This study presents a corpus-based typological analysis of complementation. Complementation is typically used to frame a nutterance, thought, desire, or immediate perception. However, many alternative constructions are available to express similar meanings, such as nominalization, adverbial clauses, the verbal complex, and parataxis. This study examines multilingual corpora of 14 languages, and explores how frequently languages use complementation vis-à-vis alternative strategies. We show that half the languages investigated prefer complementation, while others favor parataxis or adverbial clauses over complementation. These results suggest that languages can be classified in terms of the extent to which they favor hierarchical or paratactic structures to frame propositions, and that this correlates with the stylistic features of the given languages.

Our team’s long-term project investigating social cognition in a range of languages is based on a corpus typology approach. We use a set of annotation schemata to code particular instances of language use that we see as indicating some aspect of social cognition. We then compare the amounts and types of instances by language or task participant. Much careful consideration went into designing annotation schema to look at various domains of social cognition. This set of guidelines describes our eight coding schemata so that our results are interpretable and to make our scientific process open. The guidelines should also provide enough information for people who are not part of the project to code their own language data.

Sweden is often commended for the inclusion of home languages in the formal education system: both mother tongue instruction (where a pupil's home language is taught as an optional school subject) and study guidance (where a pupil is given content support in their home language or prior language of schooling) are offered. Still, while many national educational policies are supportive of multilingualism, their enactment on the ground is often problematic. The attitudes and beliefs of teacher educators, in-service teachers, and pre-service teachers are crucial here, yet few studies have investigated how these key actors in Sweden perceive their encounters with linguistic diversity. Furthermore, an understanding of the similarities and differences in the perspectives across these three cohorts is lacking. We have analysed interviews with five teacher educators, five in-service teachers, and eight pre-service teachers concerning their attitudes and beliefs on multilingualism. These interviews reveal orientations towards language and language use in teacher education and primary schools. Specifically, language is seen both as a problem and as a resource. Our results uncover tensions in the expressed attitudes and beliefs about multilingualism, as well as about multilingual pre-service teachers in teacher education and multilingual pupils in the Swedish school.

The present thesis investigates unconventional metaphors in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Empirical approaches in metaphor research have gained prominence, yet methodologies could benefit from more transparent procedural descriptions and efforts to decrease researcher intuition in the data analysis. Unconventional metaphors in ELF have mainly been researched with form-based approaches, while investigations of the conceptual level are rare. The present thesis aims at enhancing objectivity by utilizing a stringent research design in particular in relation to metaphor interpretation, as well as advancing the understanding of unconventional metaphors in ELF by investigating what aspects distinguish unconventional from conventional metaphors. To achieve these aims, a survey was created, with stimuli based on videos and transcripts from the Corpus of Academic Spoken English. One hundred sixty ELF speakers participated in the survey. The responses were analyzed by identifying co-text (verbatim use of expressions from the stimuli), frames (identified through FrameNet, based on lexical units used by respondents), and other interpretations (individual cases of interpretations that are not co-text related and differ from frames) of the expressions given. This methodology purposely utilizes FrameNet to reduce the influence of the researcher’s intuition on the analysis. Findings indicate that unconventional metaphors can be defined by their novelty, aptness and co-text. Novelty distinguishes unconventional from conventional metaphors by using new or unused properties of metaphors. Aptness is an indicator of quality and determines how well designated properties lend themselves to elucidate what speakers want to express. Co-text reflects the socio-cultural context in which the metaphor is embedded, and it can bias interpretations. Taken together, the research presented offers a systematic approach to unconventional metaphors, enabling a definition of unconventionality based on empirical data. 

Teacher motivation has been shown to be a major factor that affects students’ motivation to learn a second language; however, English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers’ motivation has not been given enough attention, particularly in the Chinese context where English plays a key role. Thus, this study investigates the motivation of English teachers at the university level in China in order to prepare the ground for the development of recommendations on how to enhance teacher motivation and thereby improve teaching quality and student performance. 

