Cross-Cultural Verbal Communication: A Perspective Of Interactive Pragmatics And Rhetoric

Intercultural communication (IC for short) as an area of study was introduced in the 1980's into the foreign language circles in China. Great achievements have been made in the past twenty years or so. Due to an overwhelming focus on descriptions of cultural differences, however, theoretical explorations have been neglected. The same case is true of teaching materials on IC abroad while monographic theoretical studies on IC there display a deplorable disconnection between theory and practice.The fact that the multidisciplinary nature of IC entails multidisciplinary approaches to IC studies has produced the negative result of theory construction deprived of a systematic and integrated focus. As a striking contrast, pragmatic and rhetoric studies have yielded fruits of both concrete examples and theoretical contemplations. Therefore, the present paper adopts the integration of pragmatic and rhetoric studies for research on cross-cultural verbal communication with a view to building up a theoretical framework of interactive (cross-cultural) verbal communication.The paper starts with the distinction between linguistic meaning, utterance meaning and pragmatic intention, thus expounding the relationship between the form and content of verbal communication. The paper then proceeds to classification of pragmatic intention into conveyance of information, expression of feeling and argumentation of views, followed by the differentiation of instantaneous focused intention in daily verbal interaction and noninstantaneous diffused intention in literary works and division of communication success into social success on the part of the rhetor and cognitive success on the part of the audience.Language use and its interpretation have been so far studied in the code model, the inference model and the ostensive-inference model with the first offering us a means of decoding linguistic meaning, the second, a starting point for locating utterance relevance and the third, relevance for determining speaker's intention. It is reproved that minimum shared information between the rhetor and the audience is a prerequisite for intention inference and that both context and relevance can be given or chosen in the process of communication.A comparative study of "rhetorical devices", "identification in rhetoric" and "cognitive rhetoric" speaks for the argument for the rationality of effect-driven communication. With effect-driven communication proved to be a sound theory, the paper goes on to review various views on the principle of appropriateness in verbal communication and uphold the principle to be one of great significance and fundamental importance. Also explored is the relationship between the abstract principle and the concrete rhetorical devices or communication strategies.The principle of appropriateness in verbal communication is in fact a condensation of the interaction between the rhetor, the audience and other contextual elements, a demonstration of the intertextuality on the part of the rhetor, the pre-structure on the part of the audience and the mutually manifested identities of both the rhetor and the audience.