ABSTRACT
When looking for causes, recent in-depth analyses of intercultural encounters (e.g., among others, Tyler and Davies (1990), Verschueren (1990), Gumperz and Roberts (1991)) have focused mainly on the level of discourse strategies. They are concerned with the lack of shared background assumptions that still form a hidden barrier to understanding where 'purely linguistic competence in terms of command of the languages spoken cannot be held responsible for communication trouble' (Hinnenkamp 1991:91). Since this kind of elementary 'linguistic' level is clearly of major importance in the encounters studied here, our task in this chapter will be to ask in which ways linguistic and contextual elements combine as causal factors of non-understanding. This means that we will not be looking for single, simple causes (see Chapter 2). The analysis of typical triggers, reasons and supporting factors for problems of understanding will also lay a kind of groundwork for subsequent chapters which centre on overcoming such problems, and it will give a first approach to the 'nature' of the different understanding problems by exploring their origins. Some conceptual clarifications may be helpful at the start, however.
