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Summary Communicating Across Cultures: reading and lecture notes week 7-12

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This summary contains notes of the lectures and readings of week 7-12.

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sociolinguistics
communicating across cultures

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Week 1: How (and Why) We Communicate
Nick J. Enfield – Relationship Thinking. Agency, Enchrony and Human Sociality

Lecture 1: How (and Why) We Communicate
Starting from the beginning
What is language?
In language, we formulate our thoughts for others and hence for ourselves. It’s a system for publicly
expressing our thoughts to help others imaginatively reconstruct them.

“Obviously, language is a tool … but is it biological or cultural?”

“Language = cognition + culture + communication”

What is communication?
Code model of communication: sender → sends an encoded message → receiver has to decode the
message

The inferential model of communication: all those involved are able to make inferences. No need for
encoding and decoding messages. Informative intentions: what the sender is trying to communicate.
Communicative intentions: that the sender is trying to communicate. These two levels go hand in
hand.

The inferential model of communication
By necessity, language cannot reference all aspects of reality; it is imperfect.
Linguistic utterances are only cues to an interpretation.
Speakers rely on listeners’ inferential abilities to complete the content of their
communicated thoughts.
Listeners know that and take this communicative intention of the speaker into account when
interpreting their utterances.

Communication is approximate
The message never transfers perfectly from one person to another.

Why do we communicate?
“Human beings devote one third of their waking time, i.e. six hours a day, to language activities. They
do so pro-actively, speaking some 16,000 words daily on average. An especially talkative individual
may utter about 50,000 words a day.”

Sharing or trading knowledge or information
Making possible social cooperation
Enabling behavioral manipulation
Teaching offspring

3 main motives for communication:

Requesting
Informing
Sharing

,Understanding relationships is key to understanding communication
Addressed in this week’s reading by Enfield.

Studying human relationships means looking at human interaction.
Studying human interaction means looking at relationship.

How is communication cultural?
Meaning involves inference making
Inferences are contextual
Context is cultural

“There is no escape or time out from interaction’s sequential, contextual demands.” (Enfield page 9)

“There is no escape or time out from the social-relational consequences of interaction.” (Enfield page
9)

Defining the discipline
What is cross-cultural pragmatics?
Pragmatics = the study of language in context. Focus on conversational inference.

Cross-cultural pragmatics investigates “the speech behavior and norms of different cultures, focusing
on contextually derived meaning, the appropriateness of language usage in differing cultural
contexts, and the complexities and challenges tied to acquisition of pragmatic competence.”

Three aspects of meaning making and inference:

Context shaping meaning
Language shaping context (week 2)
Common ground

What is the intercultural communication?
“… as a field of inquiry, is concerned with how people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds
interact with each other, and what impact such interactions have on group relations, as well as
individuals’ identity, attitudes, and behavior.”

What is the difference?
Cross-cultural pragmatics focuses on the rules and norms associated with a particular language,
comparing interaction in one language with interaction in another language.

Intercultural communication focuses on meaning construction and understanding between people
with different first language communicating in a common language.

Why do we study communication across cultures?
“An understanding of intercultural communicating is crucially related to an understanding of the
ways in which the spoken and written word may be interpreted differentially, depending on the
context. The message received is not always the one intended by the speaker or writer … an
understanding of how [pragmatic and sociocultural] principles interact in a given language, and in
intercultural communication, is crucial to the development of mutual understanding in the global
world.”

What are the pitfalls of communicating across cultures?
“Everyone’s quick to blame the alien”

,Miscommunication is mostly blamed on the outsider, this can also lead to stereotypes
(positive/negative).

Negative stereotyping:
Single dimension contrast
Problem for communication
“We” are right, “they” do it wrong
Applies to all group members
Us versus them

Positive stereotyping:
Solidarity fallacy = assuming common ground based on a single dimension. You think similarity is
greater than it actually is, based on just one aspect.

Lumping fallacy = grouping together two other groups (often) based on a single dimension. Think of
Africa and Asia which are always seen as a whole.

What are the advantages of communicating across cultures?
Personal growth: exposure to new cultures, languages, perspectives, values and behaviors
can help individuals develop intellectually, psychologically and socially.
Cultural synergy: combined power of different cultural elements working together to create
a greater, stronger effect than if they were separate.
International reach: bilingual or multilingual employees can help a business to explore and
enter new global markets and cope with the challenges of international partnerships. (week
11?)

Practicing pragmatics
Understanding human interaction
Finding language usage patterns
Analyzing recurrences systematically
Recognizing differences (and similarities)
Explaining meaning-making
Anticipating communicative behavior

How and why we communicate: Pragmatics vs sociolinguistics
What is sociolinguistics?
The study of the relationship between language and society. Accounting for how language is used in
a community.

Society/community oriented
Norms and choices
Process of social practice and variation
Language use in (societal) context

What is pragmatics?
The study of language use in context/interaction. Accounting how language users produce and
understand meaning in context.

Individual oriented
Inferences and constraints
Process of meaning-making

, Language use in (local) context

What is the difference?
Community level vs individual level

What about other disciplines?
Sociology, anthropology, ethnography of speaking.

What are some of the main concepts?
Speech acts, cooperation principle, conversational maxims, inference, communicative competence,
linguistic relativity, stereotype, essentialism, speech community, community of practice,
accommodation, backchanneling, politeness, face, face threatening act.

Week 2: Communication: A Joint Effort
Erving Goffman - Footing
The Nixon shift: code switching, code here referring to language or dialect.

“More important for our purposes here, Gumperz and his co-workers now also begin to look at code
switching-like behavior that doesn’t involve a code switch at all.”

Footing: “A change in footing implies a change in the alignment we take up to ourselves and the
others present as expressed in the way we manage the production or reception of an utterance.”

“This paper is largely concerned with pointing out that participants over the course of their speaking
constantly change their footing, these changes being a persistent feature of natural talk.”

“For the effective conduct of talk, speaker and hearer had best be in a position to watch each other.”

Ratified participation in a social encounter are for example greetings and farewells.

Even when participants are not speaking they will still be in a ‘state of talk’.

“So I think one must return to a cross-sectional analysis, to examining moments of talk, but now
bearing in mind that any broad labeling of what one is looking at – such as ‘conversation’, ‘talk’,
‘discourse’ – is very premature.”

If you are not an official participant in the encounter (the talk) you can still follow the talk closely:

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