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Communication in a multilingual society: Some missed opportunities1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Rajendra Singh ,
Jayant Lele  and
Gita Martohardjono
Rajendra Singh
Affiliation:
Départment de Linguistique, Université de Montréal
Jayant Lele
Affiliation:
Department of Political Studies, Queen's University
Gita Martohardjono
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Cornell University
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Abstract

This article critically examines contemporary interactional studies of the cultural specifity of human language, conducted mostly in modern, multiethnic, industrialized societies (e.g., Clyne 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Valdés & Pino 1981). What is often presented as the “linguistic evidence” for miscommunication in such contexts is in fact, we argue, the locus of the violations of the cooperative principles of discourse and human interaction, such as the Principle of Charity (Davidson 1974) and the Principle of Humanity (Grandy 1973). The conclusions these studies arrive at are vitiated by the fact, for which considerable empirical evidence exists, that the native speaker's repairability threshold depends crucially on nonlinguistic variables (Hackman 1977). Only a cross-cultural analysis of how or whether these misconstruals entail analogous consequences, regardless of who is being misunderstood by whom, can, we argue, produce the sort of evidence these studies claim to unearth.

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1988 , pp. 43 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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