Misunderstanding in Social Life：Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk

Misunderstanding in Social Life examines problematic talk in ordinary conversation and different institutional settings, including social events and story-tellings, education and assessment activities, and interviews in TV news broadcasts, employment agencies, legal settings and language testing. The analyzed interactions are located in a variety of sociocultural environments and conducted in a range of languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese; language varieties such as Aboriginal Australian English and Maori New Zealand English, and non-native varieties.
The original studies included in this volume adopt a variety of theoretical perspectives, including discourse-pragmatic approaches, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, social constructionism, and tropological and narrative analysis. They represent multiple views of misunderstanding as a multilayered discourse event.

Juliane House is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Hamburg University.

Gabriele Kasper is Professor of Second Language Studies at the University of

Hawai'i, and Steven Ross is Professor at the School of Policy Studies, Kwansei Gakuin University, Kobe/Sanda, Japan.