Page 54 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

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32 Vladimir Zegarac

cognitive-psychological, account of communicative interaction in the context
of culture. The lack of anything approximating a universally accepted theory of
communication or a universally accepted theory of culture inevitably makes this
endeavour possible only with some radical corner-cutting.
Although several natural points of contact between communication and cul-
ture have been identified in commonsense terms, the indissoluble link between
the two has defied explanation. The following passage provides some intuitive
support for the cognitive, Relevance-theoretic approach (Sperber and Wilson
1986/95) on which this article is based:

Over time, the habitual interactions within communities take on familiar forms and
structures, which we will call the organization of meaning. These structures are
imposed upon the situations which people confront and are not determined by the
situation itself. For example, the wink of an eye. Is it a physical reflex from dust in
the eye? Or an invitation to a prospective date? Or could it be someone making fun of
you to others? Perhaps a nervous tick? The wink itself is real, but its meaning is at-
tributed to it by observers. The attributed meaning may or may not coincide with
the intended meaning of the wink. Effective social interaction, though, depends on
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the attributed meaning and intended meaning coinciding [emphasis VZ].
Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997: 24)

This passage suggests the following view: culture is a stable system of relations
between (visible) things in the environment of people (“forms and structures”)
and their (invisible) significances, shared by a social group. (Note that the terms
cultural and social are nearly synonymous. Following the common practice in
social psychology and anthropology, I will call cultural those social things
which are relatively stable and widespread.) This view of culture as a phenom-
enon suggests that particular cultures should be thought of as having fuzzy
boundaries and that they can be identified in terms of indefinitely many various
characteristics of social groups (such as: ethnicity, nation, profession, age group,
sexual orientation).
Communication is different from other forms of social interaction in that it
involves making evident the intention to convey information by integrating the
evidence of this intention with the context. (It should be noted that the term con-
text is used more broadly in social than in cognitive approaches to pragmatics. In
social approaches context is the total linguistic and non-linguistic background to
an act of communication. In Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/95) cognitive account
of communication, this term refers to a set of mentally represented assumptions
which interacts with new information from various sources, including communi-
cation.) It is this communicative intention (i.e. the intention to make evident the
intention to inform) that crucially distinguishes a (deliberate) wink from an in-
voluntary twitch, which is also informative because it may provide evidence for
various conclusions, such as: the twitch was caused by dust in the eye. The con-