Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

482 Part 6: Language and Interaction
For the anthropologist Victor Turner (1974), liminality is the defi ning property
of transitional life stages such as puberty. The concept has since been extended
to any zones of marginality and ambiguity in the lives of persons or groups.
2. The distinction between cross-cultural and intercultural research is not consistently
observed in the academic literature.
3. However, Edward T. Hall, the founder of cross-cultural and intercultural communication
as an academic discipline, was an anthropologist and his infl uential
books (The Silent Language, 1959, The Hidden Dimension, 1966) are written
from a distinctly anthropological perspective.
4. In another study on Korean–African American service encounter interaction,
Ryoo (2007, discussed in the section on interactional sociolinguistics) arrives at
quite different conclusions concerning the participants’ discursive construction
of their social relations.
5. Given certain conditions, an utterance ‘achiev[es] the intention to produce a certain
illocutionary effect in the hearer. (. . .) The hearer’s understanding the utterance
will simply consist of those intentions being achieved’ (Searle, 1969: 48).
6. Speech act sets have been proposed for several speech acts, among them apologies
(Olshtain & Cohen, 1983), complaints (Olshtain & Weinbach, 1993), compliments
and compliment responses (Golato, 2005), and refusals (Félix-Brasdefer,
2008a), although not necessarily under the label of ‘speech act set’.
7. On occasion, speech act research draws on other politeness theories, for
instance Leech (1983) or Scollon and Scollon (2001). For recent reviews of the
major approaches to politeness, see Arundale (2006), Eelen (2001), and Watts
(2003).
8. ‘Interethnic’ and ‘intercultural’ communication are reference terms used by
Gumperz and others. We follow their terminology here, but without assuming
that the participants treat their interaction as ‘interethnic’ or ‘intercultural’ at
all times.
9. For Goffman, frames are ‘defi nitions of a situation (. . .) built up in accordance
with principles of organization which govern events [. . .] and our subjective
involvement in them’ (Goffman, 1974: 10f ).
10. In hip-hop culture, competitions between rappers in front of an audience,
with the purpose to ritually insult the opponent and demonstrate superior
verbal skill.
11. Nishizaka defi nes ‘interculturality’ as ‘the fact that people come from different
cultures’ (1995: 302). Although ‘interculturality’ in this sense has gained some
currency in the recent literature (Higgins, 2007; Mori, 2003, 2007), it is not an
entirely felicitous choice of terminology because it merely replaces more transparent
terms such as ‘cultural difference’, ‘cultural distinctiveness’ or ‘membership
in a different culture’. In fact, in much of the research reviewed in this
section, the participants orient less to interculturality than to fi rm cultural or
ethnic demarcations. The term interculturality might therefore better be
reserved for participants’ discursive constructions of intercultures, as discussed
in the section on interactional sociolinguistics.
12. From a sociolinguistic perspective, such categorizing could be as criticized as
‘ideological’. After all, languages are not owned by anyone, and language
expertise is not tied to cultural or national membership. ‘Foreigners’ studying
Japanese may know more about the language and may use it just as competently
as Japanese people. But such sociolinguistically correct arguments
would miss MCA’s point, which is to explicate how participants construct
their social world through their categorization work, not to assess whether they
are right or wrong in the eyes of external observers. For instance, Zimmerman