Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Published: 2017-05-30T12:15:02+00:00

2.Theoretical anchoring

So, how do people construct ‘otherness’ when talking about their expectations and experiences with regard to patterns of behaviors, values, and world views of the host culture? As Schütz (1970; 1944/1976) maintains, such constructions take the systems of relevance of our own culture as a starting point. Here, interpretational relevance plays a crucial role in providing an evaluative comparison between the actual event, action, or cognition: for example, a certain intercultural incident calls attention to itself because of its unexpected evolvement in marked contrast to our stock of knowledge, which contains already determined typifications and prior structures of relevance. Since the task is to make this incident coherent by typifying and explaining it in accordance with the ready-made standardised and habitualised concepts and structures at hand, and in intercultural encounters such ‘recipes’ are challenged and since they do not always work, the individual becomes increasingly aware of the alternative reality and also begins to understand that his or her own culture may not be seen as an unquestionable but as a contingent world view. Nowadays, everyone’s stock of knowledge in the Western World is already interwoven by such knowledge obtained from media, school, university, and further forms of experience mediated by others. Hence, we are not only equipped with the cultural dimensions and polar scales we have already heard or read about, but also with the whole ‘interdiscourse’ involved. This includes the way those categorisations are evaluated in public and by the public opinion. As a consequence, the sequences I chose for the following analysis associate the multi-level reflections with those categorisations, namely, the pre-figured cultural dimensions coming into play when the interactants try to classify cultural phenomena. This is especially the case in those moments when metacognitive acts become visible in explicit or implicit metacommuniation.

Since Bateson (1955/1972), it has become a fundamental insight that one has to distinguish between ‘metalinguistic messages’ as communication about language as a code and ‘metacommunicative messages’ as the framing of communication in verbal interaction also including nonverbal or paraverbal hints; an insight that has initiated research in the field of metacommunication. While Lucy’s (1993) understanding of ‘reflexive language’, and Silverstein’s as well as Verschueren’s (1998) concept of ‘metapragmatics’, draw on the reflexivity of language per se, Bublitz and Hübler (2007) and Hübler (2011) attempt to re-establish the idea of metacommunication by conceiving it as a field of research within “metapragmatics as the pragmatics of actually performed meta-utterances that serve as means of commenting on and interfering with ongoing discourse or text” (Bublitz and Hübler 2007, 6). Through this delineation, the authors exclude several phenomena like reportive speech or echo-utterances, and choose a decisive criterion to draw this distinction: according to their understanding, metacommunication is always related to a shift from one plane of action to another – from narration to debate, from coherent to less coherent, from neutral to evaluative; i.e., there is a “break which marks the boundary between communication and metacommunication: the ongoing dialogic flow comes to a halt” (Hübler 2011, 113).

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