Cultural awareness and the negotiation of meaning in intercultural communication

This paper is organised around a number of episodes in intercultural communication in which there is some degree of mismatch between the intentions and interpretations of the interlocutors. Three concepts are used to illuminate the nature of these mismatches: the concept of common ground, the principle of indexicality and the concept of cultural models. The episodes serve to illustrate how intercultural communication is facilitated by four levels of cultural awareness: a level of general awareness of how common ground, indexing conventions and cultural models may differ between members of different communities; a level of detailed awareness of the common ground, indexing conventions and cultural models of members of a particular community; an awareness of areas of communication in which differences often exist and mismatches may occur; and an overarching level of meta-awareness, which makes a speaker aware of the limitations of the first three levels and points to the need for creative inference and negotiation in specific situations.