Analyzing Intercultural Communication [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110874280, 9783110112467

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Analyzing Intercultural Communication

Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 1

Editors

Ronan Coulmas Jacob L.Mey

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York · Amsterdam

Analyzing Intercultural Communication

edited by

Karlfried Knapp Werner Enninger Annelie Knapp-Potthoff

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York · Amsterdam 1987

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

Library of Congress Cataloging

in Publication

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Analyzing intercultural communication. (Studies in anthropological linguistics ; 1) Based on proceedings of a conference on "Analyzing intercultural communication" held in Essen, Federal Republic of Germany, Dec. 2 - 3 , 1983, which was organized by the RWTH Aachen, the University of Düsseldorf, and the University of Essen. Includes bibliographies and indexes. 1. Intercultural communication—Congresses 2. Sociolinguistics—Congresses. I. Knapp, Karlfried. II. Knapp-Potthoff, Annelie. III. Enninger, Werner. IV. Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen. V. Universität Düsseldorf. VI. Universität Essen. VII. Series. RM258.A525 1987 303.4'82 87-15483 ISBN 0-89925-333-4 (alk. paper)

CIP-Kurztitelaufnahme

der Deutschen

Bibliothek

Analyzing intercultural communication / ed. by Karlfried Knapp . . . - Berlin ; New York ; Amsterdam : Mouton de Gruyter, 1987. (Studies in anthropological linguistics ; 1) ISBN 3-11-011246-9 NE: Knapp, Karlfried [Hrsg.]; GT

Printed on acid free paper. © Copyright 1987 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form — by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means — nor transmitted nor translated into a machine language without written permission from Mouton de Gruyter, a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin. Typesetting: Appl, Wemding. — Printing: Ratzlow-Druck, Berlin. — Binding: Dieter Mikolai, Berlin. - Printed in Germany.

Preface Intercultural communication has since long become an everyday experience for more and more people in the world. But although the relation between language and culture has always been a topic in the history of linguistics and although descriptions of sociocultural differences in language use, too, have a continual tradition, it is only since the recent past that problems of intercultural communication have become an area of focal interest for a larger part of the linguistic profession. This change of interest is due, at least in part, to the involvement of linguists in the solution of urgent communication problems in modern urban societies, which by their very nature required a more comprehensive, anthropologically oriented approach to language — a change which goes along with a readiness for a theoretical and methodological reorientation that gave rise to recent developments in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Dealing with intercultural communication indeed poses a challenge to many of the assumptions on which current linguistic thinking is based. Thus, for example, not even one of the most fundamental givens in conventional linguistic analyses, viz. the language to be analyzed, can be taken for granted here: In intercultural communication, before or in the course of the interaction, the participants themselves according to various linguistic and extralinguistic factors decide on the choice of the language they use. This field certainly does not allow for a comfortable retreat to an idealized hard core of abstract grammatical knowledge. To be meaningful, any analysis and any theoretical generalization has to start from the fact that intercultural communication is interactional in nature, and has to account for its political, social and psychological bases. These main determinants of intercultural communication are addressed in the different parts of this book: socio-political contexts (I), socio-political perspectives of intercultural communication (II), language choice (III), and various aspects of intercultural discourse (IV and V). Of course, as is evident from the individual chapters, the complexity of this subject necessitates an interdisciplinary and multiperspectival approach. Therefore, the present book is intended to represent a wide variety of the questions currently pursued in this field and ways of

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Preface

answering them. The editors hope that it will demonstrate the importance of analyzing intercultural communication for the development of methods and theory in linguistics in general, and that it will stimulate others to join the authors in the analysis of an increasingly important, though still underexplored area of human communication. The present reader has grown out of a conference on "Analyzing Intercultural Communication", jointly organized by the RWTH Aachen, the University of Düsseldorf and the University of Essen, Federal Republic of Germany on December 2 and 3, 1983 in Essen. However, not all the participants could make their papers available for inclusion in this volume, nor were all the contributions to this book which were completed by Summer 1985, read at the conference. Düsseldorf/Essen/Aachen

K.K./W.E./A.K.P.

Contents Instead of an introduction: Conceptual issues in analyzing intercultural communication Karlfried Knapp, Annelie Knapp-Potthoff

1

I. Socio-'political contexts of intercultural communication

15

Socio-political influences on cross-cultural encounters: Notes towards a framework for the analysis of context Alan Murray, Ranjit Sondhi II. Socio-psychological perspectives of intercultural communication. Attribution theory and intercultural communication Mansur Lalljee Contact between German and Turkish adolescents: A case study Giseal Apitzsch, Norbert Dittmar

17 35 37 51

III. Language choice

73

Language choice in multilingual societies: A Singapore case study Sherida Altehenger-Smith Why speak English? Florian Coulmas

75 95

IV. Discourse processes

109

Keeping the gate: How judgements are made in interethnic interviews Celia Roberts, Pete Sayers Foreigner talk, code switching and the concept of trouble Volker Hinnenkamp The man (or woman) in the middle: Discoursal aspects of non-professional interpreting Annelie Knapp-Potthoff, Karlftied Knapp

Ill 137

181

VIII

Contents

V. Selected elements of discourse

213

Multiple formulae Aspects of Turkish migrant workers' German in intercultural communication Jochen Rehbein The use of alors in French-Dutch negotiation: A case study Judith Stalpers What interactants do with non-talk across cultures Werner Enninger

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About the Authors Index of Subjects Index of Names

303 307 315

215 249

Instead of an introduction: Conceptual issues in analyzing intercultural communication* Karlfried Knapp, Annelie Knapp-Potthoff

The growth in foreign travel for business, study and pleasure, the migration of people seeking work in other countries, the continuous flow of refugees fleeing persecution or war and the expansion of international trade have naturally all led to a concomitant increase in contacts across national and ethnic borders. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that these contacts may be negatively affected by severe communication problems which cannot be reduced to a lack of knowledge of the pronunciation, grammar, and the lexicon of the languages involved, although such problems certainly also exist. As, for example, ethnographic studies in urban communication demonstrate, problems in situations of contact between members of immigrated minorities and those of the majority population within the host society are often made even worse when the immigrants acquire a nativelike fluency in the majority language, which is not paralleled by a shared knowledge of the ways of thinking, acting and speaking which enter into and are usually taken for granted in interaction. Differences in this kind of knowledge, which may cause trouble in any situation of contact between members of different cultural, ethnic or social groups, constitute, in short, problems of intercultural communication. For linguistics, intercultural communication poses both practical and theoretical challenges. On the one hand, as concerns practical issues, by means of the description and analysis of processes of intercultural communication, culturally divergent ways of communication can be identified and problems resulting from them may be anticipated and overcome by forms of training. On the other hand, intercultural communication represents a theoretical challenge as (a) its analysis has to refrain from the generative linguist's comfortable idealizations — it * Special thanks to Peter Franklin, who has helped us to communicate interculturally by way of English as our non-native language.

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is precisely inhomogeneity that is at issue — but has to be based instead on natural, live, informal and unsolicited speech, and (b) explanations have to be sought in the framework of a theory of language that is able to account for sociocultural determinants of meaning and use. It does not come as a surprise, then, that the advent of portable recording equipment and the development of pragmatics and conversational analysis encouraged linguists to take a greater interest in issues of intercultural communication, as tools for analyzing real life interactional data were now available. Much of the current interest is due to the work of John Gumperz,1 who has to be credited with having been the first to focus on ongoing processes of interaction. But this is, of course, not to say that the relation between languages and cultures and societies had not been dealt with in linguistics before: culturally specific ways of language use were described in the framework of the "Ethnography of Speaking" (Hymes 1964),2 or in a structuralist contrastive manner as in Lado's "Linguistics across Cultures" (Lado 1957), not to mention the classic ethnographic tradition developed in the early decades of this century and associated for example with the work of Sapir and Boas. The analysis of intercultural communication is still characterized by a multiplicity of theoretical and methodological approaches rooted in linguistics and supplemented by techniques used in the social sciences. As will become apparent in the contributions to this volume, "analyzing" can mean many different ways of describing, defining, and explaining problems that may arise from cultural differences in communication. But it is not only the notion of "analyzing" that calls for more careful examination here. The very concept of "intercultural communication" itself appears to be in need of a more precise definition. There are, in fact, quite a large number of disciplines other than linguistics that deal with intercultural communication, in particular psychology, social psychology and sociology.3 It is true that they address important issues, e.g. the psychological problems of adaptation of sojourners abroad, such as culture shock, the effect of different cognitive styles and attribution processes, or the consequences of culturally specific role relationships. However, it is often hard to see how psychological states and categories, how socio-psychological concepts and social values like these affect a concrete intercultural interaction in more than a very general way. Knowledge of these phenomena does not necessarily enable a participant to perform and interpret individual verbal and

Instead of an introduction

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non-verbal communicative acts as would be necessary for successful encounters.4 Similarly, it is without doubt very useful to know the meaning of culturally specific acts, artefacts, and symbols, for example to know what is communicated by a white dress in a particular culture,5 but again such a general semiotic approach does not automatically lead to the kind of competence required to manage the actual process of communicative action among participants from different cultures. Moreover, and as is obvious from many articles in this volume, there are more problems in intercultural contact than approaches that are not primarily interaction-oriented can discover. In most of the work done under the label of "intercultural communication", the notions of "culture" and "communication" are very broad and vague, indeed. They tend to be regarded as "passe-partout" concepts: Everything is a consequence of culture, and everything communicates. This view is neatly summarized in E.T. Hall's (1959) dictum "Communication is culture, culture is communication." Clearly, this vagueness is unsatisfactory when the focus is on how people use the linguistic means specific to their culture to communicate, which is, of course, the interest of the (socio-) linguist. In addition, much of the literature is characterized by a certain terminological arbitrariness: "intercultural", "interethnic", "interracial", and "crosscultural" often seem to be used in free variation. Thus, instead of a more conventional introduction, it may be appropriate here to raise some conceptual and terminological issues connected with the title of this book and to ask what "analyzing", "intercultural" and "communication" can mean from a linguist's point of view. We will proceed by discussing these notions in reverse order. Of course, the views expressed here are our own and we do not claim to speak for the other contributors.6 What is covered by the term "communication" should be the least problematic in this context. As indicated above, it is the linguistic aspect of communication that is at issue here, i. e. the verbal and those non-verbal (prosodic, paralinguistic and kinesic) means of communication that accompany speech and their occurrence,7 meaning and formal organization in both everyday face-to-face interaction and in institutionalized or ritualized forms of language use, be it in discourse or in other texts, as, for example, in narratives. This does not mean, however, that the internal structure of the social situation and its specific determinants in which a particular type of language use occurs can be neglected. Rather, an approach to intercultural communication should be comprehensive in nature, embed-

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Knapp-Potthoff

ding detailed analyses of communication processes in their socio-political and socio-cultural contexts. This leads us to the concept of culture. As any short glance at the literature will reveal, "culture" is a problematic notion. Kroeber/KJuckhohn (1952), for instance, list more than 200 different definitions of this concept, to which many other more recent ones can certainly be added. On the surface, what strikes the lay(wo-)man as typical of a certain culture is a set of specific artefacts, man-made environments, patterns of social organization, and overt forms of behavior. Most scientific attempts at defining culture, however, refer to a more abstract shared knowledge of members of social communities, frequently on the level of the geographical and political unit of a nation. This knowledge concerns the relation of such phenomena to the world views, value orientations, norms, manners and customs, orientations towards social and interpersonal relations, preferred styles of thinking and arguing etc. that are taken for granted by the members of a social community and that more generally explain the occurrence of and give meaning to these surface phenomena. But even if we restrict ourselves to those aspects of culture that bear on the process of communication in the narrower sense introduced above, it is still very hard to conceive of one particular culture, though this appears to be a precondition of any attempt at identifying culturally determined differences in ways of using language. In a way, the problem here is similar to that of a linguist who wants to enumerate those linguistic features and elements that are regarded as features and elements of a particular language. In part, this is — as with language — a problem of units of description, and in part it is also a problem of the range of the phenomena to be considered. In fact, almost any type of social and socio-psychological categorization concerns knowledge that directly or indirectly affects the behavior of members of a society. Thus to give a finite account of what kind of knowledge constitutes a culture would seem to be impossible. On the other hand, there is the difficulty that a social community identified with a specific culture is hardly ever a homogenous entity: the knowledge that characterizes one culture varies more or less on all levels of social stratification among members of that community. And to complicate matters further, the knowledge taken for granted by some subgroup of a larger community can extend over the borders of this community. Thus, for instance, an Indian lecturer at London University in many areas of his knowledge and behavior has more in common with his native English colleagues than, say, with a peasant fellow countryman in Gujarat, as the British-

Instead of an introduction

5

born members of the university staff are in many respects closer to the Indian than to British unskilled workers. As with the description of natural language, the description and definition of a particular culture require abstractions and idealizations. As a consequence of what has been said above, it seems reasonable to regard culture as a member's concept in the sense that its conceptualization should be based on those features that the members in their interaction with others feel to be relevant and distinctive. This does not imply, of course, that members are necessarily able to make the respective cultural features explicit. Social groups define their identity mainly in contrast to their surroundings, and usually a particular characteristic of this identity becomes noticeable to members only when either a comember or a non-member of their group deviates in his or her behavior from that characteristic. Therefore, the total of the shared knowledge in a social community seems to be of less importance in interactions among members of different communities than that subset of its features which the respective members themselves use and perceive as important. A crucial problem for research here is to identify these usually implicit and subconscious evaluations. In most cases they surface only when misunderstandings or other conflicts in communication occur. In short, what is interesting as "cultural" in linguistic analyses of intercultural communication are those properties of the shared knowledge of a social group which, because of their distinctiveness, cause or may cause trouble in interaction with members of another group. To determine a "culture in contrast" by identifying differences in shared knowledge that are taken as relevant in this sense is a procedure which, of course, applies to the identification of subcultural groups as well.8 But this raises further conceptual problems. As subcultural groups of different cultural communities obviously can share common knowledge (as is the case in the previous examples taken from the academic community with groups from different national or — for lack of a better term — macrocultural backgrounds) it is at times difficult to distinguish between inter- and i>ifracultural communication. If differences in socio-cultural knowledge which exist between similar subcultural groups of different macrocultural origin are considered irrelevant and the shared knowledge is regarded as constituting a (sub-)culture of its own, communication between subculture x t of culture χ and subculture y! of culture y may be conceived of as miracultural communication (in our example, the culture of the academic community). And

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if — with the same plausibility — differences in the sociocultural knowledge of two subcultures Xi and x2 of the same macroculture χ (e. g. between academics and unskilled workers) are stressed, the communication between members of these two subcultural groups may be conceptualized as m/ercultural communication. Difficulties such as these which result from the vagueness of the notion "culture" seem to be avoided by the use two other expressions, viz. "interracial" and "interethnic". Occasionally, these notions are applied interchangeably, which is neither useful nor correct. What makes the notion of race easier to handle than that of culture is the fact that "race" can be more clearly defined: a race is usually considered as a group of people who have certain biological features in common. However, these biological features are relevant for intercultural communication only insofar as the physical appearance of an interlocutor may make certain attributions more likely than others. That these attributions often have severe consequences for the individuals concerned cannot, of course, be denied. But there is a wide range of problem areas in intercultural communication for which no evidence exists that they originate in differences in biological features alone. The fallacy that race is always the cause of communication problems is due to the fact that racial differences are often paralleled by cultural and/or ethnic ones. Moreover, countless communication problems which can safely be called "intercultural" exist in situations where people of the same race communicate. The term "interracial communication" seems to be most applicable when the analytic focus is on issues of racism inherent in a particular contact situation. However, it does not seem suitable if potential problems of communication resulting from differences in the kind of knowledge that constitutes a certain group are the center of our interest. "Ethnic" is a label for groups characterized by quite different criteria. The term has become popular in Britain and the USA above all in combinations like "ethnic identity", "ethnic food", "ethnic bookshop" etc. The use of these expressions points to the fact that the term "ethnic" is preferred for describing groups of minorities living in the same geographical area as the majority population, rather than for characterizing groups of people living in different countries, say Japanese people living in Japan in contrast to Frenchmen living in France. The very fact that the term "ethnic" and its derivations are mainly used for groups living in a "multi-ethnic" society is connected with the empha-

Instead of an introduction

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sis on "boundaries" and "differences" in definitions of "ethnic" and "ethnicity". Thus, Wallmann (1978) defines "ethnicity" as a "felt boundary between 'us' and 'them'", and Barth (1969) points out that the survival of an ethnic group does not so much depend on a specific amount of cultural (sic) substance available to this group, but rather on the persistence of a boundary that is drawn up with respect to individual cultural features by the members themselves and that keeps the group distinct from the majority culture. At first sight, the idea of relevant features being defined by the members themselves seems to be compatible with the idea of culture as a member's concept as outlined above. This may lead to the conclusion that "ethnicity" and "culture" can be used synonymously. However, other aspects in definitions of "ethnicity" do not allow us to use "ethnicity" and "culture" in free variation. First of all, the kind of features used to function as an ethnic boundary can vary. For some groups, for example in Ireland, it is religion; for others, for instance in China, it is language or dialect. Additionally, there may be variation in the defining criteria within the same group over time. Moreover, following Cohen (1969), ethnic groups can be regarded as "informal interest groups" that are constituted in competition for control over scarce resources — this process is sometimes called "ethnic revival" — and disappear again. Accordingly, ethnicity can change or be modified relative to political and economic circumstances. In short, ethnic groups can be regarded as unstable, informal interest groups that draw boundaries between themselves and other groups in a society on the basis of varying sets of criteria. Thus, the notion "interethnic communication" applies to a more restricted range of contacts than does "intercultural communication". Furthermore, virtually no precision is gained by preferring "interethnic" because, apart from language and religion, it is the very concept of culture that is often taken as the defining criterion of an ethnic group. But there is still another term that needs to be clarified and that, too, is often used synonymously with "intercultural". This is the term "cross-cultural". Traditionally, "cross-", as in "cross-linguistic" or "cross-check" implies a comparison of phenomena. Therefore, the adequate use of "cross-cultural" depends on the analyst's perspective: if different cultures are to be compared with respect to the occurrence of, for example, a certain form of language use, the approach is "crosscultural", but if the focus is on ongoing interaction among members of different (sub-)cultures, "intercultural" communication is at issue.9

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With this notion, however, a certain vagueness remains. As linguists, we can define "intercultural communication" as taking place whenever participants introduce different knowledge into the interaction which is specific to their respective sociocultural group, which is relevant in the sense that it determines how a particular interaction should normally be verbally or non-verbally accomplished, but which is taken for granted and thus can affect the process of communication. This is a consequence of our interactive concept of culture. But, as indicated above, this of course holds also for communication among subcultures and in fact for all groups, however defined, that share some specific knowledge. If, for instance, a family moves to a new neighborhood, then successful communication with the new neighbors requires a process of adaptation to the prevailing norms and expectations. And, similarly, if problems of communication are to be avoided, an individual has to acquire new ways of acting linguistically and new criteria for judging what is relevant in accomplishing the respective type of interaction. For example, this is the case if he or she for the first time enters an institution such as a company, a hospital, a court etc. as a new member of staff or as a customer, patient or client. Problems of communication, then, that result from differences in shared knowledge are not specific to interaction among members of different cultures, but they are, more generally, problems of communicating among new arrivals and old-established residents, among professionals and laymen, among insiders and outsiders — in short: among strangers. Should we abandon, then, the concept of "intercultural communication" and replace it by the more general notion "communication among strangers"? Our answer is: no. It is true that the fundamental processes of negotiation of meaning and of "Fremdverstehen" are indeed the same in intra- and intercultural communication, and this explains why intercultural communication despite frequent problems in interaction is possible at all and why the ability to communicate interculturally does not have to be learned from scratch (though some skill developed by experience certainly is an asset). However, there is a crucial difference between intra- and intercultural communication, and that is one related to language: typically in intercultural communication at least one of the strangers does not speak the language of the interaction as her or his mother tongue, but is a learner of that language at whatever level of proficiency. The specific problem here is that interactants not only do not share the relevant knowledge, but neither do they share the linguistic means that cue this knowledge in the

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interaction. In addition, as a result of the language problem, there are typical forms of communication, such as the use of interpreters. Therefore, to us, "intercultural communication" constitutes an area of research of its own. Of the three words that constitute the title of this volume, it is the term "analyzing" that now needs more clarification. In every single contribution to this reader, the term means something more specific than the term itself suggests — and something different, too. This refers to the goals of analysis as well as to research methodology. Despite the variety of approaches, which will be considered in more detail below, there is one question basic to almost any analysis of intercultural communication, which, however, is not always easy to answer. This is the question whether particular instances of intercultural communication or certain of their aspects were successful or whether they went wrong — at least for one of the participants. With respect to research methodology, it makes a great difference whether the analyst tries to answer this question from primary interactional data alone or whether he/she relies on other data as well, e. g. the participants' own accounts of their interactional goals and on their judgments concerning the success of the interaction. In any case, however, the problems related to the adequate interpretation of an interaction in which he/she him/herself has not taken part that exist for an analyst of any kind of communication are even more severe in the case of analyzing intercultural communication. Not only does the researcher bring his own subjectivity to the process of analysis, but he also cannot even take the cultural assumptions for granted on which his own work is based. Reflecting the fact that a generally accepted consistent framework for the analysis of intercultural communication does not yet exist, the articles collected in this volume represent different methodological approaches. Due to the differences in data-bases and in research questions, an integration of these approaches has not been possible. Nevertheless, it is hoped that the particular strengths and weaknesses of the diverse approaches to analyzing intercultural communication that are documented in this volume will become evident to the reader and that a discussion of these different approaches will eventually contribute to the emergence of a more consistent theoretical framework. In the following, "analyzing" will be put into more concrete terms by briefly characterizing the various approaches taken in this volume. The first article, that by Murray and Sondhi, is not concerned with the analysis of any specific piece of intercultural communication, but

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rather tries to set a broad contextual framework for the analysis of a sub-group of intercultural encounters, those that take place in so-called "gatekeeping situations". Murray/Sondhi argue that the observer can only discover the meaning of individual utterances for each of the participants and assess when and why miscommunication occurs if he takes into account the socio-political context in which the communication occurs, especially the power relations that hold between the participants in black-white gatekeeping situations. As such, Murray/ Sondhi's article is a criticism of much of the work done so far in analyses of intercultural communication. However, the performance of linguistic microanalyses can, in our view, be justified as a necessary step on the way to a more comprehensive analytical framework. Lalljee's paper does not deal with conversational data either, but rather focusses on culturally determined differences in making attributions as an important factor influencing intercultural communication. It is implicitly suggested that the research tools which have proved successful in attribution theory, e.g. questionnaires, can also be used to assess the particular attribution processes that have been made in intercultural interactions and can thus provide post-hoc explanations for intercultural misunderstanding. In their pilot study of intergroup relations between Turkish and native German adolescents in West Berlin, Apitzsch and Dittmar use the method of participant observation. Their analysis relies basically on three types of data: observations made during interactions among the participants, tape-recordings of seminar discussions and informal conversations, and lists of stereotypes expressed by the adolescents themselves. The very nature of the topic "language choice" dealt with in Part Three requires a variety of interactions as a data-base for investigating a superordinate aspect of managing intercultural communication, rather than an in-depth analysis of a particular stretch of discourse. The articles by Altehenger-Smith and Coulmas tackle the question of language choice in two different ways: Altehenger-Smith, in the tradition of sociolinguistic research on language planning, presents a case-study of a polyglossic society, and tries to identify factors that influence language choice at the micro-level. By means of a questionnaire, she elicits reported language use in a wide range of situations. Her approach is basically quantitative. Coulmas' approach is more that of an ethnographer. His data are dialogues between Japanese speakers and foreigners, collected or recollected by a partici-

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pant observer, and form the basis of qualitative rather than quantitative analyses. The three articles in Part Four are grouped under the heading "discourse processes". What they have in common is that they take recorded samples of intercultural discourse as data-bases. Employing discourse-analytical methods of analysis, they focus on the processes by which meaning is attributed in intercultural encounters and by which miscommunication is generated. Roberts and Sayers are those who most closely follow the line of Gumperz's work. They use authentic interview data in institutionalized settings supplemented by comments elicited from the participants after the interviews. The analyses done by Hinnenkamp and Knapp-Potthoff/Knapp can both — though each of them in different ways — draw upon clues which are genuine to the respective types of intercultural communication: Hinnenkamp, fully aware of the fact that for the analyst as well as for the interlocutor there is no unequivocal indication of what is meant, can nevertheless use the surface phenomenon of switching to foreigner talk as an additional clue to underlying meaning. KnappPotthoff/Knapp, in analyzing interactions that take place with the help of a mediator, i. e. a non-professional interpreter, have the advantage of working with data in which the intended meaning is verbalized twice: by the primary interlocutor and again by the mediator, or — to put it differently — in which what is understood is verbalized again. Thus, discrepancies between the primary interlocutor's and the mediator's versions can be the starting point for analysis. The three contributions in the last part of this book deal with selected, fairly clear-cut elements of discourse, but the methods used in determining the meanings and functions of these individual linguistic units differ. Rehbein's article, more explicitly than the other chapters in this volume, addresses an issue that is basic to almost any instance of intercultural communication, viz. the fact that at least one interlocutor is a second-language learner. Using discourse data as a basis, Rehbein describes forms and functions of multiple formulae (holistic structures with only vague meanings) in the German of Turkish migrant workers and their origin in the migrants' conditions of second-language acquisition. The work of Stalpers similarly concerns problems of communication that are related to the use of a learner language, but her approach is different. In her case-study, which deals with the interactive function of the particle "alors" in the French of a Dutch salesman, she com-

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pares conversational data from French/Dutch native/non-native speaker discourse with French/French native-/native-speaker data. In yet another way, Enninger, in the final chapter, makes use of the comparative method. Enninger's analysis reveals a potential for misunderstandings and communication conflicts that may occur when second language users assume that the discoursal feature which, in its substance, is virtually universal, i. e. silence, means the same in the second language as in their first. Enninger does not present an analysis of actual misunderstandings found in a discoursal context, but instead confronts different languages in an approach that is in line with work done under the label "contrastive pragmatics". The variety of research questions addressed in these contributions and the multitude of approaches taken are indicative of the state of the art in analyzing intercultural communication, even though the editors do not wish to claim that this book covers all directions of research pursued in this area. Clearly, the articles can be taken as representative in the sense that they pose as many questions as they answer.

Notes 1. See e.g. Gumperz (1982a, 1982b). 2. A framework from which Gumperz's approach originated. 3. See e.g. Brislin/Landis (1983) for a survey. 4. A speaker may know, for instance, that an offer made by his Japanese partner in a face-to-face interaction will put him under an obligation, which for several reasons he may not be willing to submit to. But from this it does not follow automatically how he can handle this situation in a manner socially acceptable for both parties. 5. In most Western cultures, a white dress is indicative of "happy occasions", as, for example, weddings, whereas in many Asian cultures, wearing a white dress is often indicative of mourning. 6. See, for instance, the chapter by Hinnenkamp for a different view. Note, furthermore, that some contributors use the terms "interethnic" or "interracial". 7. As Enninger (this volume) demonstrates, this includes certain instances of non-speech, too. 8. Note that this corresponds in linguistics to the delimitation of dialects by means of bundles of isoglosses. 9. As "cross-cultural" refers to an analytic approach, "cross-cultural communication" in a literal sense must be regarded as a meaningless expression. In this volume, a crosscultural analysis can be found in Enninger's contribution.

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References Barth, F. 1969 Introduction. Ethnic groups and boundaries, ed. by F.Barth, 9-38. Oslo: Universitätsforlaget Brislin, R.W. and D.Landis 1983 (eds.) Handbook of intercultural training. New York: Pergamon Cohen, A. 1969 Customs and politics in urban Africa: A study of Hausa immigrants in Yoruba towns. London: Tavistock Gumperz, J.J. 1982a Discourse strategies. Cambridge: CUP 1982b (ed.) Language and social identity. Cambridge: CUP Hall, E.T. 1959 The silent language. New York: Doubleday Hymes, D. 1964 (ed.) Language in culture and society. New York: Harper & Row Kroeber, A. L. and C. Kluckhohn 1952 Culture. A critical review of concepts and definitions. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP Lado, R. 1957 Linguistics across cultures. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Wallman, S. 1978 Race relations or ethnic relations? New Community VI: 3, 235-242

Ι. Socio-political contexts of intercultural communication

Socio-political influences on cross-cultural encounters: Notes towards a framework for the analysis of context Alan Murray, Ranjit Sondhi

Introduction Much recent work in the field of inter-ethnic communication, notably the work of John Gumperz1 and Frederik Erickson2 has focussed on analysis of face-to-face encounters between white representatives of bureaucracies (both public and private sector) and black members of the public. These investigations, rooted in an approach derived from social anthropology and linguistics, have involved a close analysis of the process of interaction especially of points at which a breakdown in communication occurs. But the investigators have been conscious of the wider implications of such encounters and the socio-political influences on them. Simonot/Dodderidge (1984) refer to "the degree of ethnicity, ethnocentricity and racism present in the individual" and argue "it is important to attempt to define what each participant attributes to the other in terms of attitudes, motives, intentions, and rationality". John Gumperz in a recent paper for a non-specialist audience3 refers to "a vicious cycle of miscommunication, stereotyping and indirect discrimination" and suggests: What we need is a closer examination of our urban institutions and of the gatekeeping and adjudication processes by which they are maintained. This paper is a first attempt at constructing a broad contextual framework for the analysis of gatekeeper situations from a standpoint which assumes that an understanding of the power relations between white gatekeepers and their black clients is a necessary precondition to effective analysis of encounters between individuals. It is our conviction

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that, without such a wider understanding of context, discussion is likely to take place at the level of interactional or linguistic analysis, and may not adequately reflect the political and social realities of such encounters. In encounters in which there is considerable social and cultural distance between participants, it is only a full understanding of context which enables the observer to discover the meaning of individual utterances for each of the participants, to assess when and why miscommunication occurs, and to decide when significant exchanges have taken place and what is the significance to each of the participants. Just as such exchanges do not, in real life, take place in a socio-political vacuum, neither can empirical observation take place in such a vacuum. Our concerns arise from our practical experience of working with ethnic minorities and with gatekeepers, both in advice/counseling situations and in the training situation. We are therefore concerned with the dangers of too narrow a frame of reference for analysis — which can lead to an avoidance of the most "difficult" but more important reasons for failures in cross-cultural encounters — i.e. failures which have to do with prejudice, racism, discriminatory practices, or with problems concerned with the power relations between participants — in favor of the "easier", more technical failures in discourse, intonation or non-verbal communication. It is important to stress that most studies of the factors affecting black4 people in European countries have suffered from at least two damaging limitations: a) in most studies, at least in the sixties and seventies, the problem was located in the black community rather than in the white community, b) studies have been carried out and inventoried in a very isolated way. By concentrating only on the problems relating to, say, religion, language, cultural differences, communicative breakdowns, they have tended to overlook the structural factors which lead to racial disadvantage and have deflected the argument away from the broader issues which have to be faced if the condition of black people's lives is to be changed in any major way. Our argument for the construction of a framework for the analysis of cross-cultural interactions which takes account of the socio-political context therefore also raises questions about the limitations of such analyses at the microlevel.

