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?

Research on mediation in intercultural pragmatics is an emerging area of research and to date there is little work that currently focuses on this. Intercultural mediation is important for understanding how language users engage with intercultural pragmatics, where meaning-making and interpretation are central. The issues confronting research on mediation and intercultural pragmatics result largely from the fact that this area of work has emerged from studies of language learning rather than studies of intercultural pragmatics specifically. This chapter overviews three main research themes in the field of mediation in intercultural pragmatics: (1) the importance of metapragmatic awareness in mediation and how metapragmatic awareness is understood in intercultural contexts, (2) mediation as an activity that can be directed to others or to the self rather than always being an activity of intermediaries, and (3) the particular nature of mediation as a language teaching activity in which teachers construct learning as an interpretive process of making sense of meanings encountered in and across languages.

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social, interactional, and normative dimensions of language use, while intercultural pragmatics examines how language is used in social interactions between people who have different first languages and are usually considered to represent different cultures. While there are some points of overlap between them, the main aim of intercultural pragmatics is to analyze and theorize how language is used when participants have limited common ground and do not necessarily adhere to L1 preferred ways of speaking. It is thus argued in intercultural pragmatics not only that intercultural encounters are deserving of theorization in their own right, but that theorization in intercultural pragmatics can usefully inform pragmatics more broadly. The aim of this chapter is to consider how research in intercultural pragmatics can inform work in sociopragmatics, and vice versa. Following discussion of the main theoretical foundations of sociopragmatics, a case study examining the openings of first conversations in intercultural settings is used as a springboard to consider the place of sociopragmatics vis-à-vis intercultural pragmatics, and what insights each can bring to the other. The conclusion is that sociopragmatics would benefit from building more explicitly on the important empirical and theoretical insights offered by intercultural pragmatics.

Worldwide communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is enacted between people from different linguacultural backgrounds, so it would seem self-evident that it is inter cultural in its very nature. Pragmatically, however, it is not essentially different from “monolingual” / “intracultural” communication. In both cases, participants have to bring their diverse linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions into convergence on common ground. To conceive of this diversity as relating only to different named languages and the cultures associated with them is to disregard the vast variation in linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions that obtains within so-called monolingual communities. So to describe the use of ELF as exceptionally multilingual and intercultural is to misrepresent it as a distinct way of communicating. What makes ELF distinctive, and a significant area of study, is not that it is a different kind of communication, but on the contrary, that it so clearly brings out how communication works in general: since the degree of linguistic and schematic disparity between participants is likely to increase the challenge of convergence, the pragmatic process of achieving convergence will naturally become particularly apparent.

Classroom language ecologies are increasingly diverse as a result of mobility, migration, and information technology. In these spaces, interlocutors may draw upon shared linguistic and cultural resources but also bring in others. Prime examples are additional-language (AL) classrooms, where there is a shared target language, but where students may have different first languages from their classmates and teacher. In this chapter, we review empirical research on interaction in multilingual classrooms in approaches such as ethnography, translanguaging, and conversation analysis (CA), and discuss methods and findings in relation to the growing field of intercultural pragmatics (IP). Additionally, we offer an empirical illustration from video ethnography research in multilingual English AL classrooms in Sweden. With a CA approach, we demonstrate how a group of students participating in a vocabulary game manage an instance of diverging understandings of an English word. We show how, in resolving this interactional trouble, participants draw on the target language English and the societal/school language Swedish, and we discuss the observations in light of the IP concepts of salience and common ground. Finally, we argue that classroom studies detailing social actors’ language repertoires by using audiovisual data are essential in advancing our understanding of multilingual AL classrooms.

The expression of emotion in discourse (as defined in Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019) is treated from the perspective of intercultural pragmatics (as in, e.g, Kecskes 2004, 2011, 2014). Emotion is viewed as a pragmatic dynamical process that shows the interaction of brain-bodies-world (e.g. Van Gelder 1998, Gibbs 2010) and for that reason many aspects of its manifestation in different discourse systems/cultures are explored, taking into account not only the well-known fact that different languages and cultures may display differences in the expression of emotion at all linguistic levels (e.g. at the lexical level, a given language/culture may have a term to express an emotion that has not been conceptualized in another language (i.e. hypocognition, Levy 1973), being the cause of possible intercultural pragmalinguistic misunderstanding), but also the fact that different cultures may have different display rules (Ekman and Friesen 1975) and engage in different affective practices (Wetherell 2012), all of which may affect attempts to communicate when using a lingua franca. I argue in favor of a more comprehensive, socio-cognitive (e.g. Kecskes and Zhang 2009; Kecskes 2010) and sociopragmatic (Leech 1982, 2014) approach to the study of this kind of communication.

Over the last two decades, second-language pragmatics brought to the fore commonalities and conventions shared by speakers and hearers, those which create a common ground for communication, as well as culture varieties in language use, and those which cause communication breakdowns in real-life contexts. But, of course, meaning which is to be understood entirely under the influence of social interaction and cognitive change cannot capture the modalities or channels speakers use to convey a certain content of an utterance. Typically, natural behaviors, in the form of emotive effects, are integrated somehow into the interpretation of utterances in everyday life situations, a point generally missed in the literature on how utterances are understood in a second language. In the light of the above observations, an original feature of this chapter is its discussion of cases where "natural," i.e. affective, and linguistic communication interact in the interpretation of utterances. The task of describing and explaining what is conveyed by nonpropositional types of meaning, those "affective aspects of learning," such as feelings, attitudes, or preferences, falls squarely within the domain of L2 pragmatics, and the central aim of this chapter is to redress the balance.

The chapter addresses the relation between post-Gricean pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics. As such, it addresses meaning in relation to intentions and inferences and provides an overview of the main developments in this tradition, placing them in the context of the utility they have for understanding cross-cultural communication, and specifically the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Section 1.2 introduces the concept of pragmatic universals and moves to discussing how Grice’s account of cooperative conversational behavior can be viewed as such pragmatic universal principles. After pointing out some problems with Grice’s original account as it is seen from the perspective of several decades, Section 1.3 proceeds 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/pragmatic boundary and the related question of the truth-conditional content that opened up interesting contextualist pursuits (Section 1.3.2). Section 1.4 addresses different versions of contextualism and places them in the context of the debates between minimalists and contextualists. Section 1.5 concludes with comments on the utility of post-Gricean pragmatics for intercultural communication, stressing the significance of pragmatic universals.