Volume 7, Issue 1

The experience of immigrants and other people who live transcultural lives (cf. Besemeres and Wierzbicka eds. Translating lives: Living with two languages and cultures, University of Queensland Press, 2007) confirms that different societies and lingua-cultures have different tacit norms for interpersonal communication; and that such differences matter a great deal in many people's lives. Every lingua-culture inherits, and transmits, historically and culturally-shaped ways of thinking. This applies to English-speaking societies no less than to any other. Given the massive scale of past and on-going immigration to English-speaking countries as well as the growing domination of English in the global world it is particularly important to recognize that English, too, is saturated with historically-transmitted cultural assumptions. It is, above all, ‘Anglo English’—the common core of the “Englishes of the inner circle” (Kachru 1985)—which tends to be mistaken for a culture-neutral medium of communication. As a result, ‘Anglo English’, which greatly facilitates cross-cultural communication in today's world, is also a major source of miscommunication and cross-cultural failure. This paper takes as its starting point one of the most illuminating cross-cultural novels, Nabokov's Pnin, described by Mary Besemeres (Translating one's self: Language and selfhood in cross-cultural autobiography, Peter Lang, 2002) as “the portrait of a Russian emigrant whom fate has left dangling in the alien English language”. The author surveys a number of “anomalies” in “Pninian English” which had an impact on Pnin's life in America. Then the paper moves beyond Pnin, but stays with Nabokov, and explores one area of immigrant linguistic condition: the loss of cultural keywords. I focus in particular on the Russian key cultural concept of ‘sud’ba' and on Nabokov's continued reliance on this concept in his books created, through the English medium, by his post-Russian authorial self. My overall purpose, however, is not to talk about Nabokov, but to illuminate the immigrant condition and the miscommunication inherent in cross-cultural communication. In my analysis, I rely on the ‘NSM’ methodology of semantic analysis, which allows us to analyse intercultural communication and miscommunication from a neutral, non-Anglocentric perspective.

This article explores the parallel English and Greek announcements heard in the Athens Metro stations. It is argued that these announcements constitute a new genre, characterized by a specific format including three stages (opening, main body, closing) and manifesting the interplay between global and local linguacultural influences. The way English is used in this context diverges from native English speaker norms and, despite the expected brevity because of the temporal and acoustic constraints of the environment, elaborate constructions are employed. Both the Greek and the English announcements are verbose, since elaboration is assumed to indicate the required formality and politeness. This in turn contributes to the construction of a serious and polite institution, which can therefore be trusted by passengers. The underlying assumption seems to be that in impressive surroundings such as the Athens Metro, the linguistic code should be equally impressive rather than follow the norms of pithy announcements heard in the London Underground stations. This partly reflects the current linguistic reality in Greece, where elaborate formal constructions are thought to convey “seriousness” and “importance”.

The linguistic study of apologies has focused on identifying pragmatic norms, but with porous and inconsistent results. Functionalist models have had more success, but have not fully recognized the centrality of negotiation and discursive struggle highlighted by Thomas (Journal of Pragmatics 9: 765–783, 1985), Watts (Politeness in language, Mouton De Gruyter, 2005) and others. One major source for extended apologies is the collective apology but research in this area, mostly social-psychological, has revealed little about the pragmatics. This paper evaluates the pragmatics of apology negotiations in two Sino-American crises (1999 and 2001), as discussed in off-the-record interviews by several US officials involved in these negotiations. The apologies involved extended negotiation, with multiple speakers and audiences separated by very different cultures, multiple written translations of the “apologies”, strategic illocutionary and semantic ambiguities—and a struggle to achieve each side's realpolitical goals, accompanied by a dialectical struggle over the pragmatic meaning of the wordings used and over what an apology actually is and does. All of this proceeded in lock with a broader system of verbal remedies as well as looping back to a set of non-verbal strategies such as delay and penalization. The study indicates the importance of negotiation and discursive struggle in the diplomatic apology and possibly in apologies in general.

This paper examines linguistic politeness in a bilingual society, focusing on forms of address among Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia. We ask in what ways groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different norms of politeness and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal form of the second person pronoun, but we also investigate other aspects of sociolinguistic interaction. The analysis is based on university students' responses to a sociolinguistic questionnaire. Data from both native Estonian speakers in Estonia and native Russian speakers in Russia are compared with data from Russian speakers living in Estonia. We find that where differences are apparent between Estonian and Russian speakers, the Russian diaspora in Estonia falls between both of the majority groups.

Good communicative skills are key to medical professionals; they may even be life saving. Because of a lack of research on migrant doctors (rather than migrant patients) and on pragmatic aspects of doctors' communication with patients (rather than on strictly linguistic aspects), the present study investigated the pragmatic competence of doctors using an L2 in their clinical setting. By means of discourse completion tasks, L1 and L2 doctors in Belgium and Sweden were studied in terms of how they modify their interactions with patients. Discrepancies were found between the different groups of doctors. The Belgian L1 doctors used more internal modification than their L2 colleagues (syntactic and lexical modification of their main message). The Belgian L2 doctors' underrepresentation of syntactic and lexical modification is counterbalanced by a native-like pattern for external modification, whereby these doctors seem to pay particular attention to consolidation. The Swedish L1 doctors used more external modification (adding an utterance after their main message) than their L2 colleagues, but the Swedish L2 doctors used more internal, syntactic modification which can be understood as an expression of an overcompensation strategy to ensure adequate mitigation and consolidation. Pragmatically, one type of Swedish L2 underrepresentation, i.e., external modification, is counterbalanced by another type of modification, i.e., internal modification.

The literature on terms of address (TofA) abounds in both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Mostly, sociolinguistics explains them with rank and age (Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society, Penguin Books, 1983; Wardhaugh, An introduction to sociolinguistics, Basil Blackwell, 1986; Fasold, The sociolinguistics of language, Blackwell Publishers, 1990; Holmes, Introduction to sociolinguistics, Longman, 1992; Romaine, Language in society: An introduction to sociolinguistics, Oxford University Press, 1994) and pragmatics with politeness (Brown and Levinson, Politeness: Some universals in language use, Cambridge University Press, 1987). Furthermore, TofA are mostly studied as occurring between acquaintances that know about the social rank and age of each other to produce the address that is most coherent with the context of situation. The present study focuses on TofA used in addressing non-acquaintances, i.e., people who have never met one another before. Evidence from Tunisian Arabic (TA) shows that TofA as used with non-acquaintances are not motivated by rank and politeness as much as by the addresser's drive to create familiarity and minimize distance with the addressee. Such a pragmatic minimization of distance is not noticed when TofA are used with acquaintances. Speakers of TA inject kinship-related terms in their address to non-acquaintances in view of creating rapprochement between the speaker as a deictic center and the addressee in the periphery. Such a rapprochement is made possible through the manipulation by the speaker of the FAR-NEAR schema (Johnson, The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason, The University of Chicago Press, 1987) related to the CENTER-PERIPHERY image schema. The paper intends to show this taming of addressees by studying TofA in TA through Lakoff's (Categories: An essay in cognitive linguistics, Hanshin Publishing Company, 1982, Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind, The University of Chicago Press, 1987) theory of categorization known as Idealized Cognitive Models (ICMs).