Common Ground

Common Ground

1. What is it?

   • Common ground refers to the shared knowledge that different people must have in order to understand each other

2. Current Appoaches

   • Pragmatic view
     • Specific mental representations in mind
   • Cognitive view
     • Rejects the idea that a priori mental representations are a fundamental part of the process of communication.
   • Related with Intercultural pragmatics

3. Common ground in the socio-cognitive approach

   • Long term speech communities
   • Short term speech communities
   • Two sides of common ground
     • Micro concern that belongs to a community
     • Macro concern that belongs to their individual experiences
     • Core common ground
       • Common sense
       • Culture sense
       • Formal sense
     • Emergent common ground
       • Shared sense
       • Current sense

4. Common ground in Intercultural interactions

   • Both success and failures
     • The main problem is to consider that we can find a lot of misunderstandings and bad interpretations in the conversation because of cultural diversity.
     • The “Success Approach” in cross-cultural communication has as the main issue a cross-linguistic communication illustrating basics that facilitate members to achieve the main conversational assignments.
   • "Not Sure approach"
     • Referred to the situation in which the interlocutors have a type of susceptibility towards the other communicative participants but it is not sure what they foresee.
     • Originated with native speakers and non-native speakers.
   • Formulaic language use and common ground
     • Main measure of common ground
     • Common ground unified with context and salience