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Skidding on common ground: A socio-cognitive approach to problems in intercultural communicative situations

The research presented in this paper is qualitative in nature and focuses on a number of conversational interchanges that took place either between native and non-native speakers of English or interlocutors who came from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and who were using English as a l...

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Published in:Journal of pragmatics 2019-10, Vol.151, p.118-127
Main Author: Trbojević Milošević, Ivana
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:The research presented in this paper is qualitative in nature and focuses on a number of conversational interchanges that took place either between native and non-native speakers of English or interlocutors who came from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and who were using English as a lingua franca. The aim of the paper is to explore and account for the reasons underlying the ‘misfiring’ and communication problems that characterized these conversations. In my analysis I have relied on the socio-cognitive approach of utterance interpretation that fully acknowledges the role of private and actual contexts in governing the speakers' linguistic choices, as well as on the dynamic model of meaning as proposed by Kecskes (2008, 2009, 2010, 2014), that argues for the dynamic construal of meaning as complex and elaborate work shared in by the speaker and the hearer. Adhering to Kecskes' (2008) view that context, especially the private context, plays both a selective and constituting role in co-constructing the common ground by the participants in conversation, I propose that failure to establish the common ground ('skidding on the common ground') in intercultural conversations can be traced to partial differences or similarities between the private contexts of the interlocutors. •Misunderstandings in intercultural communication are best addressed from the viewpoint of the socio-cognitive approach to utterance interpretation.•The intercultural nature of the conversations under analysis imposes a 'contrastive' perspective on the problem of misunderstanding.•Failure to establish common ground seems to result from partial differences between private contexts of the interlocutors.
ISSN:0378-2166
1879-1387
DOI:10.1016/j.pragma.2019.05.024