PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN THE BUSINESS WORLD Dr. DINÇAY KÖKSAL

cross-cultural communication, business, pragmatism, level of the language To enhance effective cross-cultural communication in spoken business contexts, the communicators should have socio-cultural, socio-pragmatic and pragma-linguistic information/competence to be able to identify the pragmatic content of the message. If the communicators cannot go beyond the conceptual meaning of the utterances, serious misunderstanding may come into being at the pragmatic level (This is called pragmatic failure). This paper discusses the difficulties in cross-cultural communication at cultural, socio-pragmatic, and pragma-linguistic levels and suggests practical solutions as to how to overcome such difficulties when communicating with people from different cultures in the business relations. PRAGMATIC MEANING AND COMMUNICATION Conversations involving culturally different speakers are more likely to go wrong than those involving people who share the same cultural background. Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz (1982: 14) explain this as follows