101 in-service native Chinese EFL teachers currently working at universities in mainland China participated in the study voluntarily. A mixed methods design was adopted using a web-based questionnaire as the main instrument to explore EFL teachers’ motivation for choosing a teaching career and factors contributing to their motivation and demotivation. Individual background variables in relation to their motivation, such as their English writing proficiency, gender, teaching experience, overseas experience and types of students taught, were also examined. The questionnaire consists of closed questions adapted from previous studies and open-ended questions targeted at providing qualitative data as well as linguistic data for analyzing EFL teachers’ English writing proficiency. 

The results show that the EFL teachers were multi-motivated when choosing to enter the teaching profession, the main reasons being intrinsic, followed by altruistic reasons. The majority of the participants (73.30%) reported high levels of motivation at the present stage in their career. Significant differences between the first years of teaching and the present were found in the levels of teacher enthusiasm, interest and dedication. EFL teachers’ motivation was affected by various factors, among which student-related factors were reported the most important. Extrinsic factors such as a low salary and limited sources of income, unpleasant working conditions, and students’ negative attitudes were found to be demotivating factors. The results also indicated a positive correlation between EFL teachers’ level of motivation and satisfaction with self-reported English language skills (r =.435). The EFL teachers with overseas experience tended to outperform those with no overseas experience in terms of their English writing proficiency. Nevertheless, despite no statistically significant correlations between EFL teachers’ career motivation and the complexity of their written English nor between career motivation and gender, highly proficient and proficient EFL teachers tended to be predominately intrinsically motivated to enter teaching as compared with moderately proficient EFL teachers who became teachers primarily for altruistic reasons. More female (84.10%) than male EFL teachers reported becoming teachers for altruistic reasons, whereas male teachers more often reported choosing to be an EFL teacher for extrinsic reasons. Age was found to correlate negatively with the EFL teachers’ career motivation. That is, the older EFL teachers were even less likely to change their career and choose another career path than the younger ones. No significant differences in motivation were found between teachers who teach different types of students.

This study investigated the impact of sojourning activity on children in terms of language development and identity awareness for families with Taiwanese background who migrated to Australia and sent their children back to Taiwan to receive formal education during school holidays. The study conducted a survey to explore language usage in the families and the reasons to maintain a bilingual learning environment for Chinese. The study then interviewed the parents about the Chinese language education of the children and explored the social identity of the children during the journey between Taiwan and Australia. Although only mothers were willing to be interviewed, the results showed that parents themselves were persistent in their nostalgia and educational philosophy, but that children gradually changed their self-identity between the two cultures and languages. The goals of the parents with this sojourning activity were not only to improve their children’s Chinese language skills but also to increase and foster children’s identification with Taiwan. However, the results of the interviews revealed that the children had gradually developed their own personal identity, which differed from the one their parents aimed to achieve. By exploring the experiences of Taiwanese families traveling between educational systems to and from Taiwan and Australia, this study aims to provide parents and language educators with some suggestions on foreign language learning from a social identity perspective.

This study investigates the transnational experiences of young Taiwanese-background children living in Australia, who sojourn to their parents’ homeland during the school holidays to improve their linguistic and cultural skills, as reported by their mothers. Although this appears to be a frequent practice in the Taiwanese diaspora, showcasing the agency of this community, little research has systematically investigated this practice, and in particular its impact on the children and their families. Data for this study were obtained through online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with mothers who engage in this practice, to gather information on family histories and participants’ backgrounds, family language policies, and parents’ perceptions of children's experiences and challenges. The data show that parents aim to enhance their children's proficiency levels in the home language as well as their Taiwanese identity. Children, however, take an agentive role with regard to identity choices, so parents’ aims are not always fulfilled. Sojourning is presented as a clear example not only of enacted family language policy, but also as an explicit management practice, positioning the Taiwanese diaspora within both their new as well as their old homeland.

Second language (L2) aptitude has been broadly defined as the rate and ease of initially acquiring a second language. Historically, L2 aptitude has been understood as a stable trait that predetermined L2 achievement, regardless of individual learners’ efforts to acquire an L2. This traditional view of L2 aptitude as fixed and stable has led to it being a relatively neglected area of research within second language acquisition (SLA) studies. The little research that was in fact conducted was diagnostic in nature, and mostly used tests such as the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) to select potentially gifted L2 learners. Given that six decades have passed since the publication of the MLAT, now is a good time to revisit the literature and investigate whether L2 aptitude continues to be viewed as an individual difference of little interest to SLA research. While summative literature reviews of L2 aptitude research have been written, few systematic reviews exist. This article conducts a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) to provide a principled, comprehensive and reproducible synthesis of research into L2 aptitude published over the last 60 years (1959–2019). In this SQLR, close to one hundred journal articles and PhD dissertations were examined to discern generalisations and limitations in the field. This SQLR identifies a shift in the rationale for L2 aptitude testing, in which a diagnostic focus has been replaced by an explanatory perspective. Furthermore, our article points to a renewed interest in L2 aptitude research, which has come to be characterised by a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the concept and its components.

