The chapter presents the socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to communication that serves as a theoretical frame for intercultural pragmatics. SCA was developed to explain the specific features of intercultural interactions and thus offers an alternative to the Gricean approaches that can be considered monolingual theories. There are two important claims that distinguish SCA from other pragmatic theories. First, SCA emphasizes that cooperation and egocentrism are not antagonistic features of communication. While (social) cooperation is an intention-directed practice that is governed by relevance, (individual) egocentrism is an attention-oriented trait dominated by salience that refers to the relative importance or prominence of information and signs. Second, SCA claims that pragmatic theories have tried to describe the relationship of the individual and social factors by putting too much emphasis on idealized language use, and focusing on cooperation, rapport, and politeness while paying less attention to the untidy, messy, poorly organized and impolite side of communication. SCA pays equal attention to both sides. The first part of the chapter explains the main tenets of SCA. The second part discusses how context, common ground and salience are intertwined in meaning creation and comprehension. The chapter closes with suggestions for future research.

Most metaphors are highly conventionalized expressions that are typically read and understood by native speakers effortlessly. For instance, while reading “the brightest child” in the classroom native speakers naturally understand that the speaker is not referring to a child who is literally shiny, but rather, a smart child.

Nonnative speakers and language learners, however, may find some metaphoric expressions difficult to understand if expressed in a language that they do not master fluently. Moreover, they may try to use conventional metaphoric expressions translated directly from their own native or first language, into another language. This can create problems in intercultural settings, where the expression may sound strange if unheard before, and possibly unclear. For instance, the arguably unclear expression “climbing up on mirrors” is actually a direct translation of a highly conventional Italian metaphoric expression, frequently used to say “finding excuses.” This chapter elaborates on the way in which metaphoric expressions are understood, and how such comprehension processes vary in relation to metaphor conventionality, aptness, and deliberateness. I then take these observations into the field of intercultural communication, explaining how the pragmatics of metaphor comprehension may be affected by intercultural settings.

This chapter reviews work on politeness and rapport management from an intercultural pragmatics perspective. After an initial introduction, the first main section considers conceptual and methodological challenges and explores three key issues: the various ways in which culture has been conceptualized within politeness theory, the challenge of integrating micro and macro perspectives on intercultural interaction, and first-order and second-order perspectives on politeness and culture. The second main section of the chapter turns to the performance of intercultural politeness. It starts by reporting on the many intercultural studies that have analyzed the impact of different speech and behavioral practices on interpersonal relations. It then reviews the much smaller number of intercultural politeness studies that have examined interlocutors’ potentially different interpretations of the context. After this, it turns to the possible impact of differing cultural values on intercultural politeness. The third main section focuses on intercultural politeness from an evaluation perspective. It presents recent theorizing on the evaluation process and considers methodological challenges in obtaining and interpreting relevant data. The chapter ends by proposing some areas for future research.

Most metaphors are highly conventionalized expressions that are typically read and understood by native speakers effortlessly. For instance, while reading the brightest child in the classroom native speakers naturally understand that the speaker is not referring to a child who is literally shiny, but rather, a smart child.

Non-native speakers and language learners, however, may find some metaphoric expressions difficult to understand, if expressed in a language that they do not master fluently. Moreover, they may try to use conventional metaphoric expressions translated directly from their own native or first language, into another language. This can create problems in intercultural settings, where the expression may sound unheard before, and possibly unclear. For instance, the arguably unclear expression climbing up on mirrors is actually a direct translation of a highly conventional Italian metaphoric expression, frequently used to say “finding excuses”. In this chapter I elaborate on the way in which metaphoric expressions are understood, and how such comprehension processes vary in relation with metaphor conventionality, aptness and deliberateness. I then take these observations into the field of intercultural communication, explaining how the pragmatics of metaphor comprehension may be affected by intercultural settings.

Political and economic globalization, together with constant technological advances, has resulted in unprecedented levels of international human mobility. As a result, societies are increasingly intercultural. Nowhere is this interculturality more pervasive than in digital discourse (traditionally known as computer-mediated communication or CMC), where interlocutors from different cultural backgrounds may interact on global platforms and social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, to name but a few. Intercultural communication, however, poses interlocutors with serious challenges to overcome, such as differences in their value systems, and diverging communication styles and behaviours. All of them can easily lead to miscommunication and conflict between cultural groups, both within and across societies, as well as the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes. Yet, most research on CMC to date has focused on monocultural studies or cross-cultural comparisons while intercultural communication in CMC is still rather under-researched. Keeping the above in mind, the present chapter aims to review the research that has been carried out so far in the field of digital discourse with a special focus on intercultural communication, as well as to provide readers with avenues for future research in this burgeoning field.

