Leibniz Universität Hannover
Englisches Seminar
Interkulturelle Kommunikation
SoSe 2007

“Superficial Americans” vs. “Unfriendly Germans”?
Contrastive and interlanguage approaches to intercultural communication

Table of contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Research 4

    2.1. Face and face work 4
    2.2. Contrastive Pragmatics 5
    2.3. Interlanguage Pragmatics 6
    2.4. Methodology and procedures 6

3. Findings 7

    3.1. Dimensions of cross-cultural difference 7

        3.1.1. Directness vs. indirectness 8
        3.1.2. Self-orientation vs. other-orientation 8
        3.1.3. Content vs. addressees / explicitness vs. implicitness 9
        3.1.4. Ad-hoc formulation vs. verbal routines 9

    3.2. Discourse rituals 10

        3.2.1. Greetings 10
        2.2.2. Farewells 11
        3.2.3. Compliments 12
        3.2.4. Criticism 13
        3.2.5. Discussions 13

            3.2.5.1. Opposition formats 13
            3.2.5.2. Concessions 14
            3.2.5.3. Intercultural disagreement 14

    3.3. Cross-cultural convergence 16

4. Conclusion 16

5. References 18

1. Introduction

In the age of globalization, intercultural communication has become a necessity in many areas of life. Considering a worldwide increasing mobility, economists, politicians, scientists, tourists, exchange students, global celebrities, and many others frequently communicate in languages different from their mother tongues. Since English is widely spoken in the Western hemisphere, many native speakers are used to conversing with people who have acquired English as a foreign language. Misunderstandings are very likely to occur, often due to linguistic incompetence. Learners who have acquired basic knowledge of a foreign language in school, frequently struggle with their vocabulary, let alone grammatical correctness. Hence, a sufficient command of a (foreign) language is indispensable in order to communicate efficiently. Equally important is the awareness of cross-cultural differences, which often have a major impact on interactions in business as well as in everyday life.

Being able to adequately interact with people from different cultures according to their respective values and unwritten rules of communication is referred to as intercultural competence and includes behavioral, communication and comprehension skills (Lüsebrink 2005:9). Interculturally competent individuals have usually appropriated their skills in a learning process of personal experience in foreign countries and theoretical knowledge about various aspects of one or several culture(s). Intercultural trainers are in demand: Seminars and workshops teaching basics of intercultural communication aim at passing on a general awareness of crosscultural differences and possible difficulties resulting from them. As Casper-Hehne states, a major challenge in intercultural communication is to capture the link between linguistic phenomena and patterns of thought, emotion, and action, which are culture-specific for our interlocutors (2006: 63).

Linguists define intercultural communication as interpersonal face-toface encounters between members of different cultures (Lüsebrink 2005: 7). Aside from dealing with the interlocutors’ respective communicative premises, linguistic approaches to intercultural communication focus on how these premises affect the actual interaction (Knapp 2004: 411). The case of German and English shows that, although people from German- and Englishspeaking countries have been cooperating – and communicating – with each  other for centuries, misunderstandings still occur. Germans have other cultural conventions than people from English speaking countries, and speech acts are realized differently according to these conventions. Unfortunately, cultural differences are often not interpreted as such, but as
misbehavior or impoliteness instead. Generalizations such as “Germans are unfriendly and distanced” or “Americans are superficial” are the result.

In the following, this paper sets out to provide an overview of the findings of researchers who have investigated instances of intercultural communication between speakers of German and speakers of English. Namely, I will refer to the works of Helga Kotthoff (1988, 1991, 1993), Juliane House (1996, 2003), and Hiltraud Casper-Hehne (2006), who all conducted contrastive research on intercultural communication, and, with the exception of Juliane House, also approached the topic via interlanguage pragmatics. Furthermore, the concept of face work, originally coined by sociologist Erving Goffman, will be briefly introduced and discussed in relation to German and English speakers.

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