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The Vietnamese worker immediately interpreted the utterance in terms of being laid off
(rather than having a holiday). Something good in one person's schema can sound like
something bad in another's.
Cross-cultural pragmatics
The study of differences in expectations based on cultural schemata is part of a broad
area of investigation generally known as cross-cultural pragmatics. To look at the ways in
which meaning is constructed by speakers from different cultures will actually require a
complete reassessment of virtually everything we have considered so far in this survey. The
concepts and terminology may provide a basic analytic framework, but the realization of those
concepts may differ substantially from the English language examples presented here.
When we reviewed the cooperative principle and the maxims, we assumed some kind of
general middle-class Anglo-American cultural background. What if we assumed a cultural
preference for not saying what you know to be the case in many situations? Such a preference
is reported in many cultures and would clearly require a different approach to the relationship
between the maxims of quality and quantity in a more comprehensive pragmatics.
When we considered turn-taking mechanisms, we did not explore the powerful role of
silence within the normal conversa-tional practices of many cultures. Nor did we include a
discussion of a socially prescribed 'right to talk' which, in many cultures, is recognized as the
structural basis of how interaction proceeds.
When we explored types of speech acts, we did not include any observations on the
substantial differences that can exist cross-culturally in interpreting concepts like
'complimenting', 'thanking', or 'apologizing'. The typical American English style of
complimenting creates great embarrassment for some Native American Indian receivers (it's
perceived as excessive), and can elicit a reaction similar to apologizing from some Japanese
receivers (it's perceived as impossible to accept). Indeed, it is unlikely that the division one
cultural group makes between any two social actions such as 'thanking' or 'apologizing' will be
matched precisely within another culture.
The study of these different cultural ways of speaking is some-times called contrastive
pragmatics. When the investigation focuses more specifically on the communicative behavior
of non-native speakers, attempting to communicate in their second language, it is described as
interianguage pragmatics. Such studies increasingly reveal that we all speak with what might
be called a pragmatic accent, that is, aspects of our talk that indicate what we assume is
communicated without being said.
If we have any hope at all of developing the capacity for cross-cultural communication,
we will have to devote a lot more attention to an understanding of what characterizes pragmatic
accent, not only in others, but in ourselves. I hope that this brief survey has provided a
beginning, and an incentive to explore further.

DEIXIS

Deixis is a technical term (from Greek) for one of the most basic things we do
with utterances.It means “pointing” via language.Any linguistic form used to accomplish
this “pointing” is called a deictic expression.When you notice a strange object and
ask, “What’s that?”, you are using a deitic expression (“that”) to indicate something in the
immediate context.Deitic expression are also sometimes called indexicals.They are
among the first forms to be spoken by very young children and can be used to
indicate people via person deixis (“me” “you”), or location via temporal deixis (“now”