Page 147 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Editors’ introduction 125

codes contain symbolization processes that transcend the realm of interpersonal
relations and communicate honour. Kotthoff shows the interconnection of ritual
and style especially in comparing toasting in formerly Soviet republics and in
Western Europe. She combines insights from the ethnography of speaking, an-
thropology, sociolinguistics and conversation analysis to discuss scenes of in-
tercultural stylistic difference, adaptation, and creativity. The performance
study of various genres and activity types gives us access to individualistic and
sociocentric conceptions of personhood. The concept of style is related to that of
face work and to that of contextualization.
Lingua franca communication is the topic of chapter 10. Christiane Meier-
kord shows it as involving an increased number of communicative conventions
and linguistic signs and as, thus, resulting in the participants’ heightened inse-
curity as to what constitutes appropriate behaviour in the interaction. Cultural
differences are reflected in genres such as narratives and argumentation, but also
in politeness styles. Their admixture can result in new, ‘in-between’ cultures.
Although the focus is on South Africa, where English and Afrikaans serve as the
major lingua francas, Meierkord relates information about many multilingual
countries in which Esperanto, pidgins and creole languages play a role. A con-
siderable body of literature has developed around several lingua francas. South
Africa nowadays promotes multilingualism, whereas the apartheid regime had
made Afrikaans and English the sole official languages of South Africa. How-
ever, these two languages are still the languages used by the powerful elites, and
to date most schools have failed to go beyond the teaching of Bantu as a second
language. English is given a special status, which makes the situation diglossic.
Meierkord reports many studies which show that speakers tend to carry the con-
ventions of their mother tongue into their second language English. For example,
greetings are longer in Xhosa. South African English is in the process of absorb-
ing a variety of conventions that lend a peculiarly idiosyncratic pragmatic di-
mension to many encounters.
Helen Spencer-Oatey and Jianyu Xing argue in chapter 11 that the inter-
preter is never a non-person, but is an active participant who influences the ways
in which the discourse develops. Culture influences all the roles an interpreter
plays: message converter, message clarifier, cultural clarifier, and advocate of
the primary interlocutor. They examine authentic intercultural data from various
settings in which an interpreter’s unsatisfactory performance resulted in a some-
times very problematic encounter for the primary interlocutors. They discuss in
detail scenes from a Chinese-British business meeting which were video-taped
and discussed with all the participants. The interpreter created confusion be-
cause he paid such great attention to perceived cultural conventions that mean-
ings were distorted.
All five chapters of this section draw on authentic conversational material
that was to a large extent gathered by the authors themselves. Their methods, in-