Communication in a multilingual society: Some missed opportunities

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Abstract
This article critically examines contemporary interactional studies of the cultural specifity of human language, conducted mostly in modern, multiethnic, industrialized societies (e.g., Clyne 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Valdés & Pino 1981). What is often presented as the “linguistic evidence” for miscommunication in such contexts is in fact, we argue, the locus of the violations of the cooperative principles of discourse and human interaction, such as the Principle of Charity (Davidson 1974) and the Principle of Humanity (Grandy 1973). The conclusions these studies arrive at are vitiated by the fact, for which considerable empirical evidence exists, that the native speaker's repairability threshold depends crucially on nonlinguistic variables (Hackman 1977). Only a cross-cultural analysis of how or whether these misconstruals entail analogous consequences, regardless of who is being misunderstood by whom, can, we argue, produce the sort of evidence these studies claim to unearth.

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