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Ritual and style across cultures 177

tend than in the West, drinking toasts communicate a sociocentric concept of
personhood.

3. Style, inference and keying

Style plays an important role not only in ritual communication. Tannen (1984)
pointed out that style is more than “the frosting on a cake.” Style is the particular
way in which utterances and activities are performed in their contexts of use.
Within a culture we conventionalize stylistic features which thereby become ex-
pectable in a certain context. Degrees of (in)directness and (in)formality are,
among others, important stylistic dimensions in many social settings. Gumperz
(1979) combined insights from ethnography of speaking, anthropology, socio-
linguistics and conversation analysis to suggest a way of analyzing speech styles
as contextualization cues, i.e., cues that speakers use to suggest the interpre-
tation of what is said within and in relation to particular interpretive frames,
e.g., for dimensions such as degree of formality, directness, and intimacy (cf.
also Auer 1992). I will use this approach here to discuss scenes of intercultural
stylistic difference, adaptation, misinterpretation, and creativity.
Interactants use styles and their alternation in order to signal and constitute
various kinds of meaning, e.g., textual, situational, social and/or interactional;
recipients, on the other hand, perceive and interpret style as a meaningful cue
used to make particular kinds of meaning inferable (Sandig and Selting 1997).
Accordingly, important tasks of stylistic research are (a) the description of the
ways in which style and stylistic means are used to constitute stylistic meanings
and (b) the analysis of the kinds of stylistic meanings that recipients perceive
and interpret. Since contextualization cues are the most unconsciously used de-
vices and are interpreted against the background of one’s own culturally con-
ventionalized expectations, their misuse often results in unnoticed misinterpre-
tations of communicative intent. Style is often the interplay of verbal and other
semiotic cues (Eckert 2000). Language and speech are accompanied by other
semiotic procedures, for example clothing, which often indicate at the same
time a gender, class and situation marking. The “performative turn” in semiotics
and pragmatics points to the necessity of reconstructing bundles of co-occurring
style features which are used as constitutive and meaningful cues of holistic
styles. Sandig and Selting (1997) write that many typified styles can be con-
ceived of as being organized prototypically, with prototypical kernel features
most relevant for the constitution and interpretation of a particular style as
against more peripheral features that a style might share with “neighboring”
styles. Hence, styles can be realized more or less clearly.
In all areas of intercultural communication style is a relevant dimension
which may be the origin of social difficulties and conflicts (Tannen 1984). In her