Towards a sensory-pragmatics of competence: new (holistic) perspectives on business discourse and interaction in multilingual settings.

Panel convenors: Maria Cristina Gatti and Hiromasa Tanaka

Bargiela’s (2013) sensory-pragmatics perspective suggests that an understanding of communication as ‘embodied inter-action’ presupposes a holistic perspective to investigate business interaction in multi-lingual and multi-cultural environments in which lingua franca is used. This also entails an encompassing multidisciplinary understanding of competence as bodily being performed (Bargiela 2011) through multiple semiotic resources including language as well as cognition of social actors’ enactments and construal of time (Ballard & Seibold, 2004). The perception of competence elicited through the performative act is seen as part of the same heuristics (Muntanyola-Saura, 2014).

An ontology that conceives the body as active, generative and agentive of experience in social interaction, postulates space and time as vital, interactive, and dynamic constituents. Spatiality shapes social life and people shape the material environment through and over time. Treating spatiotemporality as meaning-ful helps to adopt an expansive orientation to semiotic resources and consider how the multiple features that are involved in discourse mediate and co-construct activities through an assembling process that is integral to meanings and communication.

In lingua franca environments, and particularly so in business and professional settings, participants may not have a high level of proficiency in the common language and nevertheless be able to perform meaningful activities and successfully transfer knowledge and competence. The felicitous result relies upon the fact that meaning is constructed in the situated activity through processes of indexicality (Silverstein 1985), rather than grammar and standardized norms (Cangarajah 2018); and coherence derives from the use of ‘spatial repertoires’ that are shaped and shared by participants. Spatial repertoires are diverse semioticized resources, “configurations of communicative resources that go together in particular activities” (Canagarajah 2018:36) and are assembled in place in collaboration among participants.

This panel aims to answer the call for a non-dualistic ontology of social interaction (Bargiela 2013) which goes beyond a constructivist-grounded pragmatics of discourse.

This panel also suggests an open flow between perceptions of the sensory components of discourse -which are present in the Asian cultures/thoughts-, and the need to expand the notion of a multidisciplinary approach to discourse in the European methodologies.

References:

Ballard, D. I. & Seibold, D. R. (2004). Organizational members’ communication and temporal experience: scale development and validation. Communication Research. 31(2), 135–172.

Bargiela-Chiappini, F. (2013). Embodied discursivity: introducing sensory pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics, 58, 39-42.

Canagarajah, S. (2018) The unit and focus of analysis in lingua franca English interactions. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 21 (4),1-20.

Muntanyola-Saura, D. (2014). A cognitive account of expertise: Why Rational Choice Theory is (often) a fiction. Theory & Psychology. 24 (1), 19-39.

Silverstein, M. 1985. Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology. In E. Mertz and R. J. Parmentier, (eds). Semiotic mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives, pp. 219–259. Orlando: Academic Press.