Context in intercultural pragmatics

This chapter aims to discuss the relationship between language and culture from the perspective of context. In my research, I have argued that native-like knowledge of language can be determined as knowing preferred ways of saying things and preferred ways of organizing thoughts ( Kecskes 2007a , 2010 a-c, 2013, see also Wray 2002 ). How do these ‘preferred ways’ come about? Speech community members develop unique ways of using the linguistic code with other members of the same community. In this system, certain words or sequences are preferable when expressing certain phenomena, like ‘shoot a film’, ‘dust the furniture’, ‘make love’, and so on. It is also desirable to say certain things in particular speech situations, such as ‘help yourself’ at the table, ‘welcome aboard’ when greeting a new employee, ‘be my guest’ when answering a request, ‘stick around’ when asking someone to stay and the like. If we feel that we need to mitigate our criticism towards someone, we start the conversation with, for instance, ‘not that I cannot understand your act, but …’. If we ask for clarification we often say ‘what’s your point? …’, ‘please make your point … why don’t you make clear what your point is?’ And so on and so forth, we could continue to demonstrate how conventionalized language use is.