Page 158 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

136 Susanne Günthner

power of the words depends on the power of the speaker of the words, which is
determined by her/his social location in a particular ‘field’. In addition to this
view, one should stress that the social location of the speaker is itself con-
structed communicatively to a large extent, as his/her access to a certain field is
built up by communicative activities and by way of communicative genres.
The concept of communicative genres not only allows us to analyze com-
municative activities, but it also provides a framework for relating particular
practices to larger sociocultural contexts, and thus for connecting emerging
communicative gestalts to sedimented and culturally conventionalized patterns.

3. Aspects of instantiating communicative genres within intercultural
communication

In portraying the different levels of genre analysis, I have referred to literature
on possible cultural variation in the use of features situated on these levels. In
the following, I shall portray the possible consequences of culturally specific
genre traditions for intercultural encounters.
As communicative genres are historical and cultural products, working as
orientation frames to produce and interpret communicative action, different cul-
tural groups may have different repertoires of genres; a given communicative
problem (e.g. lamenting for the dead) may be ‘institutionalized’ as a communi-
cative genre in some cultural groups, but not in others. Lack of knowledge
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about such differences may lead to problems in some situations. Even more
treacherous, however, are situations into which the participants enter with dif-
ferent repertoires of seemingly similar genres (academic discussions, business
negotiations, job interviews) and with inadequate knowledge about the differ-
ences in the mode of employment of the genre, stylistic variations, etc.

3.1. Culturally varying repertoires of communicative genres
In intercultural communication participants ‘start’ with different repertoires of
genres. In one cultural group there may be generic ways of handling particular
communicative activities, whereas interactants of another group may not be
familiar with this routinized pattern.
Birkner and Kern’s (2000) work on job interviews between East and West
German participants provides a striking example of interactants who are con-
fronted with a so far unfamiliar genre. After German reunification, East Ger-
mans were confronted with the genre of job interviews. What Birkner and
Kern’s empirical investigation shows, is a clash between the demands of the
genre (being part of the communicative culture of the West) and the communi-
cative resources available qua membership of the East German communicative