This volume contains a selection of papers from a special session of the International Pragmatics Conference (Antwerp, August 1987) and from the Symposium on Intercultural Communication (Ghent, December 1987). Studying the communicative styles of cultures and social groups, both at the descriptive level and at the level of pragmatic theory construction, should be a target of pragmatics as a discipline. A clear view is needed of the restrictions on adaptability involving potential fields of conflict in intercultural and international communication. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, very little should be taken for granted in this respect.

Misunderstanding is a pervasive phenomenon in social life, sometimes with serious consequences for people's life chances. Misunderstandings are especially hazardous in high-stakes events such as job interviews or in the legal system. In unequal power encounters, unsuccessful communication is regularly attributed to the less powerful participant, especially when those participants are members of an ethnic minority group. But even when communicative events are not prestructured by participants' differential positions in social hierarchies, misunderstandings occur at different levels of interactional and social engagement. Misunderstanding in Social Life examines such problematic talk in ordinary conversation and different institutional settings, including socializing events and story tellings, education and assessment activities, and interviews in TV news broadcasts, employment agencies, legal settings, and language testing. The analyzed interactions are located in a variety of sociocultural environments and conducted in a range of languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, such language varieties as Aboriginal Australian English and Maori New Zealand English, and nonnative varieties. The original studies included in this volume adopt a variety of theoretical perspectives, including discourse-pragmatic approaches, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, social constructionism, tropological and narrative analysis. They represent multiple views of misunderstanding as a multilayered discourse event.

This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.

This volume comprises the first part of selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, August 1987.

This volume contains a selection of papers from a special session of the International Pragmatics Conference (Antwerp, August 1987) and from the Symposium on Intercultural Communication (Ghent, December 1987). Studying the communicative styles of cultures and social groups, both at the descriptive level and at the level of pragmatic theory construction, should be a target of pragmatics as a discipline. A clear view is needed of the restrictions on adaptability involving potential fields of conflict in intercultural and international communication. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, very little should be taken for granted in this respect.

The book is the first of its kind to establish Cognitive Linguistics as a research paradigm within the field of world Englishes. The authors survey the main tenets of both areas of linguistic enquiry and suggest that the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed both within Cognitive Linguistics generally and within its novel sub-discipline Cognitive Sociolinguistics can overcome certain limitations inherent in traditional approaches to cultural variation in language. They present a case study of the linguistic realization of the cultural model of community in African English as an exemplar for the investigation of cultural models in other varieties of English. Corpus-linguistic methods are combined with conceptual metaphor analysis and blending theory to elucidate a vast network of conceptualizations salient to speakers of African English. The findings, based on computer corpora and a range of additional sources, are discussed against the background of work in anthropology, religious studies, and political science. The book also reflects on the role of English in intercultural communication and concludes with a comparison of Cognitive Linguistics and pragmatic functionalism, placing the former in the wider framework of a hermeneutic philosophy that stresses dialogic understanding.

The contributions to the book “Communicating Gender in Context” deal not only with grammatical gender, but also with discursive procedures for constructing gender as a relevant social category in text and context. Attention is directed to European cultures which till now have come up short in linguistic and discourse analytic gender studies, e.g., Austria, Spain, Turkey, Germany, Poland and Sweden. But also English speech communities and questions of English grammatical gender are dealt with.In accordance with recent sociolinguistic research the contributors refrain from generalizing theses about how men and women normally speak; no conversational style feature adheres so firmly to one sex as was thought in early feminism. The studies, however, show that even today the feminine gender is often staged in a way that leads to situative asymmetry to the advantage of men. The broader societal context of patriarchy does not determine all communicative encounters, but demands particular efforts from women and men to be subverted.

This volume comprises the second part of selected papers of the International Pragmatics Conference in Antwerp, August 1987.

This collection of papers fills a gap in current research on both metapragmatics and pragmatics in that it combines data-based pragmatic analysis with metapragmatic theory and focuses on the ways in which metadiscourse is actually used. The 12 contributions investigate speech acts and verbal (as well as non-verbal) expressions which highlight (meta-)linguistic aspects of ongoing discourse and thus provoke a deviation from the latter’s original direction and purpose. All case studies discuss ways and means which interactants employ to resolve diverging pragmatic expectations in communication. The papers analyze authentic examples from English and other languages (and cultures), including Thai, Chinese and Japanese, and center around three principal domains of communication: ordinary everyday interaction, interaction in educational contexts and in specialized discourse. The introductory chapter locates the various contributions within a systematically broader theoretical framework. The wide scope of the collection, its empirical orientation and the reader-friendly form of presentation should appeal to anyone interested in pragmatics, whether scholar or student.

This innovative and interdisciplinary book on style shifting in Japanese brings together a wide range of perspectives and methodologies—including discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, and functional linguistics—to look at a variety of types of style shifting in both spoken and written Japanese discourse. Though diverse in approach, the contributions all reflect the belief that language use is inextricably linked to both context and language structure in mutually constitutive relationships. Topics covered include shifting between "polite" and "plain" styles, the emergence of a "semi-polite" style, speakers' strategic use of gendered styles or regional dialects, shifting between different deictic expressions, and prosodic shifting. This careful and detailed examination advances our understanding of the complex phenomenon of style shifting not only in Japanese, but also more generally, and will be of interest to researchers and students in fields such as linguistics, linguistic anthropology, communication studies, and second language acquisition and teaching.