Pragmatic research on intercultural communication has attempted to re-examine the concept of “common ground” and applicability of traditional pragmatic theories in English as a lingua franca (ELF) context (Kecskes & Mey 2008; Kecskes 2013, 2015; Widdowson 2015). Based on the conviction that there are communal interactional norms and linguacultural knowledge shared by interlocutors, the previous pragmatic models of communication are in question to account for how communicative effectiveness is achieved in spite of limited common ground in ELF context.

    This paper contributes to ongoing pragmatic studies in ELF communication with a focus on the way in which disagreement is used as a channel to access “uncommon ground” (Macagno & Capone 2016) and to deal with the problems in intersubjective understanding. A discourse-segmental analysis of audio recordings of naturally-occurring casual ELF talk inspects moments in which uncommon ground is displayed and how such uncommon ground is oriented to as a clash of prior knowledge presupposed in disagreeing turns. The ensuing extended adversative discourse is the site for the use of disagreement to reconcile conflicting presumptions purported by the initial disagreeing turn. Drawing upon a socio-cognitive approach to intercultural pragmatics (Kecskes 2013), the dialectics of salience is adopted to account for the motivation of using disagreement in casual ELF talk. It is found that disagreement in such ELF context is deployed as an interactional resource for reconstructing an “emergent presupposition” (Kecskes 2013) of ad hoc collective salience during the process of managing uncommon ground governed by inherent salience. Also, it is argued that meaning construction and language processing in ELF communication rely on “salient-default model” in contrast to “literal-first model” of standard pragmatics (c.f. Giora 2003; Kecskes 2013), which offers a new perspective of the operative role that common ground plays in ELF communication.

References:

Giora, R. (2003). On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford University Press.

Kecskes, I. (2013). Intercultural Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kecskes, I. (2015). Intracultural communication and intercultural communication: Are they different?. International Review of Pragmatics, 7(2), 171-194.

Kecskes, I., & Mey, J. (2008). Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hear. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Macagno, F., & Capone, A. (2016). Uncommon ground. Intercultural pragmatics, 13(2), 151-180.

Widdowson, H. (2015). ELF and the pragmatics of language variation. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 4 (2): 359-372.