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The context of cross-cultural encounters I: Broader structural issues In Western countries which have encouraged third world immigration especially from ex-colonial territories since the end of World War II, the normal context for cross-cultural communication has been one in which White Europeans are in positions of power, and black immigrants in subordinate positions, as employees or clients. This is evidently true in formal institutional situations, whether in factories or in central or local government agencies, but it is also true of informal situations. Several studies have shown5 that, even in multi-racial neighborhoods, social intercourse between black and white as equal neighbors has been relatively rare, certainly in the fifties and sixties. A large proportion of black people's contacts have been with White Europeans as shopkeepers, tradesmen, landlords, and police, whereas for neighborly contacts and support they have largely had to rely on their own cultural groups. Where informal neighborhood intercourse takes place, the White European still holds a position of power: he (though not so much perhaps she) is the property owner, member of the dominant culture, participant in the institutions which give access to power — whether they be governmental institutions or trade unions. The black settler is in the subordinate role, whether as guest-worker,6 immigrant, ethnic minority, tenant, unskilled worker, or as "nig-nog", "coon", "wog" or "paki." The cumulative effect of such weighting of the social scales against black people is felt in every cross-cultural interaction in a Western society. In addition, White European societies have accorded their own cultures a "given" status: the dominant culture is seen as monolithic, allembracing and as being accepted and shared by all members of that society. This model of society as essentially monocultural can be traced back in Britain in its modern form very specifically to the "OneNation" arguments of Disraeli in attempting to give a moral justification for the then unpopular expansion of the British Empire (though its contemporary form owes far more than is normally admitted to the speeches of Enoch Powell in 1968 and after). In Europe, similar models were developed under Napoleon, Bismarck, Cavour etc., all in the interest of shoring up the shaky theory of the modern European nation state whose survival over the last two hundred years has often been problematic. In its classic form the monocultural model implied the

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inferiority of all other cultures, particularly those beyond the pale of "civilization," and gave birth to the racist theories of black and white of Gobineau and his followers and the "civilizing mission" of administrators and educators. In its contemporary form, monoculturalism takes for granted the superior (normally formulated as "more advanced") status of the dominant white culture: other cultures, especially from the third world, are treated as alien, if not primitive, and members of such cultures who hope to live within the dominant culture are expected to assimilate to the norms and values of the majority. Despite the recent public espousal of a multicultural model of society by, for example, many politicians, most of the assumptions behind public policy, and the procedures and practices of more institutions, are still resolutely monocultural. This is not the place to point out the historical and sociological naivety of the monocultural model, its studied disregard for the complexity of modern societies, and of the ethnic, religious, cultural, social, and political minorities which flourish within them. The work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham has exposed the way in which such assumptions have governed public policy over the last twenty years and has documented much of the damage done; 7 Chris Mullard has provided a theoretical basis for an antiracist analysis in the educational field;8 Erving Goffmann 9 (in addition to those cited in the introductory paragraph) has uncovered the extent to which quite different sets of norms and values are held by different social groups, and by individuals within groups; Basil Bernstein10 has investigated the extent to which class position influences communicative options. But what we are concerned with in this paper is to state clearly the socio-political factors (both historical and contemporary) which create social distance in cross-cultural interactions, especially in institutional situations. There is a widespread assumption that, because discussion about race relations in Britain at the macro-level now takes place within the framework of a multi-cultural or "cultural diversity" model rather than a monocultural or assimilationist model, cross-cultural encounters at the micro-level can now be between free and equal members of a multicultural society. Such an assumption is mistaken for at least three major reasons. Firstly, the assimilationist model still persists in the multi-cultural — the argument runs: previous generations of immigrants from Europe have easily (or with more difficulty if they were Jews) integrated into British Society — non-white immigrants have not, because of greater differences of skin color and culture. This is a convenient monocultur-

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alist myth — Italians, Poles, Jews etc. form culturally distinct groups in Britain despite long settlement and much intermarriage. There has always been a multi-cultural reality behind the monocultural myth. Secondly, although cultural pluralism does imply in theory that all cultures are equal and that all individuals are free to follow their religion and culture, in practice all cultures are manifestly not equal, in the status ascribed to them by the key institutions, notably educational, of British society. But thirdly, even if British society were nearer to a genuine cultural pluralism, the historical weight of discrimination, inferior ascribed status, and social disadvantage would make equal encounters between black and white impossible for some time to come. We cannot use multicultural ideals to hide a racist reality. The historically specific background to third world immigration to Europe and Britain has often been rehearsed in other contexts, but needs restating briefly because it structures the background against which all black-white encounters take place in contemporary society. The colonial past of European countries has meant that the normal relationship of white to black, as conceived of by whites, for at least 200 years up to the mid-20th century was that of master and servant, in social terms, or exploiter and exploited, in economic terms. The variations in this relationship ranged from that of master-slave, involving ownership, with the power of life and death, of human flesh, in the American colonies, the Southern States of the USA and in Southern Africa — through the stern patriarchal relation of the Central African farmer to his "boys" — to the firm control of administration, justice and finance by the British in India. In all cases the forces of authority and repression — the army, the police and the judiciary — were under the control of the colonial powers, as were, in economic terms, the means of production. Most middle class families in Britain and many in Europe had members who served or settled in colonies, while many working class families had members in the ranks of the army who, especially during the Second World War, had experience in colonies or ex-colonies, and were indoctrinated with the notions of white superiority held by their officers. Many black British and French citizens were recruited into their respective armies and received a reverse from such training, designed to develop a sense of their own inferiority. Attempts at cultural repression ranged from full-scale measures aimed at the extrication of local culture and its replacement by European culture, as in much of South America and to a lesser extent in French Algeria and West Africa, to the less comprehensive efforts of missionaries and edu-

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cators in much of Asia and Africa. Meanwhile at home the exploitation of black people abroad was substained and justified by a complex mythography of adventure and violence in which the black man ("half devil, half child") personified some of the deeper fears and worries the white man had about his own identity.11 Although there had been some recruitment and transportation of labor from the third world since the early colonial period, large-scale recruitment was only undertaken during the "boom" years for European economies, with their resulting labor shortages, of the fifties and sixties. The demand was for unskilled workers in heavy industry to do dirty and often dangerous jobs which whites would refuse to do. Many immigrants came, their interest caught by the glowing pictures painted in Government recruitment posters and literature, sometimes with good educational qualifications and/or trade, craft or entrepreneurial skills and with ambitions to match them. When they arrived they found hostility, racial abuse — sometimes violent — systematic discrimination in pay and conditions at work, in the provision of housing and basic services, in education and training, and in job recruitment and promotion. They found themselves in the position of an "underclass", in what was almost a replication of the colonial situation on British (or European) soil. While managers, foremen, and trade unionists colluded in perpetuating the master-servant view of white and black races, governments and institutions reinforced and defined the marginal status of immigrants through immigration laws and controls, labor regulations and work permits. Changes in the laws and rules governing right of abode and nationality were designed quite unashamedly to restrict entry of black — as opposed to white — workers, and to render difficult the maintenance and consolidation of family life. Most contacts between black people and white institutions thus took place in an atmosphere of, at best, cold formality and at worst, overt racial hostility, and involved the black participants in humiliation and rejection. Even at the informal level, the simplest two-word formula — "Hey, you" — carried the weight of 200 years of oppression with it. To characterize Britain and other European countries as racist societies is therefore merely to pay due attention to the structural discrimination which is present in these societies whatever the political complexion of the government of the day or whatever the particular policies on race and race relations that government might adopt. Racism, in the current usage of the term, refers to deep-rooted policies, procedures, practices, and attitudes which operate at every level of society, including ideolog-

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ical, and are dignified by and articulated through hundreds of years of tradition. These work in favor of the interests of white people and against the interests of black people. This is the socio-political context in which cross-cultural encounters take place: one in which there is no possibility of an equal exchange between black and white.

The context of cross-cultural encounters II: Culture and biographies We have argued that the broader societal context of cross-cultural interactions shapes the attitudes and behavior of individuals involved in them. If the encounter takes place in an institutional setting, then the white participant representing the institution, the "gatekeeper", will hold all the power conferred on him by the institution, whatever the color of the client. The institution will have prescribed certain modes of behavior in dealing with the public, and will have trained its institutional representatives to behave in the prescribed manner. In relation to black clients, it is also important to note that the gatekeeper represents what can only be, for the reasons adduced above, a racist institution. These three factors will influence the process of the encounter whatever the personal views or qualities of the individual gatekeeper, since gatekeepers are members of an institutional culture, whose norms, values, and attitudes they have assimilated to a greater or lesser extent. The individual concerned may have personal attitudes at any point on a continuum which stretches from overt racism to tolerance and warmth towards black people. We can perhaps distinguish four basic categories of attitude, each of which represents a cluster of beliefs, views, and prejudices, and within which there can be wide variations. The overt racist category is likely to include rigid beliefs about the superiority of the white indigenous culture over all other cultures, particularly those of the third world, and about the necessity of preserving that culture against "pollution" from "alien" sources. Black people are seen as a threat to the indigenous culture, being less intelligent, uncivilised and non-conformist. They are seen has having no rights in white society, and any institutional provision for them is seen as (unjustified) charity. Great care must be taken when they approach the institution as

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they are often devious scroungers, attempting to milk the system for all they can get. Associated behaviors by such people in their role as gatekeepers may include racist abuse, physical and verbal rudeness, and refusal to "open the gate". The racially prejudiced category may include many of the beliefs of the previous category in a less pathological form. Typically such prejudice is based on strongly-held stereotypes of ethnic groups, to which certain characteristics are ascribed (the Irish are stupid, Indians are obsequious, Afro-Caribbeans "have a chip on their shoulder" etc.). Indigenous culture is seen as unquestionably superior, but racial prejudice of this kind does not necessarily involve such defensiveness about one's own culture as does overt racism. Distinctions may also be made between different ethnic minority groups, and the gatekeeper's attitude will often be "Well, they can't help it, can they? They're not like us." In the same way such people may not actively prevent black people taking up their rights, but may be meticulous in applying rules and raising objections because of suspicions as to whether clients are really entitled to what they are asking for. A third category is more instrumental in its approach, seeing black people as strangers or outsiders in society, fulfilling a necessary role in economic terms and deserving of the same rights and benefits as members of the dominant culture so long as they fulfil that role. This group may show little evidence of prejudice and little concern for cultural differences in normal circumstances. It is only when economic and political circumstances change, as for example when unemployment becomes a major problem, that hostility towards minority groups may surface. From being strangers, they become scapegoats for the ills in wider society, as the instrumental labor-market reasons for their presence no longer apply. At such times, this group may embrace the overt racist or racially prejudiced views of the first two groups, and practise discriminatory behavior towards black people. Finally a fourth category can be distinguished which accepts and even welcomes a multicultural society, emphasizing the richness of ethnic minority cultures and praising the color and life black people bring to white society. As gatekeepers, such people may well go out of their way to assist black people, especially if they are nervous and unassuming, perhaps speaking little English. But their behavior may in many cases still be based on unshakeable beliefs about the superiority of their own culture, and they may be perceived by black people as patronizing and overbaring. Confident and assertive black people may

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be seen as troublemakers, and distinctions may be drawn along the lines of the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor of the Victorian era. To attempt to categorize attitudes and behavior in this way is inevitably to oversimplify and to distort, and also to run the risk of positing too clear a link between attitude and behavior. But it is essential, if we are to analyze meaning in cross-cultural interactions, to be analytical about the beliefs and attitudes which individuals bring with them to such situations. Equally important, therefore, are the beliefs and attitudes which black people bring with them, and which condition their expectations of gatekeepers. In a racist society, black people are forced to react to racism, and that reaction can take a variety of forms, on a continuum from acceptance to resistance. Again, three or four basic categories can be distinguished. The first can be perhaps described as inherited deference, in which a set of attitudes based on the experience of living in a colonized country are transferred to the new situation in the colonizing country. The myth of superiority and the reality of dominance are accepted as part of the natural order of things, and the authority of white people is deferred to. In its pure form, this reaction is only found among the older members of the first generation of migrants who were in some way associated with the colonizing power, perhaps in the army, or as functionaries or clients, in their country of origin, though others may have assimilated such views to a greater or lesser extent. Among this group there is acceptance, for themselves even if not for their children, of their ascribed status in white society as an underclass of manual workers, mainly unskilled, who do not "claim their rights" but rather "ask for assistance" if absolutely necessary. The possibility of social mobility and economic success in white society is seen as highly unlikely, and where it might be possible, such success is seen entirely in the terms of the dominant white culture. A further category shares this view of the near-impossibility of success in the terms of white society, but is prepared to collude for instrumental purposes with the representatives of that society. Collusion may be along political or class lines, as in the large-scale espousal of trade unions by Asian workers in Britain in the early seventies, where these white (racist) institutions were seen as a means by some Asian workers to counter the discrimination they encountered in relation to pay and conditions.12 Or there may be collusion with the ethnocentrism and unconscious racism of the education system in order to achieve bene-

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fits for children. The attitudes of this group to gatekeepers are unlikely to be as deferential as those of the first group, but there may well be a surface acceptance of white authority as being the only way to make progress against the force of institutional racism. Finally, there is a set of attitudes which can be characterized as resistance to the dominant culture. This can take two forms which can overlap to a very large extent. Passive resistance can be seen in the way in which many local groups of black people, having become conscious of the massive discrimination they face, organize either to ensure that their legitimate claims on institutional bureaucracies are maximized, or to provide parallel, alternative forms of services within their own community. Examples can be seen, in the educational field, in the mothertongue classes, evening or Saturday schools, homework clubs etc. founded and run by groups either from one community or across several black communities. Active resistance can be seen in the organizations which black people have set up for themselves, sometimes in collaboration with white people, either to fight specific issues, such as a deportation decision or a clear case of racial discrimination, or to resist laws, regulations or decisions (e. g. immigration and nationality laws, identity checks before Health Service treatment etc.). Active and passive resistance are combined in other black self-help groups who provide educational welfare, social and cultural facilities for their own groups, while striving to generate greater social and political awareness and activity among participants. Where racism has taken a more violent form, as in the case of "Paki-bashing" or of the vicious attacks on Bengalis in the East End of London, resistance has taken a still more visible form — of vigilance on the streets and organization for selfdefence. In both these last two categories, attitudes to gatekeepers are very different: there is a total unwillingness to accept racist or prejudiced attitudes, bureaucratic "passing the buck" is recognized for what it is, complaints are made and grievance procedures taken up.

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The context of cross-cultural encounters III: The immediate social and political context A further set of influences on any cross-cultural interaction is to be found in the immediate social, economic, and political conditions, whether local or national, at the time the encounter takes place. We have already noted the change in attitudes on the part of a white participant, which can occur as a result of deteriorating economic conditions. When unemployment is high, especially in depressed areas, the black communities are hardest hit, as has been shown conclusively in several PEP reports13 and other documents. There are a number of consequences: black people are likely to be in need of benefit and welfare assistance in greater numbers; white people are likely to resent the presence of visible numbers of black people whether in work ("taking our jobs") or out of work ("scrounging off the system"); greater numbers of black and white young people are likely to get into trouble with the police. The combination of such developments leads to greater resentment of black people by white, renders the latent racism active and leads to an increase in racial hostility, violence and abuse. There are obvious consequences for cross-cultural encounters, especially in an institutional setting: they are likely to be influenced by the increased tension in society. Similar consequences follow from other events. A white Community Relations Officer commented after the British Prime Minister referred in 1979 to the possible "swamping" of Britain by immigrants: "Every time a politician makes a speech like that, I can feel the change in atmosphere when black people come into my office." When the riots with strong racial overtones occurred in British cities in the summer of 1981, a similar rise in temperature in individual encounters was noted by staff of government agencies throughout the country and led to a large-scale demand for cross-cultural awareness training for such staff. Local events — police violence in Southall, a National Front march in Lewisham, a Front National victory in local elections in France can have a similar effect at a local level. So although the historical context of relations between black and white, and the context of specific encounters, in terms of the attitudes which participants bring to them, may both be relatively stable over time, there may be considerable variations as a result of the immediate pressure of events outside the interview room. Stuart Hall's "pressure

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cooker" image of racial tension in the inner city is helpful in focussing our attention on the way in which racism which is permanently present in society is suddenly released with great force because of a build up of pressure caused by a combination of political, economic and social forces. If we are to be genuinely empirical in our observation of crosscultural encounters, we need to take note of such immediate, as well as deeper structural factors.

The key structured experiences which black and white participants bring to cross-cultural encounters In the earlier sections of this paper we have indicated the main factors which must be taken into account in the analysis of cross-cultural encounters. These can perhaps be summed up as structure, culture and biography. Each encounter takes place in a broad structural context, which has both a historical and cultural content. There is also a more immediate context, in which local or national events may influence the encounter, and in which the nature, role and history of the institution will be important. The institution will have a culture, a set of "rules of the game" both written and unwritten, which will need to be exposed. Finally, the individuals involved in the encounter will bring their own biographies — their previous experiences in situations of this kind — to the encounter. The process of the interaction may be influenced at each of these levels at different times. The key experiences which each side is likely to bring to the encounter can now be listed. Black individuals are likely to have a history of frustrating experiences with bureaucracies, whether public agencies or private companies, leading to a generalized distrust of white officialdom (and often a resultant negative attitude which is perceived as "chip-on-the-shoulder" by gatekeepers). There will also be a sense of powerlessness, which may be reinforced by a sense of inferiority, in cultural terms, perhaps inherited from the colonial period, and constantly reinforced by the educational system and the mass media. Black people will also be used to being perceived as members of the lower socio-economic strata, and even within those strata characterized as "strangers" or "outsiders", so may have very little confidence in their ability to change their own circumstances through normal

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bureaucratic channels. Their experience is likely to lead them to see the methods of "streetcraft" or "beating the system" as being more likely to produce results. In specific gatekeeper situations, black people are likely to bring to the encounter less knowledge of the system, less information on their rights, and lower hopes of success. In communicative terms they are most unlikely to have any sense of co-membership14 with the gatekeeper, or to have the confidence or skills to take or maintain control over the process of interaction. White gatekeepers, on the other hand, will normally bring in a strong sense of power, deriving both from their position as representatives of a (white) bureaucratic institution, and as representatives of the dominant indigenous culture. Their culturally dominant position derives both from the historical context of the European country as a colonialist power, and from the more recent history of racism in European societies related to the presence of black immigrant minorities within their borders. As white-collar workers, their social position will normally be higher than that of their clients, and their experience will give them greater self-confidence in the interview situation. Their position carries with it control over resources which can be released or retained by their own decision or by reference to a higher authority with which they can identify. Their knowledge of, and information about, the system (as it relates to benefits, job opportunities, etc.) is much greater than that of their clients. Even their own experiences on the other side of the interview-table, as clients of other bureaucratic institutions, are likely to have been positive, given their understanding of the system from the inside. In communicative terms, their approach will be determined by their training and experience, which will lead them to expect to exercise control during the process of the interview, and will have given them the communicative strategies to initiate control and the skills to maintain it. It is important to emphasize that such a list (by no means exhaustive) of the key experiences which participants bring to gatekeeper situations, is not simply a list of random experiences, nor even merely a cluster of such experiences. These are structured experiences, structured for each participant by their radically different involvement in a racist society. The white participant is a representative of an institution into the fabric of which racism is intricately woven, with both historical and contemporary strands. Institutional racism is in turn maintained by the racism of the whole society. Individual gatekeepers derive their attitudes to a considerable extent from the institution in which they

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work and the society in which they live, thus ensuring the persistence of racist attitudes even in the more well-intentioned representatives of white institutions. The experience of black clients is equally structured, however different, in that their experience of economic exploitation and a low ascribed status in society are mirrored in many of their individual encounters with white people, whether as representatives of institution, or as individuals in society. It is the structured nature of the experiences participants bring to cross-cultural encounters which makes Gumperz's "vicious cycle" so difficult to break.

Conclusion: Some implications and questions Writing from our experience as practitioners, our concern is that the orientation of research into cross-cultural communication should be towards improving the effectiveness of such encounters for black participants. This cannot be done without an adequate recognition of the extent to which relations of power, rather than relations of culture, are the crucial factor. All cross-cultural encounters have a dimension of power: in white/black encounters in European societies that dimension assumes major importance, which in white/black gatekeeper encounters, becomes the key factor. In these encounters, all the power is in the hands of the white participants, and it is the knowledge and experience of the possession of power on one side, and of powerlessness on the other side, which makes communication difficult. In such a context, the possibilities of an "equal exchange", of "establishing co-membership", of "empathy and rapport" — all of which are seen as essential to a good communication's environment (as in Erickson/Shultz 1982) — are remote, for reasons which have little to do with language or accent, little to do with culture or with culturally-derived speech conventions, but a great deal to do with structure. The white participant, representing an institution of a structurally racist society, will be perceived as "part of the problem", rather than as a means to a solution, by many black participants. There is therefore a problem at a basic definitional level in gatekeeper situations, involving competing definitions of what the encounter is actually about: white definitions deriving from the experience of power, and black definitions which derive from the experience of pow-

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erlessness. Only if analysis breaks free from the stranglehold of white definitions (of analysis as well as of the encounter) can it become an analysis which can benefit black people as well as white institutions. The reality we have described and the framework for analysis which may be derived from it, suggest questions, rather than conclusions, about the terms and definitions commonly used in discourse analysis. Questions, first of all, about whether cross-cultural communication or inter-ethnic communication are adequate terms to describe the field being investigated, since a) they imply that we are in neutral territory in which equal exchanges are possible, b) they place the emphasis on ethnic status or on cultural identity rather than on race, which is the crucial factor in white/black encounters, c) they emphasize the individual encounter rather than the context in which the encounter takes place. Secondly, the adequacy of analytical methods which concentrate on the "technical" aspects of communication needs to be questioned (and is indeed explicitly questioned both by Erickson/Schultz and by Gumperz — as in the quotation cited above). Thirdly, key concepts such as miscommunication, communication failure or breakdown, co-membership, interactional style, cultural style, shared goals, empathy, and rapport need to be re-examined from a broader social-political perspective. Is the concept adequate as it stands, does it need some extension to take account of the context we have described, does it need a slight shift in focus (whose success, whose failure?) or does it need radical redefinition (is "cultural style" a useful concept)? Fourthly, there are questions to be asked about training for cross-cultural communication, whether of white gatekeepers or of black clients (e.g. those seeking jobs or vocational training). For white gatekeepers, the questions have to do with whether good communication is possible unless they are willing to leave the secure citadel of their own role/status/power and to see the problem from the viewpoint of the black client. For clients, the questions have to do with the focus of training — is the focus of language training, or of "self-presentation training" etc., on learning to function as reasonably as is possible in a racist society — and if so, is this an adequate focus for such training? For both white and black groups, effective training must be dependent on making explicit the power relations of such encounters and the racial context in which they take place.

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Finally, questions arise about the terrain of current research in this field. Most research is concerned with analyzing communication breakdowns and "failure" in which the black participant is seen as failing to communicate (thus perpetuating the view that it is black people who are "the problem"). We would suggest that in analyzing such material, the focus of analysis should be shifted to the white participant and to the "white" context of the encounter: there are obvious examples (the Crosstalk materials)15 where this approach would be fruitful. A more fruitful approach still might be to analyze examples of encounters which were considered to be successful by black and white participants, and between black gatekeepers and black clients. Some such material has recently become available16 and it is our conviction that, given the shifts in analytical focus which we suggest are necessary, it will provide a rich source of material for those who are concerned both with research and with policy implications.

Notes 1. See Gumpenz (1982a, b), Gumperz/Cook-Gumperz (1981). 2. See Erickson (1976), Erickson/Shultz (1982). 3. See Gumperz (1983). 4. The word "black" is used here to describe all those people who share a common history of economic exploitation and cultural subjugation under colonialism and in modern European "multicultural societies". Black therefore covers Turks and Algerians as well as Indians, Pakistanis and Afro-Caribbeans. 5. This is made absolutely clear in those books or studies which have been written from a black perspective. See, for example, Selvon (1956), Mullard (1973), Kapo (1981). 6. While recognizing the obvious differences in legal status which result from government encouragement of immigration on a contract-labor basis, rather than on an immigrant worker basis where there is a possibility of settlement, we do not consider that such differences significantly affect the conduct of "gatekeeper" interviews. We know of no evidence that bureaucracies have treated black workers substantially better or worse in Germany or Britain, Switzerland or France. 7. In CCCS (1982). 8. In three forthcoming papers, see Mullard (1984). 9. See, especially Goffman (1974). 10. Especially in Bernstein (1970). 11. See Chris Searle's argument for the decolonization and recolonization of the English Language, in Searle (1983). 12. In several cases, Asian workers took the leading role in key disputes (Imperial Typewriters in Nottingham, Greenwich in London) in which they were later followed by the (white) trade union leadership. 13. Eg. Racial Disadvantage in Employment, London: PEP (1974), The Facts of Racial

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Disadvantage, London: PEP (1976), Unemployment and Racial Minorities, London: PSL (1981). 14. See Erickson/Schultz (1982,17 and 212-213). 15. The Crosstalk materials, video recordings of gatekeeper situations made by the BBC with the collaboration of the National Centre for Industrial Language Training, Southall, London, were analyzed by J. J.Gumperz, T.C. Jupp and C. Roberts in Gumperz/Jupp/Roberts (1979). 16. The present authors, with John Gumperz, collaborated on the video recording of a series of intra-ethnic encounters in three Welfare Advice Centres in the Birmingham conurbation in Britain. One was the Asian Resources Centre in Handsworth, the other two were Neighborhood Offices in Walsall. The material is currently being analyzed in the University of California, Berkeley, by members of Gumperz's team and in the National Centre for Industrial Language Training.

References Bernstein, B. 1970 Class, codes and control. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul CCCS 1982 The Empire strikes back. London: Centre for contemporary cultural studies/ Hutchinson Erickson, F. 1976 Gatekeeping encounters: A social selection process. Anthropology and the public interest, ed. by P.R.Sanday. New York: Academic Press Erickson, F. and J.J.Shultz 1982 The counselor as gatekeeper. New York: Academic Press Goflman, E. 1974 Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New York: Harper & Row Gumperz, J.J. 1982a Discourse strategies. Cambridge: CUP 1982b (ed.) Language and social identity. Cambridge: CUP 1983 The communicative bases of social inequality. Minorities: Community and identity, ed. by C.Fried, 109-118. Berlin: Springer Gumperz, J.J. and J. Cook-Gumperz 1981 Ethnic differences in communicative style. Language in the USA, ed. by C. A.Ferguson and C.B.Heath, 430-445. New York: CUP Gumperz, J. J., T.C. Jupp and C. Roberts 1979 Crosstalk: A study of cross-cultural communication. London: NCILT/BBC Kapo, R. 1981 A savage culture. London: Quartet Books Mullard, C. 1984 Anti-racist education: The three O's'. London: NAME ( = The National Association for Multi-Racial Education). (Available from Institute of Education, Race Relations Programme, 57, Gordon Square, London WC 1) Searle, C. 1983 A common language. Race and Class XXV: 2, 65-75 Selvon, S. 1956 The lonely Londoners. London: MacGibbon & Kee Simonot, M. and S. Dodderidge 1984 Language and culture in inter-ethnic communication: Some guidelines for analysis. Interpretive Sociolinguistics, ed. by P.Auer and A.di Luzio. Tübingen: Narr

II.

Socio-psychological perspectives of intercultural communication

Attribution theory and intercultural communication Mansur Lalljee

Introduction Attribution theory is one of the central areas of contemporary social psychology. It takes as its starting point the fundamental tendency of people to seek explanations for events. Explanations serve to give meaning to events, to enable us to apportion praise or blame, and to predict the behavior of other people, and indeed of other events in our environment, and thus enable us to orient ourselves towards the environment in a coherent manner. However, it is not a "theory" in the sense of a single systematic set of propositions. Drawing on Fritz Heider's book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (Heider, 1958) various authors have suggested a range of different hypotheses to account for different aspects of these issues. Thus, for instance, Kelley (1973) has put forward a number of models concerned with how people arrive at attributions, whereas others, for instance Weiner (1980), have been concerned with the consequences of attributions. There has been little work explicitly relating attribution theory to communication. Lalljee (1981) has suggested that an analysis of interactional processes is crucial for understanding attributions, and a number of studies have now been completed, which support such an orientation. The present paper is not a statement of the main theories of attribution; still less is it a review of literature. Interested readers should refer to the work of Kelley and of Weiner, mentioned above, and to a comprehensive review of the literature by Kelley and Michela (1980). Here it will be argued that understanding attributions is of crucial importance to understanding communication, particularly intercultural communication. Some concepts of attribution theory will be elaborated, and some of the research that is most relevant to intercultural communication will be discussed. A number of other papers that were presented at the conference out of which this reader has grown also stressed, implicitly or explicitly, the importance of cognitive processes. Thus Murray and Sondhi (this vol-

38

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ume) stressed the importance of the attribution of attitudes, motives, intent, and rationality, in analyzing inter-group relations, and Molony and Thomas also implicitly underlined the importance of attributions. Molony pointed out the difficulty that arises when a Moroccan child fails to respond in ways that are considered appropriate by a Dutch teacher. The failure is, of course, important, but what is also important is that frequently the failure is attributed to characteristics of the child, rather than the characteristics of the teacher or the school. Thomas gave a number of examples of the ambiguity of interaction. One such case concerned the Russian speaker who uses the phrase "I am asking you . . . " to formulate a request. This formulation would be regarded as rude by the native English speaker, and can pose difficulties for interactions between the Russians and the English. Such difficulties arise because of the implicit attribution of the formulation to the speaker's rudeness, rather than, for instance, to linguistic incompetence. In these examples, the explanation of why the behavior occurred may have crucial implications for our conception of the person. But our conception of the person also has crucial consequences for our interpretation of behavior. Thus the meaning of an utterance may depend upon the person who says it. This has been demonstrated many years ago in an early psychological study by Solomon Asch (1952). Reacting against the idea that people slavishly agree with those who have a high reputation, or are generally regarded as experts, Asch argued that the meaning of the very same utterance would be different when it was attributed to different people. He presented his subjects with this statement from Thomas Jefferson: "I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical." Some subjects were told that the statement was made by Jefferson, while others were informed that it was made by Lenin. The supposed author of the statement made a considerable difference to the subjects' interpretation of it. When attributed to Lenin, the statement was frequently seen as presenting a justification of the Russian Revolution, and the word "rebellion" was interpreted as meaning revolution. When attributed to Jefferson, the statement was not seen as referring to radical social revolution, but as agitation, or peaceful change of political control. Thus, one subject replied: "I think Jefferson meant the word rebellion to be forcing an issue before an apathetic administration"; and another one says: " Ά little rebellion' is a necessary thing in order to keep the politicians on their toes and to remind them that they are the servants of the people"

A tfribution theory and intercultural communication

39

(Asch 1952: 422). The change in authorship appeared to alter the cognitive content of the statement as the individual assimilated the meaning of the passage to his understanding of the author. Though there has been some controversy surrounding Asch's ideas, not least because of difficulties with the concept of meaning, the notion that evaluative meaning is influenced by context is now well established (see Schneider, Hastorf, and Ellsworth 1979). An extension of these ideas more specifically into the conversational domain can be found in the work of Turnbull and Smith (1978). These authors presented their subjects with a brief story of about ten to fifteen sentences describing an interaction between two participants, Fred and Linda. Several different variants of these paragraphs were made up, but for our present purposes, the following outline of the study is adequate. In some cases, the interaction describes Linda as looking forward to going to a party that evening. In other cases, she is described as not looking forward to the party. Towards the end of the interaction, Fred asks Linda: "Where are my car keys?" In different experimental conditions, Linda's reply is: "On the kitchen table"; "Don't bother me"; or "Where you left them". The subjects were asked a range of questions about these different answers, including the meaning of the last utterance attributed to Linda. The meanings of two of these three ("On the kitchen table" and "Don't bother me") vary considerably as a function of Linda's attitude towards going to the party.

