2 - Intercultural and Gendered Communication

INTERCULTURAL AND
GENDERED
COMMUNICATION
I. The communicative system: same
and different
II. Conversation expectations and
framing
III. From ethnopragmatics and cultural
scripts to gender ideologies
Race, geographic area, age, social
status, gender are variables that divide
members of society into groups.
When communication arises among
members belonging to different
groups, assumed differences give rise
to
1. inter-racial or cross-gender
stereotyping (increases
misunderstandings)
2. expectations of participants
regarding the variables of content and
conversational signals might not
each of us is a member of a
particular corporate group, a
particular professional or
occupational group, a generation, a
gender, a region and an ethnicity.
Communication arises across some
lines which divide us into different
discourse groups or systems of
discourse (Scollon and Scollon,
1997: 3).
to interpret utterances in accordance
with the way in which they were
intended, a hearer must know what
<frame> he/she is operating in, that
is, whether the activity being engaged
in is joking, imitating, chatting,
lecturing, or performing a play
(Tannen, 1993a: 18).
any speaker who, inside a group, uses
speech that falls outside the culturally
established conversational norms of
the specific group is a norm breaker,
or linguistic deviant
I. The communicative system: same and
different
The comfort and ease of using a shared
communicative system makes it pleasurable to
talk to people of shared background, although
the feeling may not be consciously attributed to
that factor (Tannen, 1984: 78).
Misunderstanding comes from:
different expectations as to the organization
of lines, speed, pace or appropriateness of
certain turns in certain places
a different system of values and the priority
criterion of these values for people belonging to
different groups.
Example:
I saw the man who did it, but I never
told anybody
I seen the bloke what done it, but I
never told nobody
Example 1(conversational style): The
equation, in the Anglo-Saxon value system,
between aggression and power and on the
other hand, between cooperation and
solidarity, can be questioned from a cross-
cultural perspective; many cultures see
arguing a pleasurable sign of intimacy.
The Greek, for example, enjoy opposing one
another in conversation and use diminutives
while disagreeing (Tannen, 1993: 182).
Should foreign language learners try to acquire,
besides specific structures, intonation patterns
and gestures that they might use in specific
social contexts so as to avoid misunderstanding?
Example 2 (discourse pattern): Scollon and
Scollon focus on differences in discourse
patterns of Asian and Western speakers, which
lead to serious misunderstandings. For
example, Westerners will focus on the opening
stages of the discourse considering them
crucial, while Asians will tend to look for the
crucial points to occur somewhat later. If each
formulates an opinion according to his/her
pattern and tries to interpret the others talk in
the same manner, they would both miss the
others point. The result is that there arise
unfair and prejudicial stereotypes of the
inscrutable Asian and of the frank and rude
Westerner.
Example 3 (conversational style,
pace): The use of high involvement
style (fast pace, reduced syntactic
form, high pitch, abrupt questions,
marked rising intonation) with a slower
speaker who does not share this style
leads to hedges, pauses from the
interlocutor and overall to uneasiness
and distorted conversation. Too much
excitement and exuberance meant to
encourage a shy or introvert
interlocutor might in fact shut him/her
down instead of stimulating talk. The
whenever two cultural backgrounds
meet, a paradox of cross-cultural
communication emerges. People
belonging to different cultures may
often utter either of the following,
bearing in mind a desire to defend
themselves:
Dont assume Im different from you
and
Dont assume Im the same as
you(Tannen, 1984: 17).
Conclusion: when interlocutors have
similar histories, backgrounds and
experiences, their communication
works fairly easy because the
inferences each makes about what the
other means, will be based on common
experience and knowledge.
II. Conversation expectations and
framing
as individuals grow up and live in a
given culture, they learn to treat new
things, events, objects, persons in
connection to other similar things or
events that they have experienced
before, thus forming expectations of
given situations.
The notion of expectation (frame,
script or schemata) appears in other
fields besides linguistics: Artificial
Intelligence, cognitive psychology,
on the basis of ones experience of
the world in a given culture (or
combination of cultures), one organizes
knowledge about the world and uses
this knowledge to predict
interpretations and relationships
regarding new information, events and
expectations (Tannen 1993: 16).
communicative moves (verbal or non-
verbal) are only understood with reference
to a metacommunicative message
(metamessage) about what is going on,
what frame of interpretation applies to the
move (Bateson, 1993: 3).
frames are means of speaking: to
interpret utterances in accordance with the
way in which they were intended, a hearer
must know what <frame> he/she is
operating in, that is, whether the activity
being engaged in is joking, imitating,
chatting, lecturing, or performing a play
(Hymes, 1993: 18).
Example (frames - cultural dimension):
Greek and American subjects are shown a
movie and then they are asked to retell it giving
as many details as possible. All of them make it
clear that they had certain expectations
regarding what they were supposed to retell, in
what manner to retell it and what the focus
point should have been, although they had not
been given any indications as to what they
were supposed to focus on. Since the subjects
reacted differently, showing different
expectations for the same item, showing their
likes and dislikes according to their personal
expectations, the conclusion is that
expectations, so frames, are culture dependent.
Frame is a dynamic concept
the interactive notion of frame refers
to a definition of what is going on in
interaction, without which no utterance
(or movement, or gesture) could be
interpreted (Tannen, 1993: 60).
III. From ethnopragmatics and
cultural scripts to gender ideologies
Cultural scripts are intended to

