Variational pragmatics: Studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction ANNE BARRON and KLAUS P. SCHNEIDER Intercultural pragmatics is usually associated with pragmatic di¤erences between di¤erent languages. This seems to be the default reading of the term. However, this reading tacitly ignores that there is no one-to-one re- lationship between languages and cultures. 1 Speakers who share the same native language do not necessarily share the same culture. For instance, native speakers of English in Ireland and the United States use language in di¤erent ways (e.g., Schneider 1999, 2008). Neither do Americans in the US all use English in the same way (cf., e.g., Barron 2009; Wolfram and Schilling 2006: 93–101). On the other hand, cultures may be shared by speakers with di¤erent native languages. Thus, as language use in in- teraction is shaped by cultural values, pragmatic similarities may occur across languages, while pragmatic di¤erences may occur across varieties of the same language. Variational pragmatics is a subdiscipline of intercultural pragmatics. Other subdisciplines include contrastive pragmatics, cross-cultural prag- matics, ethnopragmatics, interlanguage pragmatics, and postcolonial pragmatics. Contrastive pragmatics is concerned with inter-lingual di¤er- ences, i.e., with pragmatic variation between di¤erent languages. Cross- cultural pragmatics, on the other hand, compares the ways in which dif- ferent languages are used in communication. It also deals with native speaker—non-native speaker interaction and with lingua franca commu- nication (cf. Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; House-Edmondson 1986: 282). 2 Ethnopragmatics is concerned with explaining speech practices in terms of a culture-internal perspective (e.g., in terms of values) rather than in terms of presumed pragmatic universals (cf. Goddard 2006). Interlan- guage pragmatics focuses on the specific nature of language use conven- tions in learner language, e.g., in the English as a foreign language spoken by native speakers of German, and also on the acquisition of these conventions by learners (cf. Kasper 1998; Kasper and Rose 1999; Barron 2003: 26–28). The use of second (as opposed to foreign) languages in interaction is studied in postcolonial pragmatics. In other words, this Intercultural Pragmatics 6-4 (2009), 425–442 DOI 10.1515/IPRG.2009.023 1612-295X/09/0006–0425 6 Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Authenticated | 130.126.32.13 Download Date | 2/28/13 9:33 PM