Reformulating the Notion of Intercultural Communication Style within a Rhetorical Frame

Abstract

It is customary to think that every culture around the world has its own distinct communication style or pattern. People, for instance, talk of Chinese, Japanese, Nepalese or American communication style indicating that there exists a generalizable pattern of communication within each of these cultures or countries. A lot of research works in the field of intercultural communication uphold this and similar ideas about intercultural communication style. But my study complicates such notion and contends that both cultural and intercultural communication styles are rhetorical choices of the interactants therefore dynamic and/or non-generalizable in terms of some pre-existing assumptions about cultural or intercultural communication styles.