Article Reference Intercultural pragmatics: a cognitive approach MOESCHLER, Jacques Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to explore pragmatic misunderstandings caused by intercultural factors. My thesis is that misunderstandings are caused not by difficulty in drawing the intended implicature, but primarily by lack of access to the correct explicature of the utterance. The explicit vs. implicit nature of the conveyed meaning is the key to the explanation of pragmatic misunderstanding. This argument is based on some assumptions supported by Relevance Theory, namely the ostensive-inferential character of linguistic communication and the difference between explicature and implicature. Some examples of intercultural misunderstanding will be discussed, and some consequences drawn. For instance, one parameter that increases the risk of misunderstanding is the quality of the audience’s linguistic knowledge. My hypothesis is that the greater the audience’s mastery of the speaker’s language, the greater the risk of intercultural mis- understanding. The reason is that speakers tend to attribute to non-native speakers cultural background which is in due proportion to their own mastery of language and therefore [...] MOESCHLER, Jacques. Intercultural pragmatics: a cognitive approach. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2004, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 49-70 Available at: http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:109768 Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version. 1 / 1