Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Culture 463
cultural identities are a concern for them. An emic approach to intercultural
discourse also implies that problems in the interaction are not
invariably attributed to cultural differences. Instead, the policy is to
bracket participants’ memberships in particular cultural groups as an analytical
resource and instead examine how the interactional diffi culties
arise from the interaction itself.
We will now turn to several prominent approaches to intercultural
communication. In the course of our discussion, we will revisit and elaborate
the concepts and contrasts introduced in Table 17.1.
Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT)
In the tradition of the communication sciences, research on cross-cultural
and intercultural communication is predominantly conducted from socialpsychological
perspectives. The goal of cross-cultural communication research
is to construct theories that may account for cognitive, behavioral and attitudinal
differences between cultural groups. Intercultural communication
aims to explicate the processes of intergroup communication, intergroup
and intragroup attitudes and relations and their continuity and change. 2
While there is generally not much intellectual traffi c between social-psychological
communication research, on the one hand, and sociolinguistics and
linguistic anthropology, on the other, 3 one theory that bridges disciplinary
divisions is communication accommodation theory (CAT).
Originally under the name of speech accommodation theory, CAT was
designed as a motivational account for variation in linguistic and temporal
features in speech forms, styles and choices of languages and language varieties
in intergroup communication. On Giles and Coupland’s defi nition,
accommodation is to be seen as a multiply-organized and contextually
complex set of alternatives, regularly available to communicators
in face-to-face talk. It can function to index and achieve solidarity with
or dissociation from a conversational partner, reciprocally and dynamically.
(Giles & Coupland, 1991: 60–61)
Specifi cally, accommodation refers to interlocutors’ speech adjustments
that may exhibit behavioral convergence with or divergence from the interlocutor’s
(displayed or assumed) speech. Accommodation processes are
termed objective when a party adjusts their behavior toward the other party’s
observable communicative conduct and subjective when such adjustments
are grounded in the speaker’s beliefs and stereotypical views. For
instance, Beebe (1981) reported that bilingual Thai-Chinese children
adjusted their vowels to what they believed to be Chinese variants when
interviewed by an ethnic Chinese Thai, although the interviewer’s vowels
did not have the purported phonological properties. The children’s
subjective convergence produced objective divergence.