Istvan Kesckes, Intercultural Pragmatics.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, vii + 277

pp. hb US$ 62, ISBN 978-0-19-989255-5

Reviewed by: Dorota Zielisnka, Department of English, The Jagiellonian University, Cracow,
Poland

Intercultural pragmatics is concerned with the way natural languages are used in micro-social
encounters between interlocutors who have different first languages, represent different
cultures, and communicate in a lingua franca. Such a multilingual micro-social perspective
lets the author observe aspects of general linguistic mechanisms as if through a magnifying
glass. As a result, he proposes a novel framework for studying communication, which is
significantly more adequate than previous frameworks for describing both inter-cultural and
intra-cultural communication.
Kecskes sets out to account both for what is relatively stable in language, defined by
cultural models, and for what is constructed in the course of communication. Using authentic
linguistic data, English spoken by foreigners, he argues that to capture both the normative and
emergent components of a lingua franca communication process, an appropriate language
description framework must treat on a par both bottom-up and top-down perspectives.1 By
embracing both perspectives on a par, Kecskes combines two seemingly incompatible
frameworks: reductionism and holism, challenging established wisdoms in linguistics. Yet,
this proposal is in line with recent theoretical philosophical frameworks concerning research
on emergent and convergent phenomena outlined in Bunge (2003). This latter philosophical
framework allows one to handle, in a scientifically rigorous manner, systems whose
successive levels of organization are characterized by novel properties and where interaction
is going both ways: bottom-up and top-down – similar to what Kecskes has observed in
language. (For a related perspective see Zielinska 2013.)
The cornerstone of the proposal presented in Intercultural Pragmatics is rooted in the
observation that independence of what we do and how we do it with language is only
approximate. The assumption of ontological independence between the two was postulated to
avoid the trap of basic encodings. Since basic encodings cannot be communicated directly
from person to person, Campbell and Bickhard (1992) proposed that to ground individually
encoded semantic categories in language, first there must exist interactively (pre-
conceptually) established categories. This proposal was further developed by Mey (2001) and
Capone (2009). Kecskes agrees that functional categories influence current meanings of
related verbal forms, and thus the analysis of the communication process should be
undertaken in relation to situated speech acts (pragmemes –i.e., such interactionally-defined
categories). Yet, Kecskes also stresses the role of encoded semantic content. He notes that the
semantic content of the forms constituting a pragmeme becomes encoded temporarily in
individual brains and thus for the time being becomes functionally independent to a
considerable degree. Consequently, relatively encoded meaning (i.e., meaning that is
practically stable over the time of a large number of utterances) may serve to build new, or
alter existing functional categories. And if wording may also participate significantly in
creating a pragmeme, Kecskes concludes that as far as their contribution to meaning
construction and comprehension is concerned, both the linguistic contextual factors (encoding
prior linguistic experience) and the actual situational contextual factors are of equal status. In
other words, explanations in pragmatics should go in both directions: from the outside in
(from actual situational context to prior context encapsulated in utterances used) and the
opposite way.
This means that the most critical elements of language are preferred ways of saying
things: the standardized verbal behavior in specific interactional social situations, called by
Kecskes Situation Bound Utterances (SBUs). These are such phrases as You are all set, said
by an employee of a students’ office to a student after attending to his needs. SBUs have
relatively clear meaning and thus “hold language together” by allowing one to combine
language as a semiotic system with its interactional character and to derive each component
from the other. Therefore SBUs are the type of data pragmatic (and linguistic) research should
start from, and, in the book under review, it does.
To be able to describe linguistic communication from the perspective just outlined,
Kecskes needs to constructs a novel descriptive framework. This is the purpose of Chapter
One, where the author re-conceptualizes intention, speaker meaning, cooperation, and context
dependency. The researcher postulates, first, that intention is not stable all the way through a
given discourse fragment, but that it becomes co-constructed during the communication
process. Second, he differentiates the speaker’s meaning as seen from the perspective of the
hearer and that seen from the perspective of the speaker. Third, he postulates that interlocutors
are not only co-operative, but also egocentric in the sense that their behavior is rooted also in
the speaker’s or hearer’s own knowledge and prior experience. Forth, Kecskes argues
convincingly that when assessing the content of an utterance, one should neither start from the
semantics of the utterance and observe how it connects to context, nor go the other way
round, but treat both aspects on a par.
Chapter Two contains an outline of a socio-cognitive approach (SCA), a perspective
that aims to account both for societal and individual factors in communication and introduced
earlier in Kecskes (2008). In SCA, in meaning construction and comprehension, individuals
rely both on preexisting encyclopedic knowledge and knowledge constructed in the process of
interaction. The speaker’s public knowledge and private knowledge are integrated into his/her
utterance based on the degree of silence (that is, how fast respective items come to mind) of
the information available to interlocutors.
In chapters Three, Four and Five Kecskes revisits the concepts of pragmatic
competence, encyclopedic knowledge, cultural models and interculturality. In the successive
chapters, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven and Chapter Eight, Keckes re-conceptualizes context,
silence and common ground. He proposes to distinguish core common ground and emergent
common ground, as well as two types of context: one that is in our mind, which he calls prior
context, and one which is out there in the world – actual situational context. The two types of
context interact: actual situational context is viewed through prior context and the other way
round. Kecskes also refines the traditional concept of silent information (information
accessible to an interlocutor at a given moment) by introducing inherent silence, collective
silence, and emergent situational silence. The distinctions introduced allow Kecskes to draw a
number of revealing conclusions. For instance, since inherent silence is culture specific and
since non-native speakers do not go through the same linguistic and socio-cultural experience
as native speakers do, the author concludes that when interpreting utterances the two groups
differ most importantly in what is ‘silent’ to each of them. Finally in Chapter Nine, Kecskes
uses his newly constructed tools to carry out an interesting in-depth analysis of politeness and
impoliteness in intercultural communication.
In sum, Intercultural Pragmatics is a superb book which introduces a novel
framework for analyzing linguistic data. The introduced framework explicitly gives up on the
reductionist approach to language analysis, assuming that neither pragmatic nor semantic
content is more basic. Using copious examples from language corpora, Kecskes shows
qualitatively that linguistic data can be effectively accounted for if one assumes that there is a
constant interaction between pragmatics and semantics - that the pragmatic content influences
the semantic content and semantic content co-constructs the situational content: SBUs with
functional content - which is relatively clear because it is defined largely non-verbally in a
given standard situation - serve to orchestrate the two types of meaning by assigning semantic
meanings to lexemes constituting a given part of the discourse at stake. The meanings
assigned in this way can then serve to construct items with new pragmatic functions.
Therefore, in this view, SBUs constitute the core of the language formation and development
process. What else singles out Intercultural Pragmatics is that it is based on more detailed
concepts than other related frameworks, for instance, van Dijk (2006), allowing for a more
subtle qualitative linguistic analysis. The next step should involve looking for quantitative
implications of the framework presented to corroborate its assumptions in a rigorous manner.

