Page 72 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

ˇ
50 Vladimir Zegarac

Mutual cultural environment
A cultural environment which is shared by two or more individuals and in which it is
manifest to those individuals that they share it.
(In other words, the proper subset of the mutual cognitive environment of two or
more people, which consists only of cultural representations.)

On this view, the cultural environment of an individual is a subset of that indi-
vidual’s cognitive environment, and the mutual cultural environment of two or
more people, is a subset of their mutual cognitive environment. The terms
cultural environment and mutual cultural environment are useful because they
provide a principled basis for distinguishing between issues relating to context
selection in inter- and intra-cultural communication. Thus, in examples (1), (2),
(3) and (5) miscommunication is largely due to the communicators’ incorrect
estimates of their and the addressee’s/audience’s mutual cultural environments.
Of course, which assumptions will be in the mutual cultural environment of in-
dividuals from particular cultures is an empirical matter of the sort that social
approaches to pragmatics are concerned with.
In Relevance Theory terms, communication involves the production and the
interpretation of evidence of the communicative and the informative intentions.
This evidence may be more or less conclusive. The more conclusive the evi-
dence for some belief-assumptions presented by a communicative act, the more
strongly those assumptions are communicated by that act. The Relevance-
theoretic notion of communicative strength provides the basis for explaining
the commonsense notions of direct and indirect communication. A particular
assumption, or set of assumptions, has been communicated directly to the extent
that the communicative act presents the addressee with conclusive evidence of
the communicator’s intention to make that assumption, or set of assumptions,
more manifest. And conversely, the less conclusive the evidence of the
communicator’s intention to communicate a particular assumption, or set of as-
sumptions, is, the more indirectly, i.e. weakly, that assumption, or set of assump-
tions, is communicated. It should be clear that what counts as sufficiently
conclusive evidence of a particular communicative (or informative) intention in
one culture, may be hopelessly poor evidence of this intention in the context of
another. For example, in the situation described in (3), the Japanese participants
presumed that pauses in their speech presented sufficiently strong evidence of
their communicative intentions to be noticed by the American participant,
whilst presenting suitably weak evidence of their informative intention to con-
vey a rejection of the American participant’s chosen plan. In Relevance-theory
terms, the comprehension of a communicative act which presents less conclus-
ive evidence for a particular informative intention requires more processing
effort than one which presents more conclusive evidence for that informative
intention. Therefore, a communicator aiming at optimal relevance should always