Affiliation:
1. State University of New York, Albany
Abstract
Abstract
This paper examines the roles of indexicals in explicating speakers’ intentions and constructing common ground
(CG) in the context of a continuum with two extreme endpoints, the intracultural at one end, and the intercultural at the other,
within the framework of the socio-cognitive approach proposed and developed by Kecskes (2008, 2010, 2014) and Kecskes and Zhang (2009). Thirteen participants from different linguistic and cultural
backgrounds were recruited to represent varying degrees on the intra- and intercultural continuum. They were divided into three
groups: American English speakers, speakers from Asian countries (Korea, China, and Vietnam), and a group of speakers (China,
Vietnam, Brazil, and America), each of whom represents linguistically and culturally different countries. Eight extracts were
drawn from the data of up to three hours of recordings, including discussions on one topic, and retrospective interviews
retrieving the speakers’ intentions for using deixis. The results reveal that the closer the interlocutors were towards the
intercultural communicative context endpoint on the continuum, the more they employed four types of indexicals (person, location
or spatial, temporal, and discourse deixis) as common ground construction strategies. Those strategies included the explicit
manifestation of intentions, clarification, and confirmation of referent identification in actual situational context, elicitation
of information, disambiguation and explanation of similar salient specifics in their home culture in an effort to sustain
cooperative communication. This study enhances our understanding of different functions of indexicals in interactions on the
intra- and intercultural continuum, which resulted from different levels of context interpretation and common ground.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
History and Philosophy of Science,Behavioral Neuroscience,Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics,General Computer Science
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