Institutional Discourse in Cross-Cultural Contexts. This item is unavailable.Institutional Discourse in Cross-Cultural Contexts

While the fields of Institutional Discourse Analysis and Cross-Cultural Pragmatics are now two well established, and rapidly growing, subdisciplines within pragmatics, the cross-section between these two areas remains underexplored. The current book attempts to explore this interdisciplinary dimension, by presenting a collection of papers dealing with cross-cultural aspects of institutional interaction, approached from a variety of methodological perspectives (such as ethnomethodology, speech act theory, and systemic-functional grammar). Two areas of institutional interaction are explored in detail. The first is classroom interaction, where the focus is mainly on the question how foreign language learners can improve their communicative competence in a formal teaching environment. Phenomena investigated here include intonation, phatic talk, speech act realisations, and the issue of autonomous language learning. The second context is that of professional interaction in the narrow sense, which incorporates both business and academic discourse, and which includes both written (e.g. business letters) and spoken (e.g. conferencing, service encounters) modes of communication. Given that this collection has institutional (or professional) discourse as its main focus, it is an ideal companion volume to the earlier 'Discourse in Professional Contexts' (edited by R. Geluykens and K. Pelsmaekers, 1999) collection published in the same series.