26.530, Review: Cog Sci; Pragmatics; Socioling: Kecskes (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-530. Mon Jan 26 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.530, Review: Cog Sci; Pragmatics; Socioling: Kecskes (2013)

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Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 14:34:44
From: Stavros Assimakopoulos [stavros.assimakopoulos at um.edu.mt]
Subject: Intercultural Pragmatics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-1725.html

AUTHOR: Istvan  Kecskes
TITLE: Intercultural Pragmatics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Stavros Assimakopoulos, University of Malta

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY 

Istvan Kecskes’ latest book is essentially an overview and extension of his
substantial previous research in the domain of intercultural communication.
Given that Kecskes has almost single-handedly drawn attention to this
neglected subfield of pragmatics, this monograph can easily be seen as a
milestone in itself. In it, the author goes beyond the mere concretisation of
his significant contribution to the understanding of language use across
cultural boundaries; effectively, he manages to establish intercultural
pragmatics as a legitimate enterprise that is not only worthwhile and
interesting in its own right but can also provide significant insights for the
more traditional study of theoretical pragmatics. In this respect, this work
is of potential interest to both advanced researchers in the area of
pragmatics and graduate students interested in it.

The monograph is made up of 10 main chapters accompanied by an introduction
and an epilogue section. While the epilogue is, as expected, a brief section
summarising the main points of the book and some directions for future
research, the introductory section is pretty much as extensive as the main
chapters themselves. In it, Kecskes motivates the need for his monograph by
drawing attention to the fact that multilingualism is slowly becoming the norm
in today’s world. This development should make it imperative for research in
language use to keep an eye on the intercultural communicative setting.
Against this background, after briefly presenting the subject-matter of his
Socio-cognitive Approach, the author turns to discuss its differences from
other seemingly similar lines of research, namely sociopragmatics,
interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, with a view to showing how
interculturality brings a novel perspective in the study of pragmatics.   

The first main chapter starts off with a brief overview of the way in which
research in pragmatics has progressed, leading scholars in the field to
eventually follow one of the two currently predominant strands, i.e. the
linguistic-philosophical and the socio-cultural-interactional one. Arguing
that traditional individual-centered theorising in pragmatics needs to pay
much more attention to the wider sociocultural aspects of communication, the
author goes on to introduce the issues that his intercultural perspective has
concentrated on so far. These include the shift of the focus from
speaker-intentions to “negotiated” intentions that emerge during a
conversational interaction, the need to complement current hearer-oriented
theorising with a speaker-oriented perspective, the challenge that
experimental research on egocentrism (e.g Barr and Keysar 2005) poses for
traditional accounts that are based on some notion of mutual knowledge or
common ground, and the recent surge of interest in contextualist theories of
meaning. 

In Chapter 2, Kesckes returns to outline his Socio-cognitive Approach in more
detail. In addition to defending his critique of traditional theorising and
the idealised notion of communication it assumes, he elaborates more closely
on his approach’s merits. These include a balanced interest in the speaker and
the hearer, the explication of the relationship between intention and
attention in the communicative setting, as well as the emphasis on salience as
a guiding mechanism in communicative interactions. 

Chapter 3 provides a more thorough justification for the author’s manifesto
that traditional pragmatic theory has a lot to gain from incorporating
socio-cultural factors in its analyses. Since it is the same pragmatic
mechanisms that underlie our communicative abilities, the argument goes, the
intercultural setting should not be treated as a deviation from the
intracultural one, which has after all been at the centre of attention for
theoretical pragmatics so far. In this regard, the main difference between the
development of L1 and L2 pragmatic competence is that, in the case of the
latter a lot more individual motivation is required. In continuation of the
chapter, Kecskes goes on to review the literature on pragmatic competence in a
variety of contexts, namely L2, bilingualism and multilingualism, presenting
in this way how it thoroughly affects language use. The chapter then concludes
with a brief exposition of the notion of pragmatic transfer that the
Socio-cognitive Approach adopts. 

In the following chapter, Kecskes analyses encyclopedic knowledge from a
socio-cultural perspective. After presenting the contextualist stance adopted
by contemporary researchers in cognitive semantics, he embarks on an analysis
of the ways in which cultural mental models are developed, maintained and can
be seen to affect both intracultural and intercultural interaction. Naturally,
the focus is again on intercultures, which are defined as ‘ad hoc creations’
that are produced when individuals from different cultural and linguistic
backgrounds engage in communication. 

Chapter 5 deals with the relatively understudied topic of formulaic language,
which includes multiword collocations that are assumed to be stored as a
single entry in the mental lexicon. Emphasising the role of psychological
saliency, the author provides a thorough description of formulaic expressions.
He then suggests that they are so commonly used because they decrease the
amount of effort interlocutors have to spend in processing them and embarks on
a comprehensive review of the relevant literature both in the setting of
theoretical pragmatics and that of English as a Lingua Franca. Ultimately,
this discussion ends up with an examination of situation-bound phrases, or
utterances as the author calls them, which seem to play a central role in
intercultural interaction. 

