Page 42 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

20 John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz

and c) his background knowledge tells him that this sort of stress is often used
when a speaker has a proposal to make. Therefore he seems justified in drawing
the inference that the speaker had some activity in mind. And this is what moti-
vates his inference. Such an interpretation is of course not the only possible one.
The background knowledge Bill relied on was acquired through past communi-
cative experience.
Where background knowledge or indexical signaling processes are not
shared, interpretations may differ, and this is precisely what tends to go wrong
when people who differ in cultural knowledge interact. Focusing on communi-
cative practice does not solve the problem of interpretive ambiguity. The aim is
to detect what it is about speakers’ linguistic and cultural background that leads
them to a particular interpretation. This is of course quite different from assess-
ing the truth or falsity of specific interpretations. Situated on-line interpretation
that reveals both what the most likely inferences are and how participants arrive
at them can be shown to be useful in studies of inter-cultural and inter-ethnic
communication in detecting systematic differences in interpretive practices af-
fecting individuals’ ability to create and maintain conversational involvement.

5. Misunderstandings as a resource for generalizations
about communicative practice

Throughout the chapter we use excerpts from urban encounters to show how dis-
course analysis of the linguistic anthropologists’ notion of context-bound com-
municative practice has begun to reshape our understanding of the complexities
of communication in everyday situations. To reiterate: what the presuppositions
are that enter into conversational inference and how they are reflected in talk
varies among other things with speakers’ and listeners’ communicative back-
ground. The sharing of inferential procedures cannot be taken for granted; it
must be demonstrated through ethnographically informed in-depth analysis of
what transpires in an encounter. A main purpose of analysis is to show how di-
versity can affect interpretation. Some of the best known studies in interactional
sociolinguistics were in fact carried out in urban workplace settings where
laymen who are under great pressure to perform must deal with experts whose
interpretive premises are quite different from their own and therefore operate
with different background assumptions (Gumperz 1981, 1982; Gumperz and
Roberts 1991, Roberts in this volume). Analysis of such situations can reveal the
nature of the inferential process.
Now consider the following brief excerpt from a set of selection interviews
for individuals who, having lost their positions are applying for paid trainee-
ships at a publicly funded institution offering instruction in skills that are in
short supply. In each case R is the interviewer and T the applicant.