While Australia is a highly linguistically diverse country, its educational policy is strongly dominated by a monolingual mindset, and thus languages other than English find little institutional support. A few selected languages, considered of vital importance to the country, are taught as foreign languages, but there is little provision for home or foreign languages at the preschool level.

Using Chua and Baldauf’s (Handbook of research in second language teaching and learning. Routledge, New York, 2011) model of language policy and planning as the analytical framework, the chapter explores formal and non-formal activities to foster the development of languages in young children at preschool level. These initiatives range from macro-level planning, targeting mostly English-speaking children acquiring a small number of languages, to micro-level planning, aimed at supporting home language maintenance and development. Micro-level initiatives can be parent-initiated, e.g., playgroups for diverse languages, family day care in the relevant languages, or sojourning to the parents’ home countries, or include more formal programs, usually developed and run by communities, such as supplementary schooling (e.g., community language schools).

The chapter shows that, despite a societal monolingual orientation, communities can be creative in developing initiatives. Not every community is active in pursuing language maintenance, however, and the overview suggests that some languages are better placed for intergenerational transmission than others.

Even a cursory look at conference programs and proceedings reveals a burgeoning interest in the field of social and affective factors in home language maintenance and development. To date, however, research on this topic has been published in piecemeal fashion, subsumed under the more general umbrella of ‘bilingualism’. Within bilingualism research, there has been an extensive exploration of linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives on the one hand, and educational practices and outcomes on the other. In comparison, social and affective factors – which lead people to either maintain or shift the language – have been under-researched.

This is the first volume that brings together the different strands in research on social and affective factors in home language maintenance and development, ranging from the micro-level (family language policies and practices), to the meso-level (community initiatives) and the macro-level (mainstream educational policies and their implementation). The volume showcases a wide distribution across contexts and populations explored. Contributors from around the world represent different research paradigms and perspectives, providing a rounded overview of the state-of-the-art in this flourishing field.

In this paper, I propose a decompositional lexical semantic analysis of the plural noun imaginings. The data for this study are sourced from the Corpus of Historical AmericanEnglish (COHA), and as analytical framework an object-oriented semantics based on the Unified Eventity Representation (UER) is deployed. After presenting the background to this study and introducing the data and methods, I discuss the results of the corpus data analyses. Frequencies across genres and decades, collocated adjectives and their evaluative strength, coordinated nouns, nominal genitives preceding the target word, and prepositional phrases embedded in the target word’s noun phrase are screened for their contribution to the meaning specification. The results feed into the development of a lexical semantic description for imaginings, and substantiate that the semantics of imaginings—and its corresponding verb imagine—are closely related to that of remember.

In the last decade, linguists have started to develop and make use of ontologies, encouraged by the progress made in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and the Semantic Web. This paper gives an overview of notions and dimensions of “ontology” and of ontologies for and in linguistics. It discusses building blocks, design aspects, and capabilities of formal ontologies and provides some implementation pointers. The focus of this paper, however, is on linguistic research and what a modelling framework based on ontologies has to offer. Accordingly, the paper does not aim at providing an overview of specific models for computational processing. To illustrate the issues at hand, an example scenario from linguistic typology is selected instead, where the aim of describing the world's languages is approached through ontologies.

Migrant and refugee parents considering raising their children in their non-mainstream home language often fear that this decision may impact negatively on their children’s English language ability and thus affect their academic prospects. The lack of institutional support for home languages in the Australian school system, and the well-intentioned but misguided advice parents may receive to switch to the mainstream language in family interactions reinforce parents’ doubts. To assuage parents’ concerns and assist them in making an informed decision most appropriate for their family circumstances, we developed and delivered free workshops on bilingual upbringing. We also trained bilingual facilitators who adapted the workshops culturally and linguistically and conducted these in their own communities. This paper discusses these workshops, the feedback received, our observations, and lessons learned.