The following three chapters focus in turn on three major elements that are
taken to bring together the individual and societal perspective in the study
of intercultural pragmatics. The first one is context, which, according to
Kecskes, comprises both prior experience and the understanding of the
particular setting in which a communicative exchange takes place. After this
description of context, a considerable part of Chapter 6 is dedicated to the
exposition of the author’s Dynamic Model of Meaning. The basic assumption here
is that the meaning of lexical expressions is the result of an interaction of
information that is stored in the head of the interlocutors with assumptions
about the situation in which the exchange takes place. In turn, Chapter 7 is
concerned with common ground. After going through the relevant literature on
it, Kecskes presents his Socio-cognitive Approach’s take on the notion of
common ground, which is in line with the view of context as a blend of prior
experiences with perceptions of the actual situational context. The last of
these chapters deals with the third factor that is assumed to shape our
understanding of intercultural communication, that is, salience. Much like the
previous one, the chapter begins with an overview of the literature on
salience. Then, the author turns to discuss the differences between the notion
of salience that his Socio-cognitive Approach takes on board and the
closely-related one that Giora puts forth in her Graded Salience Hypothesis
(2003). In general, the Socio-cognitive Approach distinguishes between
inherent, collective (i.e. shared among the members of a speech community) and
emergent situational salience. In this picture, inherent and emergent salience
influence each other during both utterance production and interpretation, with
which Kecskes deals in turn, before showing how the study of intercultural
communication indicates that salience can be taken to be culture-specific.    

Chapter 9 touches on the topic of (im)politeness. After an inevitably brief
overview of previous theoretical deliberations on the matter, Kecskes explains
how intercultural pragmatics approaches polite and impolite communication.
More specifically, he discusses the role that intention, cultural models and
context play in the production and understanding of (im)polite utterances on
the basis of numerous examples of interactions in the intercultural setting. 

The last main chapter of the monograph turns to the question of what forms of
data collection researchers of intercultural pragmatics can make use of. Here,
the preferred methods include conversation, discourse segment and corpus
analysis, as well as the study of computer-mediated communication, each of
which is addressed in a separate section. 

EVALUATION 

As I have already noted from the beginning of this review, Kecskes’ book is a
much needed monograph that summarises his extensive output, which has shaped
research in the domain of intercultural pragmatics. However, as the author
himself promises, it delivers much more than this. Apart from raising
awareness of an often neglected setting in which communication takes place, it
also covers an impressive array of topics that have been at the centre of
attention in the study of language use, irrespective of interculturality. In
this sense, even the comprehensive overviews of the literature on these topics
render this book an indispensable reference point for anyone working in
pragmatics. 

That said, the breadth of this book’s contents could be taken to be its main
shortcoming too. The coverage of so many topics in a single monograph cannot
realistically be exhaustive. Therefore, if the reader is not familiar with
work in the field, s/he would find it difficult at times to identify the
reasoning behind some of the proposals that Kecskes makes. For example, even
though he repeatedly criticises the (neo-/post-)Gricean perspective in the
study of verbal communication, he only offers a brief overview of the
rationale behind it. Similarly, when he discusses the differences between his
notion of salience and that of Giora’s, he does so on the assumption that the
reader is familiar with Giora’s account. Obviously, due to space restrictions,
it would be impossible to present and review each of these accounts in a
separate section, but the lack of this content could make Kecskes’
argumentation hard to follow for students or researchers who are just starting
to familiarise themselves with pragmatics theorising. 

More advanced readers, however, will be thoroughly satisfied with the job that
Kecskes does in connecting everything together while discussing the challenges
that intercultural communication presents for traditional accounts. Clearly,
the author’s main intention is to push his intercultural agenda, which he
manages to do perfectly well through the use of accessible language, solid
argumentation and appropriate examples. If anything, I expect this monograph
to inspire much more ground-breaking work in the field. After all, most of its
chapters could be expanded into books in their own right.

All in all, I find Kecskes’ ‘Intercultural Pragmatics’ to be a very
well-informed, as well as clearly written monograph. Its main limitation is
that it can be dense at times, and thus challenging for the non-initiate, but
this is certainly understandable given its scope. I would thus have no
reservation to recommend it to my advanced students, or colleagues who are
familiar with pragmatic theory; in fact, I would insist that they read it, if
only to appreciate the complexities of intercultural communication and assess
the author’s original point of view.

REFERENCES

Barr, Dale J. and Boaz Keysar. 2004. Making sense of how we make sense: The
paradox of egocentrism in language use. In Herbert L. Colston and Albert N.
Katz (eds.) Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences.
Mahwaw, NJ: Erlbaum.

Giora, Rachel. 2003. On our mind: Salience, context and figurative language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

After his PhD in theoretical pragmatics at the University of Edinburgh and a
postdoctoral appointment in philosophy at the University of Granada, Stavros
Assimakopoulos is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Linguistics
of the University of Malta. His research lies in the interface of linguistics,
philosophy and cognitive psychology and mainly focuses on the implications
that cognitive approaches to inferential pragmatics, such as the one offered
by Relevance Theory, carry for the study of linguistic meaning.



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