ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a discourse analysis of intercultural communication in English walking tours led by Japanese volunteer student guides in Nara, Japan; interculturality is viewed here as a performative process collaboratively achieved through intersubjective and agentive acts that negotiate similarities and differences between interactants. Drawing on the notion of stance (Du Bois, 2007, The stance triangle. In Englebretson, Robert (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam: John Benjamins), special attention is paid to the sequential and dynamic process during which emergent stance at a given moment results from the prior stance; this in turn prompts the subsequent emergent stances that accrue to formulate the overall stances taken by the guides and tourists toward the tourism experience. The analysis identifies two tiers regarding the stance object: the first tier represents various tourism resources of the city, while the second is concerned with the stance-takers’ meta-stance toward their identity and interactional behavior. These two co-occurring tiers of stance acts are subject to expansion, modification, and accumulation, constituting a stance frame of mutually agentive intercultural tourism discourse. I argue that such dialogic and interactive stance-taking contributes to creating an emerging global space where both the tourists and guides act as global citizens capable of co-constructing a fruitful tourism experience on equal terms.
