Volume 14, Issue 4 -

This article analyzes intercultural academic discourse in an international research project involving German and Southern African scholars, with an eye on the use of figurative language in authentic communication. It combines intercultural pragmatics with a cognitive approach to figurative language as an expression of conceptual, cognitive patterns. This paper intends to show how international academics involved in intercultural communication actively and creatively apply metaphoric and other forms of figurative language to co-construct and conceptualize academic subject matter in transculturally understandable forms, and to forge a group identity in what has been called a “discursive interculture.” The quality and communicative success of figurative language for such purposes depends on various factors, for which both pragmatic and cognitive linguistic perspectives provide explanations, which is why an interdisciplinary integration of methods is advisable.

When people experience and talk about cultural alterity, they normally refer to polar scales, such as “individual/collective orientation patterns” or “direct/indirect ways of speaking” etc. The project of the research group (Inter-)Cultural Communication in Interaction entitled Intercultural communication in extended contacts: linguistic and (self-) reflexive processes (2012–2016) aimed to reveal how exchange students retrospectively co-construct and frame their experiences abroad on a verbal, vocal, and visual-corporal plane in elicited talk on encountered divergent cultural differences. The empirical data of the study originates from the corpus recorded by our group whose activities were initiated at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil in 2012 (http://www.letras.ufmg.br/nucleos/nucoi/). The specific proposal was to reveal the connection between communicative and cognitive processes coming into play in the co-construction of cultural dimensions in interaction, especially by the multimodal use of key metaphors and their underlying image schemas. For the theoretical background, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics with its focus on prosodic cues, as well as recent work on the multimodality of cognitive metaphor with its crucial contribution to gesture studies, serve as a starting point for a more detailed microanalytic approach as a first step of analysis. In a second step, we see how the results point to studies in the field of intercultural pragmatics, as well as to underlying polar cognitive cultural schemas, as discussed in cultural linguistics. Schemas found in the sequences might be associated with cultural styles reflected in embodied communication practices: These are strength/looseness , the conceptualization of people/cultures as open or closed , which refers to the container schema, as well as rectilinear/deviating motions designed in relation to the source-path-goal schema.

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how Japanese and Greek female students conceptualize politeness and then compare the findings in order to tease out any cross-cultural similarities and differences. The data is drawn from a questionnaire filled in by two hundred female undergraduates (one hundred from each group). The results show that there are significant similarities as well as some differences. Although research on im/politeness has concentrated almost exclusively on linguistic performance, a significant similarity between the two groups is that politeness is conceptualized as primarily non-linguistic action. Another major similarity is that both groups conceptualize politeness mainly as “consideration to others” and “appropriate behavior,” the former expressed mostly non-linguistically and the latter involving both linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations. Most participants view politeness as conveyed through attentiveness/helping others, respect and empathy. Differences were located mostly in the numbers of participants who mentioned the various subcategories. For example, more Greek participants related a broad sense of “respect” to politeness, whereas more Japanese participants related it to “empathy” and only Japanese participants mentioned “honorifics.” Our participants’ understandings of politeness appear to be in contrast to earlier politeness theories which view politeness as strategic concern for conflict avoidance and closer to current approaches which view it as relational, expressing concern for the needs and feelings of others.

In this paper, I will try to support the admittedly controversial claim that presuppositions are normally defeasible inferences, taking the lead from Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics . Cambridge: CUP., Simons, Mandy. 2013. On the conversational basis of some presuppositions. In A. Capone, F. Lo Piparo & M. Carapezza (eds), Perspectives on linguistic pragmatics , 329–348. Dordrecht: Springer, Macagno, Fabrizio & Alessandro, Capone. 2016a. Presuppositions as cancellable inferences. In K. Allan, A. Capone, I. Kecskes & Springer Dordrecht (eds.), 45–68; Macagno, Fabrizio & Alessandro. Capone. 2016b. Uncommon ground. Intercultural Pragmatics 13(2). 51–180. In passing, I will justify further some of the claims we made in Macagno, Fabrizio & Alessandro. Capone. 2016a. Presuppositions as cancellable inferences. In K. Allan, A. Capone, I. Kecskes & Springer Dordrecht (eds.), 45–68; Macagno, Fabrizio & Alessandro. Capone. 2016b. Uncommon ground. Intercultural Pragmatics 13(2). 51–180. I will also make a further attempt to explain those notions in a clearer way. Most importantly, I will capitalize on the distinction between potential and actual presuppositions, a distinction which may parallel the one between potential and actual conversational implicatures (see Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings. The theory of generalized conversational implicature . Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press; Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics . Cambridge: CUP; Huang, Yan. 1994. The syntax and pragmatics of anaphora. A study with special reference to Chinese . Cambridge: CUP.; Huang, Yan. 2014. Pragmatics . Oxford: OUP.). Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics . Cambridge: CUP. understands this distinction and assumes it is of importance, but, in my opinion, he does not sufficiently capitalize on this, as I want to do in this paper. Also, the terminology he uses is not exactly cast in these terms, but I think it is not unreasonable to borrow the distinction from the theory of generalized conversational implicatures, given that as Atlas, Jay. 2004. Presupposition. In L.R. Horn & G. Ward (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics . Oxford: Blackwell, and Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics . Cambridge: CUP. say, there are many points of contact between conversational implicatures and conversational presuppositions.