Page 73 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 51

choose the ostensive stimulus which provides the most conclusive evidence of
their informative intention. It follows from this, that a communicative act which
communicates a particular set of assumptions more weakly than is necessary for
communicating that set of assumptions, will prompt the addressee to derive
further contextual (i.e. cognitive) effects in order to offset the extra processing
effort required for the interpretation. In other words, the addressee will assume
that the informative intention is also somewhat different from that which would
have been communicated by a more direct communicative act. Thus, the pauses
in (3) communicate, not merely the rejection of the American colleague’s
chosen plan, but also some degree of concern on the part of the communicators
for his positive face (see Brown and Levinson 1987). This suggests that cultural
differences in the appropriate degree of (in)directness in communication, such
as the one illustrated in (3), receive a natural explanation within the epidemi-
ological approach to culture and the framework of Relevance Theory. The per-
vasive use of subtle ostensive stimuli within a society depends on the extent to
which the mutual cultural environment of its members includes representations
about their appropriate use. As Kate Berardo has impressed upon me, such a
mutual cultural environment is more likely to be established in a relatively
close-knit isolated society, such as Japan, which went through a period of two
hundred and fifty years of cultural isolation. In contrast to the Japanese culture,
the US culture emerged in a melting pot of diverse cultural influences in which
the mutual cultural environment of its members was rather restricted, and this
explains why the use of subtle ostensive stimuli, and various forms of communi-
cative indirectness which depend on such stimuli, could not have developed and
stabilized in US culture to the same extent as they did in Japan.

6. Conclusion

In this article I have tried to show how Sperber’s (1996) epidemiological ap-
proach to culture and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/95) Relevance-theoretic
account of human communication and cognition jointly provide an intuitive,
simple and effective framework for analysing situations of inter-cultural com-
munication. In particular, I have argued that the concept of mutual cognitive
environment – in effect, a theoretically motivated equivalent of what Goffman
([1964] 1972: 63) termed “an environment of mutual monitoring possibilities” –
can be related to culture in a way which brings us closer to an understanding of
culture’s role in communication.