The terms refugee, asylum seeker and boat people are of particular prominence in the Australian discourse surrounding immigration policy, and are widely used in day-to-day conversation among Australians. Despite their frequency of use, a lexico-semantic study of the terms has not been carried out to date. This paper fills this gap by proposing a semantic analysis of them. The study is based on a corpus created from online comments to the Australian television programme Go Back To Where You Came From (Season 1, SBS 2011). After introducing the data and analytical framework—object-oriented semantics—we discuss the terms’ lexical semantics. While the discussion of immigration issues is emotionally laden, our results suggest that the default semantics of the terms do not include evaluative components. Rather, speakers tend to evaluate the agreed-upon semantic specifications differently depending on their political views. We show how each term represents a specific node in a network of concepts for translocating individuals, but may in context also be applied to neighbouring nodes that lack a lexicalization. While the terms are seemingly used interchangeably, our analysis instead emphasizes the influence of the underlying conceptual structure and the resulting constrained plasticity of nominal meaning in context.

A report on a conference initiated by the International Association for Applied Linguistics (AILA) Research Network (ReN) on Social and Affective Factors in Home Language Maintenance and Development. The HOLM 2016 conference, held in Berlin in February 2016, attracted close to 70 scholars and practitioners from over 20 countries interested in home language maintenance and development who met over a period of two days to exchange ideas and discuss projects.

This dissertation investigates linguistic and metalinguistic practices in everyday Twitter discourse in relation to aspects of speech and writing. The overarching aim is to investigate how the spoken–written interface is reconfigured in the digital writing spaces of social media.

The dissertation comprises four empirical case studies and six chapters. The first study investigates communicative functions of hashtags in a speech act pragmatic framework, focalizing tagging practices that not only mark topics or organize hypertextual interaction, but rather have more specific locally meaningful functions. Two studies investigate reported speech in tweets, focusing on quotatives typically associated with informal conversational interaction (e.g., BE like). The studies identify strategies by which Twitter users animate (Tannen, 2007) speech reports. Further, one of the studies explores how such animating practices are afforded (Hutchby, 2001). Lexically, orthographically, and with images, but primarily through typography, users make voice, gesture, and stance present in their tweets, digitally re-embodying the rich nonverbal expressivity of animation in talk. Finally, a study investigates notions of talk-like tweeting from an emic perspective, showing users' negotiations of how tweets can and should correspond to speech in relation to social identity, linguistic competence, and personal authenticity.

Six chapters situate and synthesize the case studies in an expanded theoretical framework. Together, the studies show how Twitter's speech–writing hybridity extends beyond a mix of linguistic features, and challenges a traditional idea of writing as a mere representation of speech. Talk-like tweeting remediates (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) presence and embodiment, forgoing the abstraction of phonetic print literacy for nonverbal expressivity and an embodied written surface. Twitter talk is shown not simply to substitute literacy norms for oral norms, but to complicate and reconfigure these norms. Talk-like tweeting makes manifest an ongoing cultural renegotiation of the meanings of speech and writing in the era of digital social media.

As Australian universities are increasingly pressured into attracting participation of groups previously underrepresented in the higher education system, the need to support these cohorts of students becomes more evident. This paper describes an online resource developed by members of the Linguistics team at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, to engage students with disciplinary knowledge, provide opportunities for independent and/or small group practice, test their understanding of materials covered in the lectures, self- evaluate their work, conduct exam revisions, and overall scaffold the learning process, fostering independent learning and self- reliance. While reporting on students’ perceptions of this resource, we finish the paper with a word of caution about the effectiveness on online learning in university settings.

