Interaction in Mandarin Chinese and English as a Multilingua Franca Context, Practice, and Perception

Interaction in Mandarin Chinese and English as a Multilingua Franca: Context, Practice, and Perception proposes a model of context, practice, and perception and raises awareness of the importance of understanding language use and perception in context in order to avoid intercultural communication misunderstandings. This book provides an overview of previous research on the pragmatics of Chinese and English as a multilingua franca in multilingual contexts. It argues that context is socioculturally shaped, interactionally constructed, and personally related. Context can influence and be established by the practice and perception of communicative acts. This book also combines the proposed model with the discursive-interactional approach to uncover the interplay of context, practice, and perception of extended concurrent speech for strong disagreement by native Chinese speakers in spontaneous conversations in Mandarin and English as a multilingua franca.

Contents List of FiguresList of TablesForewordAcknowledgmentsList of AbbreviationsIntroductionChapter 1 Context and (im)politenessChapter 2 Understanding Chinese (im)politeness in contextChapter 3 Pragmatics of English in multilingual contextsChapter 4 Practice in Mandarin ChineseChapter 5 Practice in English as a multilingua francaChapter 6 Perceptions of extended concurrent speech for strong disagreementChapter 7 Perceptions of disagreement and overlappingChapter 8 Context, practice and perceptionAppendicesGlossaryIndex

Weihua Zhu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. Her current research interests include discourse analysis, Chinese pragmatics, language pedagogy, and English as a Multilingua Franca.