Volume 16, Issue 1 -

Seven groups with ten people in each participated in a simulated activity in which they played the part of employees asking their boss for two days of leave. Four groups were made up of native speakers of British English, Metropolitan French, Chilean Spanish, and Swedish, respectively; the remaining three groups being non-native speakers of British English, Metropolitan French, and Chilean Spanish, with Swedish as their L1, who were long-time residents of their respective host countries. The aim of the study was to investigate the patterns of impression management that emerged in the different participant groups. Two dimensions of comparison were in focus: one regarding intercultural differences between the native speaker groups, and the other concerning non-native speakers’ alignment with local patterns of behavior. The analysis shows little variation among the three groups with regard to profession-oriented strategies, whereas divergences related to affective variables were considerably greater. The non-native speakers exhibited a generally high degree of alignment to local patterns in all three national contexts, although lower degrees of alignment appeared with regard to variables specifically reflecting common Swedish national self-images.

Pragmatic communication refers to the ability to use language and other expressive means, i.e. non-verbal/extralinguistic means such as gestures and facial expressions, in order to convey and interpret meaning in a specific context. Pragmatic abilities are important in everyday life in interpersonal interactions as they affect the way people communicate and behave in social situations. Providing a comprehensive and accurate assessment of pragmatic abilities can be challenging, partially due to the scarcity of valid assessment tools in this area. Culture-related aspects of communication need to be taken into consideration, and the assessment tools need to be specific and sensitive for specific cultural contexts. In this paper, we present the results concerning the administration of the first preliminary translation and adaptation into the Finnish language of the equivalent form A of the Italian Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo) to a sample of neurotypical Finnish adults (n=36); we discuss the results, highlighting cultural features and the consequent adaptation requirements. Data regarding performance on each subscale and on each item of the ABaCo are provided, together with a qualitative analysis of the answers. These data indicate good performance on the majority of the subscales used, thus indicating good properties of the preliminary Finnish version of the ABaCo. Compared to the paralinguistic and context scales, where the participants exhibited good performance, slightly lower scores were obtained on the extralinguistic scale. Such results shed light on a number of differences in the way Finnish people interpret pragmatically challenging communicative situations. The present study represents an interesting starting point for further steps in the specific ABaCo adaptation process, as well as for future studies in terms of cross-cultural investigation.

Peer evaluation (PE) of student writings is increasingly conducted online these days, creating unique opportunities for intercultural communication. Adopting a socio-cognitive approach and drawing on data from an online exchange program between Chinese and American university students, the study examines how revision-oriented metapragmatic comments (MPCs) are used to adjust the salience of specific contextual factors in three dimensions: information (including socio-cultural, language, and writing knowledge), situational context, and interpersonal relations. The MPCs are found to have substantiated a host of pragmatic strategies, such as patterned moves, foregrounding or backgrounding information, evidentiality markers, dispreferred second turns, and highlighting group identity. Enhancing or degrading the salience of contextual factors, the MPCs facilitate the construction of a common ground between the Chinese and American students in terms of knowledge and personal affiliation. The use of revision-oriented MPCs in PE manifests the collaborative, mutually supportive nature of web-based intercultural communication.

This article documents the increasing use of the English curse word fuck worldwide, as well as its degree of adaption into the host language, its syntactic function, and its meaning and its strength as taboo. Comparing the use of fuck with a special focus on the Nordic countries ( Norway, Denmark , and Iceland ) with its use in Eurasia and Africa (with different alphabets, namely Cyrillic in Russia , Devanāgarī in India and Ge’ez script in Ethiopia ), we found some similar developmental patterns, but also differences, for example to what degree the English loan word has replaced local curses and in what ways among social groups within a country. Comparing the terms used for the same concept was challenging because some countries have better text corpora and more research on written languages and especially on taboos, and those without such resources required additional minor investigations for a baseline. Findings revealed that fuck has spread worldwide from English, and it is commonly used in Nordic languages today. In Russian fuck is also adopted into the heritage language to a relatively high degree, and it has further gained importance in the vocabulary of India, where English has become the most used language by the higher and middle classes, but less so by lower classes. In contrast, the study of Amharic language in Ethiopia shows that the f- word is rarely used at all, and only by youngsters. We found a pattern starting from the outer North with Icelandic having adapted and adopted the word fuck the most, a slight decline in use in Norwegian and Danish, with less adaption and use in Russian, even less in Indian-English or Hindi, and being more or less absent in the African language Amharic. Formally though it is used conceptually both in Hindi and Amharic.