Volume 3, Issue 1

Research has shown that native speakers (NSs) are generally capable of adjusting their language to make it appropriate for a non-native speaker (NNS) interlocutor's proficiency. Very little is known in general about humorous interaction in intercultural communication, and in particular little is known about whether, how, and what types of conversational adjustments are made during such interaction. The research presented here suggests that the adjustments made by NSs during conversational humor often may not be appropriate for the NNS. In fact, in this type of communication, NSs who do not have experience in intercultural communication may actually overestimate the amount and types of adjustments that are necessary, thus underestimating the second language (L2) user's proficiency. The result is that the L2 user sometimes gets marginalized and constructed as less than competent during playful interaction. This paper reports on a case study of one L2 user who, due to the interactional adjustments that were made when humor was used, was often positioned in marginalizing ways by interlocutors who were inexperienced in intercultural communication.

Speech accommodation theory refers to an individual's adaptation of his or her speech to more closely approximate that of an interlocutor. A change to the interlocutor's language is one of the most obvious and observable forms of accommodation. Language choices are shaped by the linguistic proficiency of both speaker and interlocutor, the ingroup or outgroup status of each, and the situational norms for the setting in which an exchange takes place. Language choices in the workplace are further influenced by company policies and by the asymmetrical power dynamic in worker-customer interactions. This paper reports on data from service encounters with individuals who use Spanish and English in the workplace. Seven fieldworkers, acting as customers, entered businesses in New York City and initiated exchanges in Spanish, noting the worker's language of response. In the majority of encounters conducted for this project, accommodation to the customer's language choice came at the first turn. It was predicted that a customer's non-Latino ethnicity would be the most important factor in a worker's non-accommodation, but the worker's youth turned out to have the greatest effect on whether a non-reciprocal response was given.

The French pronoun system presents a particular difficulty for English-speaking learners of French with the distinction between the second person pronouns tu and vous . In textbooks, these pronouns are typically described in terms of politeness or formality but the reality is much more complex. In addition, the pronouns interact with address terms such as first name, title + last name and title + first name, which give the system further complexity. While the language structures involved are simple, the cultural context in which they are deployed is complex and involves an understanding of how interpersonal relationships are constructed and communicated through the French language. This paper will explore students' learning of aspects of the French address system from an intercultural perspective and examine the ways in which learners come to construct their own personal understandings of interpersonal relationships as they are represented in and through French.

I am grateful to Robyn Carston for her judicious and constructive commentary on my recent prise de position (Horn 2005a). In the spirit of Carston's remarks, I will touch on both some of the areas of agreement and some of the domains of divergence between her model of pragmatics and mine, while somewhat slighting the territories in which our approaches are more complementary.

Readers of this journal have recently witnessed a discussion between Kanavillil Rajagopalan and Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber on the role of the social aspects in pragmatics. I would like to touch on this issue from another point of view, focusing on intercultural (contrastive, crosscultural, and interlanguage) pragmatics. Over the past twenty years this field has made substantial contributions to the extension of linguistic models and the understanding of the relation between language and culture, as well as expanding the basis for second language studies and language curriculum materials. The scope of this journal offers wonderful opportunities for interaction and collaboration between scholars researching and applying pragmatics in different ways interculturally. I would like to draw attention to some dimensions which, to my knowledge, have so far been on the margins of the field, focusing first on the speech act of introduction, the very beginning of interpersonal interaction, which I will show varies even within speakers of German. This example raises the issue of variation in intercultural pragmatics and to pluricentric languages, ones with ‘several interacting centres, each of which provides at least some of (their) own (codified) norms’ (Clyne 1992: 1). Different national varieties are linked to specific norms of expression and cultural values. Central to the discussion is the issue of what pragmatic norms should be expected of second language learners. In discussion of English, the most pluricentric and international of all languages, the power of the pragmatics and discourse of the ‘native speaker’ of particular varieties is critiqued within the context of certain cultural parameters.

Ira A. Noveck and Dan Sperber (eds.). 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Houndmills, Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 348 pp. (Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language, and Cognition 2). (Enikő Németh T.) Maria Pilar Safont Jordà. 2005. Third Language Learners: Pragmatic Production and Awareness. Clevedon / Bualo / Toronto: Multilingual Matters. 184 pp.(Liang Chen)