Achieving mutual understanding in intercultural project partnerships : co-operation, self-orientation, and fragility

Communication depends on cooperation in at least the following way: In order to be successful, communicative behavior needs to be adjusted to the general world knowledge, abilities, and interests of the hearer, and the hearer's success in figuring out the message and responding to it needs to be informed by assumptions about the communicator's informative intentions, personal goals, and communicative abilities. In other words, interlocutors cooperate by coordinating their actions in order to fulfill their communicative intentions. This minimal assumption about cooperativeness must in one way or another be built into the foundations of any plausible inferential model of human communication. However, the communication process is also influenced to a greater or lesser extent, whether intentionally and consciously or unintentionally and unconsciously, by the participants' orientation toward, or preoccupation with, their own concerns, so their behavior may easily fall short of being as cooperative as is required for achieving successful communication

Believing in: a pragmatic account

The gap between the linguistic meaning of an utterance and the proposition it expresses in a particular context is bridged by a pragmatic inferential process with free access to general world knowledge. Therefore, pragmatic theory should be able to characterize the inputs to this inference process in a way which provides the basis for explaining why a particular linguistic expression has some contextual interpretations to the exclusion of others. The main aim of this paper is to consider how Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) rises to this challenge in one particular case: utterances of sentences containing the phrase believe in. I try to show how the various interpretations of this expression follow from the interaction of its linguistic meaning with the Communicative Principle of Relevance, the context, and two general cognitive tendencies in context selection: the orientation towards positive outcomes and the orientation towards establishing cause-effect relations

Phatic communication and relevance theory: a reply to Ward & Horn

In Žegarac & Clark (1999) we try to show how phatic communication can be explained within the framework of Relevance Theory. We suggest that phatic communication should be characterized as a particular type of interpretation, which we call ‘phatic interpretation’. On our account, an interpretation is phatic to the extent that its main relevance lies with implicated conclusions which do not depend on the explicit content of the utterance, but rather on the communicative intention (where ‘depends on X’ means: ‘results from an inferential process which takes X as a premise’)

Forskning og utviklingsarbeid i Norge 2015, alle sektorer

Endelige tall for utgifter til forskning og utviklingsarbeid (FoU) i Norge i 2015 viser at den samlede FoU-innsatsen utgjorde over 60 milliarder kroner. I løpende priser gir dette en økning i FoU-innsatsen på 6,4 milliarder fra 2014. Dette gir dette en realvekst på nær 9 prosent. FoU-utgiftenes andel av BNP øker fra 1,72 til 1,93 prosent. Veksten fra 2013, da siste fullskalaundersøkelse ble gjennomført, utgjorde 9,6 milliarder kroner. Det ble utført 42 400 FoU-årsverk i 2015, som var 2 000 flere enn i 2014

Phatic interpretations and phatic communication

This paper considers how the notion of phatic communication can best be understood within the framework of Relevance Theory. To a large extent, we are exploring a terminological question: which things which occur during acts of verbal communication should the term 'phatic' apply to? The term is perhaps most frequently used in the phrase 'phatic communication', which has been thought of as an essentially social phenomenon and therefore beyond the scope of cognitive pragmatic theories. We suggest, instead, that the term should be applied to interpretations and that an adequate account of phatic interpretations requires an account of the cognitive processes involved in deriving them. Relevance Theory provides the basis for such an account. In section 1, we indicate the range of phenomena to be explored. In section 2, we outline the parts of Relevance Theory which are used in our account. In section 3, we argue that the term 'phatic' should be applied to interpretations, and we explore predictions about phatic interpretations which follow from the framework of Relevance Theory, including the claim that phatic interpretations should be derived only when non-phatic interpretations are not consistent with the Principle of Relevance. In section 4 we consider cases where cognitive effects similar to those caused by phatic interpretations are conveyed but not ostensively communicated. © 1999 Cambridge University Press

Cross-Cultural Variation of Politeness Orientation & Speech Act Perception

This paper presents the findings of an empirical study which compares Jordanian and English native speakers’ perceptions about the speech act of thanking. The forty interviews conducted revealed some similarities but also of remarkable cross-cultural differences relating to the significance of thanking, the variables affecting it, and the appropriate linguistic and paralinguistic choices, as well as their impact on the interpretation of thanking behaviour. The most important theoretical finding is that the data, while consistent with many views found in the existing literature, do not support Brown and Levinson’s (1987) claim that thanking is a speech act which intrinsically threatens the speaker’s negative face because it involves overt acceptance of an imposition on the speaker.  Rather, thanking should be viewed as a means of establishing and sustaining social relationships. The study findings suggest that cultural variation in thanking is due to the high degree of sensitivity of this speech act to the complex interplay of a range of social and contextual variables, and point to some promising directions for further research.