The focus of this chapter is the development of pragmatic and sociolinguistic competence among second language learners during study abroad. In contrast to the foreign language classroom at home, study abroad offers learners a range of settings in which to engage in real-life intercultural encounters. These opportunities for social interaction, in turn, can have an impact on the learning of pragmatic and sociolinguistic dimensions of the second language, including speech acts and implicit meaning in the case of pragmatics and stylistic, and social factors in the case of sociolinguistics. Being able to accurately comprehend the intended message of utterances in the social context and to adequately express desired meanings are crucial components of intercultural competence. However, given that languages vary with regard to how pragmatic functions are realized and how sociolinguistic variation is signaled, the development of these areas in a second language represents a challenge for learners. While previous research suggests that study abroad can facilitate pragmatic and sociolinguistic development, such development is not guaranteed and the learning outcomes for individual learners are subject to a wide array of personal, social, and programmatic factors.

The theory of common ground is an important analytical tool in linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. Common ground has applicability in the characterization of speech acts and allows for distinguishing, for example, between an assertive, which requires a dynamic common ground, and a declarative that depends more on appropriate contextual factors for a successful realization. The theory of common ground is intrinsically linked to how knowledge relates to language and how a discourse advances between interlocutors. As such, the creation and maintenance of common ground has consequences for our stance on knowledge and what we KNOW, BELIEVE, DESIRE, and our INTENTIONS for action. There are many kinds of knowledge and a relevant portion of these are framed within a discourse situation, with common ground. We discuss the interfaces and relationship between situation, context, common ground, and knowledge including cultural knowledge, drawing on the thinking of Malinowski and Firth, and others. The challenges addressed are: (a) how do we ground the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity? (b) how do we represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis? and (c) how do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning?

Research on mediation in intercultural pragmatics is an emerging area of research and to date there is little work that currently focuses on this. Intercultural mediation is important for understanding how language users engage with intercultural pragmatics, where meaning-making and interpretation are central. The issues confronting research on mediation and intercultural pragmatics result largely from the fact that this area of work has emerged from studies of language learning rather than studies of intercultural pragmatics specifically. This chapter overviews three main research themes in the field of mediation in intercultural pragmatics: (1) the importance of metapragmatic awareness in mediation and how metapragmatic awareness is understood in intercultural contexts, (2) mediation as an activity that can be directed to others or to the self rather than always being an activity of intermediaries, and (3) the particular nature of mediation as a language teaching activity in which teachers construct learning as an interpretive process of making sense of meanings encountered in and across languages.

Sociopragmatics encompasses the study of social, interactional, and normative dimensions of language use, while intercultural pragmatics examines how language is used in social interactions between people who have different first languages and are usually considered to represent different cultures. While there are some points of overlap between them, the main aim of intercultural pragmatics is to analyze and theorize how language is used when participants have limited common ground and do not necessarily adhere to L1 preferred ways of speaking. It is thus argued in intercultural pragmatics not only that intercultural encounters are deserving of theorization in their own right, but that theorization in intercultural pragmatics can usefully inform pragmatics more broadly. The aim of this chapter is to consider how research in intercultural pragmatics can inform work in sociopragmatics, and vice versa. Following discussion of the main theoretical foundations of sociopragmatics, a case study examining the openings of first conversations in intercultural settings is used as a springboard to consider the place of sociopragmatics vis-à-vis intercultural pragmatics, and what insights each can bring to the other. The conclusion is that sociopragmatics would benefit from building more explicitly on the important empirical and theoretical insights offered by intercultural pragmatics.

Worldwide communication in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is enacted between people from different linguacultural backgrounds, so it would seem self-evident that it is inter cultural in its very nature. Pragmatically, however, it is not essentially different from “monolingual” / “intracultural” communication. In both cases, participants have to bring their diverse linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions into convergence on common ground. To conceive of this diversity as relating only to different named languages and the cultures associated with them is to disregard the vast variation in linguistic resources and schematic preconceptions that obtains within so-called monolingual communities. So to describe the use of ELF as exceptionally multilingual and intercultural is to misrepresent it as a distinct way of communicating. What makes ELF distinctive, and a significant area of study, is not that it is a different kind of communication, but on the contrary, that it so clearly brings out how communication works in general: since the degree of linguistic and schematic disparity between participants is likely to increase the challenge of convergence, the pragmatic process of achieving convergence will naturally become particularly apparent.

