Talking about intercultural experiences: the cognitive ‘leap’into another universe

Abstract

Based on the analyses of different videotaped sequences in which exchange students talk about their intercultural experiences abroad, I will show how they conceptualize those experiences on the verbal, vocal, and visual plane. The empirical data originates from the project Intercultural Communication in Interaction (). By taking up the theoretical framwork of interactional linguistics, as well as recent research in cognitive metaphor and gesture I will show how the co-occurrence of lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and suprasegmental-phonological as well as gestural and mimic elements form specific stylized features as contextualization cues through which participants in talk-in-interaction co-construct and frame their experiences in creative ways. Thus, the experience of ‘otherness’, as well as gaps between the cultures and the ‘leap’ into the new unknown universe, is displayed on the facial level by widened and fluttering eyes, accompanied by verbal expressions of bewilderment and astonishment, and marked prosodically by pitch jumps, lengthenings, or glides endowed with a strong emotional charge. Those examples also illustrate the use of nonverbal hints such as facial expressions and gestural devices which metonymically reflect underlying cultural models.