Accommodating intercultural encounters: Elaborations and extensions

Abstract

(From the chapter) as the need for sophisticated theories of intercultural communication grows increasingly important, Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) has been shown to provide insight into many of the critical phenomena and processes involved / CAT contributes to our understanding of interactions like these by focusing attention on the language, nonverbal behavior, and paralanguage used by interlocutors to realize moves of speech "convergence" and "divergence," that is, linguistic moves to decrease and increase communicative distance /// presents an approach to CAT in the intercultural context, together with some of its major propositions, revised for this context / describe some recent empirical work on intercultural communication that tests and extends CAT and that has clarified several important problems / point to a number of theoretical and methodological issues that must be addressed in the intercultural context, and that should be part of the research agenda in this area for the coming years