EXTERNAL APPROPRIATIONS AS A STRATEGY FOR PARTICIPATING IN INTERCULTURAL MULTI-PARTY CONVERSATIONS 1

The rapidly growing field of intercultural communication studies has provided many insights on how people interact when their cultural backgrounds are not completely shared or attuned. Thanks to it, we are now aware that linguistic understanding is not enough to ensure that interlocutors will achieve their interactional goals smoothly and satisfactorily. There are background assumptions, interpretation cues and interactional scripts that vary from culture to culture and that are likely to condition the ways in which speakers conduct and interpret interactions. A number of studies have pointed to the misunderstandings that may and do arise when such cultural backgrounds are not shared. These studies however, in order to isolate the 'cultural' factors responsible for the misunderstandings, were often based on encounters in which speakers had a good command of the language, which was thus ruled out as a possible problematic source (e.g. Gumperz 1982, 1992; Scollon & Scollon 1981; Tannen 1984). Work in the applied linguistic field, on the other hand, has stressed the consequences on interaction of the speakers' limited command of a second language. Thus a number of studies have been carried out that examined the conversational strategies employed by native and non native speakers for overcoming the difficulties posed by the learners' limited language proficiency; the learners' cultural background, however, has seldom been taken into consideration, as well as the general socio-cultural context in which learning and the observed interactions took place (e.g. Gass & Varonis 1985, 1989; Long 1981, 1983, 1996). What is needed is a convergence of the two fields, producing analyses sensitive to both the intercultural and the interlinguistic dimensions. This is in line with Gumperz's call to "abandon the existing view of communication which draws a basic distinction between cultural and social knowledge on the one hand and linguistic signaling processes on the other" (1982: 186). Furthermore, both the sociolinguistic/ethnographic and the applied linguistic approach have rarely taken into consideration the developmental dimension, that is how individuals gradually learn the linguistic and cultural means for achieving mutual understanding in interactions. From this developmental perspective too, linguistic and sociocultural knowledge must be seen as tightly intertwined, extending the "language socialization" approach of Schieffelin & Ochs (1986a, 1986b) to situations of second language and second culture acquisition. Studies of language socialization have stressed the culturally bound nature of language acquisition and use by children and their