Page 64 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

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42 Vladimir Zegarac

(i) establish the extent to which the intended and the attributed meanings of a
given communicative act coincide;
(ii) find out the similarity between the context in which the communicative act
was actually interpreted, and the context intended by the communicator;
(iii) find out the extent to which cultural representations have contributed to the
gap between the actual and the intended context, and
(iv) assess the impact of those cultural representations on communicative suc-
cess (taking account of their centrality).

An important methodological aspect of research along these lines is that it is in-
formed by robust intuitions about interpretations of communicative acts and by
empirical findings based on evidence from a range of different sources. Note
that these findings are independent of, and more reliable than, any of the theor-
etical concepts which guide the research, so they can provide a reasonably solid
basis for testing hypotheses about the impact of culture on communication be-
tween participants from particular cultural groups in particular situations.
The importance of this methodological observation is further highlighted
by a major difference between cultures and epidemics. Epidemics result from
the replication of micro-organisms designed to multiply by producing virtually
identical copies of themselves. What needs to be explained are the circum-
stances in the environment which favour the emergence and the success of
strains of micro-organisms which are different from, rather than being identical
copies of, their ancestors. In contrast to bacteria and viruses, human brains/
minds are designed to transform, rather than to replicate, representations in the
normal mode of operation. We generally synthesize information forming new
representations on the basis of perceptual inputs from the environment and al-
ready held representations. The outputs of such processes are new represen-
tations which are more or less similar, rather than identical, to the input ones.
For example, reports of what a person has said only exceptionally preserve the
exact form of the speaker’s original utterance, and back-translation seldom re-
sults in a text identical to the source-language original. Only in exceptional cir-
cumstances do representations with highly similar forms and contents replicate
without significant changes over long time spans, thus becoming part of cul-
ture.
This observation has two important consequences for the study of culture.
On the one hand, it suggests that cross-cultural similarity is more surprising
than cultural diversity. Since people live in vastly different physical environ-
ments, we might expect that cultures should differ rather more widely than they
actually do. So, the main task for a theory of culture is to explain systematic
cross-cultural similarities. On the other hand, cultural variation is the result of
the diverse ecological circumstances in which human populations live. There-
fore, it is extremely unlikely that these cultural variations fall in the scope of a