Strategies to build common ground among intercultural speakers in conversations
What is it about?
The author uses discourse analysis to unveil the strategies of building a common ground and retaining conversations of speakers coming from different socio-cultural backgrounds.
Why is it important?
The study shows that the dynamism and conversational tactics of people coming from different socio-cultural backgrounds are more diverse and distinctive, compared with those coming from a relatively similar contexts. The dynamism ranges from the use of word choices to the ways of keeping the conversations going. Specific examples can be seen from the corpus. It is useful to understand those conversational strategies not only to indicate how linguistic repertoires are exploited to serve communicative needs. Those strategies also approve the fact that speakers are active language participants that find ways to overcome linguistic and even conceptual barriers caused by differences in socio-cultural backgrounds.