Applied linguistics in intercultural communication: a plural approach for multidimensional processes

The study of cognitive, linguistic and social mechanisms underlying human interaction has become a useful tool for the description (and understanding) of the complexity of human mind, through the analysis of specific sociocultural manifestations. This study involves a diversity of disciplines determining specific aims and objectives that focus on a large multiplicity of situations and events. Intercultural communication processes are one of the most recent objects in the epistemological field of applied linguistics (Dervin & Liddicoat, 2013), namely in the large disciplinary domain of Discourse Analysis. However, such a multidimensional object requires a multidimensional and plural approach comprising theories that are inscribed in diverse disciplinary backgrounds linked to this specific epistemological domain: discourse analysis, conversational analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and communication studies. The specific lens used by each of these disciplinary fields will merge into a multi-layered and scaled model, in order to complexify the analytical models available so far. This paper concerns the design of such a model. Its application to the analysis of an authentic corpus of plurilingual interactions will demonstrate the coherence and efficiency of our approach.