Attribution Theory: Some concepts Attribution theory makes a central distinction between explanations in terms of personal factors and explanations in terms of situational factors. For example, there may well be agreement that a child is doing badly in school, but a range of explanations may be possible for this outcome. It could be because the child is slow; because of lack of effort; because of the influence of friends; because of inadequate teaching; because of lack of support at home; or any number of other factors. An Explanation in terms of the child's ability is a clear case of a personal attribution, whereas an explanation in terms of bad teaching by the school is clearly an instance of a situational explanation. This distinction between personal and situational causes is somewhat

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simplistic (see Lalljee 1981; Lalljee/Abelson 1983), but will carry us along our first steps in looking at the relationship between attribution theory and intercultural communication. A number of studies have shown that there is a tendency for people to underestimate the importance of situational factors when explaining the behavior of another person (Jones 1979). This has sometimes been called "The fundamental attribution error" (Ross 1977). Though this term has been challenged, a number of studies have shown that there are systematic differences between the attributions of someone performing a particular act, and of an observer of that act (Nisbett et al. 1973); see also (Harvey/Weary 1984). Specifically, actors tend to explain their behavior more in terms of situational causes, while observers tend to explain the same behavior more in terms of characteristics of the actor. In the case of a lecture, this hypothesis would imply that the lecturer might explain his inadequate performance in terms of the characteristics of the situation, for instance, that the audience was unreceptive, or the room was too hot or too cold; whereas the audience is more likely to explain this in terms of characteristics of the lecturer: that he isn't a good lecturer, or that he doesn't know his material. Both cognitive and motivational processes are relevant to explaining this difference in attributions between actors and observers. Thus the actor may have more information about his behavior in other similar contexts than the audience has. The lecturer may know that he has given perfectly good and interesting lectures on other occasions. Further, it has been shown that the perceptual focus of the participants also has a great deal to do with the attributions made (Storms 1973). Thus the audience is looking at the lecturer, who is the focus of their perceptions, whereas the focus of the lecturer is outside himself, towards the situation. Both these perceptual and informational differences may account in part for the tendency of observers to underestimate situational factors when making attributions. Other explanations that have been put forward are more motivational in their orientation. If the observer attributes the outcome to stable characteristics of the actor, this makes it easier to predict the actor's behavior on future occasions (Miller et al. 1978). Thus, if the audience explains the uninteresting lecture in terms of the characteristics of the lecturer, then they know not to attend lectures by the same person on other occasions. If, on the other hand, it is attributed more to situational factors, the audience will be more uncertain about how to orient themselves towards the lecturer on future occasions. Another

A ttribution theory and intercultural communication

41

important factor in making attributions concerns evaluations: the attribution of praise or blame. With reference to a wide range of negative events, particularly to behavior that is socially reprehensible, the actor may provide a situational explanation as a way of avoiding blame, whereas observers may tend to attribute blame to the actor, until he can prove differently. Motivational biases in attribution have been reviewed by Zuckermann (1979), and the evaluative nature of some of the actor/observer research is discussed by Van der Plight (1981). Thus, the clearest cases of actor/observer differences may be in the explanation of negative behavior where the cognitive and the motivational factors point towards a person explanation for the observer, and a situational one for the actor. The consequences of making attributions have been extensively reviewed by Kelley/Michela (1980). Attributions influence our evaluations of people, whether or not they are held responsible for their actions, whether they receive praise or blame for them. They also affect expectations about the person's future behavior. Though the relationship between cognition and behavior is never a simple one, it is a short step to believing that these evaluations and expectations have an important influence on the person's communicative behavior towards another. If people do explain the same event in different ways, it is hardly surprising if communication between them tends to be problematic, especially if, as is frequently the case, these explanations are implicit, and form part of our background assumptions about what is going on, rather than stated explicitly. These general ideas have been used to explain the attribution of causality when positive and negative behaviour is performed by people from different ethnic groups. This area of intergroup attribution has been reviewed by Jaspars/Hewstone (1982) and this chapter will mention only some of the studies that have been carried out. One study that is particularly interesting, since it deals with the classification of an act as well as its attribution, is reported by Duncan (1976). Duncan's subjects, who were white American college students, observed what they thought was a real interaction between two participants. The participants were discussing a human relations problem, and as it went along, the discussion got somewhat heated, and one of the participants gave the other what the author of the paper describes as "an ambiguous shove". Though the subjects were led to believe they were viewing an ongoing interaction, in fact the material was a video-tape which had been previously prepared by the experimenter. The subjects had

42

Mansur Lalljee

been instructed to classify the events in the interaction into various categories. Of special interest for present purposes is the way in which the subjects classified the "ambiguous shove". A number of different video-tapes had been constructed, varying the ethnic group of the interactors. The participants were either both white, both black, or consisted of pairs of one black and one white person. As can be seen from Table 1, the shove is likely to be classified either as aggressive or violent far more frequently if the person performing the act is black, than when the person performing the act is white. Table 1. Categorization of "ambiguous shove" as a function of race of harm-doer

Playing around Dramatizes Aggressive behaviour Violent behaviour

Black harm-doer

White harm-doer

1* 3 9 35

11 19 12 6

* Number of subjects using the category; (Adapted from Duncan, 1976)

This study neatly shows that the classification of an event might itself depend crucially on our conception of the person who is performing the act. Duncan also asked his subjects to rate the shove in terms of two scales: one of attribution of causality to the person, and the other of attribution of causality to the situation. The results are pre8

c .2 M 3 S 3Ο υ (/) ω ο ο £= -ϊ=U Ο 3 ΙΛ .Ο Φ C L ϊζ ~ c< σ α> Σ

• ο Black-Black

· Person Attributions ο Situation Attributions

White-White Black-White White-Black Harm-doer - Viktim Race-Pairings Figure 1. Means for the measures of attribution to person and situation (Adapted from Duncan, 1976)

A ttribution theory and intercultural communication

43

sented in Figure 1. It can clearly be seen that when the actor is black, the act is attributed far more to the person, whereas when the actor is white, the act is attributed far more to the situation. Several studies carried out in many parts of the world have demonstrated the effect that a person is likely to attribute the positive behavior of a member of his own group, and the negative behavior of a member of another group, more to personal factors; and the negative behavior of a member of his own group, and the positive behavior of a member of another group, more to situational factors. However, it seems that the effect is most powerful for people who are most ethnocentric; ie those who tend to emphasize the positive attributes of the ingroup, and tend, in general, to derogate other groups (Greenberg/ Rosenfeld 1979). Explaining the positive actions for a member of an out-group in terms of situational factors is only one way of restoring cognitive consistency, and maintaining one's stereotype of that group, claiming that the person is an exception, is another obvious alternative.

Cultural differences These studies show that actors of different ethnic groups may be judged in different ways. There has, however, been relatively little work on whether people from different groups show systematic differences in the sorts of explanations they consider most plausible, and in the kinds of explanations they regard as relevant to excusing or justifying a person's behavior. Some anthropologists (e.g. Geertz 1975) have suggested that the concept of the person as an autonomous centre of agency may not apply in many other cultures. If this is the case, the actor/observer difference discussed earlier may itself be culturally determined. Even different ethnic groups in the US show preferences for different types of explanation. Thus, Stefan (1977) was interested both in intergroup attribution between Anglos, Chicanos, and Blacks, and also in differences between these three groups. His subjects were fifth and sixth grade students who received a questionnaire consisting of three positive actions (working hard, opening the door for teacher, returning a borrowed pencil) and three negative actions (not waiting for a friend, falling down, leaving one's baseball glove at home). For each event, subjects were asked to choose whether an internal or an

44

Mansur Lalljee

external explanation was most likely. The list of explanations is presented in Table 2. Stefan's study shows the ethnocentric attribution effects most clearly for the Chicanos and the Blacks. When a positive action was performed by a member of their own ethnic group, Chicanos and Blacks were far more likely to explain the action in terms of personal characteristics. Their negative behavior on the other hand was explained primarily in terms of the situation. Complementary results were obtained when the actions were performed by members of other ethnic groups. Table 2. Explanations used by Stephan (1977) Person-Explanations

Situation-Explanations

He He He He He He

He had to go home The ground was muddy It was raining so they couldn't play Somebody made him work hard The teacher asked him to open the door His friend asked him to give it back

is is is is is is

impatient clumsy forgetful industrious helpful a responsible person

Though the Anglos, in this study, did not show ethnocentric attribution, Stefan did find that Anglos tended in general to invoke personal explanations more frequently than situational explanations, and that their choice of personal attributions was much higher than that of Blacks or Chicanos. There is no significant difference between these other two groups. Cultures may differ in explanations that they prioritize, and certain explanations may be far more predominant, and more plausible, in a particular culture than another. This point can be better illustrated with reference to the study on conceptions of illness by Herzlich (1973). In her study of conceptions of illness in present-day France, Herzlich found that central to her respondents' notions of the causes of illness, was a person's way of life, much of it to do with urbanization, noise pollution, and other hazards. Extrapolating from this, one might expect that someone living in the city, seeking to explain his illness in terms of the environment, would find such an explanation readily available. But if a person living in the country attempts to explain lack of health with reference to the country environment, and Herzlich does refer to one such example, he would find it more difficult to make the explanation intelligible because it goes against the prevailing cultural conception of the causes of illness.

Attribution theory and intercultural communication

45

Further evidence for cultural differences comes from the study carried out by the European Economic Commission (EEC) on "Images of Poverty". Again, there are considerable differences in explanation by people from different countries. Respondents were asked to choose an explanation for why people live in need, and four explanations were offered: (a) (b) (c) (d)

Because they have been unlucky Because of laziness and lack of willpower Because there is much injustice in our society It is an inevitable part of modern progress

They were also given the option of saying they didn't know, or of providing an explanation other than these four. In terms of the attribution theory classification of explanations mentioned above, laziness and lack of will-power is an obvious person explanation; whereas the other three explanations are external to the person. Explanation (c) attributes the cause to society, while explanations (a) and (d) are external explanations of a fatalistic nature. In the Community as a whole, explanations in terms of laziness and social injustice predominate. Thus, 25% of the respondents suggested that laziness and lack of will-power was closest to their own explanation of poverty; and 26% put injustice in society. 16% explained poverty in terms of bad luck; and 14% in terms of modern progress. 6% presented other explanations, and 13% said they didn't know. More interesting is the data in Table 3, which shows the difference in explanations as a function of country. In Italy and France, the most common response is in terms of society. In the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent in Ireland and Luxembourg, the predominant tendency is to explain poverty in terms of the characteristics of the poor themselves; and in Denmark, poverty is explained mainly as an inevitable part of modern progress. Again, these findings can be put in a communicative context. Explanations for poverty in terms of laziness may be more plausible to people in the United Kingdom than they are in Denmark, and a discussion on poverty by people from different countries would be complicated by different cultural conceptions of what is considered most plausible. The data reported emphasize that different explanations may predominate in different countries, but we are still a very long way away from a coherent theory of why this is the case. Indeed, the explanations given by people in the countries studied may well have changed since the survey was carried out; the change being due to changes in social and

46

Mansur Lalljee

Belgium

Denmark

Germany

France

Ireland

Italy

Luxembourg

Netherlands

European Community*

Table 3. The explanations of poverty - percentage of respondents in each country choosing each explanation

Ρ

Because there is much injustice in our society

17

14

23

35

19

40

16

11

16

26

Because of laziness and lack of willpower

22

11

23

16

30

20

31

12

43

25

Because they have been unlucky

21

17

18

18

25

14

20

20

10

16

It is an inevitable part of progress in the modern world

15

28

10

18

16

10

6

16

17

14

9

8

8

7

4

4

6

11

4

6

16

22

18

6

6

12

21

30

10

13

None of these Don't know TOTAL

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

* Weighted average; (Adapted from European Economic Commission, 1977)

economic conditions, particularly in the increase in unemployment. Education, ideology and religion, as well as technological achievement and social organization, may all have some part to play. It has already been suggested that explanations can serve to excuse or justify one's behavior (see especially Scott/Lyman 1968). Performing an apparently untoward act is potentially threatening to a positive view of the actor, unless the act can be excused or justified through providing a socially acceptable account of the act in question. However, what is considered an acceptable excuse may vary from culture to culture. In western culture, emotions are generally seen as being lower and more brutish, more biological and less than completely within our control, than are thoughts. A person can claim that he was carried away by his emotions, impelled by these internal emotional impulses to act in a particular way, and such an explanation may serve to mitigate his behavior. Different cultures see emotions in very different ways, and it is not clear whether such an excuse would be considered relevant in other societies. Further, emotions are by no means the only area where different cultures may ascribe different degrees of control

Attribution theory and intercultural communication

47

to human functioning. Scott and Lyman report that in first and second generation Italians in America, the belief that sex is the inevitable product of biological forces if male and female are alone together, can serve as an excuse for sexual relations, at least for men. The same explanation may be regarded as differentially acceptable by members of different societies. Thus, in any society, there will be culturally grounded acceptable explanations for failing to perform one's role adequately. A student who does not do his homework, or a worker who falls down on the job, may present an explanation to mitigate his failure. In one culture, an explanation in terms of family responsibilities may be completely adequate; in another it may be seen as irrelevant. Lack of effort may be seen as deserving of severe censure in one society, and of little consequence in another. Since interpersonal relationships are mediated through explanations of behavior, cultural differences in this domain must form an important part of our understanding of relationships between people of different cultures. However, it is not only in the explanation of untoward action, or indeed, general questions about plausibility, where cultural rules are important. The way such accounts are deployed in interaction might also be crucial. Motivational factors in attribution, such as the general tendency to explain one's own success in terms of personal causes, and one's failures in terms of situational factors, have already been commented upon earlier in this paper. However, some studies show that under certain conditions, success is more likely to be explained in terms of situational factors. This phenomenon of "self-handicapping" seems to occur most clearly when the person is particularly concerned with social disapproval, and is highly anxious (Weary/Arkin 1981). There may be marked cultural differences in the tendency to accept praise or claim it, or to make accusations of blame. Thus in one culture there may be a strong tendency for a person to claim praise for himself, which in another culture would be classified as boasting, and hence be negatively regarded. In another culture, modesty or "understatement" may be the norm. These culturally approved rules for the apportionment of causality need to be investigated systematically, and could be related to different cultural modes for the presentation and maintenance of face. This paper has argued that to understand intercultural communication it is vital to take into account the interpretation of the participants involved. The same act performed by people of different groups may be interpreted differently. Cultural differences in what is considered

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plausible and acceptable influence our evaluations and our expectations of others. Social rules for the presentation of explanations, for the apportionment of praise and blame in social situations, may well also vary. Systematic research into these issues is sadly lacking, but many of the ideas of attribution theory can be profitably drawn upon to investigate them.

References Asch, S.E. 1952 Social psychology. New York: Prentice Hall Duncan, B. L. 1976 Differential social perception and the attribution of intergroup violence: Testing the lower limits of stereotyping of blacks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, 590-598 European Economic Commission 1977 The perception of poverty in Europe. Brussels: Commission of the European Communities. Geertz, C. 1975 On the nature of anthropological understanding. American Scientist 63, 47-53 Greenberg, J. and D. Rosenfield 1979 Whites' ethnocentrism and their attributions for the behaviour of blacks: A motivational bias. Journal of Personality 47, 643-657 Harvey, J. H. and G. Weary 1984 Current issues in attribution theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology 35, 427-459 Heider, F. 1958 The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley Herzlich, C. 1973 Health and illness: A social psychological analysis. London: Academic Press Jaspers, J.M.F. and M.Hewstone 1982 Cross-cultural interaction, social attribution and intergroup relations. Cultures in contact: Studies in cross-cultural interaction, ed. by S.Bochner. Oxford: Pergamon Press Jones, E.E. 1979 The rocky road from acts to dispositions. American Psychologist 63, 107-117 Kelley, H.H. 1973 The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist 28,107-128 Kelley, Η. H. and J. L. Michela 1980 Attribution theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology 31, ed. by M.R.Rosenzweig and L.M.Porter. California: Annual Reviews Limited Lalljee, M. 1981 Attribution theory and the analysis of explanations. The psychology of ordinary explanations of social behaviour, ed. by C. Antaki. London: Academic Press Lalljee, M. and R.P.Abelson 1983 The organization of explanations. Attribution theory: Social and functional extensions, ed. by M.Hewstone. Oxford: Blackwells Miller, D.T., S.D.Norman and E.Wright 1978 Distortion in person perception as a consequence of the need for effective control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, 598-607 Nisbett, R.E., C.Caputo, P.Legant and J. Maracek 1973 Behaviour as seen by the actor and as seen by the observer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27,154-164 Ross, L. 1977 The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 10, ed. by L. Berkowitz. New York: Academic Press

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Schneider, D.J., A.H.Hastorf and P.C.Ellsworth 1979 Person perception. Reading, Mass.: Adison-Wesley Scott, M.B. and S.M.Lyman 1968 Accounts. American Sociological Review 33, 46-62 Stephan, W. 1977 Stereotyping: The role of ingroup-outgroup differences in causal attribution for behaviour. Journal of Social Psychology 101, 255-266 Storms, M.D. 1973 Videotape and the attribution process: Reversing actors' and observers' points of view. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27, 165-175 Turnbull, W. and E.E.Smith 1978 Attribution and conversation: Comprehending unco-operative question-answer exchanges. Unpublished paper. Simon Frazer University. Van der Plight, J. 1981 Actors' and observers' explanations: Divergent perspectives or divergent evaluations. The psychology of ordinary explanations of social behaviour, ed. by C.Antaki. London: Academic Press Weary, G. and R.M.Arkin 1981 Attributional self-presentation. New directions in attribution research 3, ed. by J.H.Harvey, W.Ickes and R.F.Kidd. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Earlbaum Weiner, B. 1980 Human motivation. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston Zuckerman, M. 1979 Attribution of success and failure revisited, or: The motivational bias is alive and well in attribution theory. Journal of Personality 47, 245-287

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents A case study Giesela Apitzsch, Norbert Dittmar

0

Introduction

In recent years several different theories of intercultural communication have been put forward. The early assimilationist hypothesis of the sixties (Fishman's four stage model, see Dittmar 1976: 79) was replaced by the persistency model of the seventies, emphasizing the survival of the migrants' culture. Both have now given way to an "integrative theory of intergroup conflict" (Tajfel/Turner 1979), which tries to place the assimilationist as well as the persistency view into a dynamic framework. Although the models of intercultural and intergroup relations between minorities and the majority, the natives and the migrants/foreigners, and the dominant and the dominated groups in a large community are very helpful for an understanding of group boundaries,1 these models are still too rough for the description and explanation of specific and locally significant intercultural relationships. For the time being, this gap can only be bridged by careful empirical micro- and macrostudies of particular intergroup situations. The following pilot study examines the intergroup relations between "late-arrival" Turkish adolescents (youngsters who were completely socialized in Turkey and then immigrated at the age of fourteen or fifteen years, usually as part of "family reunification") and native German adolescents in West Berlin. The study is based mainly on participant observation, but institutional facts are also taken briefly into account because they frame and mold the contacts in a considerable, to some extent even crucial, way. The newcomers are excluded from the "normal" labor market for the first few years, making their first strategy of survival that of successfully defending themselves in a foreign country. These "late-arrival" adolescents, then, have needs of integration different from those of other migrant groups. Any satisfactory analysis of intergroup relations will also have to include these groups if

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Giesela Apitzsch, Norbert Dittmar

it does not want to risk failure. Murray and Sondhi in this volume present a detailed discussion of this problem (see also van Dijk 1984). Our pilot study is meant to draw attention to the relationship between a specific group of the foreign population in Berlin — young Turkish people immigrating at fourteen years of age or older — and German adolescents of the same age group. We will analyze first the sociopolitical and institutional conditions that affect the possibilities for (young) foreign people to participate in German society and which — in our view — lead to social disadvantage. In the central part of this paper, we will report on participant observation of a one-week seminar for Turkish and German adolescents. In what follows we will illustrate by examples (a) that interactional contacts between "late-arrival" foreign and native German adolescents depend strongly on sociopolitical conditions, (b) what kinds of stereotypes Turkish and German adolescents attributed to each other during the seminar and how conscious they were of them, and (c) how asymmetries in verbal interactions between the Turkish adolescents and the teacher as well as between young Turkish adolescents and their German counterparts resulted in communicational breakdowns, miscommunication, and the reinforcement of stereotypes that were supposed to be overcome in the seminar. Our conclusion is that "late-arrival" Turkish adolescents do not have an easier time establishing contact than the adults of the first generation of migrants.2

1

Sociopolitical conditions determining contact between Turkish adolescents and German natives

The relationships between German and foreign adolescents are complicated by a cluster of interrelated problems stemming from the fact that contact between Turkish adolescents who immigrated at the age of fourteen years or older rarely have contact with German minors. Factors contributing to this situation can be summed up in three complexes: 1. The political and legal status of the young migrants 2. The inequality of German and Turkish adolescents with regard to their social status and career prospects 3. The difference between Turkish and German cultural norms and values.

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

53

1.1 The political and legal situation of young migrants In keeping with the principle that the Federal Republic of Germany is not an immigration country, several legal regulations further curtailing the legislation concerning foreigners have been adopted in recent years. Since the end of 1981, for example, children of foreign workers, if older than sixteen years, have not been permitted to join their relatives. The immigration of younger children is not permitted if only one parent is resident in the Federal Republic of Germany. Eighteen-yearolds who have not lived in the Federal Republic for more than five years will be expelled if they cannot document to have completed a German secondary school education, if they did not participate in preparatory vocational training, or if they were unable to find a job. The so-called late-arrival adolescents are not allowed to work for a period of two years after their arrival if they do not possess a German secondary school leaving certificate, or if for some reason, they are unable to attend preparatory vocational training. Like their parents, foreign adolescents looking for a job are subject to the Inländerprimat (i. e. priority for German natives and citizens of EEC-countries). There are many other restrictions of rights and discriminating bureaucratic procedures, too, that further complicate the migrants' everyday life and contribute to the uncertainty of their future. It is evident that this official discrimination has negative consequences for the mutual perception of migrants and natives.

1.2 The inequality of German and Turkish adolescents with regard to their social status and career prospects Educational policy is of crucial importance to the job prospects and the resulting social status of foreign adolescents. Since the regulations and concepts for schooling differ from one Land (i.e. federal state) of West Germany to the next, it is too complex a topic to be discussed here in detail. We will therefore confine ourselves to mentioning some more general characteristic features of the situation faced by "latearrival" adolescents and to describing some job-preparation programs. Because of the language problem, in most cases it is impossible to integrate "late-arrival" adolescents into regular classes with German

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students. Therefore, the foreign newcomers are segregated and schooled separately. Attending special classes, they only rarely have the chance to achieve a German secondary school leaving certificate, and in fact, some of these special school programs do not even offer this qualification. A problem common to all schools is the lack not only of specially trained teachers but also of suitable teaching materials. Foreign students are usually isolated from German students in outof-school job-preparation programs as well. Very often, contacts with Germans are limited to discussions with teachers and trainers. Because "late-arrival" adolescents have no real chance to obtain a general education or other certified qualification, they can benefit more from attending vocational training programs than from attending ordinary schools. The chances of getting an apprenticeship (at least for those who have attended school in their native country for more than five years)3 are greater because many organizers of such programs cooperate with the business world, and the trainers also try to find jobs for the adolescents. Foreign adolescents of at least 14!4 years of age have the alternative of participating in a preparatory vocational training program, the biggest and most important one being the MBSE (Maßnahme zur Berufsvorbereitung und sozialen Eingliederung junger Ausländer).4 If they are admitted — the labor exchanges are the placement authorities — they will be exempted from compulsory school attendance. The courses run for ten months with forty hours a week and include language teaching and counseling in addition to preparatory vocational training. The main emphasis, however, is on vocational elements, which comprise two-thirds of the courses. In the student group there is an extraordinarily wide range of age, educational background, socialization, and linguistic proficiency.5 So far, no curricula for the courses have been developed, and teachers in this program often have no previous teaching experience. Despite this, participants in MBSE or other "integrating courses" are a fortunate minority of the "late-arrival" adolescents. At present about 50% of all young migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany are not integrated into schools or into any kind of training program at all, nor can they find a job. In certain cities the rate is even higher. In West Berlin, for example, it hovers between 60% and 70%. Nationwide, the percentage of "late-arrival" unemployed adolescents is certainly much higher than these figures. Segregation in the key educational institutions, and above all the

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

55

lack of integration into the labor market, have a crucial effect on the adolescents' chances for establishing contact with Germans. Whereas migrants of the so-called first generation are able to communicate with German colleagues at work, which can be a starting point for contact in leisure time, too, the "late-arrival" adolescents normally have no opportunities for meeting Germans of their own age on the basis of common experiences at school or at work. Furthermore, the perpetuation of the enormous difference in social status between foreign adolescents and native inhabitants has to be considered as one of the most important factors in the communication gap between the members of both groups. 1.3 The difference between Turkish and German cultural norms and values In these times of economic crises, with the high rate of unemployment, a large group in the German population — young people are no exception — is becoming increasingly susceptible to prejudiced and hostile attitudes towards foreigners from the former "recruitment countries". Several news broadcasts as well as statements by politicians and some social scientists tend to encourage the view that foreign workers and their dependents are superfluous competitors on the labor market and a threat to social life (see Tsiakalos 1984). This is especially true of attitudes towards the Turks, who constitute a 34 per cent majority of the foreign population in Germany. Neither the Turkish economy nor Turkish culture or social life have any prestige in German society, or in Western society in general. In the Western way of life, there is no need at all for Turkish know-how and culture. The marked, centuries-old negative attitude towards Turks, who for a long time symbolized a threat to Christianity, too, is an important factor causing Germans to avoid spontaneous contact with Turks. Likewise, the Turkish population has reservations about joint activities with Germans. As a reaction to the usual discrimination they encounter, migrants often tend to stress cultural differences. As BoosNünning et al. (1984) emphasize, this behavior is not to be interpreted only as a mere sign of submission to the stigmatizing expectations of the host society, but rather as a form of protest against the "naturally" higher values attached to the cultural norms and values of the surrounding majority.

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The reader may have gained the impression that we are more or less "globally" inferring attitudes, cultural contact, and the conditions of intercultural communication from the sociopolitical macrostructure. However, forms of contact between different groups, including avoidance, are largely determined by the sociopolitical structure in which these groups coexist. In this sense, our brief account of the sociopolitical conditions governing encounters between Turkish and German adolescents is necessary for an appropriate understanding of the following report on participant observation during a one-week seminar for Turkish and German adolescents.

2

2.1

A German-Turkish seminar: Some results of participant observation

Organization of the study

2.1.1 Field work and data collection In the following, selected observations made of the interaction between 8 Turks (7 boys and 1 girl) between 15 and 19 years of age and 14 Germans (7 boys and 7 girls) between 15 and 16 years old are presented. While the Turkish teenagers were participants in an MBSE course, the Germans were 10th grade students at a Berlin Gesamtschule (comprehensive school). The two groups neither met by chance nor did they organize the meeting on their own. The students had to attend a oneweek seminar at a youth center in Weidenberg, near Bayreuth. A central topic of this seminar, which the teachers saw as an experiment, was the problem of socially integrating Turkish families in the Federal Republic of Germany or in Berlin. The purpose of the seminar was to increase the interest of the German young people in their Turkish counterparts and vice versa. Common problems and interests were to be discussed and prejudices reduced. The daily program involved about six hours of lectures by the leader of the seminar and discussions among the adolescents. The rest of the day was unscheduled. All the participants were accommodated in the youth center.

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

2.1.2

57

Aims of the observation

The aims of participant observation were to answer the following questions : 1. What are the common ways that Turkish and German adolescents use to establish contact with each other? 2. Which means do they use to approach, or disassociate themselves from, each other? 3. What kinds of reciprocal role ascription take place? How are they expressed and registered? What are the effects? It had to be taken for granted that the teachers, in particular the head of the seminar, had an impact on the interaction of the adolescents. Though such influence is of minor importance, the teacher's attitudes towards the students and vice versa were observed, too.

2.1.3

Demographic background

The Turkish young people came from different regions of Turkey and had lived in big cities before their emigration. One boy had had job experience in a garage, whereas all the others had attended school before they emigrated. Their length of stay in Berlin varied from oneand-a-half to two-and-a-half years at the time the seminar took place. Only one of the boys, (T), had attended a language course before starting MBSE courses. The level of linguistic proficiency, however, permitted relatively unproblematic communication in German. All the Turkish youngsters declared that they had spent their leisure time with Germans before. Eight of the German young people planned to continue school, whereas the others were trying to find an apprenticeship. None of them lived in an area where foreigners were concentrated.6 Except for one girl, (G), whose parents had friends in Turkey, all students stated that they had had no contact with Turks in Berlin.

2.1.4

Method

We used the technique of participant observation. That is, we immediately noted every observation that seemed to be relevant for answering our questions. As this was not always possible, we recorded our obser-

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vations every evening. As a second type of data collection, we were able to record discussions by the whole group as well as informal conversations between Turkish and German participants. We recorded all the discussions openly by placing two tape recorders on the table in front of the speakers. In doing so, we relied on the judgments of the teachers, who had stated that the adolescents were not bothered by these recordings because they were used to them from their classes. As we did not consider this procedure to be suitable for the smaller group, we concealed a tape recorder in such situations and informed the participants about the recordings at the end of the seminar.

2.2

Observed group attributions and stereotypes

During the six-hour bus trip from Berlin to Weidenberg, there was no communication between the Turkish and the German adolescents. The Turkish group, however, made the first concessions to the situation by speaking mainly German. After the group had arrived at the destination, the leader of the seminar proposed that Germans and Turks should introduce themselves and "interview" each other. While the Turkish group stood waiting, the German boys and girls took their seats side by side at a table. After all the German participants had sat down, the Turkish adolescents occupied the remaining seats opposite the Germans. (This seating plan was maintained throughout the whole seminar.) After the leader of the seminar had repeated his invitation several times, one of the German girls retorted: "What a load of rubbish, we can't remember their names anyway!" (Was soll denn der Quatsch, wir merken uns deren Namen doch sowieso nicht!) She was supported by other girls, who argued that it would be "foolish to get to know each other in a forced way" (Es ist sinnlos, sich krampfhaft kennenzulernen) or that they did "not feel like talking to the Turks" (Wir haben keine Lust, mit den Türken zu reden). Neither the German boys nor any participant from the MBSE group reacted to these statements. Finally, the leader of the seminar broke off the discussion with the words: "I see that you have too many prejudices towards our Turkish friends. We will talk about it later." (Ich sehe schon, ihr habt zuviele Vorurteile gegenüber unseren türkischen Freunden. Darüber werden wir hier noch reden.)

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In the afternoon of the first day of the seminar, the adolescents were asked to form intraethnic groups and to write down their associations, knowledge, and judgment concerning members of the other nationality on large posters. While working, seven Germans (the girls C., I., G., Ge., and S., and .the boys Ha. and Mi.) had an argument. Whereas the girls accused the boys of being hostile to Turks (Turkenfeinde) and of hating foreigners (Ausländerhasser), Ha. and Mi. declared that honesty was most important. They reproached the girls for ingratiating themselves with the teachers and rejecting "critical arguments". Finally, they decided to write down all their ideas with the exception of Turkish jokes. Individuals were to explain their points of view during group discussion. Of the statements collected in each group, the following were discussed during the first two days of the seminar: a) from poster group I (with the Germans C., I., G., Ge., S., H. and Mi.) DIE TÜRKEN

'THE TURKS'

— Sie nehmen uns die Arbeitsplätze weg, stützen aber auch unsere Wirtschaft. 'They take away our jobs but support our economy' — Sie wollen sich nicht eingliedern in unsere Gesellschaft. 'They do not want to fit into our society.' — Die Türken sind die einzigen, die unsere Dreckarbeit machen. 'The Turks are the only ones who do our dirty work.' — Türken leben nur von unseren Steuern. 'Turks only live off our taxes.' — Die Juden haben es schon hinter sich. 'The Jews have already been through it.' — Türken bilden Terrororganisationen (Graue Wölfe). 'Turks form terrorist groups.' (A fascist group called the Grey Wolves is mentioned) — Türken schlagen harmlose Deutsche auf. 'Turks cheat innocent Germans.' — Türken klauen viel. 'Turks pinch a lot of things.' b) from poster group II (with the Germans Α., D., F., Τ., U., V., and V.) DIE TÜRKEN

'THE TURKS'

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1. Türken raus aus Westberlin! 'Turks (should get) out of West Berlin.' — Türken belästigen deutsche Frauen. 'Turks molest German women.' — Messerträger '(Turks are) knife-carriers.' — Knoblauchfresser '(Turks are) garlic-eaters.' — Kümmelfresser '(Turks are) caraway seed eaters.' — Nehmen Arbeitsplätze und Wohnraum weg. '(Turks) take away jobs and housing.' — Schleppen viel Geld aus Deutschland raus. '(Turks) drag much money out of Germany.' 2. Warum kommen Türken nach Deutschland? 'Why do Turks come to Germany?' — Armut in der Türkei; verdienen wenig Geld. In Deutschland guter Verdienst, soziale Leistungen. 'Poverty in Turkey; (they) earn little money. In Germany good wages, (there are good) social services.' — Türkei = Militärdiktatur, politische Verfolgung. 'Turkey = military dictatorship, political persecution.' — Familienzusammenführung 'Family reuniting.' 3. Warum haben Türken Schwierigkeiten, sich in das Gesellschaftssystem einzufügen? 'Why is it difficult for Turks to adapt to the (German) social system?' — Religion 'Religion' — Kultur (Sitten, Gebräuche) 'Culture (mores, customs)' — Bildung (Erziehung= streng) 'Education (strict upbringing)' — Sprache 'Language' c) from poster group III (with the Turks S., Τ., M. and Mu.)

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

DIE DEUTSCHEN

61

T H E GERMANS'

— Die deutschen Mädchen und Frauen sind ganz frei. 'German girls and women are entirely free.' — Sie können machen was sie wünschen. 'They can do what they like.' — Sie können sich alleine entscheiden. 'They can decide for themselves.' — Die Männer sind überhaupt nicht eifersüchtig. 'The men are not at all jealous.' — Sie trinken meist zuviel. 'They usually drink too much.' — Sie denken nicht an die Zukunft, sondern nur an heute. 'They do not think about the future, but only about today.' — Viele Männer haben Angst, eine Familie zu gründen. 'Many men are afraid of having a family.' — In Deutschland, wenn jemand 18 Jahre alt ist, kümmert sich die Familie nicht mehr um ihn. 'In Germany, when someone is 18 years old, the family no longer takes care of him/her.' d) from poster group IV (with the Turks Ü., H. and E.) DIE DEUTSCHEN

T H E GERMANS'

— haben viele Vorurteile über Türken. '(They) have a lot of prejudices about Turks.' — streiten viel mit Worten '(They) argue a lot.' — können keinen Bauchtanz '(They) are unable to belly dance.' — machen nur das, was erlaubt ist '(They) do only what is permitted.' — sind manchmal unfreundlich, besonders die alten Leute '(They) are sometimes unfriendly, especially the older people.' — akzeptieren keine andere Kultur '(They) accept no other culture.' — wollen besonders mit Türken keinen Kontakt haben 'Especially with Turks (they) want no contact.' H., a seventeen-year-old boy who suffered badly from homesickness, left the seminar room after he had read the posters prepared by the

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Germans. He refused to talk to the German girls and boys for the rest of the time in Wildenberg. While the statements on the posters were discussed, it turned out that the German adolescents knew only little, if anything, about the social and legal conditions governing the situation of Turkish workers and their families in Germany. The discriminatory judgements expressed in the following examples are founded on ignorance of typical aspects of the Turkish social structure, especially family structure, and of the conditions under which Turks live in Germany. Example 1: (The statement by group I that "the Turks live off the taxes we pay" had to be defended) 7 H.: Wir meinen eigentlich nur, wir kamen auf den Gedanken, 'We only think, we got the idea, weil halt viele türkische Familien because many Turkish families unheimlich viele Kinder haben und dadurch have an incredible number of children and that's why (they) det äh Kindergeld soviel kriegen und dasse da get so much in this, erm, child allowances, and that then vielleicht denn halt auch weniger arbeiten oder so maybe they also work less or so und vielleicht dann nur bei Gelegenheit and maybe, only now and then' I.: Nur von dem Kindergeld also, weil sie nur Only from the child allowances, because they do (it) only wegen dem Kindergeld machen, dasse soviele Kinder kriegen. because of the child allowances, that they get so many children.' Example 2: (The topic of discussion was whether Turks can be held responsible for the unemployment of Germans) G.: Also ick weeß nich jenau, aba ick hab det so mitjekricht 'Well, I don't know exactly, but I've picked up somehow daß man die geholt hat, um die hier drei Jahre lang that they were brought in to be trained here for three auszubilden, damit se richtich arbeiten können. Stimmt det, years, so that they are able to work properly. It's right, oda? isn't it?'

