Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

462 Part 6: Language and Interaction
1997). In order to highlight the constitutive role of discourse in the constructionisms
relevant to sociolinguistic studies of intercultural interaction,
we refer to them collectively as discursive-constructionist.
Consistent with the differences in theories of culture noted earlier in
this section, notions of cultural identity come in markedly different versions.
In sociostructural/rationalist theories, cultural identity is a stable,
intra-psychological, situation-transcendent trait shared by members of the
same cultural group. It overdetermines other identities that people may
participate in and structures their actions and relations with others.
Discursive-constructionist approaches relocate cultural identity from
the privacy of the individual mind to the public sphere of social life. The
‘underlying’, ‘real’, ‘true’ self is dissolved into a relational construct, coproduced
by participants in the course of their social activities and refl exively
related to them. The critical point is that cultural identities are socially
consequential only when they are made relevant through publicly observable
action in interaction and text. In this sense, identities are something
people do rather than something they have (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006).
Consequently, orientations to cultural identities are interactionally contingent;
they may come and go (and, in fact, never come at all) in the course
of an activity.
Sociostructural/rationalist models recognize universal discourse practices
and resources, yet research efforts are predominantly directed to
identifying cross-cultural differences in communicative style, which in
turn are explained as arising from distinctive social-psychological orientations
among national groups (individualism–collectivism, masculinity–
femininity, etc.; Hofstede, 2001). Discursive-constructionist approaches
examine how cultural (and other) identities are produced through interactional
arrangements and semiotic resources. While the linguistic resources
may be language-specifi c (examples include address pronouns, interactional
and modal particles, discourse markers and honorifi cs), no a priori
assumptions are made about cultural-specifi c meanings. From sociostructural/rationalist
perspectives, cultural diversity is seen as fraught with
problems; in fact research on intercultural communication is often motivated
by the desire to identify, explain and recommend remedies for miscommunication.
Discursive-constructionist studies treat cultural diversity
as a resource that participants can exploit to construct social solidarity or
antagonism, or that remains without any visible relational consequences.
Finally, the two perspectives take different investigative stances.
Sociostructural/rationalist approaches presuppose the omnirelevance of
cultural diversity, conceptualized from the vantage point of discourse-
external (etic) theory. Under the emic view of discursive-constructionist
analysis, no prior assumptions are made about whether cultural diversity
plays a role for the participants at all. It becomes a topic for analysis only
when the participants show in their interactional conduct that their