All in all, Intercultural Pragmatics is the most inspiring book on non-quantitative

linguistics I have ever read and I am sure it will become a staple reading for generations of
linguists to come. It will be of interest both to philosophers of natural language
communication and researchers looking for new tools to analyze linguistic data. Note, that
since SBUs, and all other utterances in this book are never studied in isolation, but always as a
part of situated discourse, Intercultural Pragmatics will be of interest also to all with interest
in the discourse perspective on communication.

References:

Bickhard, M. H., Campbell, R. L. (1992). Some Foundational Questions Concerning

Language Studies: With a Focus on Categorial Grammars and Model Theoretic Possible
Worlds Semantics. Journal of Pragmatics, 17(5/6), 401-433.
Bunge, M. (2003). Emergence and Convergence. Toronto: TUP.
Capone, A. (2009) Are explicatures cancellable? Journal of Intercultural Pragmatics 6/1 55-
83.
van Dijk, Teun A. (2006) Discourse, context and cognition Discourse Studies 8/1: 159-177
Kecskes, I. (2008), Dueling context: A dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics
40/3: 385-406.
Mey, J (2001) Pragmatics: An Introduction Wiley, 2nd ed.
Zielinska (2013) Utterance and sentence meanings from the perspective of the theory of
empirical models. Foundations of philosophical Pragmatics. Red. Alessandro Capone,
Franco Lo Piparo, Marco Carapezza, Springer, pp 469-521.
1
The bottom-up, cognitive-philosophical perspective embraces the pragmatic view of cooperation, which takes place after
semantic decoding of a sentence. The top-down, socio-cultural-interactional perspective emphasizes the view that, due to
egocentrism, when constructing and interpreting sentences, people pay attention only to selected, functionally filtered
information.