ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature, emergence, and use of intercultures and their relation to encyclopedic knowledge and cultural models in the framework of a socio-cognitive approach to communication and pragmatics (Kecskes 2008; Kecskes and Zhang 2009; Kecskes 2010a). Intercultures as defined by Kecskes (2011) are situationally emergent and co-constructed phenomena that rely on relatively definable cultural models and norms as well as situationally evolving features. According to this definition, interculturality has both relatively normative and emergent components. This approach somewhat differs from other researchers’ views (e.g., Nishizaka 1995; Blum-Kulka et al. 2008), in which it was pointed out that interculturality is a situationally emergent rather than a normatively fixed phenomenon. However, the socio-cognitive approach (Kecskes 2008; Kecskes and Zhang 2009; Kecskes 2010a), to be explained later, goes one step further and defines interculturality as a phenomenon that is not only interactionally and socially constructed in the course of communication, but also relies on relatively definable cultural models and norms that represent the speech communities to which the interlocutors belong.
