Preface
When we set out to compile a handbook for the vast field of intercultural discourse and communication, we knew that we wanted to have something that was in some sense really a handbook. A book you keep returning to to jog your memory about how to do something, or remind you not to forget something. In Intercultural Discourse and Communication (IDC), that means having a perspective that is both theoretical and practical, that keeps in focus both the discourse and the communication, and that is truly intercultural (and, although not in the title, multicultural and cross-cultural, the definitions of which we will not dwell on, but are discussed in several of the chapters, especially Chapters 1 and 2). Our audience is thus an eclectic one: people who will read to understand the state of a field that really isn’t a single field, students just learning how to do analyses and also to theorize their ideas, and we hope also people “in the trenches” doing work in intercultural situations.
The first two parts comprise an overview handbook, containing chapters that provide historical context as well as theoretical perspectives. Our experience teaching also suggests that readers will be interested in surveys of different kinds of discourse phenomena that repeatedly arise as problematic in intercultural discourse contact. So the third part forms a mini-handbook on these phenomena: turn taking, silence, indirectness, and politeness.
Some of the most useful things in any handbook are examples, ...