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

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63

Observations on the quality of intercultural communication

What follows are excerpts from the verbal interaction between Turkish and German adolescents. Though the Turkish boy Ö., a seriousminded boy of seventeen, who called himself a socialist, and T., who repeated again and again that he wanted to be "like a German", participated a lot in the discussion, the leader of the seminar (SL) in his contributions referred almost exclusively to the German adolescents. When he picked up on a statement by a Turkish speaker, he usually repeated or summarized the Turk's utterance first, implicitly criticizing the language style, though the gist of the argument had already become clear, as can be seen from example (3): Example 3: (Ö. referred to the statement that "Turks take away jobs from Germans") Ö:

Viele Ausländer gibt es hier oder die werden erstmal/ 'Here there are a lot of foreigners or they will first/ es gibt über zweihundert Ausländer, ne? there are more than two hundred foreigners, right?' SL: Zweihunderttausend 'Two-hundred thousand.' Ö: Über zweihunderttausend ich meine. Die arbeiten in der 'More than two-hundred thousand I mean. They are working in in Berlin. Es gibt in Berlin deutsche Leute, die the in Berlin. In Berlin there are Germans who arbeitslos sind, und wenn die Ausländer nicht hier wären, are unemployed, and if the foreigners were not here würde die bestimmt die Deutsche noch also teuer arbeiten they certainly, the Germans would work more expensively in der Fabrik. in the factory.' SL: Hm,ja 'Erm, well' Ö: Die Ausländer arbeiten viel und mit weniger Geld. Darum 'The foreigners work a lot and for less money. About that' I: Stimmt 'Right' Ö: wegen, also wenn ich auch eine Fabrik hätte, würde ich auch 'well, if I also had a factory, I also would'

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also wer viel, wer will viel arbeiten 'well, who much, who wants to work a lot' und wer bekommt weniger Geld? Also ich bin [lacht] 'and who gets less money? Well I am (laughs)' Ha: Nee, äh 'No, uh,' Ö: bei mir ist keine Unterschied, also Mann ist Mann, ja ? 'for me there is no difference, so man is man, right?' Wenn er arbeitet, okay. Patron denken nur so. 'If he works, okay. Boss only think so.' SL: Also wenn ich das nochmal interpretieren darf, äh, in Deutsch .... 'Well, if I may interpret that once again, uh, in German Seldom calling a Turkish speaker by his/her name but using forms like "one of our Turkish friends just said" and keeping up a distinction between "we" (the Germans) and "our Turkish friends", the leader of the seminar set a frame of reference in which the Turkish adolescents in the discussion were seen more as "experts" who could be asked in cases of doubt than as participants with equal rights. As a consequence, the German students, too, usually avoided addressing individual members of the MBSE group directly and referred to Turkish speakers — indirectly excluding them from the circle of concerned listeners — in terms of "they" or "the Turks". In several cases the Turkish adolescents denied their own interests and needs, trying to influence the attitudes of the Germans positively by expressing a desire to adapt, as in example (4): Example 4: (The claim that "the Turks do not want to be integrated into our society" was discussed.) T:

Können Sie bißchen erklären, was bedeutet das? 'Can you explain a bit what that means?' Ha: Ja, also, unter Eingliedern verstehen wir also größtenteils 'Yes, well, by integrating we mean for the most part, äh, praktisch sich der Kultur anzupassen und eben nicht uh, in practical terms, adapting oneself to the culture and not äh, die Kultur beizubehalten und sich auch mehr zu den uh, just maintaining the culture and also being more outgoing towards Deutschen zuzuhalten und nicht praktisch immer von denen weggehen.

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

SL:

Ge: I: S:

SL: G:

SL:

T:

65

the Germans and not practically always avoiding them. Daß, daß die Türken also nicht nur immer untereinander sind, The fact that the Turks should not always keep to themselves sondern auch mit Deutschen öfters zusammen sind, ist also Streitpunkt. but should often join the Germans, too, that's the point (at issue).' Hast du noch η'paar Beispiele, Ha., so direkt aus'm 'Do you have other examples, Ha., directly from, aus also aus'm Alltag? from, well, from everyday life?' Ja, also mit der Musik. 'Yes, well, with music' Richtich. 'Right.' Die wollen ihre türkische Musik hörn, und da hätten wir 'They want to hear their Turkish music, and we nearly beinah uns echt drum gestritten 'η bißchen. fought about it a bit.' Naja, 'Well.' Dann mußte aba ooch dazu sagen, daß wir ihre türkische 'Then you also have to say that we don't want to hear Musik nich hörn wolln, und die wolln unsere deutsche Musik their Turkish music, and they don't want to hear our German oder die englische oder weeß ick, Disco-Musik wolln die ja music or the English or whatever. They ooch nich hörn, und det muß man ooch akzeptiern. don't want to hear disco music either, and one's gotta accept that, too.' Stimmt das, wollt ihr die deutsche, die Disko-Musik, die 'Is it true that you don't want to hear German, disco englische Musik nich hören ? and English music?' Alles Quatsch [Gelächter], nein, das alles Quatsch. Das 'That's all rubbish (laughter), no that all rubbish. That is nich Frage, also wir wolln hörn, ah, habt ihr auch is no question; we want to hear, uh, you saw yesterday, gestern gesehen, gestern Abend. Manche Leute die kommen yesterday evening. Some people, they come Ostanatolien und noch tiefer, also die haben bis jetzt nicht

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(from) East Anatolia or even deeper. They have not heard son Musik gehört, das ist logisch. Zum Beispiel also wenn such music till now, that's logical. For example, well, sie auch jeden Tag deutsch Musik hörn und wollen sie auch when they also hear German music every day, and they also wenig türkische Musik aufmache, und es is — Scheiße, die want to put on less Turkish music, and it is — shit, they haben erste Mal diese Musik gehört und is logisch, wa ? have heard this music first time, and is logical, right?' During the following days T. saw to it that no cassettes of Turkish music were played. For one and a half days, communication between the German and Turkish teenagers was limited to the discussion groups until a German girl, G., took the initiative of establishing closer contact. During a break when all the adolescents were assembled in the seminar room, she approached a Turkish boy, M., embraced him, and asked him within everyone's hearing, why he always looked sad. At dinner she took her seat beside M., with the result that her friend, I., left her place as well and sat opposite M. to start a conversation with T. This evidently had the effect of a "starting signal" for the others. After that evening the German and Turkish adolescents communicated with each other in their leisure time as well. However, the custom of sitting at different tables during the meals and opposite each other in the seminar room was not broken. Three different groups among the Germans could be clearly distinguished during the following days: 1. A group of four girls (C., G., Ge., and I.) who frequently talked with the Turkish adolescents and spent most of their leisure time with them. 2. A group of six boys (Α., R., H., Mi., To., and U.) and one girl (S.) who did not avoid communication with the Turks but who seldom initiated it. 3. A group of two girls (V. and Vi.) and one boy (D.) who were eager to avoid any talk with someone from the MBSE group. The Turkish young people stayed close together most of the time with the exception of H., who often withdrew from the others and went to a room in the basement to listen to Turkish music.

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

3

67

Discussion

3.1

Stereotypes

To break down the collective stereotypes held by the Turkish and German adolescents in the seminar, the strategy was to collect those stereotypes and then neutralize them through discussion. Before we consider communication strategies, let us first briefly summarize the nature and types of collective stereotypes we have to deal with. According to Quasthoff (1978: 3), the following definition of stereotype is suggested: A stereotype is the verbal expression of a conviction about social groups or individual persons as members [of those groups]. It has the logical form of a judgment that ascribes to or denies a class of persons certain characteristics or patterns of behavior in an unjustifiably simplistic or generalized way and with a tendency toward emotional valuation. In linguistic terms, it can be described as a sentence. Quasthoff stresses the linguistic relevance of the . . . sociopsychological character of "stereotypes", namely, their collective sharedness in a cultural community. The microstructural function of collective sharedness, of the fact that stereotypes can be expected to be believed by other members, lies in the fact that it provides the logical and argumentative basis for connecting data and conclusion. (1978: 24). Participant observation revealed many stereotypes about the members of the minority group — the Turks — but only very few about the majority — the Germans. This seems to reflect the overall pattern of contact. The immigrants as the dominated group are predominantly the target of stereotypes because of the dominant-dominated relationship. The stereotypes result from economic, cultural, and social factors ("objective" factors) and the subjective, evaluative perception of the foreigners' behavior ("subjective" factors). The first set of factors can be derived from a contrastive analysis of the two societies; the second, from the contrast in actual behavior.

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Many of the stereotypes fit the universal attitudes towards foreignlabor minority groups, attitudes that cast immigrants as "job competitors", "persons who compromise the standard of living", "take away housing" and "take money out of Germany". Criminal properties are associated with the group: its members "pinch a lot", "molest German women", "cheat innocent Germans", and "form terrorist groups". The negative predicates attributed to them are those given to members of a marginal outgroup (people who carry knives, eat garlic and caraway seeds, and do not want to be integrated into "our" society). We call these predicates "aggressive stereotypes". By contrast, the stereotypes Germans are associated with can be called "defensive stereotypes". On the one hand, they are associated with positive values: they are "free", can do what they want, can decide for themselves, and are not at all jealous. (Who would not be flattered by these attributes?) On the other hand, Germans are portrayed with minor faults: they drink too much, do not think about the future, are afraid of having a family, do not take care of adolescents older than eighteen years, fight a lot with words, and are not able to belly dance. The only accusations are that they have a lot of prejudices about Turks, they do not want to establish contact with Turks, accept no other culture, and are sometimes unfriendly. We do not see anything special or group-specific in these stereotypes. Their overall pattern is largely documented in publications on migrants. They appear in our study with striking regularity. What is the function of these stereotypes? First of all, they seem to reflect and legitimize a clearly asymmetrical relationship between the dominant and dominated group. They reinforce this social pattern. Secondly, they offer immunization strategies against any possible change. In this sense, they not only reduce cognitive uncertainty (an outcome necessary in order to cope with a group whose values and habits are not well known) but also give the objective conditions a symbolic interpretation. It is striking that these stereotypes were basically not neutralized or reversed in the discussion by the Turkish and the German group.

3.2

Interaction and communication

The data clearly show that communication between the German and the Turkish adolescents was asymmetrical. Conversations were usually

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

69

initiated and directed by the Germans, whereas the Turkish teenagers generally behaved in a reactive way. For one thing, the Turks communicated in German whenever a German was present. They did so to guarantee that Germans could join their conversations. For another, the Turks tried to keep the conversation going; apparently, they feared rejection. The avoidance of requests to repeat or explain statements that had not been understood is to be considered at least as a social strategy meant to keep conversation going. Another salient feature was that nonverbal forms of expressions that obviously had an important function in intracultural interaction were not used in conversations with Germans. For example, the variant of expressing a negative reaction or refusal and indignation by clucking the tongue and lifting the head at the same time was not observed in interactions between Turks and Germans, although the Turkish boys often used it, even when they spoke German to each other. The Turkish adolescents took much greater pains to follow norms of politeness than did their German counterparts. Hypercorrect forms sometimes appeared as expressions of inferiority. For example, the Turkish boys generally let the Germans go first when entering a room, and members of the MBSE group lit the German teenagers' cigarettes even though they had to leave their seats to do so. The German girls with the closest contacts with the Turkish boys often behaved in a particularly directive way, forcing the Turks to do them favors and smaller services. Such requests were quite unusual in the interaction with German boys, making it possible to interpret them as an instrument the girls used for securing dominant roles for themselves and allocating the role of the inferiors and dependents to the Turkish boys. In situations of conflict, the Turkish adolescents were eager to avoid quarrels. They withdrew by remaining silent or tried to dodge arguments, changing the subject by sudden questions. This might also be a sign that they deliberately waived their self-assertion so as not to jeopardize further communication. Another possibility is that differences in socialization surfaced. As often described, the Turkish family in general has a very strong hierarchical structure, with obedience rated as an important part of one's upbringing (Holtbrügge 1975; Mertens/Akpinar 1977; Weische-Alexa 1977). One could assume that verbal conflicts are not as frequent among Turkish adolescents as among Germans. The statement of the MBSE participants that "the

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Germans fight a lot with words" (see above) also seems to point to cultural differences in this field.

4

Conclusions

The results of this pilot study can be summarized as follows: 1. Although "late-arrival" Turkish minors had a substantially better command of German than members of the "first generation", barriers to establishing contact with German minors did not seem to be overcome. "Late-arrival" Turkish adolescents are evidently exposed to the same stereotypes. This was reflected in detail in conversations between German and Turkish teenagers. It seemed to be exceedingly difficult for "late-arrival" Turkish adolescents in Berlin to establish any contact with Germans of the same age group because Germans and Turks are usually seldom involved in common activities in an institutional framework. Prejudiced and hostile attitudes of many German adolescents make it necessary for Turkish adolescents to struggle for social acceptance in every encounter they have with Germans. Our observations may be taken as an example of the pressured and troubled relationship between German and Turkish peers. At the same time, these observations support the hypothesis that Turkish adolescents feel they are forced to use strategies of assimilation to reduce discrimination, a feeling that demonstrates the total rejection of values deviating from those shared by German interaction partners. 2. The target group of this study is not covered by any existing theory of intergroup relations because research on migration, though taking the dynamic character of migration into account, treats ethnic groups as homogeneous "wholes" differentiated only by generation. This study, by contrast, shows that the specific sociopsychological background of each group involved in migration must be taken into account. 3. Sharing experiences, recognizing common problems, and learning from and with each other is highly limited with Turkish and German adolescents. Turkish minors are systematically discriminated against by

Contact between German and Turkish adolescents

71

Germans in the fields of education and vocational training. Their opportunities for getting even an unskilled job are extremely limited and this is especially true for those who were older than twelve when they immigrated. Both the number and the quality of existing measures for integration are quite insufficient and do not prevent the formation of a subproletariat. In particular, linguistic problems, which are a major obstacle to getting work or training, are not treated in an adequate way. 4. Detailed empirical research on the techniques which Turkish adolescents use to cope with stigmas would be useful. Moreover, further analyses aiming at discovering mutual expectations and divergence of expectations manifested during processes of interaction between migrants and members of the dominant culture would be valuable, not least in developing concepts for intercultural education.

Notes 1. For a more detailed discussion see Dittmar/von Stutterheim (1985). 2. In this respect, our observations differ from those reported by Keim (1985: 279). 3. In Turkey, school attendance is compulsory for five years only. 4. About 15000 adolescents, mainly Turks, participated in MBSE in 1981. 5. Since 1980/81, more than 50000 adolescents have participated in MBSE, 55% of them were Turks. 6. The districts Kreuzberg, Wedding, and Neukölln have high concentration of foreigners. 7. The following transcripts attempt at capturing the Berlin dialect of the German speakers.

References Boos-Nünning, U., U.Neumann, H.H.Reich and F.Wittek 1984 Krise oder Krisengerede? Von den Pflichten einer illegitimen Wissenschaft. Migration, Bildungspolitik und Pädagogik. Aus der Diskussion um die interkulturelle Erziehung in Europa. Publikationen alfa, Berichte und Materialien 16, ed. by H.H.Reich and F. Wirrek Dijk, T. A. van 1984 Prejudice in discourse. Pragmatics and beyond V: 3. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Dittmar, N. 1976 Sociolinguistics. A critical survey of theory and application. London: Edward Arnold Dittmar, N. and C.von Stutterheim 1985 Intercultural communication. Handbook of discourse analysis, ed. by T. A.van Dijk, Vol.4. New York: Academic Press

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Giesela Apitzsch, Norbert Dittmar

Holtbrügge, Η. 1975 Türkische Familien in der BRD. Erziehungsvorstellungen, familiale Rollen- und Autoritätsstruktur. Duisburg Keim, I. 1985 Talking about foreigners — some ethnographic remarks. Interpretive sociolinguistics, ed. by P.Auer and Aldo di Luzio, 259-283. Tübingen: Narr Mertens, G. and U.Akpinar 1977 Türkische Migrantenfamilien. Familienstrukturen in der Türkei und in der Bundesrepublik. Angliederungsprobleme türkischer Arbeiterfamilien: Beispiel West-Berlin. Bonn Quasthoff, U. 1978 The uses of stereotype in everyday argument. Journal of Pragmatics 2:1,1-48 Tajfel, Η. and J.C.Turner 1979 An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. The social psychology of intergroup relations, ed. by W.G.Austin and H.Wordel. Oxford: Pergamon Tsiakalos, G. 1984 Ausländerfeindlichkeit. Tatsachen und Erklärungsversuche. München: Beck Weische-Alexa, P. 1977 Sozial-kulturelle Probleme junger Türkinnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Diss. Universität Köln

III. Language choice

Language choice in multilingual societies: A Singapore case study Sherida Altehenger-Smith

0

Introduction

Language choice takes place in all societies — it is perhaps more obvious in multilingual societies, in which the verbal repertoires often include two or more languages, but it also occurs in so-called monolingual societies where selection takes place among variants (registers, sociolects, dialects, etc.) of the "same" language. By making the wrong choice, be it language or variant, a speaker violates linguistic rules of the society resulting in a weakening of her/his position in negotiations or social prestige. Not as obvious but sometimes more critical is when the "proper" variant or language has been chosen for situation and is then used improperly, e.g. with wrong word choice, false intonation, or too loud. Both situations mean a linguistic disadvantage with social consequences for the speaker. Her/his possible power, i.e. capability of controlling in order to achieve a wanted goal,1 is limited from the beginning of the verbal interaction. Yet, communicative competence in relationship to choosing languages or variants from the verbal repertoire of the society in which one participates is not the sole factor for determination of exertion of power in verbal communication. Status, such as social position, economic status, sex, and, in multiracial communities, ethnic group membership, expressed as role relationships, provide the other components of power constellations. In certain situations, after the framework has been set (e. g. in the job applicant/interviewer situation after the written application has been handled (see Akinnaso/Ajirotutu, 1982; Jupp et al. 1982)), linguistic competence and performance become the decisive factors. Language choice in an intercultural situation can obviously be of advantage to one of the parties involved, when the language being used for interaction is the one in which s/he has the highest degree of competence. The process of choice can be manipulated by the various positions of the interlocutors (official/client, salesperson/customer,

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etc.), the one with the stronger position being responsible for the choice and, of course, the personal linguistic repertoires of the interlocutors.2 The availability of the knowledge of certain languages therefore becomes the first step in a chain of processes which can lead to the exercise of power in society. Availability of a language is influenced by language choice at a higher level via language planning or language policy. This type of choice belongs to an area of macro-linguistic investigation, whereas language choice in a particular interaction is considered a micro-linguistic phenomenon. Yet the two types of choice are interdependent. Macro-level decisions, usually government-made or -influenced, attempt to establish a framework for possible language choice in certain institutionalized areas of everyday life, whereas for the verbal repertoire of the individual (which itself is influenced by language planning — see below), context, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors set the limitations of the micro-level. The following discussion of the implications resulting from macrolevel decisions and arising from micro-level factors for language choice will be used as a framework for the analysis of field work data.3 The data, collected in the Republic of Singapore, will help illustrate some of the main constraints placed on language choice in a multilingual, multicultural and multiethnic society and show how this first step in intercultural communication can be an important factor in deciding the power-structures of communication.

1

Macro-level language choice

Language planning is a type of language choice at a macro-linguistic level which has been defined in various ways by scholars concerned with the process of decision-making about language. (See AltehengerSmith 1983a). Fishman's (1977: 36) definition illustrates its two sides: The term "language planning", as we have used it in our work, covers a variety of activities roughly subdivisible into two broad categories: language "status planning" and language "corpus planning". The former subdivision (status planning) encompasses governmental policy decisions concerning which language should be

Language choice in multilingual societies

77

assigned or recognized for which purposes within a country or region, as well as the various implementation (enforcing, motivating, influencing) steps taken to support the policy that has been adopted. The latter subdivision (corpus planning) encompasses efforts to alter and improve the language per se whose status is the object of policy decisions and implementation attempts. As is clear from this description, language choice on a macro-level takes place first within the area of status planning. This area concerns such decisions as which language or languages are to be declared official or national (a problem which has been or is still being faced by socalled "developing countries"), which languages are to be used as the medium of instruction in schools,4 which languages are to be used in governmental offices and institutions,5 the language used in government-controlled and/or -operated mass media, or even what language knowledge is required for issuing a license to engage in certain businesses or professions. Such decisions determine the "public" language environment of an individual to a certain degree. Though these decisions, like other social frameworks or social restrictions, do not necessitate the use of the "specified" languages in their respective functions, social norms with their consequences of recognition (financial, prestige, social identity, professional or job advantages) or disadvantages influence the choice made in many cases. In many political entities the language learnt or spoken at home is not that which has been designated for official use by the government. Skills required for the use of the official languages are then dependent upon training in the school system. Language courses can also be offered by other institutions,6 but these are accompanied by a fee and organizational considerations (availability of time, transportation, etc.). The second area of language planning — corpus planning — deals with decisions about forms of one language or changes within it. Decisions must be made, for example, as to which forms are considered grammatically correct, which nomenclatures are to be introduced, and which variant is considered "proper and correct". Such official traces within a specific language can among other things influence word selection in intercultural communication; for example which term is to be applied to a person of another ethnic or cultural group to achieve a certain result such as respect, insult, attention, or sympathy.7 But corpus planning as a whole does not influence language choice to the degree that status planning does.

78

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Sherida

Altehenger-Smith

Micro-level language choice

Although the language planning processes within a speech community8 can try to establish a certain language or languages as possible choices in certain situations or settings, the actual decision is made by an individual in her/his daily interaction. With the use/non-use of a variant in a specific interaction two questions arise for the analyst: 1. What was the purpose of the individual when making the particular choice; meaning what type of action/reaction is to be expected and what is to be achieved by the interaction? 2. What are the other factors (e. g. role relationships, etc.) involved which lead to the specific decision? The answers to the above questions are capable of giving some insight into the rules of communication in the particular speech community involved.9 The starting point (e. g. sociological, psychological, sociolinguistic) sets certain restrictions on the framework developed for examination. For example, a sociological perspective may place higher significance on the specific societal rules of the interlocutors for explanation of certain language choices than on individual psychological processes. In the following, several approaches which try to account for factors influencing language choice at the micro-level will be discussed. Each offers tools for establishing a framework which might aid in protecting language choice in certain types of verbal interaction. The approaches deal with such aspects as the influence exerted by a particular setting, the societal and psychological identity expressed in language choice, or the impact which is made by the choice of an unexpected variety in a specific situation.10 The question "who speaks what language to whom and when" is asked by Fishman (1971,1972) at the beginning of his analysis of communication in a speech community. The "when" aspect of the question initiates the search for areas which can be classified as units for the typical use of a specific language or variants of the same language. The concept "domain" introduced for such a unit has been defined as: a social-cultural construct abstracted from topics of communication, relationship between communicators, and locales of communication, in accord with the institutions of a society and the spheres of activity of a speech community. (1971: 587)

Language choice in multilingual societies

79

In other words, it is defined in terms of the role-relations between the participants (e.g. boss — secretary, family members, etc.), the setting, and from a socio-psychological viewpoint, the quality of the interaction, e.g. if between members of the same group, at a formal, informal, or even an intimate level. (See Fishman, 1972: 245 ff.). Elements from the socio-psychological approach can coincide with role-relationships and/or settings: for example public interaction at the post office can be considered formal and in the public domain; mother-daughter interaction informal and in the family domain. Such units or domains are not universal; each social unit or speech community has established its own specific patterns and configurations via everyday action. When in a social unit the use of a particular variant of one language or a particular language is allocated to certain social situations and contexts, the linguistic situation is considered diglossic.11 These situations are the result of simultaneous individual usage patterns and societal norms. Gumperz (1971, 1975), although aware of the importance of domains, sees the use of a specific language in a situation as an expression of identity — that is the association with the other interlocutor as being one of in-group membership or of out-group affiliation. Each individual is involved in a series of networks which represent her/his relationship to other interlocutors. Depending upon the position in such, language choice takes place. Although this may seem to be the same as the socio-psychological variants mentioned above, it expresses other relationships. If a member of a particular minority group which has a high degree of in-group identity and solidarity encounters a member of the same group in a formal situation or public domain, the in-group feeling associated with the choice of the in-group language may override the social constraints of language choice in the situation. Gal (1979), applying Gumperz's approach in her study of language change and social network, found that the social networks influence the communicative strategies of an individual when her/his identity is expressed through language. At the same time, " . . . the power of social networks to constrain linguistic presentation of self depends on the fact that social contacts associate certain linguistic choices with particular social categories". (Gal 1979:16). Language choice is therefore an expression of self-identity in relation to the interlocutor within the social norms of the setting. Giles (1973) proposes a model for language accommodation which looks for the underlying motivation and social consequences for changes in language styles. Although the model itself

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Sherida Altehenger-Smith

is designed more for the analysis of speech changes within an interaction, the basic postulate which assumes that .. people are motivated to adjust their speech styles, or accommodate, as a means of expressing values, attitudes and intentions towards others " (Giles/Bourhis/ Taylor 1977: 322) can also be applied to the initial language choice in an encounter. With the choice or change to another speech style, an individual can show social approval or disapproval; if s/he changes the style or selects a variant more towards the interlocutor's, this is termed convergence, whereas a move away from such would be considered divergence. In a later article (1979) Giles proposes three paradigms which may occur in interethnic language choice: 1. "language choice situation", which is found in multiethnic societies where many languages exist side by side but where one or more languages are known by all groups; 2. "accommodation situation", which is found where a minority group has immerged into a dominant culture learning its language but remaining bilingual (for example, Puerto Ricans in the U.S.A.); 3. "assimilation situation", where an immigrant group has assimilated (independently or forcibly) into the dominant culture linguistically, adapting its language as its own (for example, West Indians in Great Britain). Where the accommodation pattern expected in the second or third paradigm is that of the one ethnic group which is subordinated economically, socially and/or politically to the dominant groups using the dominant group language, the prediction of choice in the first situation is more difficult. An attempt to take all the above mentioned points of analysis into consideration is presented in Scotton's (1980,1983) theory of markedness and code choice. This approach proposes that linguistic code choice is a part of the communicative competence of a speaker in a speech community which interprets the choice of a specific code as being marked or unmarked. An unmarked choice conforms with the societal norms or the role-relationships and specific rights and obligations associated with verbal interaction in the social unit. Speaking is seen as an interactional behavior. While code choices are always situated, they are not a function of situation, but rather of negotiation, so that speaking is seen as

Language choice in multilingual societies

81

a rational process involving decisions. Operating within the frame of markedness, speakers negotiate rights and obligations interactionally by their code choices. (Scotton, 1983: 115) Through the choice of a particular language which is seen as being the most expected or most unmarked variety the role which the interlocutors have via the societal norms is maintained. When a marked choice is made, it is seen as negotiating a new relationship and with it a new set of rules.

3

Case Study: Singapore

In Singapore, a multilingual, multiracial and multicultural city state in Southeast Asia, intercultural communication is a daily phenomenon for most of the 2.3 million inhabitants of the island. According to the 1980 Census, 76.9% are classified as ethnic Chinese, 14.6% Malay, 6.4% Indian and 2.1% Other. The so-called ethnic mother tongues of the four groups build the official languages of the nation: Mandarin, Malay (which is also the national language), Tamil and English. This Table 1. Native languages in Singapore Ethnic group

Language

1970

1980

Chinese: (Sinitic languages)

Hokkien Teochew Cantonese Hakka Hainanese Others (including Mandarin)

42% 22% 17% 7% 7% 5%

43% 22% 17% 7% 7% 4%

Malay: (Malayo-Polynesian languages)

Malay Other (including Javanese and Boyanese)

87% 13%

90% 10%

Indian: (Dravidian and IndoAryan languages)

Tamil Malayalam Punjabi Others (including Gujerati)

66% 12% 8% 14%

64% 8% 8% 20%

* The percentages are rounded off. The statistics for 1970 have been adapted from Arumainathan (1973) and for 1980 from Khoo (1983).

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Sherida Altehenger-Smith

diversity in itself would give rise to a multitude of situations in which interethnic interactions take place, but with the native languages of the population and their distribution, the situation becomes even more complex. Less than seventeen percent claim to belong to an ethnic or dialect (all varieties of Chinese except Mandarin are referred to as dialects in Singapore) group which have one of the official languages as their first language. The number of different cultures rises with the number of various Chinese and Indian groups present in the population. From this it is obvious that language choice not only in an interethnic but also intraethnic interaction is an everyday task in Singapore.

3.1

Macro-level language choices

Language planning and language questions have been of great importance in Singapore since its founding as an English settlement in 1817. With no dominant culture which immigrants could adopt or be forced to assimilate to, each of the arriving groups maintained its homeland culture to a high degree, many feeling that they were transitory in the country. The three main groups of immigrants came from Southern China, India (basically Southern but with certain groups such as Punjabis coming from the North), and the Malaya Peninsula.12 The basic language policy or language planning decisions which have had an effect on interethnic communication in Singapore are those for the education system, the civil service (either the colonial or that after independence) and other official areas. Until 1920, education was available in English, Chinese dialects, Malay and sporadically in Tamil. With the change in policy towards language in Mainland China, Kuo Yu (colloquial Mandarin) was introduced in all Chinese schools in the 1920s.13 Malays had access to primary education solely in the Malay language and only a few could then advance to secondary education, which was in English. Several types of education systems functioned side-by-side not only divided by who financed them (e.g. government, missionary societies, ethnic community), but also divided as to the type of education being given (e.g. religious, political, general). This produced a dividing line by the type of education one had received: English-educated, Chinese-educated, Malay-educated or Indian-edu-

Language choice in multilingual societies

83

cated. The sharpest division was found between the English- and Chinese-educated in the ethnic Chinese community. The Chinese-educated continued with the traditional pattern of education found in Mainland China whereas the English-educated learnt not only English but the culture and tradition of the Western World. The English language was associated with economic and educational rewards. It was the language of the colonial government, the legal system, and of that part of the business world which was directed towards the West. After Merdeka (Independence) in 1965, the prestige associated with English remained the same in Singapore, although the new government formed by the People's Action Party (which is still in power today) began a policy of equal treatment for the four main ethnic groups in Singapore and for their so-called ethnic mother tongues. Four streams in the education system, each with one of the ethnic mother tongues as the major medium of instruction and English emphasized in the three streams not using it as the main language were to produce bilingual14 Singaporeans. But the favoured position of English education is reflected in the statistic that in 1976 71.3% of Singaporean pupils were enrolled in English stream schools, 26.9% in Chinese, 1.7% in Malay and 0.1% in Tamil, with an increasing tendency towards the English stream. Approximately 85% of the pupils attending school in Singapore are taught in a language that is not spoken at home. (See Goh Keng Swee 1979). The recent reform in the school system (called streaming) has again emphasized the importance of bilingualism, but not in its earlier universal form. Only those pupils who achive certain standards are to be enrolled in schools which are bilingual, whereas approx. 20 percent are to be enrolled in monolingual schools. The monolingual schools use either English or Mandarin as their medium of instruction; Malay, Indian and Other children being enrolled in the former and Chinese children in the latter. The largest difference between the school language and the languages spoken at home is found among the ethnic Chinese. Less than 5 per cent reported Mandarin as their native tongue in the 1970 census. (Twenty-two per cent claimed Mandarin as the language spoken at home in the 1980 census). Because of this and other economic reasons (See Altehenger-Smith 1983 b), a campaign was launched in 1979 to "Promote the Use of Mandarin" and to reduce the amount of dialects

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Sherida Altehenger-Smith

used. Mandarin was to become the language for intraethnic communication among the Chinese. The position of English in the legal area has basically remained the same. All laws, ordinances, etc. are in English and the language for court transactions is English. For all higher civil servant appointments, the knowledge of English is explicitly or via educational qualifications necessary. Although all four official languages may be used in Parliament,15 English is dominant. The official government attitude towards language use in Singapore has often been expressed in political speeches. Accordingly, English has been designated as the language for interethnic communication and the ethnic mother tongues respectively for intraethnic communication.

3.2

Micro-level framework

Research has been done on the linguistic situation in Singapore which proposes a dichotomy of a polyglossic society with individual multilingualism. Polyglossia has been defined by Piatt (taken here from Piatt/ Weber 1980) as: A number of different, often unrelated, language varieties are used side by side in a community. Each one may have different functions. One may be used for religious services, one for government, legal procedures and education and others in less formal situations. (1980: 274) This means that with the number of languages being used and the number of various groups using them, a situation exists in Singapore where several languages or variants can be considered high varieties with others being middle or low. Basically, according to Piatt/Weber (1980), all formal varieties of Singapore English (acrolect),16 Mandarin, Malay and the various Indian languages are classified as having a high status occurring generally in the domains of education, media, government and except for Malay in the religious domain. (Most Malays in Singapore are Moslems, whose language or religion is Arabic). The other two varieties of Singapore English (mesolect and basilect) and the semi-formal varieties of the other languages receive a medium sta-

Language choice in multilingual societies

85

tus ranking, whereas all dialects, colloquial Malay and Indian languages and Bahasa Pasar are considered low varieties. The medium status languages are found in transactions, employment, education and media domains and the low forms in basically the family and friendship domains. The latter are sometimes found in the transactions or employment domain. The polyglossic situation and the reference to which languages are appropriate for which areas is one way of determining the unmarked varieties, which can be expected in verbal interaction in Singapore — be it inter- or intraethnic. The other relevant factor is the verbal repertoire of the individuals involved in the interaction and their respective status via ethnic groups, social positions, etc. In his analysis, Piatt has marked all three varieties of Singaporean English along with Bahasa Pasar as being used in some interethnic group communication. Mandarin and Hokkien on the other hand are the varieties used for so-called "inter-dialect" or intraethnic communication among the Chinese in Singapore. When Piatt's analysis is used in conjunction with Scotton's model, the unmarked forms for interethnic communication, dependent upon the domain being analyzed, would be a variety of English or Bahasa Pasar and the unmarked forms for intraethnic Chinese communication either a form of Mandarin or Hokkien.17

3.3

Data collection in Singapore

Within the project "Language Planning in Singapore: Its Norms and its Sociolinguistic Implications", one of the areas of data collection was that of reported language use. The main aim of the project was to establish the relationship between the macro-level language choice decisions made by the language planning processes and the micro-level language choices made by Singaporeans. The method chosen for the collection of data was a type of network study. Five Singaporeans, all of whom had academic training and experience in interviewing, belonging to a friendship network, acted as interviewers. Each interviewed her/his respective family, their friends and/or their co-workers. Selection of interviewees was restricted only in that the proportions of each ethnic group in the total survey should be close to that which is found in the Singaporean population in general.18

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Sherida Altehenger-Smith

Table 2 shows the basic breakdown of the 205 interviewees: Table 2. Background of Interviewees Chinese Malay Indians Others

72.7% 13.2% 10.7% 3.4%

Female 57.1% Male 42.9%

Economically 71.2% active Pupils, stu28.8% dents, housewives and retired

English68.3% educated Chinese24.4% educated Malay-educated 4.9% Other/None 2.4%

A type of domain determination was completed after three months of living in Singapore. The period of time was utilized to assess which areas of everyday life were important for looking at patterns of language use in Singaporean society. The following areas were chosen for use in the questionnaire as domains: (01) the extended family (spouse, parents, grandparents, siblings and spouses, spouses' siblings and spouses, children and spouses, grandchildren and spouses) (02) friends and neighbours (03) administration (including the post office, land office, housing board office, legal services, utilities board, and schools) (04) the clinic (assistant, nurse, and doctor) (05) religion (institutionalized (church, temple, mosque) and spirit mediums) (06) market (divided into the various vending stalls: i.e. fish, fruit, egg, vegetable, noodle, beef, chicken, mutton and pork) (07) food shops (the local provisionist and the supermarket) (08) food stalls (divided into Chinese, Malay and Indian food) (09) restaurants (Chinese, Malay/Indonesian, Indian and Western) (10) public transportation (bus and taxi) (11) work (supervisors, colleagues, subordinates, clients, etc.) (12) services (amah, repairmen, etc.) These areas could be subdivided into those where when asked which language is used, the choice is connected with a specific person (i.e. with one's spouse, other family members, friends, neighbours, but also with the vendors at the market stalls where one purchases food products regularly) and with a random person only identifiable by the situation in which the interaction takes place (the public utilities board) or by the situation and the ethnic group of the interlocutor (i. e. bus conductor who is a Malay).

Language choice in multilingual societies

87

The areas of the questionnaire where interethnic communication was most common are: language choice at the market, when eating out either at a restaurant or at a Hawker stall (open air vending areas) or when using public transportation. For each of these, the interviewee was able to give the ethnic group of the partner and which language or languages were used when speaking to the interlocutor and which were used in return. (In 97% of the cases the languages given were the same). For all questions, it was also possible to give the answer of a non-verbal type of communication, which occurred frequently in bus transportation.19 Table 3 shows the reported interethnic language use from Chinese, Malay, and Indian interviewees in the survey when engaged in interethnic communication, and Table 4 gives data on specific interethnic communication.20 Table 3. Reported interethnic language use from Chinese, Malay and Indian interviewees in % Stalls

Hokkien Mandarin English Tamil Bahasa Pasar Malay Non-Verbal Other

Res

West. Res.

Market*

Prov

Supermarket

Bus

Taxi

0.5

0

1.0

3.5

3.0

0

1.1

1.0

0

0

2.0

0

0

0

0.2

0

40.5

50.5

97.0

9.2

21.2

89.0

39.1

47.8

0.3

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

38.9

34.0

69.7

0

31.9

33.0

18.3 (57.2) 1.3

14.9 (48.9) 0

14.9 (46.8) 12.4

18.2 (51.2) 0

0.3

0.5

°\ V/

87.5

0

0

0

0

6.1 (75.8) 0 0

11.0 (11.0) 0 0

0.2

0

* The Bahasa Pasar and Malay responses for the area market have been totalled

Table 3 shows that the main languages chosen for interethnic communication in those areas described are English or a variety of Malay (either Malay or Bahasa Pasar). According to Scotton's dichotomy (1980, 1983), a variety of Malay would definitely be an unmarked choice for interethnic communication in all areas except Western restaurants or supermarkets. The use of Malay in these two areas of interaction would be considered marked and therefore chosen for a particular reason, e.g. ethnic identity or group identity. The choice of English

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speech perception (comprehension strategies) and speech production in L2

at work local authorities housing office labour exchange public transport while shopping looking TV etc.

I language consciousness in the mother tongue

procedures of inferring from the mother tongue

Notes 1. As mentioned above, the spelling of the German utterances is adapted to the pronunciation of the Turkish speakers.

Multipleformulae

247

References Barkowski, Η., U.Harnisch and S.Kumm 1977 "Wir sagen, das tarzanca . . . " — Zum Sprachbewußtsein türkischer Arbeitsmigranten. Deutsch lernen 2,19-33 1978 Thesen zum ungesteuerten Spracherwerb ausländischer Arbeiter. Deutsch lernen 3, 7-20 Bever, T.G. 1970 The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. Cognition and the development of language, ed. by D.Hayes, 279-352. New York: Wiley Brown, R. 1973 A first language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Bublitz, W. 1978 Ausdrucksweisen der Sprechereinstellung im Deutschen und Englischen. Tübingen: Niemeyer Bühler, K. 1934 Sprachtheorie. Jena: Fischer Butzkamm, W. 1978 Fremdsprachenunterricht und natürliche Zweitsprachigkeit: Spracherwerbssituationen im Vergleich. Zielsprache Deutsch 4,11-19 Chafe, W. 1972 Discourse structure and human knowledge. Language comprehension and the acquisition of knowledge, ed. by B.Carroll and R.O.Freedle, 41-69. New York: Wiley Coulmas, F. 1981 a Poison to your soul. Thanks and apologies contrastively viewed. Conversational routine, ed. by F. Coulmas, 69-91. The Hague: Mouton 1981 b Routine im Gespräch. Zur pragmatischen Fundierung der Idiomatik. Wiesbaden: Athenaion Edmonsdon, W. 1981 A model for the analysis of spoken discourse. London: Longman Ehlich, K. 1982 Anaphora and deixis: Same, similar, or different? Speech, place and action, ed. by R.J.Jarvella and W.Klein, 315-338. Chichester: Wiley Ehlich, K. and J.Rehbein 1976 On effective reasoning. Proceedings of the IVAILA Congress of Applied Linguistics, ed. by C.Candlin, 313-338. Stuttgart: Hochschulverlag Ferguson, C.A. 1971 Absence of copula and the notion of simplicity. Pidginization and creolization of languages, ed. by D.Hymes, 141-150. Cambridge: CUP Fillmore, L. Wong 1976 The second time around: Cognitive and social strategies in second language acquisition. Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms International Fillmore, Ch.J. 1979 On fluency. Individual differences in language ability and language behavior, ed. by Ch.J.Fillmore, D.Kempler and S.-Y.Wang, 85-101. New York: Academic Press Gumperz, J.J. 1982 Discourse strategies. Cambridge: CUP Gumperz, J.J. and D.Tannen 1979 Individual and social differences in language use. Individual differences in language ability and language behavior, ed. by Ch.J. Fillmore, D.Kempler and S.-Y.Wang, 305-325. New York: Academic Press Hanania, E.A.S. and H.L.Gradman 1977 Acquisition of English structures: A case study of an adult native speaker of Arabic in an English-speaking environment. Language Learning 27, 75-91 Hakuta, K. 1974 Prefabricated patterns and the emergence of structure in second language acquisition. Language Learning 24, 287-297 Kasper, G. 1981 Pragmatische Aspekte in der Interimsprache. Eine Untersuchung des Englischen fortgeschrittener deutscher Lerner. Tübingen: Narr Knapp-Potthoff, A. and K. Knapp 1982 Fremdsprachenlernen und -lehren. Eine Einfuhrung in die Didaktik der Fremdsprachen vom Standpunkt der Zweitsprachenerwerbsforschung

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Krashen, S. and R.Scarcella 1978 On routines and patterns in language acquisition and performance. Language Learning 28, 283-300 Meisel, J. 1977 Linguistic simplification: A study of immigrant workers' speech and foreigner talk. The notions of simplification, interlanguages and pidgins, and their relation to second language pedagogy, ed. by S.P.Corder and E.Roulet, 88-113. Geneva: Droz Peters, A. M. 1977 Language learning strategies: Does the whole equal the sum of the parts? Language 53, 560-573 Rehbein, J. 1979 Sprechhandlungsaugmente. Zur Organisation der Hörersteuerung. Partikeln der deutschen Sprache, ed. by Η. Weydt, 58-74. Berlin: de Gruyter 1981a Announcing - On formulating plans. Conversational routine, ed. by F.Coulmas, 215-258. The Hague: Mouton 1981 b On fluency in second language speech. Speech production. Proceedings of the Kassel Symposium 1980, ed. by H. W.Dechert and M.Raupach. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum (in press) 1981 c Verbale und nonverbale Kommunikation im interkulturellen Kontakt. Sprachprobleme bei Gastarbeiterkindern, ed. by P. Neide, G. Extra, M. Hartig and M. de Vrient, 111-127. Tübingen: Narr 1985 a Einführung in die interkulturelle Kommunikation. Interkulturelle Kommunikation, ed. by J.Rehbein, 7-39. Tübingen: Narr 1985 b Diskurs und Verstehen. Zur Rolle der Muttersprache bei der Verarbeitung der Zweitsprache. Gesteuerter Zweitsprachenerwerb, ed. by E.Apeltauer. München: Hueber (in press) 1985 c Sprachnoterzählungen. Integration und Identität, ed. by Ε. W. Β. Hess-Lüttich, 63-86. Tübingen: Narr Rieck, B.-0.1980 Fehler beim ungesteuerten Zweitsprachenerwerb ausländischer Arbeiter. Fehlerlinguistik, ed. by D.Cherubim, 42-60. Tübingen: Niemeyer Schumann, J.H. 1978 Thepidginization process. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House Selinker, L. 1972 Interlanguage. IRAL 10: 3, 209-231 Tannen, D. and P.C.Öztek 1981 Health to our mouths. Formulaic expressions in Turkish and Greek. Conversational routine, ed. by F.Coulmas, 37-54. The Hague: Mouton Tarone, E., A.Cohen and G.Dumas 1976 A closer look at some interlanguage terminology: A framework for communication strategies. Working Papers on Bilingualism 9, 76-90 Wagner-Gough, J. and E. Hatch 1975 The importance of input data in second language acquisition studies. Language Learning 25, 297-308

je connais par exemple quelqu'un qui sait tres bien raconter des histoires en general tres amüsantes ( . . . ) il parle un bon fran9ais parce que quand il raconte une histoire ce η'est pas cousu de alors et puis apres et puis alors et puis alors et puis alors et puis alors qu'on dit toujours en franfais (OC .004: 1363-69)1

The use of alors in French-Dutch negotiations: A case study* Judith Stalpers

1.

Negotiating in a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic setting

The paper presented here is part of a research project on the role of language and culture in international technical-commercial negotiations.2 The aim of the project is two-fold. The first goal is a theoretical linguistic one; we want to make a linguistic description model of negotiations in which different types of analyses are brought together, such as argumentation theory (Toulmin 1969), speech act theory (Searle 1969), conversational analysis (Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson 1974) and analysis in pragmatic units (Ehlich/Rehbein 1972). The second goal is more applied, namely to design postacademic courses to teach businessmen to negotiate effectively, taking into account the linguistic and cultural component. For this purpose, we do contrastive analyses, in order to describe and explain misunderstandings in international negotiations to the extent that these are caused by the contact of different languages and cultures. At present, the research focuses upon FrenchDutch commercial relations. Dutchmen are well-known polyglots. Nowadays it is said that they * I am indebted to Karlfried Knapp and Annelie Knapp- Potthoff, without whose critical comments the work would have lost a lot of insightful information. Special thanks also go to Konrad Ehlich for his helpful and encouraging cooperation.

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Judith Stalpers

owe their economic (trade) power partly to the fact that they speak several foreign languages (English, German and French) on a quite good level. Nevertheless, Dutch businessmen still experience discomfort with another language (and culture) as has been established in a questionnaire (chapter 2). Recordings of actual negotiations gave us the opportunity to investigate how Frenchmen and Dutchmen use the French language in conversations. In this way, we will be able to detect where similarities and differences between the foreign-languagespeaker and the native speaker exist and how these differences give rise to misunderstandings. Traditionally, research into foreign-language-learning focuses on failures in syntax, lexicon, morphology and sometimes phonology of the learner. Communicative skills have been ignored most of the time — one of the few exceptions is e.g. Thomas (1983). One of the reasons for this probably is that no unequivocal methodology exists. In this paper, we will demonstrate one way to examine the limited communicative ability of an advanced foreign-language-speaker. As an example, we will choose for the presentation of a detailed analysis one of the many verbal elements which have pragmatic consequences. This analysis is still a pilot study. One striking difference between the language use of a native speaker of French and a Dutchman speaking French as a foreign language in a negotiation is the frequency with which they use alors. This stimulated us to take a closer look at this phenomenon, and it turned out in a detailed study that various types of analysis were necessary to reveal the similarities and diffences between a Dutchman and a Frenchman regarding semantic and pragmatic functions.

2.

What do negotiators think about intercultural differences?

In order to get an overview of the language and culture problems that negotiators face at international meetings, we started the project with a questionnaire survey among Dutch negotiators in 200 industrial companies (Gorter et al. 1983), followed by interviews among a select group of French as well as Dutch negotiators. The results can be summarized in the following way:

The use o/alors in French-Dutch negotiations

251

1. In general, negotiators gave little or no thought to the language and culture differences although they did remember all kinds of difficulties. 2. Where they had considered these difficulties, misunderstandings were often ascribed to cultural differences rather than to linguistic ones. In these cases, negotiators were concerned with polite behavior, for example, how to behave before or after the actual meeting. 3. Negotiators paid little attention to the cultural background of their partners; however, Eastern cultures (Japan and the Middle East) received more attention than did the Western ones. Some of the interviewees felt that it might be useful to be provided with a booklet or a course giving the necessary cultural information. 4. Most of the negotiators felt that inadequate knowledge of a language was not always a disadvantage; in fact it could be used strategically for negotiating. 5. When questioned more deeply, it transpired that misunderstandings occurred when a negotiator used a foreign language and when his receptive abilities in this language were overestimated by his interlocutor. As one interviewee put it: "The problem with the Dutchmen is that they speak French better than they understand it". The difficulties included the failure to identify particular constructions (e.g. those in which pronouns were used) and to understand the nuances expressed. Furthermore, legal terms seemed to cause more problems than economic, technical and everyday vocabulary. 6. It was also found that the nationalities which gave rise to the majority of problems were the French, the Japanese and those of the Middle East. This is in line with evidence from research in cross-cultural psychology: In a cross-cultural study of values and work relations, Hofstede (1980) pointed out that Dutchmen were most unlike people from France, Japan, and the Middle Eastern region on the following dimensions : - Power Distance, which indicates the relation with senior persons; - Uncertainty Avoidance, which indicates the need to regulate the unknown future in order to reduce uncertainty; - Individualism, which indicates the place assigned to an individual in the community; - Masculinity, which indicates the sex-role pattern expressed by male assertiveness as opposed to female modesty. 7. Most of the interviewees felt that negotiating was more of a personto-person activity than a culture-to-culture one.

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Judith Stalpers

What we learned from this survey is that it is not that much necessary to teach the negotiators to speak a language perfectly, but rather to make them aware of differences in the presentation of information and of how to evaluate the impact of an utterance.3

3.

The negotiation setting

In the literature, negotiating is often seen as a decision-making process and/or a problem-solving one, in which each participant, at some time, tries to influence the decision of the other party with arguments, as Putnam/Jones stated: "Bargaining is a process whereby two or more parties with divergent aims, motives, or interests, attempt to settle what each shall give and take or perform and receive, in a transaction between them. The parties engaged in this process are interdependent as they use proposals, counterproposals, and compromises to reach mutually acceptable outcomes (1982: 171)". But much more is involved. As an interviewee in the above-mentioned survey emphasized, "negotiating is a personal, individual activity, where all kinds of situational factors interfere, but where the personal factors quite often determine the establishment of good personal relations with your partners". This means that every act, whether linguistic or stylistic, can influence the negotiation and can itself be object of it, i. e. can be discussed by the other party with a view towards coming to a mutual agreement about the topic itself. For this, two examples: in the case of the Vietnam peace negotiations in Paris, the table configuration took a few weeks to negotiate, whilst in a negotiation simulated for the purpose of our project the two interlocutors started with the following sequence: (1) A. X. A. X. A.

LCN:901 hello Mister X hello Mister A it's been a long time since we saw each other last yes, too long, I'm afraid well, that depends on what you mean by a long time

Accusations followed about the long delays for replying to letters: all this was introduced by A's innocent small talk, uttered out of polite-

The use of alors in French-Dutch negotiations

253

ness. The ambience immediately became competitive and the parties did not come to an agreement. Negotiations are not purely arguments that involve a statement which has to be defended or challenged. A buyer can provide information about his needs and the seller can use this to boost his product, perhaps, even to demonstrate it. The buyer asks questions; the seller provides information. Both of them compare facts. At the same time, they try to establish a good relationship and they organize their discourse by apportioning turns to speak. The establishing of a positive interpersonal relationship and the organization of the ongoing discourse is to a large extent accomplished by the use of specific little words or particles (Merritt 1976, Franck 1980, Reichman 1981). Until now, these words have been studied mainly as they occur in informal conversations and service encounters. We will focus here on one of these small words in French, and we use the negotiation setting as the starting point of our analysis.

4.

Alors

In an audio-taped negotiation between a Dutch salesman of medical equipment and a French physician who represented a hospital, we found a strikingly higher frequency of the use of alors by the Dutchman compared to his French interlocutor. To us, this phenomenon gave rise to the following question: "Is the difference in the use of alors only one of frequency or is it one of function, too?" An explanation for the frequent use of alors coming to mind first is that the Dutchman uses it as a device to fill the time during the verbal planning of his French unterrances. If this interpretation is correct, then what is the effect of these silence-filling particles on the interaction? Therefore, we had a closer look at the phenomenon and we looked for an opportunity to broaden our data-base. To supplement our data, we used three additional texts. Our corpora now consist of: the French-Dutch negotiation as described above (LCN:101); a French-French negotiation between a French salesman and a French buyer (LCN:201); two interviews from the Orleans-corpus, one with relatively few occurrences of alors (OC:007), the other

254

Judith Stalpers

one with a far higher frequency (C)C:004). After counting the occurrences of alors in all texts, it was obvious that the Dutchman used alors much more often than a Frenchman would (see table 1). Table 1. Frequency of alors* person

occurrences

number of words

ratio

D. Salesman (LCN 101) F. Buyer (LCN 101)

187 9

7288 3151

1/39 1/350

F. Salesman (LCN 201) F. Buyer (LCN 201)

28 4

5534 2184

1/198 1/546

F. Interviewee (OC 007) F. Interviewee (OC 004)

2 115

4897 16650

1/2449 1/145

* D. = Dutch, F. = French

Clearly, we have encountered a native/non-native speaker difference with a potentially great impact on intercultural communication.

4.1

Alors as a transition marker

Until now, the only studies of alors can be found in Gülich (1970) and Zenone (1982). Gülich describes those verbal elements which precede or follow a sentence in spoken French, and, in this way, have a connecting function (Gliederungssignal): they open an utterance (et, alors, mais, puis, oh, ah, eh bien, tu sais, enfin, oui, non) or they close an utterance (tu sais, quoi, hein, oui, enfin, (n'est-ce) pas, non, alors). Opening markers occur six times as often as closing markers. Frequently, no closing markers are found at all. In Giilich's analyses, alors is one of the most frequently used opening markers (Eröffnungssignal); while in far fewer cases it serves as a closing marker (Schlußsignal) for sentences. Zenone, on the other hand, goes further by analyzing the relation between the clauses which are connected by alors; then, she describes the role of alors in relation to the speech act preceding and following the particle. In her study (1982), she compares three similar consecutive markers, done, par consäquent and alors and distinguishes three functions: both done and alors can function as a structure marker, an

The use of alors in French-Dutch negotiations

255

introductory marker of a conclusion and as an argumentative marker, whereas par consequent only fulfills the last mentioned function. Zenone demonstrates further that done and alors express different values: done presents the information in a more objective way, whereas alors has a subjective value. In the following, firstly, we will study the position of alors within turns of talk; subsequently, we will have a closer look at the semantic and pragmatic values of alors. In our analyses we will refer to Gülich's and Zenone's findings.

4.2

Alors and the turn-taking system

To determine the function of an alors for the turn-taking system, we looked at the sequential postion of alors in each speaker's turn of talk. Does it occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a turn? Further we distinguished an isolated alors which could be identified as a 'false start', neither preceding nor following that speaker's talk. Minimal responses or back-channel behavior of the other participant were not considered as turns. The results were as follows (see t able 2): Table 2. The place of alors in the turn of talk person

beginning

middle

end

isolated

D. Salesman (LCN 101) F. Buyer (LCN 101)

14 2

158 7

13

2

-

-

F. Salesman (LCN 201) F. Buyer (LCN 201)

6 1

19 3

2

1

-

-

-

-

-

-

F. Interviewee (OC 007) F. Interviewee (OC 004)

-

15

2 98

Now, we will have a closer look at the end- alors, the case when alors directly precedes or overlaps a change of turn. We will present examples for the occurrence of end-alors. We will then give an analytical paraphrase and finally we will describe in general terms the use of alors. We will start with the use of alors by the French salesman: (2) LCN:201:321-327 F. S. a. done on va partir sur ceite base-Ιά (0-6)

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Judith Stalpers

b. tu m'fais conßancej'teprepare les grilles toujours dans les memes proportions F. B. c. ben c'est ά dire que j'aimerais bien tu mets pour les grilles F. S. d. oh ben je te laisse le doute de toutes Jasons je t 'laisse le doute hein F. B. e. non mais j'suis d'accord avec toi (0.4) f. = mais c'que j'aimerais bien voir= F.S. g. —j'ai beaucoup d'choses ä t'montrer= * h. j'ai beaucoup d'choses ά t'dire encore alors * F. B. j. j'ai ce que j'aimerais voir quand meme c'est e:h (0.7) k. c'est le: les coloris quand meme des v'lours F. S. 1. bien sur bien sur bien sur m. on va t'laisser le choix c'est ά toi de choisir (see appendix for the transcription conventions and translation of the examples) The two participants were talking about an order for trousers and they had to specify the types to be ordered. F. S. concludes this topic by stating that this will be the starting point (a) and that he will write out the order (b). F. B. agrees with F. S. (c). Then, F. S. says that he will leave some latitude (d). F. B. again agrees (e). F. S. and F. B. start talking simultaneously (f and g). From what follows, it can be deduced (h) that F.S. wants to start another topic. He formulates a metastatement "I have much to tell you". On the other hand, F. B. interrupts F. S. after his alors and rejects the introduction of another topic by saying that he has got what he wanted to see (j) and then, he reformulates (k) his former desire (f) that he wants to see the various colors. This means a continuation of the topic 'ordering trousers'. F. S. agrees (1 and m). A similar situation occurs a few minutes later: (3) LCN:201:371 -378 F. S. a. oui alors j't'expliquais tout ά l'heure eh F. B. b. t'as pas eh t'as pas depasse les quantites-lä hein F. S. c. j't'aifait j't'aifait les quantites eh

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d. d'toutes facons j'te confirme comme d'habitude (0-6) e. e:t ouij'te parlais 'y a, 'y a cing minutes de la Campagne de publicite (0.6) F.B. f. ouais * F.S. g- alors * F.B. h. tu voudrais pas qu'on finisse la collection-lä (0.5) F.S. j· mais j'vais t'dire unp'tit mot quand memeparce que F.B. k. ςα t'a ςα t 'arrange pour me: pour m'entendre plus ςα apres non F.S. 1. non c'est pas pour t 'entendre plus non c'est surtout pour qu'tu saches un p'tit peu bon ben The conversation was interrupted. F. B. had to go to his shop, in the mean time, F.S. had a soft drink and wrote down the order. F.S. takes up the conversation (a). F. B. interrupts him in order to check if F. S. has written down the right quantity (b). F. S. confirms (c and d), then he introduces another topic (e). When F. B. back-channels (f), F. S. continues with alors (g). F. B. interrupts him by proposing to continue talking about the orders (h). F. S. rejects this proposal, he starts to explain why, when F. B. interrupts him by reproaching F.S. that he is depriving him of an opportunity to talk on another subject (k). F. S. denies this accusation (1). In both the examples (2) and (3), an alors is used after a metastatement by the salesman when he tries to start another topic. In this case the alors stands in close relation to the topic shift so that we can interpret it as the opening signal for the real start of the next topic. Then the buyer interrupts in order to avoid a change of topic. In example (2), the buyer rejects the introduction; in example (3), he proposes another topic which is rejected by F.S. In both examples, the rejections are underlined by the use of quand meme.4 Let us now turn to the end -alors of the Dutchman; as stated above, a prima facie interpretation of alors (often followed by eh or a pause) is that it is an instance of hesitation or verbal planning. If this is so, it means that the Dutchman is thinking about what he is going to say. Then, the alors is a device which indicates that he does not want to lose his turn: a turn-keeping device. A closer look at the examples (4) to (6), however, shows that things are rather complicated.

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(4) LCNrlOl :195-197 D. S. a. et alors eh la mathematique stoppe on peut pas e:h la reste si on η'a pas une separation optimale c'est trial and error (0.6) d'accord (0.7) b. et la systeme ά quat'solvants vous donne la possibilite (1.0)

*

de d'optimaliser au/jssi la selectivite d'accord/jalors F.B. c. j'enprie D. S. d. non non/2oui/20ui F. B. e. alio oui // /] = telephone rings /2 /2 = F- B- lifts the receiver In (a), D. S. discusses the restrictions of the old system 'ä deux solvants' in order to contrast it with the advantages of the improved system 'ä quat'solvants' (b). Whilst D.S. presents the new system, the telephone starts ringing. This interrupts the conversation; consequently, D.S. closes his statement with the particle d'accord followed by alors. F. B. (in c) makes an excuse for the interruption (or he asks to be excused). D. S. acknowledges (d). Then, F. B. lifts the receiver and speaks to the caller (e). (5) LCN:101:476-477 F.B. a. et nous et nous onpaye dans les conditions de paiement si vous voulez on met on paye eh la somme divis0e par six avec un sixieme, tous les mois (0.6)

pendant six mois * D. S. b. done vous allez e:h, payer dans six mois alors? (0.9) F. B. c. eh disons dans six mois on aura le dernier e:h la demiere tranche quoi There is a misunderstanding between D. S. and F. B. about the conditions of payment and F. B. explains in detail (a) the way that the payment will be done. D.S. checks in (b) whether he has understood F. B. by querying the information given by F. B.. F. B. corrects D. S. and elucidates on his method of payment in (c).

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The fragment in example (6) follows that of example (5). (6) LCN:101:478-480 D. S. a. d'accord de oui ouije comprends alors (1.0)

une offre F. B. b. sans interet quoi = c'est fa que eh = D.S. c. = une bonne de=commande (0.8)

d. une (2.3) * invoice alors F. B. e. c'est fa oui D. S. f. et alors seulement dans les conditions After clarification of the payment terms by F. B., D. S. checks again by listing the various items of F. B.'s proposal (a, c and d). The list ends with alors on a downward intonation and declining voice. Thus the turn-ending can be recognized by the intonation structure of the utterance. When F. B. has acknowledged the check, D. S. continues with the item of the proposal which F. B. wants to change (f)· The analyses by Gülich (1970) showed that alors can be used as a closing marker for a sentence (in a narrative); however, what we want to claim here is that the end -alors was used by the Dutchman as a closing marker, not only for closing a sentence, but also for closing his turn of talk; therefore, it is used as a device for regulating the interaction. Other characteristics of the utterances under study support the validity of our claim. In all the examples (4), (5) and (6), there are grounds for a turnswitch in D.S.'s utterance with end-alors and the reasons for this were indicated by the content of the utterance. In (5), a question (here followed by a rather long pause!) needs an answer. In (6), a check needs confirming (or rejecting). In example (4), there is an extra-linguistic reason, namely, the ringing of the telephone. The end-alors in these examples does not seem to be a turn-keeping device like the silence-filling version; however, it seems to be used to signal 'over to you': i.e. a turn-ending device. In this way, D.S. not only marks the end of his turn, but he avoids a clear-cut turn-ending. He smoothly tunes out.

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4.3 Alors and its semantic and pragmatic functions Originally, alors was a deictic, temporal expression, but during the development of the French language, alors acquired a semantic continuum between temporal and consecutive meanings. In some instances the temporal meaning of alors predominates: (7) 00.004:245 F. I. et puis alors eh troisieme fait eh le fait que whereas, in other instances it has the consecutive meaning: (8) Zenone:1982:134 il lui a tout raconte, alors Pierre α άέάάέ de venir In her analyses, Zenone describes how different clauses in a sentence can be interrelated. Apart from alors as an argumentative marker (or a conclusion marker), she distinguishes the function of alors as a discourse structure marker: with alors, the speaker returns to the theme of the conversation, or he digresses, or he changes the subject. As such, alors connects units of a text bigger than the sentence and makes the macro-organization of the discourse apparent. Briefly, alors has a wide range of applications, varying from a conjunction to a particle (transition marker), and from a temporal to a consecutive marker. We will come back to this later. The functional distinctions made by Zenone can indeed be found in our data; but not always can alors be seen to fall into one of these categories, because it would reduce the variety of expression for alors. There are a few cases where alors contributes to the internal organization of a clause without being an argumentative marker: (9) LCN:201:273 F. S. alors moi c'que j'te propose (10) LCN:201:284 F.S. bon alors moi j't'offiirai In these examples, alors opens a highlighting construction : a left-dislocation highlights the constituent upon which the subsequent predication is going to bear.5 This phenomenon is not found in the Dutchman's corpus although it is common in the Frenchmen's. A more detailed analysis led to some other observations; for

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instance, although we can say that alors itself is a structure marker, we often found that it could be combined with metastatements which made the structure of the discourse explicit, both in the language of the Dutchman and of the Frenchmen. (11) LCN:101:203 after a telephone call: D. S. alors eh j'etais en train de vous expliquer eh, les quat'solvants (12) LCN:201:89 F. S. bien, alors on va commencer par le commencement sij'ose m'exprimer ainsi This made clear a more general phenomenon abundantly present in the talk of the Frenchmen: the combining of alors with other elements (particles, words) which make explicit the function of the transition marker. All this might be explained by the fact that the meaning of alors has become so generalized that the particle calls for a more specific indication: (13) CC:004:599 F. I. et puis alors d'autre part je suis persuadi (14) LCN:201:106 F. S. bien alors done tu as le 603 (15) LCN:201:462 F. S. mais alors parlons parlons parlons des modeles typiquement Also from our data in the main text, we can see that the Dutchman is hampered when presenting his concluding remarks. He used the doncconstruction only once, but in all other cases the a/ors-construction; however, the Frenchmen used a variety of particles: done, ά ce momentΙά, ainsi, par consequent. In this way, the Frenchman was able to incorporate more nuances into his expressions with different stress between the different parts of the argumentation (Zenone 1982).

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Costs and benefits of alors

Although it is not surprising to observe that the performance of foreign-language speakers is limited, it is worth looking at the extent of their limitations. Our data and analysis show that the Dutchman is limited in the sense that he favours the use of alors at the expense of similar consecutive markers; the semantic/pragmatic value range of alors allows him to get away with this. Furthermore, he is inclined to use alors without other particles. This kind of limitation makes the conversation of a foreign-language speaker monotonous, because it lacks the benefit of nuances. Another restriction involves the limited number of functions used. Not only does this have consequences for his own expression of thought, we also wonder if he is able to recognize α/ors-nuances of the native speaker. From the quoted examples (2)-(6), in general, we can see that alors was used as a transition marker (Gliederungssignal). We suggest that, in the cases of the Frenchmen, the end -alors signalled the opening of a discourse unit (a topic) after a pre-sequence (a metastatement which announces the topic change). Some of the Dutchman's end-a/ors-es, however, were used to close a special type of discourse unit, namely, a speech act which elicitated a reaction from the other participant. In any case, since alors marks the transition from one grammatical unit to another one, it appeared to create an opportune moment for the listener to take over the turn (a transition relevance place6). Even in cases where the first speaker did not want to give away his turn (see ex. (2) and (3)), the one taking over the turn did not interrupt a grammatical unit; this can be considered as a more or less polite interruption. Thus, the use of alors created a risk: the listener could seize the opportunity to take over the turn, as is the case in the following example: (16) LCN:101:166-170 D. S. a. le pompe nouv nouveau avec les trois tetes alignees vous donne la possibilite de: d'acheter (0.5) eh la pompe (0.8)

isocratique

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F. B. b. peut-etre (0.8)

D. S. c. ajouter apres (0.3)

le le gradient (0.8)

* * F. B. D. S. F.B. D. S.

d. et e:h alors e. on η 'est pas limitέ quoi f. on η 'est pas limite g. c'estfa h. pour vous eh vous pouvez acheter directement la la systeme gradient D. S. is explaining the advantages of the renewed system he wants to sell but, in the middle of his presentation (d) he is interrupted by F. B. who brings the number of advantages to an end by anticipating the outcome (e). In this way F. B. initiates the end of the explanation which actually happens after a confirmation on the side of D. S. and another by F.S.. D.S. in (h) continues by giving advice to buy. So the Dutchman who used alors abundantly created the additional risk of losing his turn, which led to losing the topic as well (see 16). Our data is limited in size, and, at present, no comparable corpus of negotiation data is available. The similarities and differences encountered in the speech of the Dutchman and the Frenchmen, however, give clear indications of differences in the use of the particle alors, a word in the French language which has not attracted much attention from linguists before. The functions of alors are subtle ones, but it is probable that the use of alors, like that of similar particles, influences the course of verbal interaction to an important extent. This is obvious from the very fact that they occur regularly in all corpora of spoken French examined. Our analysis of alors has shown that in intercultural communication a particular type of potential differences exists which deserves closer attention from all analysts of the field. Moreover, our data and analysis have given a clear indication that in intercultural communication native/non-native speaker differences appear with regard to turn-ending devices, highlighting-phenomena, and nuances of speech. Further research, if possible on a broader base, will show which other phenomena are involved, how our observations can be integrated into an intercultural communication theory, and which conclusions can be drawn for the teaching of foreign languages.

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Appendix

Transcription Conventions D. S. F. Β. F. S. F. I. : ? = ...= (0.3)

= = = = = = = =

Dutch Salesman French Buyer French Salesman French Interviewee the sound is 'stretched out' question intonation simultaneously spoken pause, in tenths of a second

Translations of the examples (2) LCN:201:321-327 F. S. a. so we'll start on this basis (0.6)

b. trust me to always prepare the lists according to the same proportions F. B. c. Ο. K. you mean that I'd like for you to fill in the list F.S. d. yeah, Ο. K., I'll leave it to you I'll just leave it to you Ο. K. F. B. e. no but I agree with you (0.4) f. = but what I'd like to see = F. S. g. = I've got a lot of things to show you = h. I still have a lot to tell you so F. B. j. I've got what I wanted to see anyhow, it's uh (0.7) k. it's the the colors anyhow of the corduroys F.S. 1. O.K. O.K. O.K. m. the choice is left to you you make the choice (3) LCN:201:371 -378 F. S. a. yes Ο. Κ. I just explained to you uh F. B. b. you didn't uh you didn't exceed the quantities F. S. c. I made you I made you the quantities uh d. anyhow I'll confirm you as usual (0.6)

The use ofalors in French-Dutch negotiations

F.B. F. S. F. B. F. S. F. B.

F. S.

e. yeeaah, I mentioned you five minutes ago the advertising campaign f. yeah g. so h. you don't want to finish this collection first (0.5) j. but I'll tell you a little bit anyhow because k. that'll that'll work out nicely for you not not having to listen to me after that uh 1. no it's not so as not listen to you anymore no it's especially so that you'll know a bit well O.K.

(4) LCN:101:195-197 D. S. a. and then the mathematics uh stops one can't uuhh the rest if there's no optimal separation it's trial and error

(0.6)

right (0.7) b. and the four-solution system gives you the possibility

(1.0)

of a/jlso optimalizing the selectivity right/i so F. B. c. excuse me D. S. d. no no Ayes/ 2 yes F. B. e. hello yes (5) LCN:101:476-477 F. B. a. and we, and we, we pay according to the payment conditions if you wish we'll put we'll pay uh the sum divided by six with one sixth, every month

(0.6)

for six months D. S. b. so you'll u:h, pay in six month then? (0.9)

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F. B. c. let's say in six months you'll have the last u :h the last part (6) LCN:101:478-480 D. S. a. right, yes yes I understand so (1.0)

one offer F. B. b. without interest = that's what eh = D. S. c. = one order form = (0.8)

d. one (2.3) invoice then F. B. e. that's it yes D. S. f. and than only under the conditions (7) 00:004:245 F. I. and then uh third fact uh the fact that (8) Zenone:1982:134 he told him everything, so Peter decided to come (9) LCN:201:273 F. S. as for me, what I propose (10) LCN :201:284 F. S. Ο. K., as for me I'll offer you (11) LCN:101:203 D. S. Ο. K. uh I was explaining you uh the four solutions (12) LCN:201:89 F. S. good, Ο. K. we'll begin at the beginning if I may put it that way (13) OC:(X)4:599 F. I. and so then, on the other hand I'm convinced (14) LCN:201:106 F. S. well, then, so you have the 603 (15) LCN:201:462 F. S. but Ο. K. let's talk, let's talk, let's talk about the typical models

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(16) LCN:101:166-170 D. S. a. the η new pump the the pump with the three aligned heads gives you the opportunity to: to buy (0:5) uh the pump (0.8) isocratic F. B. b. maybe (0.8) D. S. c. add afterwards (0.3) the the gradient (0.8)

F. B. D. S. F. B. D. S.

d. e. f. g. h.

and uh then one isn't limited, right one isn't limited that's right for you uh you can buy the the gradient system directly

Notes 1. OC = Orleans-corpus. The Orleans-corpus consists of interviews with some people of Orleans. This corpus has been put at our disposal by Prof. Dr. Bernard Al of the Free University of Amsterdam. 2. The research project "De rol van taal en cultuur in internationale technisch-commerciele onderhandelingen" ("Negotiating technical business in a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic setting") is sponsored by the 'Samenwerkingsorgaan Tilburg/Eindhoven', an institution which supports inter-university research projects at the Universities of Eindhoven and Tilburg. 3. For example, several negotiators mentioned the fact that Japanese people avoid saying no, nevertheless, they have a way of expressing rejection. 4. Grevisse (1980) gave two descriptions of quandmemeas a conjunction: introducing an oppositive subordinate clause, or as a locution in colloquial French with the meaning — "malgre ce qui vient d'etre dit; en depit de ce qui est arrive ou pourrait arriver" (516). 5. In some languages, the distinction between theme and predicate is grammatically marked (e.g. morphologically in Japanese); in other languages, this is done by accent intensity (for instance in Dutch and German). The French language utilises neither of these two ways therefore it has to resort to other means. "Cette indetermination du theme et du propos affecte surtout les formes parlees" (Bally, 1965:75). The quite strict

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constituent order is changed, for instance, by means of a left-dislocation of the theme ("c'est moi qui ai fait cela", an impersonal construction ("il manque de l'argent"), or an indirect construction with a modal verb ("je veux que Paul sorte"). 6. The term Transition Relevance Place comes from Sacks/Schegloff/Jefferson (1974): This is a possible place where a turn might be ended, determined by turn-constructional units. "There are various unit-types with which a speaker may set out to construct a turn (702) . . . Whatever the theoretical language employed to describe them, they still have points of possible unit completion . . . (Our) turn-taking system identifies the types of turn-constructional units as sentential, clausal, phrasal, and lexical — i. e. syntactically (720).

References Bally, Ch. 1965 Linguistique Generale et Linguistique Franfaise. Bern: A.Fancke Ehlich, K. and J. Rehbein 1972 Zur Konstitution pragmatischer Einheiten in einer Institution: Das Speiserestaurant. Linguistische Pragmatik, ed. by D. Wunderlich, 209-254. Frankfurt: Athenaion Franck, D. 1980 Grammatik und Konversation. Königstein: Scriptor Gorter, T. et al. 1983 Het taal- en cultuurproblem van de technisch-commerciele onderhandelaar. Eindhoven/Tilburg: LCN Working Paper 2 Grevisse, M. 1936 (1980) Le Bon Usage. Paris: Duculot Gülich, E. 1970 Makrosyntax der Gliederungssignale im gesprochenen Französisch. München: Fink Hofstede, G. 1980 Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills/London: Sage Merrit, M. 1978 On the use of o.k. in service encounters. Texas Working Papers in Sociolinguistics 42. Austin, Tx.: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory Putnam, L. L. and S.J.Jones 1982 Reciprocity in negotiations: An analysis of bargaining interaction. Communication Monographs 49, 171-191 Reichman, R. 1981 Plain speaking: A theory of grammar of spontaneous discourse. Cambridge: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. Technical Report 4681 Sacks, H., E.Schegloff and G.Jefferson 1974 A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language 50, 696-735 Searle, J. R. 1969 Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: CUP Thomas, J. 1983 Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics 4:2, 91-112 Toulmin, S. E. 1969 The uses of argument. Cambridge: CUP Zenone, A. 1982 La consecution sans contradiction: done, par consequent, alors, ainsi, aussi (premiere partie). Cahiers de Linguistique Franpaise 4, 107-141

We have learned to expect cultures to be different from one another in innumerable . . . ways: in speech, burial rites, marriage practices, and eating habits . . . The stuff out of which these richly variegated cultures are made is found around man and in man . . . None of these raw materials from which cultural elements are constructed (by selection and contrastive structuring) is more ubiquitous than silence. (Samarin 1965:115)

What interactants do with non-talk across cultures* Werner Enninger

1.

Introduction

1.1

Terminology

The terminological discrepancy between "non-talk" and "silence" in the title and in the introductory quotation respectively, is indicative of the heterogeneous terminology which characterizes the extant discussion of the significant absence of vocalizations in verbal behavior. For the sake of clarity, and despite their awkwardness, the ex-negativo terms "non-phonation", "absent phonation", "absent vocalization", "non-speech", and "non-talk" will here be used interchangeably in order to refer to the unclassified and uninterpreted acoustic phenomenon. By contrast, all other terms such as "juncture-pause", "hesitation/ cognitive pause", "rhetorical pause" as well as "gap", "lapse", and "silence" will here be used non-interchangeably in order to refer to * The author gratefully acknowledges the stimulation of the present paper by Leo Loveday's writings. Furthermore, the paper owes many of its stronger points to the detailed criticims which Annelie Knapp-Potthoff and Karlfried Knapp gave of earlier versions. Gratitude is also owed to Richard Brunt for his stylistic suggestions and to Heidi Kroheck for converting the manuscript into a fine typoscript. As always, the author alone is responsible for the remaining weaknesses.

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contextual and functional classifications and/or interpretations of instances of absent vocalizations. Although systematic analyses have brought to light a variety of classifications (cf. Ballmer 1980; Drommel 1980, Levinson 1983: 298-300; Bergmann 1982), there appears to be general agreement among investigators that non-phonations should be basically classified according to whether they occur within the turn of a single speaker or between the turns of two different speakers (cf. Goodwin 1981: 18, who quotes Goffman 1975: 2; Sacks et al. 1974: 715; and Jaffe and Feldstein 1970:19 as evidence). As a matter of convenience, within-turn non-phonations will provisionally be referred to as "pauses". Terms such as "juncture-pause", "hesitation pause", "cognitive pause", "rhetorical pause", etc. (cf. Goodwin 1981: 68, also for further literature) will be used to denote subcategories of withinturn non-phonations. For between-turn non-phonations no unitary non-technical term is available. Therefore between-turn non-phonations will provisionally be referred to at the subcategory-level by the non-interchangeable terms "gap", "lapse", or "silence". This is in accordance with Levinson's (1983: 298-300) usage. For quotations where a different usage may obtain, the paraphrase will reflect our terminology. As the problems of a), isolating turns theoretically and b) of assigning an instance of non-phonation to either pauses or gaps/lapses/ silences, and c) of assigning a between-turn non-phonation to the preceding, the following, or no turn at all, indicate (cf. Goodwin 1981: 18-25), the terms used here are convenient labels that roughly locate variants of the phenomenon under discussion, rather than clearly defined theoretical terms of an unambiguous classification. They suffice, however, to circumscribe the subject of this paper.

1.2

Subject

The paper is not concerned with turn-internal pauses, neither in intracultural nor in inter-cultural speaking behavior. It deals rather with non-phonations at transition relevance places in the speaking behavior of various cultures. Transition relevance places (TRPs) are defined as points where speakers may change in conversations. At each of these TRPs, participants may choose not to take a turn, or to take a turn with a delay. For example, although the sequence "Can I go down an' see

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'im ?//C'mon//Come 'nte see ' i m / / C ' m o n / / " (cf. Levinson 1983: 335) is produced by only one speaker, it contains four TRPs produced by a turn-offer to a selected next speaker, and consequently, five turns. However, the scope of the paper extends beyond the role which nonphonations at TRPs play in organizing uncontroversial speaker continuation or smooth turn transition. Beyond its function of greasing the turn-taking machinery, non-talk can serve in interaction as the formal exponent of acts and even as a means of transacting events and complete situations in the sense of the ethnography of communication. Both the non-phonations which function in greasing the turn-taking machinery and the non-phonations which serve as means of transacting acts, events, and situations are the central subjects of this paper. Furthermore, the paper briefly deals with the meta-information which a speaker gives off unintentionally (Goffman 1959:14) at TRPs by taking his turn either too slowly or too quickly, i. e. by producing too long and too short non-phonations.

1.3

Assumptions

The basic assumption made in this article is that non-phonations are meaningless and insignificant nothings only before, between, and after interactive periods and that, by contrast, all non-phonations during interactive periods are significant absences and therefore have the status of zero signs, or rather of zero signifiers (cf. Poyatos 1981:151-153; Umiker-Sebeok 1980: 296; Samarin 1965: 115; Baumann 1974: 144-145). The second assumption is that the universally available signmaterial called non-phonation is universally made to serve essential and quite diverse functions in discourse and action systems (cf. Levinson 1983: 329). Furthermore, it is assumed that the non-phonations circumscribed above originate not only in pan-cultural requirements of conversational organization, but also in culture-specific socio-pragmatic constraints on the universal speaking behavior of homo loquens. This implies the assumption that the sign-theoretical statuses of nonphonations co-vary with the degree to which they are normatively raised from (universally interpretable) nature-motivated symptoms towards arbitrary-conventional symbols which cannot be interpreted across cultures, except where cultural constraints coincide. On the one hand, we have interactive situations which — with regard to non-phon-

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ation — are cross-culturally invariant, because the practical constraints override any socio-pragmatic rule of language use. For example, the abstention from speech by the technicians involved in recording a symphony is cross-culturally interpretable, because these non-phonations are determined by the nature of the event. On the other hand, there are situations and interactional phases for which the non-phonation rules are not determined by the nature of the event and which therefore may vary across cultures. The boiling of sausage, for example, is in no intrinsic way related to abstention from talk, and yet in some parts of Sweden boiling sausage and non-talk are closely associated. Their association is the result of a culture-specific socio-pragmatic constraint which, in turn, is rooted in a folk-belief in sympathetic magic. The parallel between the sausage casing and the human intestinal tube leads to the taboo of speaking and breaking wind at the other end of the intestinal tube, because breaking wind at either end might break the sausage skin (cf. Bringeus 1975). In this case, non-talk is the formal exponent of a culture-motivated act of sympathetic magic. However, although this example of non-phonation is highly culture-specific, it illustrates at the same time the apparently universal principle of abstention from talk in what is culturally perceived as a critical situation. This, in turn, implies the further assumption that socio-pragmatic constraints on phonation vary not only inter-culturally, but also intra-culturally. One further assumption is that stretches of non-phonation rank extremely high on the scale of phenomena which may foster cross-cultural miscommunication. In actual fact, the absence of phonation may be the most elusive component of both the language and — above all — the discourse system, i.e. of that system which — in comparison with the language system — causes initially graver problems in interethnic interaction (cf. Gumperz 1977 a, 1977 b; Gumperz and Roberts 1978). The grammatical system gives the message while the discourse system tells how to interpret a message. The greatest cause of interethnic problems lies in the area of understanding not what someone says but why he is saying it. This information about why people are speaking is not signaled in the same way in all ethnic groups . . . (Scollon and Scollon 1981:12) For non-speech the problem is aggravated by the fact that the listener must not only infer why no material signal is uttered, but also what is

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mediated by an absent signal. In terms of information theory, nonphonations in both intra-cultural and inter-cultural exchanges are speech segments of high uncertainty. It is true that where there is no uncertainty there can be no information. It is, however, equally true that the reduction of uncertainty (i.e. retrieving information) is nowhere harder than where semantic meaning and the interactional significance of a materially absent signal must be inferred on the basis of its verbal cotext and its situational context alone. Therefore the awareness of rules for the display and interpretation of non-phonation appears to be even more basic than the rules for selecting the speech material appropriate for a given slot in a discursive sequence. When an inter-cultural clash between non-phonation display patterns occurs, the non-proficient decoder may a) fail to perceive that a given non-phonation is not just nothing, but rather the formal exponent of an act (noncommunication), and b) fail to perceive which act is performed by the given non-phonation, as, for example, turn-planning, turn-relinquishing, hesitation before taking a turn, ratification of the previous turn's content, disagreement, non-committal, prevarication, embarrassment, etc. (semi- or miscommunication). Conversely, the non-proficient encoder may a) fail to select non-phonation as the appropriate formal exponent of his intended act, and b) — by selecting a material formal exponent — violate the speech rules, i. e. verbal etiquette, and c) trigger an interpretation in the decoder which does not match his intentions (cf. Basso 1972: 69). In either case, the interaction is subject to crosscultural failure. What is worse, the member of a culturei with an insufficient command of the display and interpretation rules obtaining in culture2 may be considered a faulty interactant and — if such instances are repeated — be stigmatized as a faulty person. Still worse, if such interactive derailments are experienced with more members of a culturei, the ascription of "faulty interactant" and "faulty person" may be generalized into the cultural stereotype of "faulty people". However, not only can discrepancies between the discourse systems used in a cross-cultural encounter foster inappropriate display and false interpretations of non-phonations. Since in a cross-cultural encounter either both interactants use a lingua franca, or one of them uses as his L2 the other's L u either both or one of them may be subject to incomplete learning and may therefore produce non-phonations either due to the increased utterance-planning load or due to the delayed decoding of the cues of transition relevance places in alter's contribution. Neither of such non-phonations which originate in the

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transaction of the interethnic encounter itself can be accounted for in either of the participants' discourse systems. The very variability and instability of such approximative intersystems may even be the cause of the majority of cases of interethnic bewilderment, and of the attribution of (conversational) uncooperativeness to alter. Finally, it is assumed here that the potential of non-phonation for cross-cultural non- and miscommunication is so great, because people expect cultures to be different where these differences have distinct material exponents, as for example in the domain of artifacts and languages, but not in the domain of the material nothings called nonphonations, etc.

1.4

Goals

The overriding goal of this paper is to find out to what extent the participants' productive and interpretative handling of non-phonations at TRPs contributes to what Scollon and Scollon call "interethnic miscommunication" (1981: 11), to what Loveday calls "communicative interference" (1982), and what Thomas calls "cross-cultural pragmatic failure" (1983). This will be done a) by describing the cultural relativity of the speaking rules obtaining for TRPs, and b) by illustrating the impact of incomplete learning of the discourse rules of an Lz by both or one of the interactants in a cross-cultural encounter. It is hoped that the supreme goal can be approximated by outlining a basic taxonomy of cross-cultural miscommunications occasioned by the participants' productive and interpretative handling of non-phonations at TRPs. Section 2 will focus on the cultural relativity of the use of non-phonation in the turn-taking machinery. Section 3 will deal with the cultural relativity of under what circumstances a non-phonation is rated as the formal exponent of an act. Section 4 will briefly sketch the meta-information which interactants give off unintentionally by taking their turns either too slowly or too quickly. Section 5 will point out further perspectives from which research into non-phonation may prove fruitful.

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275

Approach

Insights into the cross-cultural differences of significantly absent speech can be, and have been, sought in various ways. In general, two classes of approaches can be distinguished, i. e. those which start from the phenomenon > absence of phonation and vocalization < itself on the one hand, and — on the other hand — those which start from the folk-conceptualizations of the phenomenon in natural languages. These approaches will be briefly outlined, beginning with the latter, which is ethnoscientific in nature. Stedje starts from the assumption that the lexicon of a culture stores a certain amount of collective knowledge about das menschliche Schweigen ('silence of man'), and that the analysis of the lexicalized knowledge should reveal culture-specific differences (1983:10). In her study — one which is conceived of as a first step towards a contrastive analysis of German and Swedish lexicalizations of the phenomenon (1983: 31) — she excerpts from pertinent reference books (mostly German) proverbs, sayings and set phrases which topicalize aspects of the phenomenon under discussion, and attempts to classify them. Thus she systematizes what others have done in passing. From Samarin (1965:117), Basso (1972:67), Verschueren (1979: 111, 116), Hunter (1982: 408), Loveday (1982: 13; 1983:173), Schlieben-Lange (1983:90), and others, similar examples may be culled, all of which support the assumption that folk notions concerning the phenomenon exist in many cultures, and that the sets of notions — despite some overlap, in part due to a shared tradition — are not identical and that they might therefore be used in order to gain tentative and preliminary insights into the cultural relativity of the absence of vocalizations. Leaving aside the German sayings collected by Stedje, the following examples illustrate this view: English "Silence is golden", "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"; Latin: "Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses", "Cum tacent, clamant", "Qui tacet consentire videtur ubi loqui debuit atque potuit". Japanese: "Mouths are to eat with, not to speak with", "A man of many words has little refinement", "To say nothing is a flower"; Dutch: "Hij zwijgt en alle zeven talen", "Hij zwijt als een Mof"; Gbeya: "Speech is a reedbuck. Some stay down (that is, keep hidden), and some stand up (and are seen)"; anonymous: "It is not the case that the man who is silent says nothing"; Frisian: "It moat in goede prater veze, dy't it in swijer forbetteret".

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Also on the level of the conceptualization of the phenomenon in natural languages is Verschueren's comparative analysis of the Dutch and English verba tacendi{\919\ 83-157) with their subsets of verba silendi, verba reticendi and verba cessandi. His contrastive analysis of the semantic features of Dutch and English verba tacendi reveals the folk taxonomies of speech acts in the two speech communities; it reveals — in terms of the title of Verschueren's PhD dissertation — "What people say they do with words", or rather "What people say they do without words". The heuristic value of such studies of the phenomenon > absent Phonation and vocalizations < undertaken on the level of its conceptualization lies in the assumption that folk taxonomies, as found in natural languages, reveal the cultural relativity of the pre-theoretical classifications of, and attitudes to the phenomenon. However, what people say they do without words is one thing, and what they actually do without words, or rather without vocalizations may be a different thing altogether, because what lies largely below the threshold of awareness — such as absent vocalizations — cannot be expected to be lexicalized exhaustively. "Open juncture", for example, is not part of English folktaxonomy, but rather of technical register. Insights into what people really do without vocalizations have been gained by the empirical study of the phenomenon itself, be it along the quantitative-correlational or the interpretive dimensions of the empirical paradigm. The analyses undertaken in the paradigm of "pausology" (Tosi 1965), established by Goldman-Eisler and recently represented in Dechert and Raupach (1980) and by Butcher (1981), are most impressive. The bibliography to Dechert and Raupach (1980: 344-365) alone lists more than 130 pertinent publications. However, although the absence of vocalization belongs to the phenomena which are, at least in part, subject to culture-specific constraints, only few studies — as, for example, by Grosjean and Deschamps (1975), Deschamps (1980), Raupach (1980), Dechert (1980), Faure (1980), and Meara (1980) — focus on the cross-cultural variability of within-turn pauses. In view of the few studies devoted to the analysis of the potential of turn-internal non-phonations for cross-cultural miscommunication one wonders whether or not the nature of the phenomenon itself makes turn-internal non-phonations relatively resistent to such failure. Insofar as turn-internal non-phonations are largely the realization of the prosodic component of the language system, and only to a lesser extent of the rhetorical system of language use (Palmer 1971: 47; Wode 1968:

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169; Drommel 1980: 227-232; Di Pietro 1980: 317; Gumperz 1982a: 110,117-118,131,191,193, 200; Levinson 1983: 329), the lower potential of turn-internal non-phonations for cross-cultural miscommunication — if it turns out to be more than an abductive hunch — would be in accordance with the assumption that the discourse system causes initially graver problems in interethnic interaction than the language system (cf. Gumperz 1977 a, 1977 b; Gumperz and Roberts 1978; Scollon and Scollon 1981:12). This is why non-phonations at TRPs have been made the subject of this paper. The approach taken here is basically ethnographic-comparative, and it remains largely on the descriptive plane. In actual practice, the paper will scan pertinent studies, mostly undertaken within the paradigms of anthropology and the ethnography of communication for descriptive data and attempt to classify them. The categories used are mostly taken from conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, the ethnography of communication and the theory of speech acts. More than a rough mapping of the territory, which might trigger in-depth studies, should not be expected.

2.

The temporal management of TRPs across cultures: The cultural relativity of conversational chronemics.

The temporal management of TRPs has two aspects, namely the length of between-turn non-phonations, and the length of turns between speaker changes. We start from the assumption that a systematic investigation of both dimensions of the temporal management of TRPs across cultures might relativize the implicit pan-cultural assumptions of conversation analysis concerning the temporal management of nonphonations at TRPs.

2.1 The length of non-phonations at TRPs This dimension of the temporal management of potential speaker change can be formulated as follows. What are the minimum and maximum lengths of non-phonations between two turns which cannot be

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transcended without ruining an interaction? This formulation does not imply the assumption that every actual speaker change is accompanied by an intermediary non-phonation. This would be contrary to empirical evidence because at actual points of speaker change we find not only non-phonation but also inaudible and almost unmeasurable splitsecond speaker transitions (Ervin-Tripp 1979: 292; Kempton 1980, Gumperz 1982: 141) as well as simultaneous talk by different parties, i.e. overlap (cf. Levinson 1983: 296-297; Goodwin 1981: 2). Furthermore, this formulation does not imply the assumption that (at the minimum end of the scale) speaker gaze (Kendon 1967), kinesic activity (de Long 1974), or a combination of lexical, syntactic, paralinguistic and kinesic cues (Duncan 1972) or merely verbal pre-closing and closing signals (Schegloff and Sacks 1973) are not important factors in facilitating smooth change-over of speakers, although Levinson cogently argues against the central importance of such material signals and for the key role of the opportunity assignment rules of the turn-taking machinery (1983: 302). All that is said is that to the extent to which minimum non-phonations at the end of turns play a role of speakerchange, they are subject to culture-specific constraints and by implication, a potential for cross-cultural miscommunication. Similar considerations apply for the maximum end of the scale: cultures appear to vary with regard to the maximum length of post-turn non-phonations which are tolerated as between-turn non-phonations, and which do not count as a cue to the conclusion of a focused and an unfocused interaction, respectively (cf. Goffman 1963: 24). Scollon and Scollon (1981: 25) found the different timing of turninternal and between-turn non-phonations in Athabaskan-English interactions to be an important source for cross-cultural pragmatic failure and stereotyping. The example deserves to be quoted in full Problems start to come up when two speakers have different systems for pausing between turns. Generally speaking, Athabaskans allow a slightly longer pause between sentences than do English speakers. The difference is probably not more than half a second in length, but it has an important effect on interethnic communication. When an English speaker pauses he waits for the regular length of time, and if the Athabaskan does not say anything, the English speaker feels he is free to go on and say anything else he likes. At the same time the Athabaskan has been waiting his regular length of time before coming in. He does not want to interrupt the English

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speaker. This length of time we think is around one and one half seconds. It is just enough longer that by the time the Athabaskan is ready to speak the English speaker is already speaking again. So the Athabaskan waits again for the next pause. Again, the English speaker begins just enough before the Athabaskan was going to speak. The net result is that the Athabaskan can never get a word in edgewise (an apt metaphor in this case), while the English speaker goes on and on. The Athabaskan point of view is that it is difficult to make one's whole point. The length of pause that the Athabaskan takes while expecting to continue is just about the length of pause the English speaker takes in exchanging turns. If an Athabaskan has in mind a series of sentences to say, it is most likely that at the end of the first one the English speaker will think that he has finished because of the length of the pause and will begin speaking. The Athabaskan feels he has been interrupted and the English speaker feels the Athabaskan never makes sense, never says a whole coherent idea. Much of this misunderstanding is the result of something like a one half second difference in the timing of conversational pauses, but it can result in strong stereotypical responses to the opposite ethnic group. (Scollon and Scollon 1981: 25) What is intended to be a turn-internal rhetorical pause is interpreted as a turn-relinquishing non-phonation (a gap or lapse, respectively; Levinson 1983: 298-300; cf. also section 3), and vice versa. The fact that such potential for miscommunication arises irrespective of the variety used, i. e. English Athabaskan or the so-called Village English (a variety of Canadian English used in villages of the area) (Scollon and Scollon 1981: 28), underlines the view that vocabulary and grammar are less dangerous factors than the discourse systems of the parties involved. They are part of the culture's speech protocol, that is, of social etiquette, and any deviation may count as a social misdemeanour. Since conversational principles are acquired early in life, (between the ages of one and two, i.e. at a time when children have little to say (Scollon and Scollon (1981: 23)), they tend to be transferred to conversations transacted in L2, like turn-internal pausological behavior as demonstrated by Deschamps (1980), and hardly accessible to later modification.

