Misunderstanding in Intercultural Communication

Misunderstanding in intercultural communication may result from many different and possibly interacting sources such as inadequate perception, inappropriate comprehension at different linguistic levels, gaps in interlocutors' knowledge of the world, uncooperativeness on the part of one or both of the interlocutors, or their inability to assemble and realize an intercultural move that is expected by the partner at this particular point in the interaction. Given this complexity, any analysis of misunderstandings must be approached in an interdisciplinary manner such that different research traditions can be taken into account. In this article, an overview of a number of research traditions relevant for investigating intercultural misunderstandings is given and the results of an ongoing project featuring conversations from a corpus of naturally occurring everyday talk, fieldnotes and diary-entries as well as open role plays between members of different linguacultures are discussed. This primary data is triangulated by introspective reports, narrative interviews and metapragmatic assessment data. The results of this project essentially confirm the findings of earlier contrastive pragmatic analyses (German-English), which I conducted with different subjects, data and methodologies. Given this converging evidence, the assumption of deep-seated differences in communitive preferences and expectation patterns between members of the linguacultures I examined may not be totally unwarranted.

Published online: 24 March 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/ttwia.57.02hou