The Yunshan Chair Professor of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies Istvan Kecskes fromNew YorkStateUniversity(Albany) was invited by theNationalCenterfor Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies to hold a seminar on Intercultural Pragmatics on June 9^th, 2013. The participants include teachers, researchers, M.A. and Ph.D. students from the university, and the pragmatics reading group of the Center.

Beginning with questions “Should we distinguish intercultural communication from intracultural communication? Why and how should we distinguish intercultural communication from intracultural communication?”, Professor Kecskes started the seminar interactively.

Then, Professor Kecskes explained interculturality, and the principled difference between intracultural and intercultural communication. He also discussed the nature and content of intercultural communication and intracultural communication. In intracultural communication, speakers rely on their prior knowledge rooted in cultural models, core common ground, shared knowledge, common beliefs of a relatively definable speech community. This knowledge is privatized and adjusted to actual situations by individuals belonging to that speech community. In contrast, intercultures are situationally emergent and co-constructed phenomenon that rely both on relatively definable cultural models and norms as well as situationally evolving features. Cultural constructs and models change diachronically while cultural representation and speech production by individuals’ changes synchronically. Prior knowledge of speakers brought into and privatized in the actual situational context belongs to different cultures and languages. Besides, preferred ways of saying things and preferred ways of organizing thoughts within a particular speech community in intracultural communication are discussed too.

Afterwards Professor Kecskes analyzed intercultural conversational data to demonstrate how intercultures are co-constructed in a communicative process in which cultural norms and models are brought into the interaction from prior experience of interlocutors and blend with features created ad hoc in the interaction.

During Question & Answer section, the pragmatic groups had a heated discussion in an interactive with Professor Kecskes about interculturality, emergent nature of intercultures, and how it is represented in intercultural interaction.