Misunderstandings in Intercultural Communication in Kenya: a Relevance Theoretic Approach

The main purpose of this book is to explore intercultural pragmatic failures using the relevance theoretic perspective. In particular, the primary aim is to find out the extent to which the cultural contexts and perceptions of relevance of interlocutors influence the inference process in communication, and whether relevance theory provides adequate tools for understanding the reasons for most cases of intercultural communication failures. A research that was conducted showed that most cases pragmatic failures in intercultural situations arise mainly because the inference process is constrained by the cultural contexts through the culture-specific principle of relevance. The study concluded that relevance theory provides the conceptual and descriptive tools which can fruitfully be applied to the analysis of most cases of intercultural pragmatic failures.