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Bonding through Context: Language and interactional alignment in Japanese situated discourse
Edited by Risako Ide and Kaori Hata
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 314] 2020
► pp. 105–122

Chapter 5
Social consequences of common ground in the act of bonding

A sociocognitive analysis of intercultural encounters

| Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

This chapter is concerned with the act of “bonding” in intercultural encounters. Drawing on a sociocognitive theory of context, I analyze interactions taken from my fieldwork in the United States and research interviews in New Zealand. Against the dominant trend of antimentalism in linguistic anthropology, I focus on common ground (CG) as a cognitive context in interaction. Analytically, I attend to face strategies and relationship implicative actions. My point is argue that the notion of CG needs to be refined and extended by taking into account ideological components. For further empirical studies, I suggest that we should specify what kinds of ideologies are integrated into components of common ground and explore how we can create bonding between participants with conflicting ideologies across national boundaries. Implications for linguistic anthropology are also discussed from an evolutionary perspective.

Keywords: common ground, context, face strategies, relationship implicative action, intercultural encounter, ideology, Japanese nationality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Research questions and background theoretical concerns
  • 3.Conceptual framework
    • 3.1An overview of the sociocognitive theory
    • 3.2Common ground (CG)
    • 3.3Two face strategies: Involvement and independence
    • 3.4Relationship implicative actions
  • 4.Background to data
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1(Un)bonding in the discourse of war
    • 5.2Bonding in narrating about “whaling”
  • 6.Discussion and implications
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 3 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.314.05yam
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