Читать книгу The Politeness/Impoliteness Divide. English-Based Theories and Speech Acts Practice in Moroccan Arabic онлайн

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The main issues at stake here are the supposed benefits of looking into the differences (cross-culturally determined) in realizations of specific linguistic activities, most frequently speech acts, as a means of shedding light on the causes of intercultural miscommunication. It has been argued that cross-cultural analysis on its own does not suffice for the understanding, let alone the prevention, of potential cases of intercultural miscommunication. Such an analysis needs complementing with a context-inclusive analysis of what strategies and discursive patterns are actually activated in each specific interaction, as well as personal, social and other variables. Thus, the fact that particular languages employ different formulae for the ‘same’ communicative routine, such as sneezing or coughing for example, does not automatically indicate that an English or an Arabic speaker will resort to their formulae when communicating in a different language. Even if they do, there may be other factors involved, such as a certain degree of tolerance or awareness on the part of the native speaker to the possibility of having misunderstood the non-native speaker’s utterance. Nonetheless, I concur with Gass and Varonis (1991: 130) in their claim that we “interpret through the filter of our native language”, and hence we do not undervalue the special position held by native speakers in their communication in a foreign language. An important issue here derives from the field of social psychology and involves individual versus group identity. The cultural difference approach, as Banks et al. (1991) argue, focuses on members’ communicative behaviour, together with their selection of linguistic codes and interactional strategies, as tools for individual and group identity preservation. What seems at stake in the cultural difference approach is the speakers’ adjustment of their behaviour to several cognitive and social dynamics, such as a sense of threat to ethnic identity (Bourhis and Giles 1977), an appeal for social approval, or a need to adhere to or detach oneself from others (Street and Giles 1982).