Home language literacy education in Australia has been pursued predominantly through Community Language Schools. At present, some 1000 of these, attended by over 100,000 school-age children, cater for 69 of the over 300 languages spoken in Australia. Despite good intentions, these schools face a number of challenges. For instance, children may lack motivation and perceive after-hours schooling as an unnecessary burden. Trained teachers and suitable teaching materials are often not available. Moreover, not every language can be offered in each city or region. Hence, home language speakers’ needs are often not met. This situation has detrimental effects for children, families and communities, and entails a loss of opportunities for the country. Reporting on an alternative approach, this paper presents a pilot study conducted in Australia with English–German bilinguals. We sought to investigate whether primary school-aged children can self-direct their home language literacy acquisition through playing online educational games in the privacy of their homes and with little adult input. Results indicate that the games can be effective in promoting emergent literacy development. Thus, such a grassroots approach could become a viable option for multilingual societies, addressing some of the practical challenges faced by, for instance, Community Language Schools.

Australia is a country of high linguistic diversity, with more than 300 languages spoken. Today, 19% of the population aged over 5 years speak a language other than English at home. Against this background, we examine government policies and prominent initiatives developed at national level in the past 30 years to address the challenge of offering 'Literacy for all', in particular focusing on minority language speaking children. Across the examined policies and initiatives, a distinct negative correlation can be observed: the more multilingual Australia has become, the more assimilationist the policies, and the more monolingual the orientation of the society that governments have sought to establish through policy. We argue that to enhance literacy outcomes more generally, this orientation needs to be reversed. We explain why policy understanding and approach need to instead promote the maintenance of home languages and support literacy acquisition in these languages.

Much of the sociolinguistic and stylistic variation which is of interest to linguists is phonetic in nature, but the access route to corpus data is typically via a textual transcription. This poses a significant problem for a researcher who wishes to access the original recordings of speech in order to analyse variation: how can they search for relevant data? Many transcription traditions allow for the representation of such variation through non-standard orthography, and such conventions should therefore allow access to data relevant to the study of variation. However, the specific conventions used vary between traditions (and indeed may not be applied consistently by individual transcribers). This then creates another problem where the researcher wishes to access data across an aggregated collection, which is a practical necessity given the relatively limited size of most corpora of spoken language. In this paper, we analyse the conventions used in two of the component collections in the Australian National Corpus, the Australian Radio Talkback Corpus and the Monash Corpus of Spoken English. On the basis of this analysis, we develop a fragment of an ontology which gives an explicit account of the phenomena related to non-standard pronunciation represented in the transcripts and which can therefore act as the basis for better searching of the collections and better access to relevant data for analysing sociolinguistic and stylistic variation.

The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) started in 2008 in only two locations and has since grown to a nationwide competition with almost 1500 high school students participating in 2013. An Australian team has participated in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) every year since 2009. This paper describes how the competition is run (with a regional first round and a final national round) and the organisation of the competition (a National Steering Committee and Local Organising Committees for each region) and discusses the particular challenges faced by Australia (timing of the competition and distance between the major population centres). One major factor in the growth and success of OzCLO has been the introduction of the online competition, allowing participation of students from rural and remote country areas. The organisation relies on the goodwill and volunteer work of university and school staff but the strong interest amongst students and teachers shows that OzCLO is responding to a demand for linguistic challenges. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The aim of this study is to examine the strategies majority language-speaking parents use to support the development of the minority language in families who follow the pattern of exposure known as one-parent-one-language (OPOL). In this particular pattern of raising a child bilingually, each parent speaks only their own native language to their children. Previous studies concerned with language development in children raised under the OPOL pattern primarily focused on how input from the minority language-speaking parent affects minority language development, leaving the role of the majority language-speaking parent largely unexplored. To address this gap, a case study was carried out on three families in Brisbane, Australia, who reported following the OPOL pattern. Video and audio recordings were taken, along with interviews using an elicited recall task based on the recordings to gather data on the families' language practices and motivations. The results of the qualitative analysis suggest that, in these families, the majority language-speaking parent plays an important role that extends beyond the provision of input in the majority language and may contribute to fostering minority language development and maintenance.

The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) started in 2008 in only two locations and has since grown to a na- tionwide competition with almost 1500 high school students participating in 2013. An Aus- tralian team has participated in the Interna- tional Linguistics Olympiad (ILO) every year since 2009. This paper describes how the competition is run (with a regional First Round and a final National Round) and the or- ganisation of the competition (a National Steering Committee and Local Organising Committees for each region) and discusses the particular challenges faced by Australia (tim- ing of the competition and distance between the major population centres). One major fac- tor in the growth and success of OzCLO has been the introduction of the online competi- tion, allowing participation of students from rural and remote country areas. The organisa- tion relies on the good-will and volunteer work of university and school staff but the strong interest among students and teachers shows that OzCLO is responding to a demand for linguistic challenges.

