Name : Khinanti Giantari

NIM : 2012943
Subject : Language in Use

SUMMARY OF INTERCULTURAL PRAGMATICS

The topic is about intercultural pragmatics. This summary will discuss three sections. They
are issues in intercultural communication, intercultural pragmatics in the real world, and lingua
franca pragmatics. First, I have learned about issues in intercultural communication. Despite the
idiosyncrasies of other people’s ways of doing things in their own culture, we can solve the
puzzle of what someone means by what they say in an intercultural encounter. There are five
sub-sections of this first explanation:
 Cultural membership
Phyllis confirmed what I had implied, that she must have a guilty conscience.
Despite this, what I meant by saying ‘You know what they say’ wasn’t clear to
readers. This is the stereotypical way of conveying that meaning. However, this
certainly isn’t a universal utterance-type meaning.
 Culture-specific knowledge
Different cultures make use of broadly the same linguistic strategies for politeness
purposes, but the circumstances in which these linguistic strategies are used vary
across cultures. There are four terms to describe the relationship of communication
and cultural membership: intracultural communication (communication involving
interactants who share a common culture), cross-cultural communication
(communication where a non-native member interacts with a native member of a
particular culture), intercultural communication (communication when the
interactants don’t share a common culture), and trans-cultural communication (any
communication that isn’t intracultural).
 Trans-cultural communication and high and low contexts
Meaning is conveyed by drawing an inference from two kinds of premise, the
utterance we hear and our encyclopedic knowledge of the world. As intercultural
communication is necessarily less context-rich than intracultural communication, we
expect the role of (non-formulaic) language to be relatively greater in intercultural
encounters.
 Speech acts in trans-cultural communication
From the research to determine the socio-pragmatic and pragma linguistic
expectations of various cultural groups, the findings are likely to have practical
application in cross-cultural encounters where not only socio-pragmatic knowledge
but also pragma linguistics formulas assist non-native members to communicate
effectively and appropriately.
 Implicated meaning in trans-cultural communication
 There are categories of pragmatic inference explored and the implications for
communication: utterance-token meaning (because of the production conditions on
utterance-token meaning, token inference presents no particular problems in either
cross-cultural or intercultural communication), M-inference (it’s possible for an
abnormal utterance to go unrecognized in trans-cultural communication), I-inference
(the cross-cultural communicator is likely to have difficulties recovering
stereotypical interpretations of idiomatic formulas), Q-inference (usually
unproblematic in trans-cultural communication), and lexical implicata (because
native members have a culturally conditioned sense of the implicata conventionally
associated with particular lexical items, the cross-cultural communicator will often
be at a disadvantage).
Second, I have learned about intercultural pragmatics in the real world. The first brief
exchange showed that non-typical form-meaning pairings are often unproblematic in
intercultural communication where stereotypical native member optimal form-meaning pairings
don’t apply. In the second case, the perlocutionary effect wasn’t the one the sender of the
message intended. This could be because the sender had a cultural expectation which wasn’t
shared by the person who received the email. Finally, the three-way trans-cultural conversation
shows the contextual awareness of interactants and how they try to find remedial strategies for
situations where the cognitive abilities and contextual resources of any of them may be
inadequate to the demands of the situation.
Last, I have learned about lingua franca pragmatics. In this section we first speculate about
pragmatic meaning in a lingua franca and then consider the special case of written language. A
lingua franca is a language in which people with different first languages communicate. Being an
English native speaker in an English lingua franca communication isn’t necessarily an
advantage. The lingua franca is almost always written in English. First, in writing as a cultural
phenomenon, there are a number of aspects of written communication to consider: written
language is obviously not dialogic in the same way as spoken interaction, some cultures have no
written language, and writing is used for a wide variety of purposes. Next, in the ‘careful’ nature
of writing, writing has to be codified and standardized. As pragmatists, we prick our ears up.
Writing, it seems, has typical qualities which we might expect to be problematic in lingua franca
use. Pragmatists haven’t traditionally paid much attention to writing. Perhaps it’s time for a
change.
Actually I have not learned about this topic (intercultural pragmatics) and I did not know
about this topic before reading the chapter. Now, I want to know about intercultural pragmatics
in more detail and other examples that will make me understand more about this topic from the
group who is presented.