in combination with visual) prompts33 often questions and directives which launch and structure the conversation to a varying extent. Thus, interviews may be fully or in part narrative (i.e. unstructured, open-ended), semi-structured or structured, formal or 31 See also Golato (2017: 22); Turnbull (2001); Bou Franch and Lorenzo Dus (2008); Félix Brasdefer (2010); Economidou Kogetsidis (2013); Schauer and Adolphs (2006). On specifics regarding the disadvantages of DCTs, see Turnbull (2001; 35f.). 32 Even though interviews are “much more constrained than elicited conversation[s in that t]he participant roles in interviews are fixed” (Schneider (2018: 62). 33 See Rose (2000) for his use of a cartoon to elicit oral production. 375 376 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG informal,34 while the conversation between interviewee and interviewer (i.e. usually the researcher) is audio- or video-recorded (provided the interviewee’s informed consent). Sometimes, structured interviews are used to collect background and demographic data about participants, although, given the relatively high level of complex pre- and post-factum work that any thoroughly designed interview will require, this is rarely done overall (but see Savić 2015). At the same time and for interviews in general, however, Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury (2004) stress that the richness of interview-elicited data that they collected longitudinally outweighed the transcription workload by far.35 The range of interview (sub)types is multifaceted, including what authors call, e.g., “informal,” “spontaneous,” “off-the-record,” “openended,” “free,” “(semi-) structured.” Specifically relating to L2 contexts are, e.g., “language awareness” and “oral proficiency interviews.” The most frequent kind, however, are retrospective (post factum) interviews conducted mostly for reasons of affirming triangulation with the data collected otherwise (see Section 14.5.2). In rare cases, researchers make the effort of incorporating interviews in a pre-data collection stage in order to back up their framework or terminology. A particularly rich yet so far underused interview type has emerged with focus group interviews.36 Focus group designs “allow individuals to respond in their own words, using their own categorizations and perceived associations” (Stewart et al. 2007: 13), thus producing the type of interactional data that is “suitable for a detailed discursive analysis” (Goodman and Burke 2010: 328) and that IP researchers in particular would be arguably most interested in. It should be mentioned at this point that interviews alone are rarely considered a sufficient primary data source. In fact, they are rather often used to confirm assumptions deducted from data collected and analyzed before (see, e.g., Moreland and Cowie 2016).37 14.5.3.3 High-Interaction and Collaboration Tasks It is particularly within L2 contexts that collaborative learning activities are used to elicit data. This may range from collaborative writing or translation assignments to video-conferencing sessions and face-to-face 34 As Briggs (2008: 202) explains, “[f]ormal or structured interviews are pragmatically distinct from informal, unstructured ones. The former involve the use of a predetermined set of questions, and their presentation by an interviewer is standardized as much as possible: questions are to be read as printed and presented in the same order. The standardization of responses may be maximized through the use of closed questions in which the interviewee must choose between preselected alternatives.” 35 On an in depth discussion of (dis)advantages in applying interview methods, see Briggs (2008), Salmons (2012). For transcription protocols and systems, which are not explicitly discussed in this chapter, see, e.g., Couper Kuhlen and Barth Weingarten (2011) and Du Bois et al. (1992). 36 On the format of focus group interviews, see, e.g., Krueger and Casey (2009). 37 Yuan (2001), for instance, compared written and oral DCTs, while contextualizing his findings by field notes and audio recorded interview data. Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics as well as computer-mediated group discussions. Oral or computermediated peer assessment and peer feedback tasks are also used to elicit productive as well as comprehensive data on a high-interaction level. Role-play tasks (RPTs) then are certainly among the most representative of the high-interaction tasks available. They are inherently collaborative and interactional, given that they will require participants to cooperatively act out such roles that they are usually not familiar with personally. RPTs are used relatively frequently in L2 (see, e.g., Ross and Kasper 2013; Youn 2020) and awareness assessment (see Abdoola et al. 2017; Taguchi and Kim 2018). In pragmatic instruction, open-ended learner learner RPTs are commonly used for oral practice (see Martı́nez-Flor and Usó-Juan 2010). Yet, RPTs’ limitations and drawbacks need to be addressed, too, with one of them being the high level of complex workload required on the researcher’s part. For instance, Kasper and Dahl (1991: 229) claim that “coding role play [or any other interactional] data is more difficult than coding data from more tightly controlled tasks, since illocutionary force and the precise function of conversational markers often cannot be unambiguously determined.” What is more, RPTs still pose a high risk of spinning out of control, even if well-prepared, as the researcher may not be able to either foresee all relevant situational variables or prevent unnatural (verbal) behavior to emerge from the evolving dynamics (see, e.g., Kasper and Dahl 1991). In fact, even the quality of the data elicited through RPTs is frequently called into question (see, e.g., Pulaczewska 2013), given that participants will “play roles” that they will usually not conceive as personally authentic. This is opposed to role enactment tasks, which usually draw upon more authentic roles that individual participants tend to be more familiar with (see, e.g., Félix-Brasdefer 2010: 47). At the same time RPTs have been defended as capable of “yield[ing] more realistic data than other data elicitation methods” (see Kasper and Dahl 1991; Turnbull 2001; Félix-Brasdefer 2007; Golato 2017: 22). Yet, particularly when it comes to intercultural scenarios, RPTs should be used with caution and, if they are employed, “[t]he choice of situations to be put to a test in role plays . . . should take into consideration that speakers of different cultural backgrounds may be sensitive to different aspects of the context related to multiparty interaction” (Pulaczewska 2013: 671). 