Business communication is becoming increasingly intercultural and much more complex in the face of the globalized business arena and workforce diversity (Varner, 2000; Yuan, 1997; Zaidman, 2001). This trend has highlighted the need for understanding the role of culture and language use in business communication. It deserves a close look at how people from different linguacultural backgrounds come into contact and achieve successful interaction with one another in business communication. This chapter aims to survey the research on business communication and discuss its various aspects to help us better understand business communication from an intercultural pragmatics perspective. It consists of three sections after a general introduction and before a conclusion: (1) business communication and culture; (2) major business communication genres (i.e. business meetings, call center exchanges, emails and social media platforms); (3) main research areas and topics.

The notion of common ground entails that prior to a conversation, mutually shared knowledge is available to interlocutors by virtue of the situational context or a shared cultural background. Within linguistic pragmatic theories, recipient design is a determining factor for cooperation in interaction. The socio-cognitive approach to communicative interaction acknowledges the importance of cooperation and common ground but maintains that interlocutors tend to adhere to their individual background knowledge and experience for production and comprehension. The shared knowledge base may therefore not be fully available prior to the exchange but, rather, established dynamically and interactively in the course of the conversation. Discussing internet memes, it will be shown that stable core common ground and dynamic emergent common ground are fundamental assets for the description of contemporary and future phenomena in digital communication. I will argue that internet memes represent a kind of communication where emergent common ground is aspired to rather than resorted to as an emergency solution when core common ground is lacking.

Intercultural pragmatics is a relatively new field of inquiry that is concerned with the way in which the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages but communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures (see Kecskes 2004, 2013). The main focus of research in this field is on intercultural interactions. In these encounters, the communicative process is synergistic, in the sense that existing pragmatic norms and emerging co-constructed features are present to a varying degree. The innovative feature of the field is that it provides an alternative way of thinking about interaction by shifting the attention of researchers from first language (L1) communication to intercultural communication. In Gricean pragmatics everything is about native speakers (mainly native speakers of English) of a language who are members of the same, although diverse and relatively definable, speech community, who have preferred ways of saying things and preferred ways of organizing thoughts, who share core common ground, conventions, norms, and distributed collective salience. This gives them a relatively firm basis for understanding each other.

The concept of context has undergone some fundamental rethinking in the scientific community. Rather than being considered an external constraint on linguistic performance, context is analyzed as a product of language use and thus as an interactional achievement, which is negotiated and co-constructed, imported and invoked. Context and contexts are analyzed from the perspectives of interlocutors, considering contextualization, recontextualization and decontextualization, and entextualization. The complexity, multilayeredness and dynamics of context have far-reaching implications on its role in intercultural pragmatics with interlocutors from different linguistic backgrounds having diverging meaning-making processes, diverging contextualization conventions, and thus diverging constructions of context. Intercultural pragmatics thus calls for context-sensitive particularizations of the fundamental premises of cooperation, contextualization, meaning-making process, and negotiation of discourse common ground.

Intercultural interactions in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) are increasingly becoming the norm as speakers of diverse first languages and cultures find themselves needing to communicate in both personal and professional domains for any number of reasons. The chapter provides an overview of ELF pragmatics research that is focused on how multilingual, multicultural speakers in real-world settings achieve mutual understanding through the effective use of ELF. Specifically, the chapter examines the pragmatic strategies that speakers deploy to preempt misunderstanding as they conjointly negotiate and construct shared meaning. Practices that enhance explicitness and clarity, such as repetition, rephrasing, topic negotiation, and the insertion of a parenthetical remark that provides additional information, reveal how speakers who anticipate difficulty in understanding, possibly arising from linguistic variability and cultural difference, increase efforts to minimize mis/non-understanding. Using data extracts from relevant ELF studies, the chapter illustrates how speakers in these intercultural interactions accommodate their interlocutors and the context of communication to arrive at shared understanding.

Medical language – like all forms of living language – is subject to change. The ‘scientific currency’ (de Almeida 1991: 13) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries differs from our own. One word in English that had special meanings at the time, as identified by Professor Alberto Tanturri, is excitability, and the linked terms excite, excitant, and so on, which in the late eighteenth century came to develop specifically physiological meanings. This usage seems to derive from the writings of John Brown (1735–88), an Edinburgh physician of the Scottish Enlightenment whose biography is conveniently available in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Lawrence 2004; see also Beddoes 1795; Bynum & Porter 1988). Brown, the founder of an eponymous innovative nosographic system known as Brunonianism, held that excitability was the fundamental feature of living bodies, being triggered by interaction with the environment to produce excitement; that is, the life force. Brunonianism thus pointed forward to Vitalist and Romantic notions of the operation of the body, going beyond the dominant earlier eighteenth-century conception that living bodies could be understood as the outcome of mathematical or physical laws alone.

