Intercultural communication and Grice's principle

Abstract Grice’s theory of implicature has been considered ethnocentric, but this paper will argue that it is highly relevant to intercultural analysis. The Principle of Cooperation, and its subordinate maxims, focus on the rationality of discourse, but Grice also includes linguistic and nonlinguistic context, conventional meaning and “other items of background knowledge” in the inferential process. This notion of background knowledge is radically refined by Sperber and Wilson. Within a theory of relevance, interlocutors share only some contextual clues in a “mutual cognitive environment”. In intercultural negotiation a high level of awareness of assumptions about what is “mutually manifest” is of central importance to performance. Teachers of intercultural communication skills attempt to establish a balance between providing meaningful practice and a useful rationale for improving theoretical awareness of the inferential process. This paper uses recordings of a classroom simulation involving foreign and Japanese students of intercultural communication taking part in a traffic accident insurance negotiation. Two data extracts are examined in detail, in which the failure by a foreign student to recognize radically different background assumptions had a decisive negative impact on his ability to negotiate, but a positive impact on his ability to analyse his own intercultural performance.