This chapter examines theoretical understandings and research findings related to the notion of pragmatic awareness within the field of intercultural language learning, highlighting important points of connection with the field of intercultural pragmatics. It first presents a critical overview of dominant theoretical understandings of pragmatic awareness within the field of language learning and then delineates key assumptions about the relationship between pragmatics and culture that have informed work on pragmatic awareness with a distinctly intercultural orientation. This discussion brings into focus a number of ways that sociocultural and socio-cognitive perspectives within intercultural pragmatics have contributed to an enlarged understanding of the nature of pragmatic interpretation and the close links between pragmatics and moral judgments. The chapter then addresses key findings and perspectives from empirical studies on pragmatic awareness within the field of intercultural language learning, highlighting implications for the field of intercultural pragmatics and areas for future development.

This chapter presents some of the most significant studies in the history of intercultural pragmatics (IP) research that have applied the methodology of corpus pragmatics (CP). In fact, the use of corpora has been an essential contribution to IP in crucial areas such as formulaic language, context and common ground, or politeness research, among others, with the conviction that CP has redefined the conceptualization of pragmatic competence in a globalized world. The chapter follows a topical structure in which critical areas of research from an intercultural and corpus pragmatic perspective are addressed, like the role of the lingua franca; the use of academic, professional, and scientific language; cross-cultural studies; prosody, multimodality, and computer-mediated communication and learner's corpora. In all these areas, the chapter highlights the significant research concerns and achievements that have helped to shape IP as an essential discipline in current linguistic theory. A final section with conclusions and ideas for further research will ensue.

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 depends not 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 Kecskes in 2014.

Intercultural rhetoric and intercultural pragmatics are two linguistically based fields with many principles and processes in common: both examine the use of language systems in encounters between people with different L1s, coming from different cultures, but communicating in a common language. This chapter provides an overview of intercultural rhetoric highlighting the ways in which intercultural pragmatics and intercultural rhetoric parallel and complement one another. The chapter begins with a description of the evolution of intercultural rhetoric from contrastive rhetoric drawing particular attention to the shift to understanding culture dynamic, understanding the importance of analyzing texts in context, and drawing greater attention to the use of negotiation and accommodation. The chapter then explores the influences that intercultural rhetoric and intercultural pragmatics have exerted on English for Specific Purposes, English for Academic Purposes, and second language teaching, particularly noting the ways the two fields have complemented and paralleled one another and suggesting ways the fields can serve as a bridge across chasms that have formed in linguistics, second language writing, English as a Lingua Franca, and translingualism. The chapter ends with a short discussion of the future of intercultural rhetoric and suggestions for future trends.

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 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. 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.

Successful communication – whether relayed verbally, visually, or in any other mode or mode-combination – crucially depends on cooperation between sender and recipient. Relevance Theory assumes that, ceteris paribus, humans are naturally inclined to help each other and therefore attempt to optimize the chance that their fellow creatures understand them. Given the folk wisdom that “a picture tells more than a thousand words,” we may be forgiven for thinking that visual communication, when possible, is always preferable to its verbal variety. We should not underestimate, however, how much background knowledge is presupposed in communication via pictures or other visuals. A visual message may thus misfire because its sender misjudges the background knowledge and values of the envisaged audience. A further complicating factor is that visual (and all other) messages come with varying degrees of commitment to the meaning conveyed, this meaning ranging from being fully explicit, via being strongly or weakly suggested, to being unintentionally transmitted. Unsurprisingly, visual communication is even more challenging when it straddles different cultures. After presenting a bare-bones introduction to Relevance Theory, I discuss a number of exclusively or partially visual messages that involve, in one way or another, intercultural communication.

Human conversation is an extremely intricate social ritual that involves the strategic utilization of signs and sign systems that will ultimately determine how it will unfold successfully or not. When two people speak the same language and belong to the same culture they automatically can plug into the same semiotic codes (language, facial expression, relevant cultural allusions, etc.) that ensure the flow of meaning exchanges, thus determining the outcome of the conversation. What happens when the interlocutors speak different languages and belong to different cultures, yet engage in conversation through a common language, which may or may not be spoken by either one of them as a native language? In such situations the codes that regular conversations may trigger meaning anomalies that lead to unanticipated reactions or misunderstandings. This chapter looks at the problem of intercultural communication from the perspective of semiotic method, focusing on the semiotic codes (verbal and nonverbal) involved in any interaction.

This chapter examines the miscommunication of an intercultural team working on a task via videoconferencing technology using English. We utilize multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011, 2019, 2020) as our theoretical and methodological framework to shed new light on how participants appear to negotiate and co-construct common ground, while they in fact do not achieve conceptual convergence but, instead, produce their own actions. The data for this chapter comes from a corpus of twelve dyads working on tasks via videoconferencing technology in New Zealand. Data was collected from various English monolingual and Serbian multilinguals in various interactive constellations. In this chapter, we focus on a dyadic team with a Serbian native speaker and a monolingual New Zealand English speaker. Rajic and Norris (2018) show that Serbian native speakers’ nonverbal actions vastly differ from New Zealand English speakers’ nonverbal actions. While the difference in production of nonverbal actions is relevant in all interactions, they do not necessarily lead to intercultural miscommunications. However, as noted earlier, interactive alignment is not just a linguistic accomplishment (Pirini & Geenen 2018). Our results conflict somewhat with those of other scholars (House, 1999; Mauranen, 2006), who claim that few miscommunications occur in English as a Lingua Franca interactions. Owing to our analysis, we would like to claim that miscommunications in linguistically and culturally diverse communicative situations are more frequent than previously thought. However, many of the miscommunications that occur cannot be said to come about because of cultural differences.

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 and cultures interact in similar situations, and how the differences observed may be, ultimately, a source of problems in intercultural communication (see Kaur, 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 humor. In 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 light-hearted 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.

This chapter surveys and discusses research methods and research designs commonly and saliently adhered to within the field of intercultural pragmatics. A particular focus will be on data collection methods and qualitative analytical approaches to empirical data, with the guiding question of this chapter being: What are the most saliently trending research methods employed in current and recent research in intercultural pragmatics?As such, this chapter represents a hub among the contributions assembled in thishandbook in that it intertwines with or at least closes contingent spaces between topics and issues discussed across the five strands covered. Thus, this chapter not only falls 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 “doing” research in intercultural pragmatics. Sections included offer an extensive review of the massive body of literature on conventional and relevant terminology as well as salient aspects of data collection and data analysis in (intercultural) pragmatics overall. The core sections present research designs ranging from introspective, observational, and extracted data to (non- )experimental data elicitation techniques and tasks.

The focus of this chapter is the development of pragmatic and sociolinguistic competence among second language learners during study abroad. In contrast to the foreign language classroom at home, study abroad offers learners a range of settings in which to engage in real-life intercultural encounters. These opportunities for social interaction, in turn, can have an impact on the learning of pragmatic and sociolinguistic dimensions of the second language, including speech acts and implicit meaning in the case of pragmatics and stylistic, and social factors in the case of sociolinguistics. Being able to accurately comprehend the intended message of utterances in the social context and to adequately express desired meanings are crucial components of intercultural competence. However, given that languages vary with regard to how pragmatic functions are realized and how sociolinguistic variation is signaled, the development of these areas in a second language represents a challenge for learners. While previous research suggests that study abroad can facilitate pragmatic and sociolinguistic development, such development is not guaranteed and the learning outcomes for individual learners are subject to a wide array of personal, social, and programmatic factors.

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 has 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) how do we represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis? and (c) how do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning?