As Wolf and Polzenhagen (2006) point out, there is still little research with regarding the conceptual level of intercultural encounters. Silva (2015) and Schröder (2017, 2018) have shown that metacommunication might be a point of access for focusing on this issue since ‘standing between the cultures’ often favors a metareflexive attitude through questioning and objectifying the target culture as well as the culture of origin from a more distant point of view. Kecskes (2014) shows that in intercultural encounters meaning is co-constructed ad hoc and in situ in the process of interaction and is not determined by prefabricated frames. Nevertheless, he also admits that those emergent and co-constructed phenomena concurrently rely on relatively definable cultural norms and models, and therefore proposes a dialectical relationship in his socio-cognitive approach to intercultural pragmatics. This interaction between a micro- and macroperspective is evidently illustrated by Kecskes when he reveals, on the one hand, how misunderstandings may arise by the use of fomulaic and idiomatic expressions, and also, on the other hand, how intercultures may be created successfully due to the emergence of new terms in English as a lingua franca between people from different countries.

               Based on examples which stem from the corpus NUCOI – (Inter)Cultural Communication in Interaction (www.letras.ufmg.br/nucleos/nucoi), I take Kecskes’ framework as a starting point to show how (1) metacommunication and (2) corporal-gestural, as well as prosodic means, contribute to create intercultures. In one sequence, two Brazilians and two Germans talk about their stay abroad and draw their attention to their experience of being constantly labeled as ‘strangers’ through the eyes of the natives. Driven by this common experience, one of the German participants resorts to a ‘primary metaphor’, namely the container schema, which has already been revealed as a metaphor to be frequently used to refer to culture (Lakoff & Johnson 1999; Johnson 1987; Schröder 2015; Marschak 2015, p. 321). In the given context, the German participant represents her position of being inside and outside of the culture from both perspectives (the native’s and and stranger’s viewpoint), using the container metaphor only monomodally on a gestural level (Cienki & Müller 2008) while talking about her experience. The different examples reveal that intercultures are often created in multimodal ways, also by resorting to conceptualizations which are assumed to be shared or which serve as a starting point for creating something new.

 

References

 

CIENKI, Alan; MÜLLER, Cornelia. 2008. Metaphor, Gesture, and Thought. In: GIBBS,                Raymond W. Jr. (Ed.). The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought.                Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 483–501.

Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning,           Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

KECSKES, Istvan. 2014. Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

LAKOFF, George; JOHNSON, Mark. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. The Embodied Mind       and its           Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.

MARSCHARK, Marc. 2005. Metaphors in sign language and sign language users: A                window into relations of language and thought. In: Colston, Herbert L.; Katz, Albert                N. (Eds.). Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences.                Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p. 209–334.

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SCHRÖDER, Ulrike. 2017. A construção metafórica de palavras-chave para a descrição de                experiências interculturais: um estudo a partir da análise da conversa multimodal.                Cadernos de Estudos       Linguísticos 59(1), p. 111–133.

SCHRÖDER, Ulrike. 2018. Zur Funktion von Metakommunikation in der dialogischen                Konstruktion von Alterität. Linguistische Berichte, 2018, in press.

SILVA, Diogo H. 2015. A construção do conceito de ‘Heimat’ (Alemanha) / ‘Pátria’                (Brasil) em âmbito intercultural. Dissertação apresentada ao Programa de Pós-               Graduação em Estudos Linguísticos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade                Federal de Minas Gerais.

WOLF, Hans-Georg; POLZENHAGEN, Frank. 2006. Intercultural communication in                English – Arguments for a cognitive approach to intercultural pragmatics.                Intercultural Pragmatics 3(3), p. 285–321.