Abstract
Taking the Russian and Irish teleconference team of a multinational IT company as the subject of analysis, this paper problematizes the assumption that a community of practice (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992) will converge on a set of conventions through prolonged, recurrent interaction. Although the teleconference team successfully achieves a level of communication sufficient to carry out their task, key pragmalinguistic conventions remain resistant to passive assimilation, affecting the level of engagement expressed by team members. Thus the study of participation frameworks (Goffman 1981) can reveal how participant engagement is established and sustained, as well as where crosslinguistic transfer of pragmalinguistic norms may hinder participation. By means of discourse analysis, CA analysis, and deviant case analysis, normative discourse practices and linguistic strategies in the intra- and intercultural data are identified in terms of their pragmatic function and the participation frameworks they elicit. Attempts to facilitate engagement are analyzed, and general recommendations are made for why the study of culturally specific participation frameworks may have particular relevance for high-level nonnative speakers.
About the author
Lindy B. Comstock received her MA in applied linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at UCLA. Her research interests include intercultural communication, functional linguistics, and workplace, media, and political discourse. She is the recipient of the Fulbright and FLAS fellowships.
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