Istvan Kecskes

Stavros Assimakopoulos

Having been established as a field in its own right for the last decade, intercultural pragmatics is increasingly being recognized as an important area of research among scholars working in pragmatics. The present volume is a collection of selected papers from the 6th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication – admittedly the biggest venue for researchers in the area, and comprises contributions that report on recent research that deals with or can directly inform work in intercultural pragmatics. Given the breadth of research areas that are represented herein, ranging from lingua franca and business communication to the study of cultural perceptions, translation and pragmatic development, this volume is bound to be of interest to not only students and scholars engaged in the area of intercultural pragmatics, but also to all those with a more general interest in the sociocultural turn in the study of pragmatics.

Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics

In recent years the traditional approach to common ground as a body of information shared between participants of a communicative process has been challenged. Taking into account not only L1 but also intercultural interactions and attempting to bring together the traditional view with the egocentrism-based view of cognitive psychologists, it has been argued that construction of common ground is a dynamic, emergent process. It is the convergence of the mental representation of shared knowledge that we activate, assumed mutual knowledge that we seek, and rapport as well as knowledge that we co-construct in the communicative process. This dynamic understanding of common ground has been applied in many research projects addressing both L1 and intercultural interactions in recent years. As a result several new elements, aspects and interpretations of common ground have been identified. Some researchers came to view common ground as one component in a complex contextual information structure. Others, analyzing intercultural interactions, pointed out the dynamism of the interplay of core common ground and emergent common ground. The book brings together researchers from different angles of pragmatics and communication to examine (i) what adjustments to the notion of common ground based on L1 communication should be made in the light of research in intercultural communication; (ii) what the relationship is between context, situation and common ground, and (iii) how relevant knowledge and content get selected for inclusion into core and emergent common ground.

Common Ground in First Language and Intercultural Interaction

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 5 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 enquiry and generate new research questions. Comprehensive in its scope, it is essential reading not only for scholars of pragmatics, but also of discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, communication, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and second language teaching and learning.

The Cambridge Handbook of Intercultural Pragmatics

Liliana Albertazzi

This work has a uniquely cognitive-functional perspective on bi-lingualism. This means that it makes a clear distinction between real world and projected world. Information conveyed by language must be about the projected world. Both the experimental results and the systematic claims in this volume call for a weak form of whorfianism. The authors examine too some relatively unexplored issues of bilingualism, such as, among others, gender systems in the bilingual mind, synergic concepts, and ontological categorization.

Cognitive Aspects of Bilingualism

In Intercultural Pragmatics, the first book on the subject, Istvan Kecskes establishes the foundations of the field, boldly combining the pragmatic view of cooperation with the cognitive view of egocentrism in order to incorporate emerging features of communication.

Intercultural Pragmatics

This volume explores how linguistic research can support the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language. It responds to a rapidly growing interest in the Chinese language all over the world, and answers the need for a strong research background for the discipline. Without that, Chinese language learning remains only a unique experience and/or a useful education challenge. The first section explores crucial issues about the structure and use of Chinese as a Second Language such as word-order, noun-noun compounds, meaning-making in writing, pronunciation and stress and tone. The second section explores the learning of Chinese by seeking answer to questions about difficulties, expectations, beliefs, use of corpus and learning how to express necessity. The authors coming from eight different countries demonstrate how existing knowledge has been generated, bring together different lines of research, point out tendencies in the field, demonstrate and explain what tools and methods researchers can use to address major issues in the field, and give direction to what future research should focus on.

Explorations into Chinese as a Second Language

Laurence R. Horn

The papers in this volume reflect current trends in international research in pragmatics over recent years. The unique feature of the book is that the authors coming from ten different countries represent all aspects of pragmatics and address issues that have emerged as the result of recent research in pragmatics proper and neighboring fields such as cognitive psychology, philosophy, and communication. Recent theoretical work on the semantics/pragmatics interface, empirical work within cognitive and developmental psychology, intercultural communication and bilingual pragmatics have directed attention to issues that warrant reexamination and revision of some of the central tenets and claims of the field of pragmatics. In addition, cultural changes originating from globalization have affected the relation of language to the wider world. In particular, the spread of English as a global language has led to the emergence of issues of usage, power, and control that must be dealt with in a comprehensive pragmatics of language. Pragmatic theories have traditionally emphasized the importance of intention, rationality, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in the formation and execution of communicative acts. The new approaches to pragmatic research reflected in this volume, while not questioning the central role of these factors, extend the purview of the discipline to allow for a more comprehensive picture of their functioning and interrelationship within the dynamics of communication. The papers address these issues from a variety of directions. In Part I, Searle and Horn examine language use and pragmatics from a philosophical perspective. In Part II, the cognitive aspect of pragmatics is represented in the papers of Moeschler, Ruiz de Mendoza & Baicchi, and Giora. They focus on well-known domains such as illocutionary constructions, the pragmatics of negation, and the relevance-theoretic concept of explicature. However, each paper sheds new light on the familiar concepts. The papers in Part III by Mey, Kecskes and Grundy discuss the intercultural aspects of pragmatics while Terkourafi explores the explanatory potential of an interpretation of Grice's Cooperative Principle. Margerie's and Geeraert & Kristiansen's articles focus on the application of usage-based methodology in different ways within pragmatics.

Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects

Explorations in Pragmatics

Professor of Linguistics and Education Istvan Kecskes

T nde Papp

This is the first book that discusses the effect of foreign language learning on first language processing. The authors argue that multilingual development is a dynamic and cumulative process characterized by transfer of different nature, and results in a common underlying conceptual base with two or more language channels that constantly interact with each other. Language representation and processing are discussed from a cognitive-pragmatic rather than a lexical-syntactic perspective. This required the review of several crucial issues of L2 acquisition, such as transfer, vocabulary development, conceptual fluency, and pragmatic skills. The authors also reviewed a large body of literature touching on cognitive psychology, linguistics, psycholinguistics, SLA, philosophy, and education in order to explain multilingual development and the positive effect of foreign language learning on the first language. An important read for linguists and language educators alike, this volume: * attempts to explain multilingual development from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, * argues that foreign language learning has a positive effect on the development and use of mother tongue skills, * relies on research findings of several different disciplines, * builds on the results of quantitative research conducted by the authors, and touches on a wide range of literature.

Foreign Language and Mother Tongue

Keith Allan

Alessandro Capone

This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment.This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance (critical discourse analysis), others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.

Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use

Jesús Romero-Trillo

This volume looks at current issues in Intercultural Pragmatics from an applied perspective. The content is organized in three sections that encompass the primary applications of intercultural exchanges: the linguistic and cognitive domain, the social and cultural domain, and the discourse and stylistics domain. The chapters analyze real language situations in English, Russian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Greek, Filipino or Polish.

Research Trends in Intercultural Pragmatics

Explores the language behaviour of speakers of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), through the lens of Gricean pragmatics. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across the fields of pragmatics, language contact, world Englishes, second language acquisition, and English as a second language.

Istvan Kecskes

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