Gumperz, John J. & Cook-Gumperz, Jenny (2007) “Discourse, cultural diversity and communication: a linguistic anthropological perspective” in Handbook of Intercultural Communication (eds.) Helga Kotthoff & Helen Spencer-Oatey: 13-29. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.

1. Language difference and cultural relativity

language differences affecting interpretation in everyday life are not just matters of  semantics and grammar. Speaking and understanding also depend on the social situations in which verbal exchanges take place. – 13

2. Ethnography of communication

culture was essentially a communicative phenomena, constituted through talk. – 15

a second approach emerged that focuses directly on the organization of speech exchanges and takes a broader view of language as communicating both content and metapragmatic or indexical information about content. This later approach became known as interactional sociolinguistics. – 16

One cannot, therefore, assume that communicating is simply a matter of individuals transforming their ideas into signs by means of a culturally acquired code. Instead we concentrate on participants’ own context-bound, situated, on-line processing of information. – 17

In interpreting what they hear, interactants focus not just on the referential content of messages, but on what a speaker, intends to communicate. – 17

Interpretations also rely on perceptions of extralinguistic context, knowledge of the world, as well as on the cultural presuppositions that are brought to the interaction. – 17

3. Communicative practice and conversational inference

Communicative practice provides a unifying concept for the analysis of context-bound everyday talk that enables us to deal with grammar and semiotics as they enter into situated interpretation, along with cultural presuppositions that rely on two types of knowledge: (a) grammar and lexical signs that signal via well know grammatical rules and lexical semantics and (b) indexical signs, and among them contextualization conventions that signal by direct association between sign and context. – 18

Conversational inference is defined as situated, context-bound process of interpretation by means of which participants in an exchange assess other participants’ communicative intentions and on which they base their own responses. – 18

4. Interpretation in interaction

5. Misunderstandings as resource for generalizations about communicative practice.

6. Interactional sociolinguistics’ contribution to intercultural communication

7. Conclusion