Page 31 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Editors’ introduction 9

Editors’ introduction

Research on intercultural communication is a multidisciplinary endeavour.
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As early as the 18 century, researchers in disciplines such as psychology and
anthropology were exploring how culture and language mutually influence each
other and how this in turn impacts on thinking. Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767–1835) argued that language was the soul of a nation and that we could
discover national characteristics by means of language analysis (von Humboldt
1997).
Section 1 of this handbook demonstrates the range of disciplines that con-
tribute to research on intercultural communication, along with the variety of
research methods that are used. The authors’ areas of expertise include cultural
anthropology, discourse analysis/interactional sociolinguistics, cognitive prag-
matics, social/cross-cultural psychology, applied linguistics, social pragmatics
and organizational behaviour. The types of data the researchers gather for analy-
sis include questionnaire responses, interactional discourse and interview com-
ments, and the foci of their interests range from the understanding of intercul-
tural communication processes to the challenges of intercultural adjustment and
the management of conflict.
In chapter 2, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz, who are cultural anthropologists
as well as linguists, focus on the question of how culture influences communi-
cation. They argue for a perspective which distinguishes between grammatical
and semantic structures and the historical knowledge they encapsulate, on the
one hand, and broader communicative processes, on the other hand. They use a
number of interaction sequences to demonstrate what kinds of cultural knowl-
edge are needed for appropriate inferences to be drawn and for cooperative in-
teraction to take place. The authors outline developments within interactional
sociolinguistics, a branch of applied linguistics that has, for more than thirty
years, focused on the analysis of conversations in which participants have very
different repertoires. The analytical methods used are empirical, and usually in-
volve several steps: the recording of relevant situations followed by interview-
ing of key participants and checking with them about the researcher’s interpre-
tations of how local actors handle the problems they encounter. Building on the
tradition of the ethnography of communication, which these two authors have
strongly influenced, Gumperz and Cook-Gumperz maintain that researcher par-
ticipation in cultural events is of vital importance for identifying the implicit
knowledge of ‘insiders’. With this empirical procedure, it has been found that
contextualization cues, such as prosody, are highly important. When interpreted
along with other grammatical and lexical signs, they construct a contextual
ground for situated interpretation and thereby affect how particular messages
are (mis)understood.