ABSTRACT
Intercultural pragmatics is a relatively new field of inquiry that is concerned with how the language system is put to use in social encounters between human beings who have different first languages, communicate in a common language, and, usually, represent different cultures (Kecskes 2004, 2011). The communicative process in these encounters is synergistic in the sense that it is a merger in which the pragmatic norms of each participant are represented to some extent. Intercultural pragmatics represents a sociocognitive perspective in which individual prior experience and actual situational experience are equally important in meaning construction and comprehension. Research in intercultural pragmatics has four main foci: (1) interaction between native speakers and non-native speakers of a language; (2) lingua franca communication in which none of the interlocutors has the same first language (L1); (3) multilingual discourse; and (4) language use and development of individuals who speak more than one language.
