Abstract
Intercultural Pragmatics is concerned with the way natural languages are used in micro-social encounters between interlocutors who have different first languages, represent different cultures, and communicate in a lingua franca. Such a multilingual micro-social perspective lets the author observe aspects of general linguistic mechanisms as if through a magnifying glass. As a result, he proposes a novel framework for studying communication, which is significantly more adequate than previous frameworks for describing both intercultural and intracultural communication.
Kecskes sets out to account both for what is relatively stable in language, defined by cultural models, and for what is constructed in the course of communication. Using authentic linguistic data, English spoken by foreigners, he argues that to capture both the normative and emergent components of a lingua franca communication process, an appropriate language description framework must treat on a par both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. 1 By embracing both perspectives on a par, Kecskes combines two seemingly incompatible frameworks: reductionism and holism, challenging established wisdoms in linguistics. Yet this proposal is in line with recent theoretical philosophical frameworks concerning research on emergent and convergent phenomena outlined in Bunge (2003). This latter philosophical framework allows one to handle, in a scientifically rigorous manner, systems whose successive levels of organization are characterized by novel properties and where interaction is going both ways: bottom-up and top-down – similar to what Kecskes has observed in language (for a related perspective, see Zielinska, 2013).
The cornerstone of the proposal presented in Intercultural Pragmatics is rooted in the observation that independence of what we do and how we do it with language is only approximate. The assumption of ontological independence between the two was postulated to avoid the trap of basic encodings. Since basic encodings cannot be communicated directly from person to person, Bickhard and Campbell (1992) proposed that to ground individually encoded semantic categories in language, first there must exist interactively (pre-conceptually) established categories. This proposal was further developed by Mey (2001) and Capone (2009). Kecskes agrees that functional categories influence current meanings of related verbal forms, and thus the analysis of the communication process should be undertaken in relation to situated speech acts (pragmemes – that is, such interactionally defined categories). Yet Kecskes also stresses the role of encoded semantic content. He notes that the semantic content of the forms constituting a pragmeme becomes encoded temporarily in individual brains and thus for the time being becomes functionally independent to a considerable degree. Consequently, relatively encoded meaning (i.e. meaning that is practically stable over the time of a large number of utterances) may serve to build new, or alter existing, functional categories. And if wording may also participate significantly in creating a pragmeme, Kecskes concludes that as far as their contribution to meaning construction and comprehension is concerned, both the linguistic contextual factors (encoding prior linguistic experience) and the actual situational contextual factors are of equal status. In other words, explanations in pragmatics should go in both directions: from the outside in (from actual situational context to prior context encapsulated in utterances used) and the opposite way.
This means that the most critical elements of language are preferred ways of saying things: the standardized verbal behavior in specific interactional social situations, named by Kecskes as Situation Bound Utterances (SBUs). These are such phrases as You are all set, said by an employee of a students’ office to a student after attending to his needs. SBUs have relatively clear meaning and thus ‘hold language together’ by allowing one to combine language as a semiotic system with its interactional character and to derive each component from the other. Therefore SBUs are the type of data pragmatic (and linguistic) research should start from, and, in the book under review, it does.
To be able to describe linguistic communication from the perspective just outlined, Kecskes needs to construct a novel descriptive framework. This is the purpose of Chapter 1, where the author re-conceptualizes intention, speaker meaning, cooperation, and context dependency. The researcher postulates, first, that intention is not stable all the way through a given discourse fragment, but that it becomes co-constructed during the communication process. Second, he differentiates the speaker’s meaning as seen from the perspective of the hearer and that seen from the perspective of the speaker. Third, he postulates that interlocutors are not only co-operative but also egocentric, in the sense that their behavior is rooted also in the speaker’s or hearer’s own knowledge and prior experience. Fourth, Kecskes argues convincingly that when assessing the content of an utterance, one should neither start from the semantics of the utterance and observe how it connects to context nor go the other way round, but treat both aspects on a par.
Chapter 2 contains an outline of a socio-cognitive approach (SCA), a perspective that aims to account both for societal and individual factors in communication and introduced earlier in Kecskes (2008). In SCA, in meaning construction and comprehension, individuals rely both on preexisting encyclopedic knowledge and knowledge constructed in the process of interaction. The speaker’s public knowledge and private knowledge are integrated into his or her utterance based on the degree of silence (i.e. how fast respective items come to mind) of the information available to interlocutors.
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Kecskes revisits the concepts of pragmatic competence, encyclopedic knowledge, cultural models, and interculturality. In the successive Chapters 6, 7, and 8, Kecskes re-conceptualizes context, silence, and common ground. He proposes to distinguish core common ground and emergent common ground, as well as two types of context: one that is in our mind, which he calls prior context, and one which is out there in the world – actual situational context. The two types of context interact: actual situational context is viewed through prior context and the other way round. Kecskes also refines the traditional concept of silent information (information accessible to an interlocutor at a given moment) by introducing inherent silence, collective silence, and emergent situational silence. The distinctions introduced allow Kecskes to draw a number of revealing conclusions. For instance, since inherent silence is culture specific and since non-native speakers do not go through the same linguistic and socio-cultural experience as native speakers do, the author concludes that when interpreting utterances, the two groups differ most importantly in what is ‘silent’ to each of them. Finally, in Chapter 9, Kecskes uses his newly constructed tools to carry out an interesting in-depth analysis of politeness and impoliteness in intercultural communication.
In sum, Intercultural Pragmatics is a superb book which introduces a novel framework for analyzing linguistic data. The introduced framework explicitly gives up on the reductionist approach to language analysis, assuming that neither pragmatic nor semantic content is more basic. Using copious examples from language corpora, Kecskes shows that linguistic data can be effectively accounted for if one assumes that there is a constant interaction between pragmatics and semantics – that the pragmatic content influences the semantic content and semantic content co-constructs the situational content: SBUs with functional content – which is relatively clear because it is defined largely non-verbally in a given standard situation – serve to orchestrate the two types of meaning by assigning semantic meanings to lexemes constituting a given part of the discourse at stake. The meanings assigned in this way can then serve to construct items with new pragmatic functions. Therefore, in this view, SBUs constitute the core of the language formation and development process. What else singles out Intercultural Pragmatics is that it is based on more detailed concepts than other related frameworks, for instance, Van Dijk (2006), allowing for a more subtle linguistic analysis. The next step should involve looking for quantitative implications of the framework presented to corroborate its assumptions in a rigorous manner.
All in all, Intercultural Pragmatics is the most inspiring book on non-quantitative linguistics I have ever read, and I am sure it will become staple reading for generations of linguists to come. It will be of interest both to philosophers of natural language communication and researchers looking for new tools to analyze linguistic data. Note that since SBUs and all other utterances in this book are never studied in isolation, but always as a part of situated discourse, Intercultural Pragmatics will be of interest also to all those with interest in the discourse perspective on communication.