Abstract
The present paper introduces the work of American-Welsh social psychologist Howard Giles to the Czech linguistic audience. It focuses mainly on the development of Giles' communication accommodation theory from 1970s to 2000s.
Key concepts as convergence, divergence, maintenance and complementarity are discussed, as well as associated issues like the explanation of accommodation (causal attribution theory, similarity attraction theory), the direction of accommodation (upward vs. downward) etc. The design of selected experiments by Howard Giles is also described to show the methodological perspective typical for this researcher.
Last part of the paper is devoted to current assumptions and predictions of communication accommodation theory.