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Going beyond pragmatic failures: Dissonance in intercultural communication

Abstract Any circumstance in which speakers, deliberately or not, organize the linguistic action in such a way that hearers perceive it as grammatical but conflicting with the harmonious flow of the conversation, can be defined as a “dissonance.” In spite of the fact that dissonances can be produced either intentionally or unintentionally, both intra-culturally and inter-culturally, the present study focuses exclusively on dissonances involuntarily generated in intercultural communication, as a consequence of speaker's inadequate linguistic, sociolinguistic, or pragmatic competence. To provide some representative examples, six utterances occurred in six separate intercultural encounters will be analyzed. They were produced in Japanese by a female native speaker of Italian (the author of this paper) interacting in Japan with native speakers of the target language and culture. Given that dissonances may have consequences on the interpersonal level, and given that the utterances under analysis are in Japanese, a review of some influential studies on Japanese (im)politeness will also be offered. Ultimately, as the paper will show, the concept of unintentional, intercultural dissonance may also have some pedagogical implication. In fact, it may enable us to go beyond Thomas' (1983) distinction between “failures” of “pragmalinguistic” and “sociopragmatic” nature. In this respect, this study will show that (1) unintentional, intercultural dissonances can arise simultaneously from different overlapping categories of causes, either linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociopragmatic, or encyclopedic; (2) they can be produced by factors involving more than speakers' competence of mitigating illocutionary force and redressing face threatening acts; (3) they can display different degrees of intensity and have rather unpredictable effects, which can range quite widely from unpleasant feelings to humor.