Page 39 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 17

B: Hm … like what?
A: I wondered if they sent you a receipt or anything or a copy of–
B: ==you mean your employment forms?
A: Yeah.
B: Yeah, I kept a copy. Why, is there a question?
A: Cause I just left it with the anthropology department.
B: Oh, that’s OK, they’ll just send them over to L. and S. and they’ll send them
on.
A: I just wanted to make sure they’re OK.
B: Oh yeah. Don’t worry about it.

This example could be described as a typical event within a university setting
where a graduate research assistant enquires about his employment status. How-
ever, a single event classification is not sufficient to explain the details of the
exchange, which involves a series of speech activities. Note, for example, that
B replies to A’s initial “neutral” greeting by shifting to a more informal “Hi.”
This leads to the second pair of greetings confirming the informality of the ex-
change. A then makes a tentative sounding enquiry leaving the exact nature of
his request unspecified, leading B to ask for more information, so that four turns
of talk are necessary before the reason for A’s request is made clear. B realizes
the need to give more information on the employment process.
In this exchange we can see that what is conveyed at any point is significantly
affected by preceding talk, and in turn constrains what can follow. One cannot,
therefore, assume that communicating is simply a matter of individuals trans-
forming their ideas into signs by means of a culturally acquired code. Instead
we concentrate on participants’ own context-bound, situated, on-line processing
of information. As in example 1, the participants rely on culturally acquired
knowledge about institutional goals and procedures to arrive at their interpre-
tations, that are then constantly adjusted during the interaction (see also Roberts
in this volume).
In interpreting what they hear, interactants focus not just on the referential
content of messages, but on what a speaker intends to communicate, as speech
act theorists have already told us (Austin 1962; Searle 1969; Grice 1989). Em-
pirical research on discourse and conversation over the last decades provides
ample evidence to document this position. It has become clear in the course of
this work that interpretations also rely on perceptions of extralinguistic context,
knowledge of the world, as well as on the cultural presuppositions that are
brought to the interaction (Atkinson and Heritage 1985). Everyday conversa-
tional interpretations are automatically produced, and their underlying mechan-
isms are not readily subject to conscious recall. They can only be studied by
means of deductions based on comparative examination of speakers’ and lis-
teners’ moves and countermoves, and for analytical purposes it is useful to as-