ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a step back in time into the words of the philosopher and social anthropologist Alfred Schütz, who wrote in 1944 about the perceptions of a so-called stranger who approaches a new culture and suddenly realizes that his/her ways of thinking and acting often do not match those of the new environment. This is followed by examples of how linguistics took up these considerations, for example, with the empirical work of the sociolinguist John Gumperz in the 1980s. After that, more recent examples of empirical work on failure are shown and “failure in intercultural communication” is looked at from the points of view of semantics and pragmatics, two broad strands of linguistics. An explanation follows on the problem that speaking about “failure in intercultural communication” poses for studies that lean on a critical-theoretical perspective, and Gadamerian hermeneutics is suggested as a possible philosophical orientation to the study of this topic. Further examples of empirical studies and analytical tools in applied linguistics are provided, and the chapter ends with the conclusion that failure can potentially lead to intercultural understanding.
