Intercultural communication and Positioning of Maxims: An Analysis of ‘The Terminal’

Abstract

Language is crucial in comprehending people's lives. Intercultural pragmatics focuses on communication. According to Kecskes (2000), intercultural communication involves persons from diverse cultural origins speaking different languages. They interact via a shared language. In intercultural communication, when individuals from various cultures speak different languages, it is challenging to understand one another. The study aimed to investigate how the main characters from the movie construct the current sense of emergent common ground from the perspective of the socio-cognitive approach. For the purpose of generating successful communication, (Grice, 1975), proposed four maxims that must not be ignored. The findings of the study indicated that in intercultural interaction between the two selected characters Frank and Viktor, Frank co-constructs a common ground because both of them come from different cultural backgrounds. He formulated the utterances in such a way that Viktor was able to comprehend the information with relative ease. The study also showed that Grice maxims, which include maxims of manner, maxims of quality, maxims of quality, and maxims of relevance, were both followed and sometimes ignored during an intercultural interaction between Frank and Viktor, i.e., maxims were positioned in a specific context.