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Among the Old Order Amish there appears to be an outspoken tolerance for longer between-turn non-phonations. While in American monologues pauses of six seconds are acceptable, conversational between-turn gaps and lapses of the same length without previous notification of temporary interactional exit and its acceptance ("Wait a minute" (i.e. 'hold') — "Take your time" (i.e. 'accept')) are not easily tolerated, at least not in focused interaction. In a forty-minute conversation of three adult Old Order Amish we found no fewer than eleven between-turn gaps and lapses longer than twenty seconds, the longest being fifty-six seconds. Not one of them was preceded by a 'hold — accept' pair. The absence of pre-closings like okay or terminal elements like bye alone appears to suffice to keep conversation going across long gaps and lapses. The absence of turn-overlap in the same conversation appears to indicate that once a party has the status of a speakerlistener participant (children with auditor statuses (cf. Duncan 1972: 302) were not present), s/he is given a fair share of speaking time. While the co-present German driver (the Old Order Amish ride in, but do not drive cars) felt uneasy about the gaps and lapses, the Old Order Amish participants appeared not to mind although two of them had travelled for more than two hours to pay this and other visits. Obviously, gaps and lapses do not count as wasting the precious and limited good of speaking time, but as a component of the visiting event (cf. the Wishram, the Gbeya, and Black Foot Indian examples below). This view was later confirmed in interviews. As the reaction of the German participant observer — who according to the Dutch proverb "He zwijgt als en Mof" does not belong to the most voluble of cultures — indicate, this timing of gaps and lapses may have contributed to the attribution of taciturnity and of uncooperativeness to the Amish by American mainstream society. In another sixty minute conversation which developed in the course of what was intended as a Saturday afternoon visit to another Old Order Amish living about five miles away, we found no fewer than 85 between-turn non-phonations of five seconds or more. Of these 29 were longer than ten seconds, 16 were longer than 15 seconds, eleven were longer than 20 seconds, namely 55, 38, 36, 35, 29, 27, 26, 24, and twice 22 seconds. Although the three participants "gathered close together and openly cooperate (-d; W.E.) to sustain a single focus of attention" (Goffman 1963: 24), i.e. although the situation fulfilled the criteria of focused interaction, here the focus of what was originally intended as a visit shifted from "doing conversation" to the close scru-

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tiny of the function of an old tool. This might explain the many nonphonations in what the visitor later claimed to have been a nice visit. On other occasions, the participant observer found the Amish to be using up all interaction time by not leaving any longer gaps and lapses. So it appears that gaps and lapses are not the result of an obligatory conversational principle, but rather of an optional rule which produces a higher tolerance for non-phonation. Samarin describes a similar pattern for the Gbeya (1965: 117), where there seems to be no embarrassment about not continuing a conversation when the other person has completed her/his turn. He concludes that it seems as if the Gbeya do not feel under obligation to talk. Despite the lengthy non-phonations during conversations, Samarin does not consider the Gbeya as taciturn people. Among them nonspeech (our rendition of his "silence"; W. E.) is looked upon as something which is as effective as speech. What may appear as cross-cultural differences in the tolerance for conversational "time out", may, however, be the epiphenomena of focused vs. unfocused types of interaction. In unfocused interactions participants are not so much concerned with filling time by a continuous flow of turns, but with "the management of sheer and mere copresence" (Goffman 1963: 24), as for example retired neighbors sharing a park bench. The extreme tolerance for gaps and lapses which Goffman reports for Shetland Isle appears to be a case in point. In Shetland Isle, when three or four women were knitting together, one knitter would say a word, it would be allowed to rest for a minute or two, and then another knitter would provide an additional comment. In the same manner a family sitting around its kitchen fire would look into the flames and intersperse replies to statements with periods of observation of the fire. Shetland men use . . . the lengthy pauses required for the proper management of their pipes. (Goffman 1963: 103) It is not quite clear whether Saville-Troike has only focused interactions in mind when she states that certain American Indian groups are accustomed to waiting several minutes for responding to a question or taking a turn in conversation, while the native English speakers they may be talking to have very short time frames for responses or conversational turn-taking, and find non-phonations (our term for her

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"silences"; W.E.) embarrassing (1982: 23; see also Schnapper 1979: 137). If one follows Key (1975: 118-119), in some American Indian cultures gaps and lapses of even up to five minutes do not have negative readings, and they do not indicate an interactional break-down, or the regression of the involved persons from "withs" to "copresents" and to "enemies", as — by contrast — in the case of the Belize speech community: But regardless of the particular speech act being performed, one is usually talking. In fact, it is only when a social relationship has completely broken down that one treats another with silence (Kernan et al. 1977: 41) Furthermore, Kernan et al. (1977: 42) report that the cultural value of filling each moment of social interaction with talk was constantly brought home to the field-workers, insofar as periods of non-talk were regarded as clear evidence of the investigators' lack of any sort of linguistic competence or social grace. The Belizan interlocutors would fill what to them was an awkward vacuum, with stories. Thus some negative attributions appear to depend on what is felt to be a "normal" stretch of non-talk at TRPs. Since what is "normal" is a highly ethnocentric question, it is plausible that Belizan interlocutors should make negative attributions to Americans who may be sure that they are obeying the rule according to which "someone's turn m u s t . . . always be in progress" (Goffman 1963: 136). Middle-class American conversationalists, who read what is sub-normal non-talk to them as a cue of "impoliteness", "social gapping", "sullenness" (Umiker-Sebeok 1980: 295), are likely to attribute these qualities to American Indian conversationalists who feel that their between-turn non-phonations are unmarked behavior. In Europe, Mediterranean cultures with their lower tolerance for longer gaps and lapses may attribute similar qualities to central and northern Europeans. Similarly, the "American talking to a Japanese associate is . . . baffled . . . by long silences that 'waste time'" (Barnlund 1975: 41; cf. also p. 50, 52, 55, 57, 63). Conversely, to Japanese ears Americans seem to talk "incessantly" so that "they sounded . . . almost hypermanic" to Doi (1974: 21, cf. Loveday 1985: 50-51). Thus it appears that the cultural relativity of conversational chronemics is a great potential for cross-cultural miscommunication and negative attribution. This messy area is hardly accessible to well-

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intended repairs, because its cause is the mere extent of verbal nothings which are largely below the threshold of awareness. With regard to the cultural relativity of conversational chronemics, Levi-Strauss (1963: 68) provides a descriptive generalization: "There are cultures . . . which are rather thrifty in relation to language. They don't believe that language should be used indiscriminately, but only in certain specific frames of reference and somewhat sparingly". Condon and Yousef try to account for the divergent evaluations of speaking vs. non-talk in conversations in terms of Florence Kluckhohn's concept doing vs. being-in-becoming culture: . . . persons from identifiably doing oriented societies tend to regard silence as an absence of words, a waste of time, a period when "nothing is doing". For those who can be characterized as of the being or being-in-becoming mode, silence in conversations has positive meaning: It is essential to self-fulfillment and to an awareness of here and now. (Condon and Yousef 1975: 137) Hostetler (1980: 18-20, 374) attempts to account for the evaluation of speaking in Hall's (1976: 105-116) terms of low-context vs. high-context cultures: high-context cultures with widely shared socio-cultural knowledge do not have to verbalize as much as low-context cultures. However, Hostetler — who uses the term "silence" — appears to be concerned with the principles controling the socially appropriate selection and organization of speech content, i. e. what needs to be topicalized and what one can and must "be silent" about, rather than with conversational chronemics. With regard to the latter aspect Hall's distinction between monochronic time cultures vs. polychronic time cultures (1976: 9-24) appears to offer a framework within which the differential use of interaction time might find an explanation. M-time cultures emphasize schedules, separation of activities and doing one thing at a time, while P-time cultures are characterized by several things happening at once (cf. Hall 1976: 17). With regard to the cultural relativity of conversational chronemics, it might be worthwhile to test the following hypothesis: when doing conversation, M-time cultures do just that and fill all time with words, while P-time cultures may fill the available time with words, and/or actions, and/or simply be present and thus "do interaction" also in other than verbal modes. This may go along with the relative frequency of focused vs. unfocused encounters in M-time vs. P-time cultures.

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The relative frequency of TRPs accompanied by non-phonations

The cross-cultural relativity of conversational chronemics concerns not only the duration of non-phonations at TRPs, but also the relative frequency of TRPs in interchanges, which determines turn-size. However, this is only indirectly related with between-turn non-phonations, namely insofar as non-phonations occur at TRPs. In the following examples this appears to be the case. As Scollon and Scollon (1981: 25-26) state, there are different expectations about how long a speaker should be allowed to speak before s/he stops and relinquishes her/his turn. The reader will remember that in Athabaskan-English interaction the relative length of non-phonations is the distinctive criterion of turn-internal pauses vs. between-turn gaps/lapses/silences. Generally Athabaskans expect that a speaker will take as long as necessary to develop an idea. ..., there is . . . an expectation that something like a monologue is the normal speaking turn. The role of other speakers is that of an audience that by frequent traffic signal responses indicates that it is following. English speakers, on the other hand, treat monologues as exceptions, with the norm being the dialogue in which speakers exchange more or less equal turns. In Athabaskan-English interethnic communication, the expectation that English speakers have is rarely fulfilled. True dialogue rarely occurs. The reason for this has been given. The exchange of turns works toward the English speaker's continually regaining the floor and against the Athabaskan's being able to hold the floor for more than a brief speaking turn. Where an Athabaskan may expect to get his turn after a long English monologue he rarely gets more than a brief statement before another English monologue begins. The result is again stereotyping of the English speaker as egocentric and the Athabaskan as having no ideas of his own. (Scollon and Scollon 1981: 26) What counts as an appropriate turn-size and an appropriate turn-entry device is apparently a matter of cultural relativity. Barkowski, Harnisch and Kumm (1976: 45-46) report for intra-ethnic communication of Turkish guestworkers in Berlin that the contributions are long and detailed, that they prefer narrative styles and that

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speaker change takes place only after current speaker has — after many repetitions — concluded his argument with only rare interruptions, interjections and short responses by other parties. Given the German dialogue pattern of shorter turns and more frequent speakerchange, interethnic communication appears to suffer similar problems as in the Athabaskan-English context. In German-German conversations, where shorter turns appear to be the expected behavior, and where any participant may self-select at any TRP according to rule 1 b of Sacks et al. (1974), obtaining an extended stretch of talk requires the use of the specific turn-entry device, such as a story preface suspending rule 1 b followed by an accept. By contrast, in Turkish-Turkish conversation, where multisentence turns appear to be normal conversational behavior, such a technique is redundant in the repertoire of discourse strategies. In order to smooth the resultant discrepancies in TurkishGerman conversations, Turks have to learn a) how to suspend rule 1 b of the turn-taking machinery for the duration of their multisentence "stories", and b) overt turn-exit devices lifting the suspension of rule 1 b, while Germans have to learn the turn-exit cues that signal the re-starting of the turn taking machinery again, such as punch lines, summaries, and extended non-phonations which cannot be mistaken as turn-internal pauses. Furthermore, explicit mutual requests for repairs might in the long run produce a rapprochement of conversational chunking similar to that which appears to have emerged in Athabaskan-English conversations (Scollon and Scollon 1981: 28). With reference to Mizutani (1981: 85), Loveday (1985) provides another pertinent example from Japanese-Westerner interactions. According to Loveday, Mizutani claims that the taking and timing of turns is shorter in the Japanese speech community where "a conversation is thought to be created together by two persons". It is even possible to speak with an intonation calling for aizuchi (listener signals) from the other person after a single word. As a result of this rhetoric pattern for structuring interpersonal conduct, Westerners often seem unable to respond appropriately in Japanese, even those quite advanced in their study of Japanese . . . feel somewhat out of step. (Loveday 1985: 50-51) Hoffer summarizes the discrepant back channel patterns of Japan and the USA as follows:

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In American English the addressee usually marks the listening channel every 5-10 seconds (varying with the path of conversation) with a verbalization such as "yes" or "I see", a vocalization such as "uh huh", and/or a movement such as a head nod. (...). In Japanese, a channel marker such as the vocalization "ee ee" is usually made every 2 or 3 seconds on the phone and almost as frequently in face-to-face interaction. (...). Again the contrast is total in terms of timing (...). The American who uses Japanese channel markers at the American pace is viewed by Japanese as aloof, uninterested in the subject of the speaker, unable to understand, or so on. (...). The Japanese who uses American markers at the Japanese pace, "uh huh . . . uh huh . . . uh huh" rather than "uh huh uh huh uh huh", is often interpreted as wanting to take a turn to speak, since that is one way Americans signal they want their turn in conversation. When the American stops to allow the Japanese to take a turn, the subsequent silence is quite awkward and leads to the feeling of uncomfortableness in the cross cultural situation. (1985: 18) For further evidence on the discrepant patterns of listener signals and concomitant cross-cultural misreadings of turn-internal vs. turn-final cues (often triggering akward gaps and lapses), see Loveday (1985: 49-52).

3.

Non-phonations at TRPs as the formal exponents of acts

As long as this paper focused on the sheer quantities of non-phonations at TRPs, a subclassification of such nothings was not essential. At this point, where the focus shifts from the mechanics of the turn-taking machinery to acts performed by participants through non-phonations at TRPs a subclassification can no longer be postponed. According to Levinson (1983: 298-300) non-phonations occurring at TRPs can be assigned to either of three classes: gaps, lapses, and significant (or attributable) silences. These are defined with reference to the turntaking rules of Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974). A non-phonation which a selected next speaker produces by not at all realizing his speaking rights (assigned to him by rule 1 a is a significant (or attribut-

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able) silence. A non-phonation which is produced by the fact that either a non-selected party self-selects (according to rule 1 b) with a delay, or current speaker continues (rule 1 c) with a delay, is a gap. A non-phonation which is produced by the fact that neither selected next speaker (1 a), nor a non-selected party that might self-select (1 b), nor current speaker takes the next turn (1 c), is a lapse. Rule 2 provides that, in those cases where current speaker continues into a new turn-constructional unit, the rule set reapplies at the next TRP, and so on until a new speaker takes over. These apparently clear categories are not free from problems. Since these categories depend on turns as their basic criterion, Goodwin's literature-based discussion of what constitutes a turn (1981: 15-29) has also consequences for the classification of non-phonations at TRPs. Furthermore, the analyst's application of the taxonomy to instances of non-phonation may result in the assignment of one and the same nonphonation to pauses or gaps (Goodwin 1981: 19). In generalizing from the case analyzed by Goodwin, one might hypothesize that for many non-phonations no single classification is available to the analyst who, instead, must deal with it as an event emerging through time and thus capable of ongoing transformation. If it were not in part paradoxical, one might formulate: actual non-phonations are homophonous stretches of speech which, on the basis of cotext and context alone, cannot in all cases be assigned unequivocally either to classes or to turns. If this is true of the detached analyst who has the preceding and the following co- and context available as a referential frame, it is even more true of the participant involved in the production of the conversation and who must interpret the non-phonation without reference to the post non-phonation cues which are still to emerge (cf. Bergmann 1982: 145,147). However, Levison's classification of non-phonations at TRPs admits of the assumption that the interpretation of between-turn nonphonation as the formal exponent of an act presupposes its asignment or attribution to one participant/participants who thus perform(s) an act. This is the reason why we will refer to the non-phonations discussed in this section 3 as silences.1 In retrospect, this explains why, if interpretive terms occurred at all in section 2, the terms gap and lapse were used. In order to show the cross-cultural relativity of silences used as the formal exponents of an act, we must briefly resort to the theory of speech acts. It clearly distinguishes "what is said" from "what is done",

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but does not separate them far enough in order to catch all that can be done with between-turn non-phonations. The locutionary act "there is a dog!" has referential meaning and sense. In uttering that, the speaker may perform the illocutionary act of warning a addressee, and he may thus bring about the perlocutionary effect of deterring the addressee from endangering himself. However, the assumption is that something must be said in order for something to be done. In terms of conversational analysis, the acts are performed through turns, whereas the nonphonations between them only help to synchronize the turns/acts, as seen in section 2. Here we will pursue the assumption that just as one can utter words without saying anything, one can do something without uttering anything (cf. Saville-Troike 1982: 30). Empirical evidence shows, a) that between-turn silences can also be the zero exponents of acts, and b) that what is done by silences varies across cultures.

3.1

The silent transaction of complete situations

One pertinent aspect ethnographies take issue with is Malinowski's notion of "phatic communion", i. e. the utterance of stretches of speech whose "acthood" lies only in establishing and acknowledging the social rapport between interactants. The ethnographic studies do not deny that speech may have such an interpersonal function, but they rather disclaim the universality of the principle that humans have to converse even if they do not have anything to say, as Sapir (1949: 11, 16) and Hayakawa (1967: 87) claim. Voegelin and Harris (1945: 458) state that the Black Foot Indians do not talk for about five minutes, even when they are making a social call (cf. Samarin 1965: 117). Among the Gbeya, a sick call is transacted, and sympathy is expressed by a lugubrious mien and sitting in silence. A minimal amount of chit-chat may go on between the visitors, but it does not involve the patient. (Samarin 1965: 118). Hymes provides an even more striking example from the Wishram, one which deserves to be quoted in full. Note the terminology which is not identical with the usage of this paper.

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That talk was not mandatory is more dramatically clear by contrast to our own society in what might constitute a visit. A friend could come to one's house, sit, and leave without a word being exchanged. One would later report, "So-and-so came to see me yesterday". That he had taken the trouble to come was communication enough. A visit need not include talk, if nothing needed saying. (Hymes 1975: 134) In modifying Cherry (1971: 12) and Goodwin (1981: 13), we suggest that in certain cultures conversation is not the, but a fundamental unit of human communication, and that in certain cultures types of interactions in which no words are exchanged are just as fundamental. At the same time, the example illustrates Goffman's tenet that conversation is but one type of focused interaction. Furthermore, it underlines Labov's view that the question "Why should anybody say anything?" (1972) is the fundamental question of sociolinguistic approaches which aim at complementing the descriptions by explanations. This pattern of transacting a complete visiting situation appears to be a radical extension of the speaking principles applying to the Amish, the Gbeya, and Black Foot Indian events described above and following below. While among the Amish, a visit has at least a verbal opening and a verbal closing and some verbal exchanges as obligatory components, among the Wishram 'doing communion' can have the formal exponent of silence extending over the complete situation of a focused interaction.2 However, not only 'doing communion' but also legal transactions can be carried out without words being exchanged throughout the situation. In her discussion of primitive institutions, Hertzler describes the institution called "silent barter", "dumb barter", or "deposit barter", "The general principle of these being that the articles for exchange are put in a certain well-known and appointed place . . . ; other persons from other tribes then come and take those and put other articles of approximately equal value in their stead" (Hertzler 1928: 90-91).

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The silent transaction of events and acts

Of course, not only complete situations (in terms of Hymes) can be transacted without words, but also shorter components of such situations. This applies to cases where silence is the culturally expected exponent of an act, mostly in highly prestructured contexts such as (silent) prayer in the church service of various cultures, and the (silent) condolences of, for example, the Abbey speakers of the Ivory Coast, the Igbo speakers of Nigeria (cf. Saville-Troike 1982: 157-160) as well as in European cultures where a handshake alone is acceptable. Bringeus' examples of performing an act of Sympathie magic (1975) is also a case in point. The "acthood" of silences becomes most salient in turn-pairs of all kinds, if and when an expected pair(-part) is replaced by silence. The term "turn-pairs" is here used to comprise a) strict adjacency pairs with one and only one expected second pair-part, such as greetings and farewells, b) adjacency pairs with a limited set of strict expectations with regard to preferred (unmarked) and dispreferred (marked) second pair-part options such as acceptance vs. refusal following an invitation, or such more open pairs as questions and answers (Sacks et al. 1974: 717), as well as c) less tightly paired action-chains (Hall 1976: 141-167; Pommerantz 1978) "where a first part does not seem to require but rather makes apt some response or second" (Levinson 1983: 337). Where the second constituent of such pairs is replaced by a non-phonation, it has the status of a significant silence attributable to a specific participant because, even where an address term is not included in the first constituent, either the limited number of interactants or the content of the first constituent will, as a rule, isolate a relevant next speaker. In intra-cultural communication where the participants share the stock of turn-pairs and, therefore also their expectations with regard to the second pair-parts in conversation, the replacement of the latter by silence may be intended and interpreted as a loaded silence, as socially marked behavior, and as a definitely dispreferred second. It should be noted that in this case the socially marked and dispreferred secondpair-part "silence" is, however, not linguistically marked in the sense that it has additional morphological material. In this case, the socially marked, i.e. the dispreferred, second has rather a zero-exponent which — despite its phonological, morphological and semantic emptiness — has the pragmatic force of adversely affecting a cooperative endeavor.

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In those inter-cultural interactions, in which turn sequence patterns of the interactants clash, the decoder may interpret a non-phonation as the formal exponent of socially marked act, while the other participant follows the unmarked pattern of his culture which happens to have fewer constituents than the decoder expects. Greeting and farewell-pairs are considered to be next to universal, and to vary mainly with regard to the degree of their elaboration. In this respect, greetings in Arabic, Indonesian and Igbo, for example, are more elaborate than greetings in English (cf. Saville-Troike 1982: 13). In cultures where greetings are paired by an obligatory rule, such as the European, the unexpected deletion of the second-pair part is socially marked communicative behavior and thus carries a high information load on the relationship level of interactants. Heeschen et al. (1980: 152-153) report an encounter among the Eipo of West New Guinea, in which — after an initial eyebrow movement establishing contact — the expected greeting and politeness formulae such as "Your are coming" were not exchanged, and in which further eyecontact was avoided and a distance of at least three meters was kept during some minutes. Heeschen et al. conclude: From the standpoint of ethology the silence and ongoing absence of communication can be interpreted as hostility, arising when a stranger or another party penetrates another's territory . . . silence conceals the efforts to suppress or to control feelings of hostility. (1980: 152-153) This tension is in the subsequent phase released either by humorous remarks, nonverbal communication such as eyecontact and proxemic shifts, the exchange of gifts, the sharing of cigars and sugar canes or a combination of these. With regard to the later phases of the interactional opening, the authors conclude: "In our view this exchange is the true equivalent of the Western type of greeting and politeness formulae" (ibid.). Even where verbal greetings exist in the speaking economy, they may be less important than nonverbal communication or instrumental interaction signifying a rapport. The replacement of (part of) the verbal or kinesic greeting pair by silence appears to be even interpretable across cultures as socially marked behavior signalling resentment to the intrusion of one's territory. Holzach (1982: 37, 41, 47 and passim) reports several instances of deleted (second pair parts of) greetings in his, i. e. the outsider's, initial encounter with the Hutterites:

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Auch hier wie im Kuhstall, kein Händedruck, kein Willkommensgruß, nur Schweigen und skeptische Blicke. (1982: 41) Likewise, the concept of territoriality may serve to understand the rare instances in which well-acquainted Amish delete the normally expected greeting and politeness formulae such as "Hi. Wie bischt?" (probably a loan rendition of American English "How are you?"). Our field-protocol contains several entries which amount to the conclusion that an Amish person on seeing a friend may delete the knock on the door, enter, offer no salute, sit down and either be silent for a while or immediately proceed to the business-phase of interaction. The fact that Amish may enter Amish homes even in the absence of the host (as experienced by the author on occasion of one of the visits described in section 2.1) underlines the assumption that in this culture the territoriality principle applies not to a single home, but rather communally to "all our homes" even if they lie in different states, and even if guest and host have not met for years. Obviously, the replacement of a normally expected greeting formula by silence is not in all cultures read as the formal exponent of an act of hostility. Absent greetings may have completely different, and even contrasting readings depending on the given interpretation and application of the territoriality principle. To the outsider, such a differential usage of greeting pairs shared by his and the others' culture may pose graver cross-cultural communication problems than the interaction with cultures where the repertoires themselves are different. In about 1880, White reported for the Apache: "they seem to have no form of salute or greeting — when meeting or taking leave of each other" (cf. Saville-Troike 1982: 6). He illustrated this generalization by a situation in which one Apache after an absence of several months returned to his dwelling: In this instance the Indian simply rode up to his little brush dwelling and dismounted. One of his wives took charge of the horse. (He) approached the fire along side of his hut where his family were collected without exchanging a word with any of them — not even to the wife who had taken the horse. There he stood motionless and speechless for some ten or fifteen minutes when at last he took a seat on the ground and engaged in ordinary conversation without having observed any form of greeting, (cf. Saville-Troike 1982: 7)

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The same pattern is described for the Apache of Arizona by Basso in 1972, in which case the participants were children returning to their parents after a term in boarding school. As the latter (children; W.E.) disembark (from the bus; W.E.) and locate their parents in the crowd, one anticipates a flurry of verbal greetings. Typically, however, there are few or none at all. Indeed it is not unusual for parents and child to go without speaking for as long as fifteen minutes. When the silence is broken, it is almost always the child who breaks it. (Basso 1972: 74-75) Greeting formulae may be universal, if this means to say that every culture has such formulae in its repertoire; however, their use and their deletion (sometimes by a replacive silence) appears neither to be universal, nor to be governed by categorial, but rather by context-sensitive rules, both across cultures and within one and the same culture. For intra-cultural variability the Old Order Amish greeting patterns are a case in point. Besides the patterns mentioned above, there is at least a third. For the entry passage to the Old Order Amish church service, Enninger and Raith (1982: 15) report that a handshake and a fleeting gaze are obligatory, and that a mumbled greeting is optional. It is this intracultural variability of the formal exponents of the greeting act (verbal, kinesic, gaze, proxemic, silence) which makes behaving appropriately so difficult even for the well-intentioned outsider. How is he to know when he is expected to do something by saying nothing? So much for greetings. Mackey (1968: 574) provides an example of adjacency sequences which in the routine patterns of some cultures have just a two-turn structure, while in others the second pair-part of the first pair is at the same time the first part of another second, so that a three-turn sequence, or a "double" pair emerges.

χ y χ

English Counterpart Here's a seat Thanks! (silence)

German Model Bitte Danke! Bitte.

English Replica Please Thanks! Please.

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While a person that has acquired the English discourse pattern 3 may in the German context not be able to assign pragmatic force to the semantically clear third part, a person that has acquired the German discourse pattern may in an English context be disappointed at the expected third part being withheld. That is, s/he may assign a reading to what s/he considers to be a significant silence, whereas the English interactant did not mean anything, but only followed her/his two-constituent routine. Heeschen et al. (1980: 151) report for the Eipo of New Guinea that "There is no verbal equivalent to our 'thank you' in Eipo language". From the context one can infer that also the offer is not accompanied by an equivalent of the German "Bitte". While the absence of such a pair poses no problem in intra-cultural contexts, in inter-cultural interactions what is normal absence to the Eipo may be given a socially loaded reading by the outsider. The case of the Amish is slightly different. Their trilingual repertoire contains a variety of lexical items which are semantic equivalents of "please" and "thank you", yet their use is subject to rigid constraints. In some situations, as for example, when passing food around at a meal, outsiders expect the equivalent of a "please: thankyou" pair, which, however, is never uttered. Here, like in many other routine-situations, silence is the socially unmarked behavior. Question-answer pairs are less tightly prestructured, insofar as the second pair-part can be taken from a limited set of options. With regard to the WH question-and-answer pair, the near-universality of Radio Erivan jokes 4 attest to the near-universality of the principle of the morphological markedness of the socially marked dispreferred second pair-part, while the Japanese culture is notorious for providing the exceptions to the rule. Levinson (1983: 333) states that preferred seconds are linguistically unmarked insofar as they tend to have less morphological material, whereas dispreferred seconds are linguistically marked insofar as they tend to have more material such as delays, announcement of dispreferreds like Uh and Well, token agreements before disagreements, appreciators, apologies, qualifiers (I don't know, for sure ... but), restarts, self-editing, accounts, declining component (cf. Levinson 1983: 334). According to the Japanese discourse system, however, dispreferred seconds such as declines, refusals, do not always take an elaborate formal exponent — as predicted by the above assumptions concerning the morphological markedness of dispreferreds — but rather, and in order to avoid the face-endangering and the therefore dispreferred no, just silence is used.

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One would prefer to be silent than utter words such as 'no' or Ί disagree'. The avoidance of such open and bald negative expressions is rooted in the fear that it might disrupt the harmony and order of the group. (Nakane 1970: 35) With reference to Harumi Williams, Saville-Troike (1982: 159) reports an exception to this exception: a young male adult intending to propose holds the hand (optional) of a young female adult, and, looking at her, says "Please, marry me". The female, with head down, remains silent and thus accepts, i.e. performs the preferred second with the least possible morphological material — in accordance with the prediction that the preferreds have less morphological material than the dispreferreds. In the Japanese conversational matrix obtaining for this encounter, the expected uptake is silence, and it is the appropriate interactional ratification of the proposal. What appears to be an abnormality in the Japanese paradigm is, however, in accordance with the anthropological notion of rule-reversal in passage rituals (Gluckman 1962: 42). The third kind of pairs to be mentioned here are action-chains. The cross-cultural decoding of the verbal zeros occurring in such chains is complicated by the fact that certain acts such as inappropriate questions, indecent remarks, insults, invectives in some cultures or subcultures must obligatorily be responded to by verbal correction, verbal retaliation (as for example the "raps and caps" in "playing the dozens" in the Black Ghetto (Abrahams 1964, Kochman 1969)), or the verbal duelling of Turkish teenage boys (Dundes/Leach/Özkök 1972), or verbal reproach, while the speaking principles of other cultures, such as the Amish, make silence the mandatory second-pair part. Among the Apache, there is a first pair part "Getting cussed out", in which an individual, angered and enraged, shouts insults and criticisms at another, irrespective of whether the addressee is the source of the speaker's anger or not. "But whether they (the addressees; W.E.) are innocent or not, their response to the situation is the same. They refrain from speech" (Basso 1972: 76). In still other cultures, like my own, both verbal retaliation and silent disdain are available as second parts of such action chains. Their alternative use appears to depend on the individual speaker's strategy. Both across cultures and across subcultures, such contrastive exponents of seconds in action-chains are open to misinterpretation and lead to false attributions, although from

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an internal perspective the "verbose" and the silent respondents do what makes sense in their behavioral schemas and the value systems governing them.

4.

Meta-information given off by the amount of non-phonation at TRPs

A brief remark is appropriate on the meta-information which a participant may give off unintentionally by taking his turn either too slowly or too quickly. In their quantitative laboratory-based study of the social perception of lying, Baskett and Freedle (1974:117), "found that if the target person responded either too quickly or too slowly the subjects attributed his response as a lie more often than if the delay was more intermediate in duration". The mean level proportion of lieattribution was highest at the 0.07 second level, i.e. over 50 per cent; it was second highest at the 2.57 and the 2.67 second level, i. e. about 43 per cent; it was lowest at the 0.27 second level, i.e. about 38 per cent. Thus there appear to be not only non-verbal cues to deception (Ekman and Friesen 1969), but also cues such as the reaction time of respondents. Speakers may not intentionally communicate that the linguistic content of their utterance is contrary to truth, but the receiver may all the same use the speaker's reaction time as a cue for assigning a specific pragmatic force to the utterance meaning. In view of the cross-cultural, cross-racial, and across-sex variability of auditory reaction time reported by Klineberg (1935: 139-141; Whites 146.0 milli-seconds, Indians 116.3, Negroes 130.0, Murray Island 135.7, England 141.6, Sarawak 120.7; Caucasian males/females 181/217, Chinese males/females 205/222, Japanese males/females 205/244, Part-Hawaiian males/females 182/231), Baskett and Freedie's analysis warrants a cross-cultural follow-up study. The reaction time that in one culture may be read as a cue to an ongoing involuntary meta-"act" "speaker is lying", may have different readings in another culture. This potential for cross-cultural pragmatic failure is more prone than others to ruin contacts among persons, and even whole cultures.

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297

Conclusion

On the basis of their analysis of politeness phenomena, Brown and Levinson (1978) have convincingly shown how universal motives and reasoning underlie politeness behavior, and have convincingly rebutted "the once-fashionable doctrine of cultural relativity in the field of interaction" (1978: 61). In view of their well-documented argument, it appears to be hazardous to take a relativistic stance and to compare interactional surface phenomena across cultures and to delineate areas of potential cross-cultural failure, much in the fashion of the once fashionable paradigm of systematic contrastive linguistics. Yet, since it is perceptible surface phenomena which mediate imperceptible deepprocesses, and that in culturally divergent ways, surface phenomena cannot be totally neglected. The universally available material called non-phonation which is "homophonous" across cultures is supposedly particularly treacherous sign "material" because such nothings are often not even suspected of being sign carriers, and if so, not expected to vary across cultures, neither materially, nor semantically, nor pragmatically. This paper has attempted to show that non-phonations are worthy objects of cross-cultural interaction research. If the attempt has led to mildly interesting insights, other components of (cross-cultural) interaction might be scanned for the role which non-phonations play in their transaction. Among the potential questions are: How much silence on the part of the witness is tolerated (except for certain legal provisions) before it counts as the act of "contempt of court"? What are the contextualization cues for the silence of defendants in political trials — meant as a rejection of the proceedings — to be interpreted as an admission of guilt (cf. Levinson 1983: 321)? Under what conditions does non-phonation count as a 'silent declaration of intent' (cf. Palandt und Bearbeiter 1978: 78-87)? What social knowledge do non-phonating participants, ratified or non-ratified, signal in institutional (client vs. agent) and in non-institutional context (cf. Bauman 1974:144-145; Samarin 1972: 18; Samarin 1969 : 223; Saville-Troike 1982: 277; Hymes 1972: 42, 45; Gardner 1966: 398; Frazer 1918: 71-81)? It is against the background of such expanded knowledge that one may come to fully appreciate the dictum: " . . . the natural home of speech is one in which speech is not always present" (Goffman 1963:135).