capture background norms, templates,
guidelines or models for ways of
thinking, acting, feeling and speaking,
in a particular context (Goddard &
Wierzbicka, 2004: 153).
Examples:
The mealtime: for the Dutch, it is a
time of discussing family matters, for
West Africans, it must be dominated by
silence (Ameka & Breedveld, 2004:
168).
Hands: in the West African cultural
area, the use of the left hand when
interacting with people is strictly
forbidden (Ameka & Breedveld, 2004:
169-171).
Request phrasing: Anglo English speakers
formulate requests as interrogatives,
Singapore English speakers employ a much
smaller range of alternative formulas; when
asking, the speaker is more interested in
whether the addressee can do a particular
action rather than if he/she wants to do it
(Wong, 2004: 236). Thus, Anglo English
speakers could think that the Singapore
English manner of speaking is overbearing
and imposing, whereas Singapore English
speakers might interpret the English respect
for personal autonomy as social distance
and unfriendliness.
language competences should go
hand in hand with cultural
competences, and different speech
norms must be linked with
differences in cultural values.
The cultural script and gendered language
Specific, recognized features distinguishing
mens and womens speech are interpreted
and reacted to by members of a society as
valued or disvalued, positive or negative,
according to the norms, values and power
relationships of the society, in particular of
course those concerning men and women
(Sherzer, 1987: 116-19 in Philips, 2005: 258).
Any speaker that uses speech that falls outside
a specific cultural script is a norm breaker or
a linguistic deviant = a speaker who fails to
follow normative expectations of how men and
women should speak (2005: 353).
During the pre-feminist period the
linguistic deviant is the woman herself,
whose speaking patterns are peculiarly
divergent from more normative, namely
male, ways of speaking.
With the emergence of the dominance
theory, all speakers who are in some way
disenfranchised from institutionalized male
power women, hippies, homosexuals, and
even academic men become linguistic
deviants (Hall, 2005: 353).
Towards the 1980s with the two-cultures
model, the deviant tomboy, whose
preference for other-sex playmates proved the
normative, different cultures rule.
Recent research has introduced the
Communities of Practice
(individuals involved in specific
activity types) attempting to study
speech patterns of men and women
in a variety of communities, societies
and cultures in order to prove
overgeneralizations wrong and to
demonstrate that normative means
in fact infinite.
CofP = an aggregate of people who share
practices, namely ways of doing things,
ways of talking, beliefs, values, power
relations (Eckert and McConnel-Ginet,
1998: 490, in Sunderland, 2006: 8).
Peoples access, exposure to, need for
and interest in communities of practice
are related to class, age, ethnicity and
sex (Sunderland, 2006: 157).
The discovery of this concept that
determines linguistic gender variation
demonstrates that variation cannot be
overgeneralized.
Finally, the development of queer linguistics
that has the sexual and gender deviance of
previous generations at its centre demonstrates
that linguistic deviance is a superfluous term.
The word queer is used to encompass marginal
sexual tendencies, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender, and it is used to challenge
clear-cut notions of sexual identity.
According to queer theory, sexual identities are
not descriptive but performative not what
people are but what they do [] In this view,
sexual identities are not personal attributes or
individual constructions but culturally readable
acts that are being created or performed during
social interactions (Sunderland, 2006: 131).
This transition happened because
identities previously viewed as
deviant or non-normative began to
be brought into the mainstream of
scholarly discussion. Queer theory is
said to make possible to explore
how acts of identity are not
necessarily straightforward or
transparent but can be complex,
changing, and contested
(Sunderland, 2006: 132).
Women language is a potent ideological
construct (Talbot, 2005: 477). Paradoxically,
the same constructs can be used against or in
favour of women.
recently there has been a reversal of the
perception of women as deficient language
users.
Women language has been found profitable in
an era of communication boom, and the
apparently new view of women as expert
communicators has been taken up by
management gurus and advertisers.
A newly born tradition makes that womens
talk is no longer judged against an ideal of
female silence (Talbot, 2005: 483).
Conclusion: cultural scripts are
associated with different ethnic
backgrounds, but also with social
categories within the context of the
same ethnic background.
ideologies within cultural scripts have
given birth to categories that have in
turn been used as starting point for
research, such as the static and
binary category of gender, but have
also been questioned and contested.

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INTERCULTURAL AND

Cultural scripts are intended to

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