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Abstract A corporate multinational team is an organizational structure of a corporation in which members differ in their nationality, culture and language, work in different time zones and loca¬tions, and rely on the Internet for team communication, management and operation. Team mem¬bers often encounter intercultural conflicts because they lack core common ground of culture. Based on a corpus of regular meetings of a multinational team in a China-based IT company, taking the socio-cognitive approach (SCA), this study investigates how team members employ the speech act of explanation to construct the emergent common ground of perceived emotion, com¬municative etiquette and communicative intention for intercultural conflict management. The re¬sults show that, in the process of intercultural conflict management that achieves cultural adapta¬tion and cultural integration, the speaker employs the speech act of explanation to negotiate and construct emergent common ground in three ways: adjusting salience, supplementing informa¬tion and reframing implicature. This study, for the first time, unfolds the features of the speech act of explanation employed for the construction of emergent common ground in the context of intercultural communication. This study also provides some insights into the pragmatic mecha¬nism of mutual transformation between core and emergent common ground which is conceptual¬ized in SCA theory.
Key words: corporate multinational team; the speech act of explanation; intercultural conflict; socio-cognitive approach
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