Abstract

In this paper, after a short summary of Istvan Kecskes' paper, I expatiate on the speaker's duty to make himself/herself understood, which involves avoiding interpretative ambiguities, given that the speaker puts himself/herself into the hearer's shoes and saves her a lot of time and effort by avoiding lexical items that may cause obscurity. While Kecskes assumes that egocentrism is one of the facets of human communication, I believe that, on the contrary, speakers have a duty to move beyond egocentrism by taking into account the hearer's communicative needs. I, nevertheless, concede that egocentrism may play a key role in intercultural communication and, thus, I agree with Kecskes that literality prevails over non-literality in intercultural communication.