Interactional sociolinguistics as a resource for intercultural pragmatics

The link between interactional sociolinguistics (IS) and intercultural prag matics (ICP) is a close and obvious one. Both fields are concerned with how language conveys meaning in interaction; both regard the process by which language does so as dynamic, emergent, and resulting from the interaction of participants rather than from the single-handed linguistic production of individual speakers; and for both, the language of intercul tural interaction is key. However, whereas this latter focus is constitutive of the field of ICP, it is, in a way, a heuristic for IS; that is, IS researchers tend to focus on intercultural interaction because the ways in which language works to create meaning in interaction stand out in relief when expectations regarding their use are not shared, and intercultural interac tion provides a research site in which such expectations are typically not shared. That is why the discourse analysis of audio- or videotaped inter cultural interaction is the bedrock of IS methodology, and its theoretical foundation is the notion that expectations and conventions regardin