ABSTRACT
We have seen in previous chapters how pragmatics was able to give an account of the mechanisms by which researchers and the researched understand one another in context. The explanations I have oered have aimed to show that language as code, often referred to as sentence meaning, was not by itself able to generate meaning; an appeal to the context was needed if full meaning was to be recovered by researchers and their participants. Following on from this discussion of how context inuences intercultural research, this chapter oers an overview of some basic aspects of intercultural communication styles from the early beginnings of cross-cultural research to the more recent perspectives of linguistic pragmatics on the role of intention in multilingual research. I will rst briey review examples of early research which I consider to be misleading, if not plainly misguided, in the eld of what is known as cross-cultural pragmatics. I will then present three principles – intention recovery, a certain type of inference known as implicature, and performativity – drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical investigations spanning linguistic pragmatics, narratology and theology. These are intended to inform the data which come from interviews with PhD students involved in intercultural research in the elds of education, international development and applied linguistics. My aim here is to show how meaning is arrived at by researchers and the researched through forms of interaction which involve the use of diverse, and at times strange, even unexpected strategies. This prompts a later discussion of a number of questions further to demonstrate how understanding is arrived at. What role do researchers and participants’ intentions play in data collection? And when misunderstandings occur, how are they resolved?
