Volume 21, Issue 1

Current times call for continuous communication across countries, negotiations on several levels, and the creation of international relationships based on dialogue and participation. Those ideals are often pursued in intercultural communication contexts and written about, as a desideratum, in the Intercultural Communication literature. However, how can this be achieved concretely? In this article, we analyze how decisions are taken by newly founded intercultural teams of higher-education students playing a so-called intercultural game online via Zoom. The game revolves around the creation of a development plan for a fictitious city. In our study, we conducted a conversation-analytic investigation of decision-making processes by players oriented towards the ideal of ‘intercultural speakers’ as the ones mediating between different points of view and giving voice to all parties in an inclusive way. We illustrate our analysis with examples that range from unilateral decision making to decisions achieved through highly collaborative processes. We point to how expectations of inclusion-oriented interactional moves in intercultural situations are sometimes at odds with how these interactions and the related decision-making processes actually unfold.

This paper examines factors that affect the comprehension of novel and conventional idiomatic expressions by second language students of English. Using the Conventional Figurative Language Theory (CFLT), the study explores how the understanding of novel and conventional idioms differs and how it is affected by context. I find that novel idioms tend to be easier to comprehend than conventional idioms and interpret this effect through the role of digital media in the creation and dissemination of new phraseological coinages. However, I also observe that while the understanding of conventional idioms is enhanced by context, the role of context in the comprehension of novel idioms is not pronounced. I conclude by discussing the strategies that facilitate the comprehension of both novel and conventional idioms such as the analysis of mental imagery associated with their literal meanings, reliance on background knowledge, and attention to the motivation of an idiomatic expression.

Difficulties in false belief reasoning are associated with autism spectrum. False belief tasks tend to be easy to administer and code, and thus are often used for testing purposes. However, the amount of information that can be gleaned from this type of assessment task goes beyond correct/wrong score attribution. Instead, fine-grained information may be derive from a detailed qualitative analysis of the content of the answers, as well as the strategies used to produce them. Moreover, the testing situation contains other interesting aspects, such as a child’s orientation to the task. Therefore, we examined both qualitatively and quantitatively the various ways children (15 autistic and 15 control children; mean age 7;5 years) responded to a false belief question. The false belief question was more difficult for the autistic than for the control children, but there was no statistically significant difference among the answering strategies between the groups. The answering strategies were mostly similar between the groups. Autistic children preferred to use nouns or locative pro-adverbs while answering, whereas control children used more versatile ways of answering, even though the length of the answers did not differ between the groups. When considering the orientation to the ongoing task, the autistic children had longer reaction times than the control children did. Some autistic children needed the researcher’s support to focus on the task, but in general, expressions of uncertainty or commenting during the task were not frequent among the children. The results of this study can be utilized in deepening our understanding of the abilities of autistic individuals and to develop sensitive ways to assess and support autistic children.

Pragmatics research has been following two separate lines: the cognitive-philosophical line and the sociocultural-interactional line. Joining recent efforts of integration in pragmatics research, this paper reinterprets from a socio-cognitive perspective Grice’s theory of conversation (the Cooperative Principle with attendant maxims). The paper aims to incorporate social considerations into the theory, in the hope of enhancing its explanatory potential for information exchange in real-life discourse contexts. Focusing on cooperation as process, this paper examines Grice’s theory of conversation in connection with his theory of meaning and looks into the social-normative basis of the conversational behavior predicted by Grice. The conversational maxims can be characterized as socio-cognitive in the sense of being both cognitive and normative. They are normative expectations whose breach commits the speaker to interpretive and social consequences. The maxims used to be thought of in terms of a simple dichotomy: they are either observed or not observed, and non-observance has often been equated with non-cooperation. The paper draws attention to the fact that non-observance comes in different types (violating, opting out, flouting, and so on). It matters communicatively and extra-communicatively which type the non-observance falls into, as different types of non-observance have different interpretive and social consequences.