Classroom language ecologies are increasingly diverse as a result of mobility, migration, and information technology. In these spaces, interlocutors may draw upon shared linguistic and cultural resources but also bring in others. Prime examples are additional-language (AL) classrooms, where there is a shared target language, but where students may have different first languages from their classmates and teacher. In this chapter, we review empirical research on interaction in multilingual classrooms in approaches such as ethnography, translanguaging, and conversation analysis (CA), and discuss methods and findings in relation to the growing field of intercultural pragmatics (IP). Additionally, we offer an empirical illustration from video ethnography research in multilingual English AL classrooms in Sweden. With a CA approach, we demonstrate how a group of students participating in a vocabulary game manage an instance of diverging understandings of an English word. We show how, in resolving this interactional trouble, participants draw on the target language English and the societal/school language Swedish, and we discuss the observations in light of the IP concepts of salience and common ground. Finally, we argue that classroom studies detailing social actors’ language repertoires by using audiovisual data are essential in advancing our understanding of multilingual AL classrooms.

The expression of emotion in discourse (as defined in Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019) is treated from the perspective of intercultural pragmatics (as in, e.g, Kecskes 2004, 2011, 2014). Emotion is viewed as a pragmatic dynamical process that shows the interaction of brain-bodies-world (e.g. Van Gelder 1998, Gibbs 2010) and for that reason many aspects of its manifestation in different discourse systems/cultures are explored, taking into account not only the well-known fact that different languages and cultures may display differences in the expression of emotion at all linguistic levels (e.g. at the lexical level, a given language/culture may have a term to express an emotion that has not been conceptualized in another language (i.e. hypocognition, Levy 1973), being the cause of possible intercultural pragmalinguistic misunderstanding), but also the fact that different cultures may have different display rules (Ekman and Friesen 1975) and engage in different affective practices (Wetherell 2012), all of which may affect attempts to communicate when using a lingua franca. I argue in favor of a more comprehensive, socio-cognitive (e.g. Kecskes and Zhang 2009; Kecskes 2010) and sociopragmatic (Leech 1982, 2014) approach to the study of this kind of communication.

Over the last two decades, second-language pragmatics brought to the fore commonalities and conventions shared by speakers and hearers, those which create a common ground for communication, as well as culture varieties in language use, and those which cause communication breakdowns in real-life contexts. But, of course, meaning which is to be understood entirely under the influence of social interaction and cognitive change cannot capture the modalities or channels speakers use to convey a certain content of an utterance. Typically, natural behaviors, in the form of emotive effects, are integrated somehow into the interpretation of utterances in everyday life situations, a point generally missed in the literature on how utterances are understood in a second language. In the light of the above observations, an original feature of this chapter is its discussion of cases where "natural," i.e. affective, and linguistic communication interact in the interpretation of utterances. The task of describing and explaining what is conveyed by nonpropositional types of meaning, those "affective aspects of learning," such as feelings, attitudes, or preferences, falls squarely within the domain of L2 pragmatics, and the central aim of this chapter is to redress the balance.

The chapter addresses the relation between post-Gricean pragmatics and intercultural pragmatics. As such, it addresses meaning in relation to intentions and inferences and provides an overview of the main developments in this tradition, placing them in the context of the utility they have for understanding cross-cultural communication, and specifically the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Section 1.2 introduces the concept of pragmatic universals and moves to discussing how Grice’s account of cooperative conversational behavior can be viewed as such pragmatic universal principles. After pointing out some problems with Grice’s original account as it is seen from the perspective of several decades, Section 1.3 proceeds to post-Gricean approaches to linguistic communication, focusing not so much on the traditional debates concerning the number and scope of the necessary maxims or principles (covered briefly in Section 1.3.1) but rather on the semantics/pragmatic boundary and the related question of the truth-conditional content that opened up interesting contextualist pursuits (Section 1.3.2). Section 1.4 addresses different versions of contextualism and places them in the context of the debates between minimalists and contextualists. Section 1.5 concludes with comments on the utility of post-Gricean pragmatics for intercultural communication, stressing the significance of pragmatic universals.

