Edinburgh Napier University

  When two individuals from different cultural backgrounds fail to achieve mutual understanding, the accusatory finger is almost always automatically pointed at ‘cultural difference’. Indeed it is a commonly held notion that interactions between speakers from different cultural
backgrounds are susceptible to miscommunication. This chapter seeks to put forward a dynamic and multi-faceted view of intercultural miscommunication that forces us to re-evaluate the role that culture plays in the interaction and, secondly, to illuminate an aspect of miscommunication that has often been obscured—that is, what happens after the miscommunication episode. Methodological and analytic inspiration derives from linguistic ethnography combining insights from discourse analysis and ethnography. The data suggest that miscommunication between participants does not lead to a communication break own but instead, creates a productive site for negotiating relationships.