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Notes 1. Since this paper is concerned with the function of non-talk, one prominent reading of "silence" lies outside its scope. The expression "to be silent about s.th." refers not to non-talk, but rather to the non-topicalization of certain subject matters in conversations. This reading of "silence" lies within the scope of the rules for the appropriate selection and organization of speech content, and it is, for example, the dominant perspective of Barnlund's discussion of the handling of public and private self in Japan and the United States (1975), as well as of Hostetler's approach to survival strategies among the Amish (1984). 2. Other exceptions to the putative universal of mandatory conversation that serves "the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment" (Malinowski 1923: 315) are reported by Coulmas for Japan and Finnland (1981:181), by Hostetler (1976: 169; 1980: 374-382) and Enninger (1982: 113) for the Amish, by Key (1975: 117) for some tribes of Peru, by Scollon and Scollon (1981:14-16) for the Athabaskan Indians, by Hunter (1982: 393) for the Hausa, by Loveday (1982, 1983, 1985) and Barnlund (1975) for Japan. 3. It is debatable whether the silent pair part in Mackey's example represents the general usage, or only that of Canada. Several native speakers of English insisted that in their respective home contexts they might give and receive a "You're welcome!" instead. Conversely, to many Germans the second "Bitte" appears to be optional. 4. Question to Radio Erivan: Is it true that comrade cosmonaut Gagarin won a car at a charity banquet in Moscow? Radio Erivan answers: In principle yes. Yet we have to point out that it was not the cosmonaut Gagarin, but the teacher Gagarin. Furthermore, it was not in Moscow but in Kiev, and it did not happen at an charity banquet but at a party congress. Finally, it was not a car that he won but a bicycle that was stolen from him.

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About the Authors

Sherida Altehenger-Smith holds degrees in German/Political Science (B.A.) and Sociology (Dipl-Soz.). As an American in Germany, she is daily involved in intercultural communication. At present she is completing her doctoral thesis in linguistics on language change and language planning. Her publications, influenced by her involvement with the sociology of developing countries, are in the areas of language planning and sociolinguistics. Gisela Apitzsch who holds a degree in German and Roman Languages, was a research assistant in a research project on intercultural communication funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft at the Free University of Berlin from 1982 to 1984. In the academic year 1985/86, she worked at the University of Osnabrück. At present, she is completing her doctoral dissertation on the acquisition of German as a second language by Italian migrant workers' children. Florian Coulmas is Associate Professor at the Department of Linguistics, University of Düsseldorf. Also he taught at the University of Hiroshima, the University of Bielefeld, from where he received his doctorate, the Christian University of Tokyo, and Georgetown University, Washington D. C.. He has published books and articles on language comprehension, contrastive pragmatics, linguistic routines, language planning, and writing. He is co-editor of the series Anthropological Linguistics (Berlin/New York: Mouton-de Gruyter). Norbert Dittmar is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of German at the Fachbereich 16, Free University of Berlin. He does research and teaches in the areas of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition. His publications deal with the empirical foundations of linguistics, the description of varieties of German, the analysis of therapeutic discourse, and the syntax and pragmatics of elementary learner varieties. His recent publications include Variatio delectat and Soziolinguistik Grundlagen, Ergebnisse, Perspektiven. He is editor of the series Sociolinguistics and Language Contact (Berlin: de Gruyter).

304

About the Authors

Werner Enninger is Professor of English at the University of Essen and Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Delaware. His recent research focusses on the Old Order Amish community, its verbal and nonverbal repertoires, as well as their uses. Pertinent publications are on Pennsylvania German (PG), Amish High German (AHG), (Amish) American English (AE) including contact phenomena such as borrowing (PG), language death (AHG) and substratum interference (AE); communication in institutions such as church service and school; signification and communication via hair- and beardstyles, clothing codes, buggy variants etc. Volker Hinnenkamp teaches German as a Second and Foreign Language at the University of Augsburg. His main interests within the wider field of linguistics are sociolinguistics, intercultural communication, pidgin and Creole languages and second language acquisition. His major publication is a book on foreigner talk discourse of Germans vis-ä-vis Turkish immigrants contrasted with a study of Turkish foreigner talk vis-ä-vis German tourists (Hamburg: Buske Verlag 1982). A book on power and communication in intercultural encounters following the line of the paper included in this volume is in preparation. Karlfried Knapp received a doctorate in Linguistics and Sociology from the University of Constance and is at present Assistant Professor at the Department of English, University of Düsseldorf. His research interests focus on second language acquisition, forms and functions of English as an international lingua franca, interpreting and related aspects of intercultural discourse and communication. His recent publications in these areas include Fremdsprachenlernen- und -lehren (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1982), written jointly with Annelie Knapp-PotthofT. Annelie Knapp-Potthoff teaches Applied Linguistics in the Faculty of Education, Department of English, at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen. Before her present position, she worked as a research assistant at the Department of Linguistics, University of Constance, from where she received her doctoral degree. Her research and publications are mainly in the fields of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. Her present work is concerned with the identification of strategies of successful intercultural communication, particularly with strategies of text processing in non-professional interpreting.

About the Authors

305

Mansur Lalljee comes from Bombay, where he received a degree in Philosophy. He then went to Oxford University, where he completed a doctorate in Psychology. He is now Staff Tutor in Psychology at Oxford University's Department for External Studies, and a lecturer at University College, Oxford. He has been Visiting Lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the University of New South Wales at Sydney, and Visiting Fellow at Yale University. His recent research, published in various articles, has investigated the explanations people provide for events in everyday life. He is currently an Editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology. He has also been involved with projects concerned with race relations and with education for disadvantaged groups. Alan Murray studied Philosophy and Theology and taught at various schools and universities in Europe and Northern Africa. Before he obtained his present position in Great Britain as Head of the Section of Further Education for Ethnic Minority Groups in the Department of Education and Science, he was Head of the English Department at the University of Algier. He has published above all on social and political problems of intercultural education. Jochen Rehbein teaches as a Professor for German as a Second Language at the University of Hamburg. He has published books and articles on pragmatics, classroom discourse, action theory, non-verbal communication, and everyday narratives. His present research focusses on socio- and ethnolinguistic aspects of the acquisition and use of German by Turkish migrant workers and their children. Among his recent contributions to the field of intercultural communication is his editorship of the book Interkulturelle Kommunikation (Tubingen: Narr 1985). Celia Roberts is currently Reader in Language Studies at Ealing College of Higher Education in London. From 1975-1984 she worked in the Industrial Language Training Service, which is concerned with training both black workers and members of the white majority community in equal opportunities and effective communications. She also taught in India, Spain and Hong Kong. Her research has covered a number of areas including: evaluating government- run training courses for minority ethnic workers, natural second language acquisition among adult minority workers, and various aspects of interethnic communication, in particular the job interview. Her publications include a variety of articles and papers, some of them written with John Gumperz. In 1985 The Interview Game was published by the BBC.

306

About the Authors

Pete Sayers received an MA in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University. At present he is working at the West Yorkshire Language Link, Bradford, a regional branch of the Industrial Language Training Service. His research interests concern the equal opportunity interview and the training of white professionals who are working with ethnic minority groups. He has written several papers on these topics. Ranjit Sondhi was born in India, came to the United Kingdom in 1966 and graduated in Physics from the University of Birmingham in 1972. He has since worked in the inner city area of Handsworth, Birmingham, on various community projects setting up the Asian Resources Centre in 1977. He conducted research into the effects of immigration rules on minority groups and perceptions of race in the provincial press and published articles on community and social work with Asian minorities, immigration and nationality and race in the media. Also he contributed to various TV and radio programmes on race, community and culture. Presently he is lecturer in Youth and Community Work at Westhill College, Birmingham. Judith Stalpers studied General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, with a specialization in pragmatics and discourse analysis. She then worked in a research project on discourse analysis at Tilburg University, The Netherlands, and is now a visiting researcher at Georgetown University, Washington D. C..

Index of subjects

absent phonation 269 fT. absent vocalization 269 ff. accomodation (of language) 79 f., 89 acculturation 114 acrolect 84, 91 act 271 ff. adaptation 2, 8 address, forms of 183 adjacency pairs 290, 293 alors 249 fT. ambiguity (of formulae) 219 American 280, 285 f. - Indians 281 f. analysis, antiracist 20 - , contrastive 68, 249 - , conversational 249 - , macro-level 20 - , method of 190 - , micro-level 18 Anglos 43, 44 announcement 233, 234, 238, 242 Apache 292 approach, ethnographic 111 problemsolving 111 approximative expression 219 Arabic 291 argumentation theory 249 Asians 199, 200 assertion 322, 242 assessments 232 f., 236, 238, 242 assimilation 20, 80, 82 assimilationist hypothesis 51 Athabaskans 278 f., 284, 285 attitudes 17,23 ff., 28,29, 38, 55,56,64,68, 70, 80,112, 118,120, 233, 276 attributes, personal 120 attribution 2, 10, 11, 37, 38, 58 fT., 274, 282 - error 40 - theory 10, 37 fT., 45, 48 augmented character 240 Ausländerdeutsch 157

backchannel behavior 186,192, 209, 255, 256, 285 f. Bahasa Pasar 85, 88, 89 basilect 84, 91, 218 Belize 282 Bengali 95 bias, motivational 41 bilingualism 83, 91 black 18, 32, 42 Black Foot Indians 288, 289 Blacks 43, 44, 295, 296 boundaries (of groups) 7, 51,170 brought about(s) 143 f., 157, 171 - along(s) 143 f., 157,159,170, 171 Caucasian 98 Chicanos 43, 44 Chinese 81 fT., 95 clarification 121,129 closing signals 278 co-membership 29, 30, 31 code 100,158,171 - -shifting 137 - -switching 91, 98, 101,137 ff., 172 - - , balanced 162 - - , unbalanced 162 colonialism 21 f., 29, 32 - , cultural 95 common ground, claiming of 191,194, 197,199, 201, 209 - knowledge 239 communication 37, 41, 57, 66, 100 - failure 31, 32 - problem 98,101 - strategies 67, 79 -, asymmetrical 69 - , cross-cultural 7, 31 - , intercultural 37,40,47, 51, 56,76, 77, 92, 95,101,102,136, 137,174, 181 fT., 215, 216, 219, 224, 236, 240, 243, 245, 254, 263, 270 fT. - , intercultural, quality of 63

308

Index of subjects

- , interethnic 6, 7, 31, 82, 84fT., 125,158, 174, 285 - , international 95 -.interpersonal 102 - , interracial 6,102 - , intracultural 8,199, 209, 270ff. - , intraethnic 82, 84f., 89, 92, 284f. medium of 103 - , non-verbal 18, 69,192, 291 - -breakdown 17,18, 31, 32, 52 communicative apparatus 233 - competence 80,155 comprehension 147,152,172 conditions, economic 27 - , political 27 social 27 - , sociopolitical 52 condolences 290 contaminations 229 f., 242, 243 content, propositional 194 f., 200 context, communicative 45 of learning 224, 226, 233, 243, 244 - , situational 273, 287 - , socio-cultural 3f. socio-political 3 f., 10,18 ff. - , structural 28 contextualization conventions 181 - cues 194,197,199 conventions, linguistic 103 convergence (of style) 80 conversational analysis 2, l l l f f . , 146, 148, 277 - synchrony 186 correctness, grammatical 77 cotext, verbal 273, 287 counseling/advice 18, 54, l l l f f . cultural identity 31 - rules 47 - style 31 - substance 7 culture 4ff., 43, 46, 47, 114,169, 174 - , dominant 19f., 26, 29, 80, 82, 89 - , high-context 283 - , low-context 283 - , M-time 283 - , P-time 283 - -shock 2

data 9, lOff., 98,122,140,142,175,187ff., 253 ff., 277 - collection 56, 85 ff. - , authentic 140 - , interview 11, 85ff., I l l , 113,190,193, 250 f , 253 - , network study 85 ff. - , primary interactional 9 - , recordings of 142 deictic procedure 225, 227 deixis, personal 183,198 dialects 12 directness (vs. indirectness) 186 discourse 253, 260 f. - aim 238, 240 - analysis 11,182,184, 216 - procedures 240 f. - system 272, 273 f., 277, 279 intercultural 11 - , native/non-native speaker discrimination 17,18, 21, 22, 26, 70, 112, 113,132, 170 distance, cultural 18 social 18, 20 divergence (of style) 80 domain 78 f., 84, 86 downtoning devices 196 f., 199 - particles 196f. duality of structure 143 Dutch 11, 38, 249 ff., 276 education 28, 82 ff., 89, 90, 91 effective reasoning 239 Eipo 291,294 empathy 31 empractical discourse 228, 229, 231, 241 encounters, cross-cultural 18ff. - , interethnic 113,115,117 English 38, 81 ff., 95 ff, 98, 99, 100,126, 131, 276, 278 f., 281, 284, 291, 293 f. - , international variety of 105 - , second language speaker of 121 - , standard variety of 120,126 ethnic group 7, 41, 43, 44, 71 - identity 6, 87, 90 - revival 7 ethnicity 17 ethnocentricity/ethnocentrism 17, 23

Index of subjects ethnography of communication 137, 271, 277 - of speaking 2 ethnomethodologists 112 ethnomethodology 144,145, 277 etiquette, linguistic 103,105,187, 273, 279 evaluation 41, 48 event 271 ff. explanation 37, 39, 43 ff. - , ethnocentric 44 -.external 44 intergroup 41 internal 44 - , of causality 41, 42 -, personal 39 - , situational 39, 41 -, types of 43 face, preserving of 186f., 188, 197fT. - , threatening of 186f„ 188f., 191,198fT., 294 factors, cognitive 41 cultural 68 -, economic 68 - , motivational 41, 47 -, personal 39, 43 - , psycholinguistic 76 - , situational 39, 40, 43 -.social 68 - , sociolinguistic 76 failure, cross-cultural 273, 274, 296 f. false start 255 farewell-pairs 291 flouting of the cooperative principle 113 f. focus activity 225 f. folk conceptualizations 275 f. foreign language learning 250 foreigner talk 11,100,104,137,138 ff., 215, 238, 239 - - strategies 140 - -, consistent 141 - - , emblematic 141,153 - -, secondary 158 - - , variable and code-switched 141 formality, of situation 182 f., 185 formulaic expression 153 - speech 215ff. fossilization 217ff.

309

fragments (of foreign language) 245 frame 115f., 120,127,143 French 11, 95,100, 105, 249ff. function, phatic 103 -, pragmatic 250, 260 ff. -, referential 103 -, semantic 250, 260 ff. gambit 233 gap 269 f., 279 fT. Gastarbeiterdeutsch 141,158 gatekeepers 23ff., I l l , 113,121 gatekeeping 10,17 - interview 11 Iff., 121 - judgements 131 ff. gaze 278 Gbeya 281, 288, 289 German 10,11, 51 ff., 95,105,136ff., 187ff., 218, 220 ff., 275, 285, 293 f. Greek 95 greetings 291 ff. hermeneutic 146 hesitation 257 - pause 269 f. heterogeneity 89 highlighting 260 f., 263 Hindi 95 holistic structure 216 homogeneity 89 honorific equilibrum 103 honorifics 103, 105,189 hyperexplanation 119 Igbo 290, 291 in-group 79 incompetence, linguistic 38 Indian 81, 83 individualism 251 informant 142 inhomogeneity 2 institutions 8,11,19, 20, 23 ff., 52, 76, 77, 84, 86, 90, 84, 289, 297 interaction, focused (vs. unfocused) 278, 280f., 283, 289 - , formal 79, 91 - , informal 79 -, verbal 100

310

Index of subjects

intercultural communication theory 263 interference, communicative 274 interlanguage 130 interpreter 9,11 interpreting, non-professional 181 ff. professional 182,185, 201 interrogation 125,127 interview situation 29 interviews, interethnic 111, 113,115 - , intraethnic 112 intonation 18, 75, 259, 285 Italian 95

language acquisition research 184 - choice 10, 75ff., 101 - -, macro-level 76 ff., 82 ff. - - , micro-level 84 ff. - development 218 - difference 132 - difficulty 132 - learner 8,11,12,137,170 - planning 10, 76 ff., 106 - - , corpus planning 76 f. - - , status planning 76 f. - teaching 54, 245 national 89 f. - , non-western 102 official 77, 90 f. lapse 269 f., 279 ff. learner language 184,190 lexicalization 275 f. lingua franca 89 f., 105,182, 273 loanword 104 lying 296

- , introductory 254f. - , opening 254 - , structure 254, 260 f. temporal 260 - , transition 260, 262 masculinity 251 maxim, intercultural communication maximizing 100 local language 100 maxims of conversational cooperation 114 meaning, consecutive 260 - , evaluative 39 semantic 273 - , social 201 - , temporal 260 meat-information 271, 274, 296 f. mediator 11,183, 209 Mediterranean cultures 282 membership categorization 160ff., 172 mesolect 84, 91 message 103,105 -, prepositional 103 meta-communication 186 metamessage 103,105 metastatement 257, 261, 262 methods, analytical 31 microanalyses 10 migrants 51 minority ethnic groups 113,119 miscommunication 10,11,12,17,18, 31, 52, 91, 272 ff. misunderstanding 113, 119,130, 166,168, 190, 200, 209, 219, 243, 249, 251, 258 modal verbs 196f. model, monocultural 19ff. -, multicultural 20f. Moroccan 38 motive 38 multilingualism 84 multiple formulae 11, 220 ff. multiplicity 216 f., 240, 241

Malay 81 ff., 105 Mandarin 81 ff. markedness 80 ff. marker, argumentative 254 f., 260 - , closing 254, 259 - , consecutive 260

native language 98 - speaker 95, 98, 99,102,104, 123, 137 ff, 215, 243, 250 - - perspective 123 negotiations 249 ff. negotiation of meaning 181

Japanese 10, 95, 98, 251, 282, 285 f., 294 f. job interview 114 juncture-pause 269 f. kinesics 278 Korean 187 fT.

Index of subjects networks, social 79 non-comprehension 129 non-native speaker 101,125,128,137 ff. - - speakership 136 non-participant observation 122 non-phonation 269 ff. non-speech 269 ff. non-talk 269 ff. non-verbal action 228 norms 4, 20 cultural 52 - , social 77, 79 North Americans 200 nuances (of speech) 261 f., 263 object, extralinguistic 231 observer 40 observer's paradox 142 Old Order Amish 280 f., 289, 292 ff. opening signal 257 organizations l l l f f . , 128,131,132 out-group 43, 68, 79 overpoliteness 103 participant observation 10, 51, 52, 58, 68, 98 particles 253 pause 270 - , cognitive 269 ff. rhetorical 269ff. - , turn-internal 270, 276 f. pausology 276 perception 40 period, interactive 271 persistency model 51 personalization vs. objectivization 161,170 phatic communion 288 pidgin 137 politeness 69,105,186f., 190ff, 209,252f., 262, 291, 297 Portugese 95 power 132 - distance 251 - relations 10,17, 18,19, 29, 30, 31, 75 f., 89 f. pragmatics 2, 249 -, contrastive 12, 216 prayer 290

311

pre-closing signals 278, 280 pre-requests 186 prefabricated pattern 217 prejudice 18, 23 f., 68,102,129 prestige 75, 77, 83 principle, communication control 100 conversational 281 procedural work 114 processes, cognitive 37, 40 - , interactional 37 motivational 40 - , interpretative 111 proficiency, linguistic 54 proverbs 275 psychology, cross-cultural 251 questionnaire 43,142, 250 f. quoting 228 f. race 6, 31 - -relations 20 racism 6,17,18, 20, 21 ff. rapport 31 rationality 38 recipient design 148,152, 154,157,159, 160, 172 relations, intercultural 51 -, intergroup 51 relationship, asymmetrical 68 -, dominant-dominated 68 -, interpersonal 47, 253 - , social 194 repair 145f., 147, 155,157, 170,172, 285 - mechanism 155 - sequences 129 - strategies 121,128 f. -, other-initiated 147, 170 - , parasitic 172 -, self-initiated 128, 147 - , symbiotic 172 repetitive phrase 216 requests 187,193, 194, 209 research methodology 9,112, 220 rheme 239 ritual competence 157 role relationships 2, 78 f., 80 f. routine 114 - formula 216

312

Index of subjects

routinization 245 rules of grammar 105 of display 273 of interpretation 273 - , socio-pragmatic 271 f. Russian 38, 95 sayings 275 schema 115 f., 120,124,127 - /frame mismatch 122 ff. second language acquisition 215ff. - language learner 129,130 - - speaker 122,125, 215 ff. self-identity 79 serial format 239 f. set phrases 275 setting 78 f., 252 shared knowledge 4, 5, 8,114 silence 12,124, 269ff. - , significant 286 f. situation 78 situational talk 231 f. social anthropology 17 socialization 54, 70 society 45, 46, 52 - , monolingual 75,136 - , multicultural 24, 76, 81 - , multiethnic 6, 76, 80 multilingual 75 ff., 81 - , multiracial 81 polyglossic 10, 84 sociolinguistics 10 solidarity 79 Spanish 95 speech act 262, 254, 276 - - theory 249, 277, 287 f. - activity 114 - community 78 f., 91,157 - event, culture specific 114 - style 137,152,157 - , direct 183 - , indirect 183 - , reported 229 split-second speaker transitions 278 Sprachmittler 183 status, legal 52 political 52 - , social 52, 53, 75, 84f.

stereotypes 52, 58 ff., 67 ff., 70,102,119, 273, 278 f. - , aggressive 68 - , defensive 68 stereotyping 17, 24,187 stigma 71 story-telling discourse 220 ff., 236, 240 strategies of second language acquisition, cognitive 217 f. .social 217f. strategy of comprehension 219 f., 244 f. - - overgeneralization 228, 241 - - production 218, 219 - - reduction 240 - , communicative 216 - , lexical 234 - , perceptual 228, 241, 242 style, cognitive 2, 4 communicative 120 conversational 120 ff, 181 f., 187 interactional 31 - , narrative 284 of discourse 120 - , of language 153 - , personal 181 subjectivity (researcher's) 9 surface structure 126, 127,131 Swedish 275 Tamil 81, 83 text processing 184,186,190, 209 theme 239 theory of intergroup conflict, integrative 51 topic 78,124f., 160f., 183, 185, 188,191, 195,198,199, 209, 234, 238, 239, 256 f., 262, 263, 283 - control 121,124ff, 129 - shift 160f. - , change of 257, 262 topicalization 228, 241 training 18, 31, 77, 111, 113,133, 201, 249, 252 - , cross-cultural awarenesstransition relevance place 262, 270 f., 273 f., 277 ff. translation 189 f., 194,197, 209 trouble 137ff., 145 ff., 171 f.

Index of subjects -.transactional 170 Turkendeutsch 157 Turkish 10,11, 51 ff., 136ff., 215fT., 284f., 295 turn 269 fT. turn-ending device 259, 263 - -entry device 285 - -exit device 285 - -keeping device 257, 259 - -overlap 278, 280 - -taking 184,185,190,194,195,198, 200, 209, 253, 255, 262, 270 f., 273,274,277 ff. uncertainty avoidance 251 - , cognitive 68 universale 137, 193, 272, 291, 293, 297 values 20, 80, 251 - , cultural 52

-, pragmatic 255, 262 - , semantic 255, 262 variant, linguistic 75, 79 f., 84 varieties, formal 84 - , high 84 f., 91 - , low 84f., 91 marked 81, 85, 87 ff. -, non-standard 120 - , unmarked 81, 85, 87 ff. variety, nonnative 104 verbal planning 253, 257 video 133 vocabulary 99, 100, 251 West Indians 80 Wishram 289 zero signifier 271

Index of names (Page numbers in italics refer to bibliographies)

A Abelson 40, 48 Abrahams 295, 298 Afendras 90, 92 Ajirotutu 75, 92 Akinnaso 75, 92 Akpinar 70, 72 Alisjahbana 105, 107 Altehenger-Smith 76, 83, 90, 92 Arumainatan 81, 92 Asch 38, 39, 48 Askin 47, 48 Asmar Haji Omar 89, 92 Auer 175, 177 Β Ballmer 269, 298 Bally 268, 268 Barkowski 244, 247, 284, 298 Barnlund 282, 298, 298 Barth 7,13 Bartlett 115,134 Baskett 296, 298 Basso 273, 275, 293, 295, 298 Bateson 103,107,116, 134 Baumann 271, 295, 298 Becker 113,134 Bergmann 269, 287, 298 Bernstein 20, 32, 33 Bever 234, 247 Blom 137, 177 Bochner 209, 210 Bodemann 137, 177

Boos-Nünning 56, 72 Bourhis 80, 93 Bringeus 272, 290, 299 Brislin 210, 210 Brown, P. 128, 134, 191,193, 210, 297, 299 Brown, R. 217, 247 Brumfit 210, 210 Bublitz 232, 247 Bühler 228, 247 Butcher 276, 299 Butzkamm 218, 247 C Calvet 90, 92 Caputo 48 Chafe 228, 247 Cherry 289, 299 Chiellino 173, 177 Chun 146, 177 Cohen, A. 219, 248 Cohen 7, 13 Condon 283, 299 Cook-Gumperz 32, 33, 93 Cooper 90, 92, 92 Coulmas 216, 243, 247, 298, 299 Crewe 91, 92 D Dechert 276, 299 Deschamps 276, 279, 299, 300 Dijk, van 52, 72 Di Luzio 175, 177

316

Index of names

Di Pietro 276, 299 Dittmar 51, 72 Dodderidge 17, 33 Doi 282, 299 Drommel 269, 276, 299 Dumas 219, 248 Duncan, D.L. 41, 48 Duncan, S. 278, 280, 299 Dundes 295, 299 Ε Edmondson 233, 247 Ehlich 202, 210, 228, 239, 247, 249, 268 Eibl-Eibesfeld 291, 294, 300 Ekman 296, 299 Ellsworth 39, 48 Enninger 293, 298, 299 Erickson 17, 30, 32, 33, 111, 119, 120,133, 134, 209, 210 Ervin-Tripp 278, 299 Eysenk 106, 107 F Faure 276, 299 Feldstein 270, 300 Ferguson 91, 92,138,158, 177, 235, 247 Fillmore, Ch. 247 Fillmore, L.W. 217, 247 Fishman 76, 78, 79, 92, 94, 107 Franck 253, 268 Frazer 297, 299 Freedle 296, 298 French 282, 300 Friesen 296, 299 Fuller 138, 178 G Gal 79, 89, 91, 92

Gardner 297, 299 Gaskill 146, 177 Geertz 43, 48 Giddens 143,144, 177 Giles 79, 80, 89, 93 Gluckman 295, 300 Goffman 20, 32, 33,144,145,146, 157,158,170,176, 177, 270, 271, 278, 280, 281, 282, 289, 297, 300 Goh Keng Swee 83, 93 Goh Soo Tian 91, 93 Goodwin 270, 278, 287, 289, 300 Gopinathan 91, 93 Gorter et al. 250, 268 Gradman 217, 247 Greenberg 43, 48 Grevisse 267, 268 Grice 114, 134 Grosjean 276, 300 Gühlich 254, 255, 259, 268 Gumperz 2,11,12, 13,17, 30, 31, 32, 33, 79, 89, 91, 93, 111, 112, 115, 133,137,160,161,169, 170, 177,181, 209, 210, 219, 243, 247, 272, 276, 278, 300 Η Hakuta 217, 231, 247 Hall 3,13,192, 210, 283, 290, 300 Hanania 217, 247 Harding 146, 177 Harnisch 244, 247, 284, 298 Harris, Β. 209, 210 Harris, Ζ. 288, 302 Harstorf 39, 48 Harvey 40, 48 Hatch 217, 248 Hayakawa 288, 300 Heeschen 291, 294, 300

Index of names

Heider 37, 48 Heritage 134 Hertzler 289, 300 Herzlich 44, 48 Hewstone 41, 48 HFP153, 178 Hinnenkamp 137,138,142,145, 157, 158,176,177, 178 Hofstede 251, 268 Holtbrügge 70, 72 Holzach 291, 300 Hostetier 283, 298, 300 Hudson 91, 93 Hunter 275, 298, 300 Hymes 2, 13,137, 178, 288, 289, 290, 297, 300 J

Jaffe 270, 300 Jaspers 41, 48 Jefferson 128, 129, 135,145, 178, 270, 280, 286, 290, 301 Jones, Ε. E. 40, 48 Jones, S.J. 252, 268 Jordan 138, 178 Jupp 33, 33, 75, 93,114, 115, 134 Κ Kapo 32, 33 Kasper 219, 233, 247 Keenan 134, 134 Keim 71, 72 Kelley 37, 41, 48 Kempton 278, 300 Kendon 278, 300 Kernan 282, 300 Key 282, 298, 301 Khoo Chian Kim 81, 93 Kindaichi 102, 107 Knapp 183, 194, 195, 209, 210, 240, 247

317

Knapp-Potthoff 183,194,195, 209, 210, 240, 247 Klineberg 296, 301 Kluckhohn 4, 13 Kochman 295, 301 Krashen 217, 247 Kroeber 4, 13 Kumm 244, 247, 284, 298 Kursh 175, 178 L

Labahn 106, 107 Labov 289, 301 Lado 2, 13 Lalljee 37, 40, 48 Leach 295, 299 Legant 48 Levinson, S. 111,114,128, 134, 191, 193, 209, 210, 269, 270, 271, 276, 278, 286, 287, 290, 294, 297, 299, 301 Levi-Strauss 283, 301 Lewin 202, 209, 210 Lienert 106, 107 Long, A.J. de 278, 301 Long, M.H. 137, 178 Loveday 274, 275, 282, 285, 286, 298, 301 Lyman 46, 47, 48 Μ Mackey 293, 298, 301 Malinowski 293, 298, 301 Maracek 48 Marx 176, 178 McCune 209, 210 Meara 276, 301 Meisel 137, 178, 218, 230, 248 Merrit 253, 268 Mertens 70, 72

318

Index of names

Michela 37, 41, 48 Miller, D.T. 40, 48 Miller, R.A. 101,102, 107 Mitzutani 285, 301 Mullard 20, 32, 33 Ν Nakane 295, 301 Naro 137, 178 Nayar 106, 107 Nisbett 40, 48 Norman 40, 48 Noss 91, 93 Ο Ο'Barr 106, 107 Özkök 295, 299 Öztek 216, 248 Ostow 137, 177 P,Q Palandt 297, 301 Peters 216, 248 Platt 84, 85, 91, 93 Plight, van der 41, 49 Pommerantz 290, 301 Poplack 137, 153,175, 178 Poyatos 271, 301 Putnam 252, 268 Quasthoff 67, 72 R

Raith 293, 299 Ramos 138, 178 Raupach 276, 299, 301 Rehbein 202, 210, 219, 220, 230, 238, 239, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 268 Reichman 252, 268 Reischauer 209, 210

Richards 199, 211 Rieck 218, 248 Roberts, C. 33, 93,115, 134, 209, 272, 276, 300 Roche 140,175, 178 Rosenfeld 43, 48 Ross 40, 48 S Sacks 128,129,135,145,178,249, 268, 268, 270, 278, 280, 286, 290, 301 Samarin 269, 271, 275, 281, 288, 297, 301 Sapir 2, 288, 301 Saville-Troike 91, 93, 281, 288, 290, 291, 292, 295, 297, 301 Sayers 125,134, 135, 209 Scarcella 217, 248 Schapper 282, 301 Schegloff 128,129, 135,145, 178, 249, 268, 268, 270, 278, 280, 286, 290, 301 Schieffelin 134, 134 Schlieben-Lange 275, 301 Schneider 39, 48 Schumann 21, 218, 248 Schwartz 146, 178 Scollon R./Scollon, S.B.K. 125, 128, 135,193, 211, 272, 274, 276, 278, 279, 284, 298, 301 Scott 46, 47, 48 Scotton 80, 81, 85, 87, 89, 93 Searle, C. 32, 33 Searle, J.R. 249, 268 Selinker 219, 248 Selvon 32, 33 Sherwood 209, 210 Shultz 30, 31, 32, 33,111,119, 120,133, 134, 209, 210

Index of names

Simonot 17, 33 Smith, E.E. 39, 49 Sondergren 282, 300 Stedje 275, 302 Stephan 43, 49 Stewart 200, 211 Stieffenhoevel 291, 294, 300 Storms 40, 49 Τ Tajfel 51, 72 Tannen 115,116,117, 135, 209, 211, 216, 219, 243, 247 Tarone 146, 179, 219, 248 Taylor 80, 93 Thomas 250, 268, 273, 302 Thorpe 134, 135 Todd 157, 179 Tosi 276, 302 Toulmin 249, 268 Traxel 106, 107 Tsiakalos 55, 72 Turnbull, C.M. 91, 93 Turnbull, W. 39, 49 Turner 51, 72

V Verschueren 275, 276, 302 Voegelin 288, 302 von Stutterheim 71, 72 W Wagner-Gough 217, 248 Wallat 116,117, 135 Wallmann 7, 13 Weary 47, 48, 49 Weber, H. 84, 91, 93 Weber, M. 90, 93 Weiner 37, 49 Weische-Alexa 70, 72 Werkgroep Taal Buitenlandse Werknemers 140, 179 White 302 Widdowson 114, 135 Wilson 91, 93 Wode 276, 302 Woolford 137, 179 Wright 40, 48 Y Yousef 283, 299

U Umiker-Sebeok 271, 282, 302 Ungeheuer 154, 179

Ζ Zenone 254, 255, 260, 261, 268 Zuckerman 41, 48

319