Academic writers with different linguistic backgrounds communicate scientific findings following objective norms, although they do so in different ways, as is evidenced in intercultural studies. This chapter focuses on the identification of boosters and hedges used by Spanish and Chinese researchers to persuade readers about scientific findings in engineering and linguistics. The objectives were to categorize and compare the frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters used by nonnative writers of English, to study whether there are any linguistic and cultural differences, and to identify boosting and hedging features different from those used in English as a mother tongue. The material was a corpus of 120 academic papers on linguistics and engineering papers written by Spanish and Chinese researchers. Boosters and hedges were spotted and occurrences extracted and classified with METOOL, a tool designed to identify metadiscourse markers. In the results, it was shown that Chinese writers used more boosters and hedges than their Spanish peers. To conclude, it was observed that although Chinese and Spanish writers tend to be assertive in their mother tongue, mitigation was used to adopt an academic style.

This chapter analyzes how the Great Replacement conspiracy theory is exploited in far-right discursive strategies. Indeed, the common ground and/or collective narratives identified in discourses such as the Great Replacement theory have been created through re- or de-construction of current news, such as the influx of migrants. We draw on the Dynamic Model of Meaning theory, combining the theoretical concept of (emergent) common ground – fundamental to intercultural pragmatics–and the notion of proximization. Our data comprises Marine Le Pen interviews, Viktor Orbán speeches, and Matteo Salvini tweets, where we examine various aspects of their narratives as well as the specific contextualization. Our analysis reveals both common ground and cross-cultural variation in the conspiracy narratives disseminated by these far-right leaders: inferences vs. directness; national history vs. doomed future. We conclude by suggesting that such narratives work as metaphor scenarios and could, in fact, represent covert hate speech against a specific community. Moreover, these narratives function as useful political arguments, since they arouse strong emotions against the declared enemies of populists. While a rational and well-documented counter-discourse is needed to answer such strategies, it is crucial to both deconstruct and understand the beliefs underlying the emotions that lead a person to trust such beliefs.

Medical communication is characterized by an essential cultural difference, as the nature of healthcare provider–patient interactions consists of an epistemic imbalance between the expert and the layperson. This specialized knowledge gap combines with other types of cultural differences, defined by mismatched background knowledge (including values, expectations, facts, or theories) and the proficiency in the use of distinct languages or dialects. Such cultural differences define a type of communication that is essentially and primarily intercultural.

Drawing on examples from different types of medical communication, we provide an overview of these studies in linguistics, pragmatics, and health communication to describe differences and commonalities between pragmatic strategies used in interactions of different types and levels of “interculturality.”

We propose a more consistent integration of pragmatics in healthcare communication by looking at how shared understanding is obtained in language-discordant contexts through the mediation of interpreters. Based on this analysis, we design a new communicative role for healthcare providers highlighting future perspectives for clinical training and practice. In this sense, the role played by an intercultural pragmatic approach in healthcare communication leads to redefining pragmatic strategies as part of a communicative toolbox, and not only as a discipline explaining how context affects meaning.

This chapter presents a comprehensive review of vague language studies from a pragmatic perspective. An utterance is vague when it conveys unspecific meaning. For example, “Many friends attended her birthday party,” how many is many? 20, 100 or 200? Our interpretation of “many” may vary from individual to individual, from context to context. Vague language is fluid, stretchable, and strategic. It consists of various types, including approximators, vague quantifiers, placeholder words, vague category identifiers, general terms, intensifiers, softeners, and epistemic stance markers. This chapter serves as a guide for understanding the characteristics of vague language. The discussion involves the conceptual frameworks and features of vague language, which are illustrated by examples and research drawn from intercultural corpora. This chapter reviews the theorization of vague language, its linguistic categories and pragmatic functions, vague language use in intercultural communication, and includes suggestions for future research. Vague language plays a crucial role in intercultural communication and its pragmatic functions, such as mitigation, politeness, and self-protection, form an important part of the strategic moves used in effective language interactions. This chapter provides an important contribution to the field of intercultural pragmatics.