Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

464 Part 6: Language and Interaction
CAT also proposes that behavioral convergence and divergence do not
necessarily map on corresponding types of psychological accommodation,
the ways in which participants’ social and personal perceptions of
each other align or misalign. White (1989) found in a study of Englishmedium
interactions between Japanese and North American participants
that the Japanese participants used signifi cantly more backchannel tokens
than the American interlocutors, ostensibly a negative discourse transfer
from Japanese. In interlanguage pragmatics, negative pragmatic transfer is
typically seen as a cause of intercultural miscommunication (e.g. Kasper
& Blum-Kulka, 1993). However, the American participants evaluated
Japanese interlocutors who had a distinctly higher rate of backchannels as
particularly interested and convivial. In this case, behavioral divergence
resulted in psychological convergence. Conversely, Bailey (1997) examined
service encounters between the Korean owners and employees of
convenience stores and their African-American customers in Los Angeles
(USA). In Bailey’s analysis, the customers’ affi liative strategies (using
solidarity-marking address terms, joking, citing common history or disclosing
personal information) garnered reserved, non-reciprocating
uptake. Here, rather than achieving social solidarity and bridging ethnic
boundaries, behavioral convergence had the effect of psychological divergence.
4 The two cases point to the complex relationship between discursive
conduct and its psychological conditions and consequences, a
challenge that has oriented CAT research on intercultural communication
into different directions (Sachdev & Giles, 2006).
In the context of communication science, CAT developed into a general
theory of intergroup communication (Gallois et al., 2005). The theory
acknowledges that communication is sociohistorically embedded and
that interlocutors manage information exchange and identity negotiation
by mutually adjusting their interactional conduct on a wide range of
discursive, linguistic and temporal features. However, of greater theoretical
interest than ‘behavioral tactics’ are the psychological dispositions
and strategies thought to motivate interactional conduct, whereby
‘motivation’ refers to beliefs and assumptions of intergroup or interpersonal
relations rather than goal-related social action. Talk between
culturally diverse participants serves as a window to underlying cognitive-affective
processes rather than being treated as an object of investigation
in its own right. In its dominant current version, proposed by
Giles and his associates, CAT is thus two degrees removed from sociodiscursive
approaches to intercultural communication: fi rst, by privileging
interlocutors’ perceptions and motivations over their displayed
communicative behavior and, second, by emphasizing the roles and
interrelations of attitudes, attributions, affect, cognition and intention as
causes and effects of intergroup relations over visible social action in
intercultural communication. The absence of action-orientation sets