14.5.4 Data Elicited under Experimental Conditions When I speak of experimental elicitation of data, I am referring to a range of various research designs that do have in common that they employ a manipulating component or one that the study participant is kept unaware of for the duration of the data collection phase. This is in alignment with Turnbull’s definition of experimental techniques, which will commonly employ “a hypothesis testing procedure in which certain variables are manipulated while others are held constant. . . The manipulation 377 378 MONIKA KIRNER LUDWIG is powerful and occurs in an experimentally controlled setting, yet it is a common part of daily life and the study occurs in the ‘real world’ rather than in the laboratory. For these reasons, the data generated under these conditions should be highly representative or generalizable” (2001: 37f.). While certain scholarly disciplines and supposedly conversation analysts in particular may, as has been suggested, have had a tendency to “typically reject experimental designs, coding, and quantitative analyses as appropriate tools for research on conversation” (Turnbull 2001: 33), pragmatic methods have certainly been shifting into experimental spheres in recent years.38 Yet, experimental pragmatics (see especially Noveck and Sperber 2004; Garrett and Harnish 2007; Meibauer 2012; Meibauer and Steinbach 2011) has hardly been informing IP research so far in a significant manner. The few studies and intercultural pragmaticists who do, however, venture on experimental approaches do address quite a multifaceted scope of topics (e.g. negation, context effects, intonation, speech acts, etc.) and propose rather diverse experimental designs. A majority of these study designs in IP include primarily quantitative and statistical analyses of the experimentally obtained data, e.g. measured processing times under self-paced reading conditions (see, e.g., Fein and Giora 2015), or eye-tracking data (e.g. Shuval and Hemforth 2008).39 Salient are mixed method approaches, as, for instance, taken by Krzyżanowska and Douven (2018), who study missing-link conditionals. Maier et al. (2016) set up an experimental, qualitative study to investigate speakers’ choices of overtness in discourse relations. Félix-Brasdefer (2009) used RPTs to elicit experimental data. Giorgi and Dal Farra (2019) posed counterexpectational questions so as to elicit gestural data; and, as a final example to be mentioned here, the study by Al-Gahtani and Roever (2014) manages to manipulate subjects into producing NOD. The scenario was set up as follows (p.628): At the end of the semester, two final exams for each level were intentionally scheduled to be administered on the same day. Teachers of those subjects informed students of the possibility of altering the timeslot of one of those exams, provided that half the group individually ask the administrator to defer or bring forward one of those exams to another day. . . . The administrator was informed that his interactions with the learners were being recorded in order for the department to evaluate the progress of learners’ language. The learners, however, were not informed that their interactions with the administrator were recorded, making the data collected genuine. 38 Elicitation of data through experimental set ups is, however, an adventure pragmaticists in general have only recently been embarking upon (see Noveck and Sperber 2004: 8; Schlesewsky 2009). 39 On methods such as neuroimaging, event related potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging or electroencephalography, see Schneider (2018), Golato and Golato (2013: 3f.), and Félix Brasdefer and Hasler Barker (2017: 35f.). On eye tracking methods, see, e.g., Hansen Schirra and Gruzca (2016). Research Methods in Intercultural Pragmatics It is to be expected that experimental research designs are likely to remain relatively underrepresented in future IP research overall, due to the highly complex (and, occasionally, cost-intensive) set-ups needed. 14.6 Intercultural Pragmatics and Its Focus on Interactional Analysis Specific research aims niched into specific frameworks will require their very specific analytical approaches, which is an aspect this chapter has not specifically addressed up to this point.40 In Kecskes’ view, what differentiates research in IP from traditional pragmatic approaches is IP’s focused interest in interaction and, thus, in discourse segments and discourse relations rather than utterances representing speech acts (2017: 411ff.; 2020: 147). Although Kecskes’ postulate may well be followed in the future, current IP research does not reflect a prominent emphasis on analyzing discourse segments as of yet. Rather, the overall analytical focus still seems to be on traditional utterances as units of analysis. At the same time, conversation analysis (CA) has become increasingly appreciated by IP scholars seeking “to fine-tune analysis of intercultural interactions” (Kecskes 2020: 148). That is particularly due to CA’s acknowledgment of meaning as “jointly achieved and negotiated in sequential [coconstructed] context” (Mori and thi Nguyen 2019: 230). What is more, CA’s emic stance also means that context in L2 interactions is not treated as a priori and fixed . . . rather, context needs to be invoked, renewed, and made relevant by participants in moments of interaction (p. 230; see also Schegloff 1992, 1997). This being said, CA ties in neatly with the socio-cognitive approach

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