ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces intercultural pragmatics, offering a new perspective on communicative processes from a sociocognitive angle. The sociocognitive approach (SCA) defines interculturality as a phenomenon that is not only interactionally constructed but also relies on cultural models and norms that represent the speech communities to which the interlocutors belong. Interculturality is a situationally emergent phenomenon that relies both on relatively fixed cultural norms and models as well as situationally evolving features. Norms and models brought into the interaction from prior experience blend with features created ad hoc in the interaction in a synergetic way and the result is intercultural discourse.
The second part of the chapter presents the sociocognitive approach to communication and explains the relationship between intracultural and intercultural communication within that paradigm. In SCA there is no pure intracultural or intercultural communication because the relationship between the two is considered a continuum with two hypothetical ends. Every concrete communicative event or process can be placed somewhere on the continuum, closer to one of the ends or somewhere in the middle. The last part of the chapter focuses on the application of SCA in analysing intercultural interactions where emphasis is on discourse segments rather than utterances.
