One point made by Gumperz repeatedly is that communicative break-
downs are seldom analysed as linguistic. Speakers typically react with a
sense of frustration and hostility; frequently each participant accuses the
other of perverse and wilfully difficult behaviour, and if confronted with a
re-run of the conversation, claims that his own interpretation of a given
prosodic pattern, or a given utterance, is the only reasonable one. In the case
of cross-ethnic communication,. this kind of breakdown appears to con-
tribute to hostile stereotyping, and one concern of Gumperz has been to
devise training programmes for those whose work involves them in com-
municating with other ethnic groups. This would appear to be an important
application of any theory of communication which could account elegantly
and systematically for the frequent miscommunications which do un-
doubtedly take place. It seems likely, moreover, that the kind of culturally
distributed problems and reactions to these problems which Gumperz
describes are not limited to inter-ethnic communication. They almost
certainly occur in a similarly systematic manner in conversations between,
for example, Englishmen who, like the Group I and Group III speakers
discussed in relation to youse wash the dishes, are socially distant from each other.