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In a world of increasing migration and technological progress, multilingual communication has become the rule rather than the exception. This book reflects the growing interest in understanding communication between members of different linguistic groups and contains a collection of original papers by members of the German Science Foundation's research center on multilingualism at Hamburg University and by international experts, offering an overview of the most important research fields in multilingual communication. The book is divided into four sections dealing with interpreting and transl

AbstractThis paper revisits the concept of 'politeness marker', by proposing the bottom-up and corpus-based model of 'ritual frame indicating expressions' (RFIEs). Our central argument is that, in certain linguacultures, the relationship between 'politeness markers' and politeness itself is significantly stronger than in others. Therefore, any theory which argues that there is a definite relationship between form and politeness - or totally rejects this relationship - is potentially problematic if it does not take a contrastive pragmatic perspective, simply because this relationship is subject to significant linguacultural variation. The contrastive pragmatic study of RFIEs also helps us to determine the relationship between forms and speech acts and, indirectly, politeness. As a case study, we examine in this paper one-word and more complex expressions which are commonly associated with the speech acts of request and apology, drawn from the typologically distant Chinese and English linguacultures.

Misunderstanding is a pervasive phenomenon in social life, sometimes with serious consequences for people''s life chances. Misunderstandings are especially hazardous in high-stakes events such as job interviews or in the legal system. In unequal power encounters, unsuccessful communication is regularly attributed to the less powerful participant, especially when those participants are members of an ethnic minority group. But even when communicative events are not prestructured by participants'' differential positions in social hierarchies, misunderstandings occur at different levels of interac

The present paper is based on an interview, conducted by Victor V. Leontyev with Juliane House and Dániel Z. Kádár. It provides an overview of a new theory in pragmatics, namely, Ritual Frame Indicating Expressions (RFIEs). This theory provides a bottom-up and corpus-based approach to the study of various pragmatically important expressions through which the participants of an interaction indicate their awareness of the Ritual Frame underlying the interaction. 'Ritual Frame' encompasses a cluster of standard situations in which the rights and obligations of the participants are clearly defined. The corpus-based RFIE approach complements sociopragmatic approaches to various expression types, including so-called 'politeness markers', honorifics, forms of address and so on, and it also helps us to systematically capture the relationship between expressions and speech acts. In studying RFIEs, the analyst focuses on the ways in which RFIEs spread across various standard situations. The study of this issue also allows the researcher to contrastively examine the use of RFIEs across linguacultures. Such contrastive research helps us to unearth major linguacultural differences. For example, the research of J. House and D.Z. Kádár has revealed that while in East Asian linguacultures such as Chinese RFIEs tend to be strongly associated with a particular speech act, this relationship is casual in Western linguacultures.

Abstract
In this paper, we revisit the popular assumption that politeness in languages such as Japanese and Korean with a complex honorific system is crucially different from politeness in languages with no comparably rich honorific repertoires, such as Chinese. We propose a bottom–up, contrastive and corpus-based model through which we challenge this binary view. This model combines interaction ritual and speech acts. As a case study, we compare a set of expressions representing lexico-grammatical honorifics in Japanese and Chinese, i.e., in a so-called "honorific-rich" and a "non-honorific-rich" language. Our results show that the group of honorifics studied work in an essentially comparable fashion, hence disproving the above-outlined binary view.

Conflicts between different racial, ethnic, national and other social groups are becoming more and more salient. One of the main sources of these internal conflicts is social and economic inequality, in particular the increasing disparities between majority and minority groups. Even societies that had been successful in dealing with external conflicts and making the transition from war to peace have realized that this does not automatically resolve internal conflicts. On the contrary, the resolution of external conflicts may even sharpen the internal ones. This volume, a joint publication of the University of Haifa and the International Center for Graduate Studies (ICGS) at the University of Hamburg, addresses questions of how to deal with internal issues of social inequality and cultural diversity and, at the same time, how to build a shared civility among their different national, ethnic, religious and social groups