While advantages of literacy in the home language have been widely documented, the Australian education system has not been proactive in providing institutional support for its development. This paper investigates the impact of (il)literacy in the home language on the academic, affective, and social development of bilingual/multilingual children and proposes principles that home-language-literacy programs should meet to be effective. It discusses programs that, although designed to develop literacy or second-language proficiency mainly in classroom contexts, could be easily adapted to address the needs of the linguistically and culturally diverse Australian context. We argue that the cost of not investing in successful homelanguage-literacy programs will be higher in the long run than their implementation costs and recommend that Australia should consider supporting grassroots home-language-literacy programs in a push to improve overall literacy outcomes for Australian home-language speakers. © The Author(s) 2013.

Linguists traditionally have published their research in book and paper publications. However, advances in technology enable new innovative electronic dissemination paths, coupled with an immediate reuse potential and flexible accessibility of both the data and their analysis. In this chapter, a new computational research tool that is currently still under development is presented: TYTO (‘Typology Tool’) is specifically tailored to typological work carried out by a group of researchers. The first application domain of TYTO is social cognition and its cross-linguistic grammaticalisation. I outline TYTO’s features, describe its backbone ontology, and in what way it is envisaged to be able to support typologists and other linguists in their work. 

There is a perceived tension between empirical and theoretical approaches to the study of language. Many recent works in the discipline emphasise that linguistics is an ‘empirical science’. This volume argues for a nuanced view, highlighting that theory and practice necessarily and as a matter of fact complement each other in linguistic research. Its contributions – ranging from experimental studies in psychology via linguistic fieldwork and cross-linguistic comparisons to the application of formal and logical approaches to language – exemplify the mutual relationship between empirical and theoretical work. The volume illustrates how selected topics are addressed by different contributions and methodological stances. Topics include the cognitive grounding of language, social cognition and the construction of meaning in interaction, and, closely related, pragmatics from a typological perspective and beyond. Anyone interested in these topics and more generally in meta-theoretical considerations will find great value in this volume.

here is a perceived tension between theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of language. Most recent works in the discipline emphasise that linguistics is an 'empirical science'. This chapter argues for a nuanced view that is not geared towards one of the two sides. Drawing on the volume's contributions, it describes the mutual relationship between theoretical and empirical work, and how theory and practice necessarily and as a matter of fact complement each other in linguistic research. It does so by examining a number of methodological facets relevant to the study of language, by illustrating how debated topics in linguistics are addressed by different contributions and hence methodological stances, and by discussing some meta-theoretical implications arising from this. 

In this paper, I introduce a computational tool, TYTO (“Typology Tool”), that utilises Semantic Web technologies in order to provide novel ways to process, integrate, and query cross-linguistic data. Its data store incorporates a set of on- tologies (comprising linguistic examples, annotations, language background infor- mation, and metadata) backed by a logic reasoner software. This allows for highly targeted querying, and, with enough data on the relevant interest areas, TYTO can return answers to rather specific typological questions such as ‘Which other lan- guages in the North America, in addition to Yuchi, do encode senior kin and in- group (such as belonging to the same ethnic group) in a suffixal case marking sys- tem?’ TYTO’s data store can be extended with additional ontologies and adapted to allow for project-specific analyses of linguistic data. It is further designed to facilitate collaboration and allow multi-user contributions, including automatic in- tegration of data submitted at different stages by different contributors. 

Many disciplines describe themselves as studying ‘communication’. However observation of interdisciplinary discussion suggests that ‘communication’ may be conceptualized in different ways by different disciplines. This paper aims to promote mutual understanding among disciplines, not by proposing a universally valid definition of communication to which all disciplines should subscribe, but by, first, offering a set of questions that can be used to help disciplinary groups communicate their own views on communication to colleagues from other disciplines, and then creating a (preliminary) typology to map out the range of possible positions that can be taken in relation to those questions. Noting that academic disciplines have distinct cultures, the paper presents some concepts of intercultural communication as understood in applied linguistics that may be useful in facilitating interdisciplinary communication about communication.