This chapter focuses on the hybrid genre of pamphlet advertisements of proprietary medicines from the late seventeenth century. These texts have a dual purpose: on the one hand, they promote a medical product, and on the other hand, they appropriate and distribute medical information for the general public. A move analysis of thirty-two advertisements reveals seven structural elements, of which three can be considered obligatory elements. Parallels with the structural elements of recipes and specialised medical treatises are also considered to show how established elements are appropriated and mixed from different existing genres alongside completely fresh elements in the new hybrid genre. The analysis thus shows the dynamic nature of medical writing of the period, in which authors made use of their considerable knowledge of established medical genres and the characteristics of the contemporary medical marketplace to form a new genre for new purposes.

This book, Genre in English Medical Writing, 1500–1820, is adorned with thirty-five figures. Many of these figures are tables or graphs condensing the evidence and arguments of a particular author into forms that can be appreciated better through visualisation. The authors of chapters employing this presentational kind of figure have used their own computer software to generate them. They have no problems other than those involved in designing the book – how best to fit such figures into the layout of the chapter and the pages in which they are found. Other kinds of figure in this book are not presentational in this way but are quite different. These are images chosen by the author, and they reproduce pages in manuscripts or printed books of the early modern era. The author may refer to these images in the text of the chapter as evidence in pursuit of an argument, or choose them as emblems of the kind of things discussed (and so not essential to the argument). Illustrations that do necessary work for the argument of the chapter are found in the chapters by Peter Jones (Chapter 2), Alpo Honkapohja (Chapter 5), and Maura Ratia (Chapter 13). In the last two cases the argument focuses on the ways in which the same or similar textual matter is represented very differently in scribal handiwork, layout, or typography at different dates. The third kind of emblematic figure is there to engage the interest of the reader, giving material form (manuscript or printed) to the genre under discussion in the chapter. This applies to the figures in the Image Gallery, where Figure 2 is an emblem of London in time of plague, Figure 3 an author portrait, and Figure 6 a satire on man-midwifery, all from early modern printed books. The images supplied for these kinds of illustrative figure must first be obtained from professional imaging services or directly from libraries. In extraordinary times of lockdown, as we saw in the Preface to the Image Gallery, there may be difficulties in getting images or permissions.

The Low German translations of two of the earliest surgical handbooks printed in the High German language area (Brunschwig’s and von Gersdorff’s) represent two different and, in many respects, opposite forms of the use of medical texts.

In this chapter these two Low German translations are contrasted and discussed, with particular attention paid not only to their medium of transmission (print vs manuscript) and genre (handbook vs commonplace book), but also to their aim, function, and intended audience.

In this chapter we study representations of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III, relating his myth and history to the discovery of his body in 2012 in a Leicester car park. Focusing on the body of Richard, we address the unique cross-genre nexus between historiography, Shakespeare’s drama, and modern medical writing, to evaluate the mythical, factual, fictitious, and scientific depictions of Richard. Our aim is to find out what role interpretation and truth play in the differing genres and what kind of implications interpretation and truth have for these genres regarding the body of Richard. We draw on literary studies, disability studies, health sciences, and especially the work of Horkheimer and Adorno to argue that, in the case of Richard, myth and science are modes of representation that seek to control truth and rely on interpretation and speculation to draw conclusions about uncertain and unknowable things. The post-excavation science does not oppose myth and fiction, but perpetuates the mythology surrounding Richard, whereas Shakespeare drama has ‘truth content’ in challenging conceptions of disability. Moreover, this cross-genre nexus demonstrates the inseparability of subjectivity from interpretation and that truth never appears unmediated. Thus, making subjectivity visible in analyses is indispensible for a higher fidelity to truth.

In 1815–16, the small town of Noja (now called Noicattaro), on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, was affected by a plague epidemic, the last manifestation of this disease in Italy and one of the last in Continental Europe. Besides having serious demographic consequences at local level, the plague also had a considerable influence on medical and scientific debate concerning the nature of the disease and its feasible cures. In the first part, this study reviews some of the most significant doctrinal positions on the subject emerging within the southern medical profession. In the second part, it concentrates on the therapeutic strategies actually experimented with in Noja, highlighting the rejection of traditional pharmacopoeia and mainstream treatments such as emetics, purgatives, and bloodletting. Yet the medicines validated and tested as an alternative to these therapeutic modalities were at best palliatives, if not at times highly toxic substances. As a whole, the analysis shows how, when confronted with the plague, medical science continued to grope in the dark, despite wanting to free itself from traditional dogmas; the doctors' intervention on the epidemic certainly had negative effects on the course of the disease and on the trend of the fatality rate.