In the course “Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communications": we will: 1) Build skills in the analysis of the intercultural communication process using Russian-Western communication as an example. 2) Apply the knowledge of interrelations between different contexts of communication (cultural, institutional, professional, social, interpersonal, etc.) to the cultural history and national psychology of Russians. The purpose of the course is to provide the students with a broad overview of the basic principles governing the past, the present and the future interactions between Russia and the West, with a focus on the culture and national psychology of Russians and Western Europeans. For example, we will look at the cases when basic cultural values of Russians show up through the linguistic choices shaping language production which is consequently misattributed by Western partners. No matter what the language of intercultural communication is – Russian, or English – the meaning of many linguistic expressions may be reconstructed wrongly by the representatives of another culture. Some of the basic questions we will tackle are: • What are the concepts of culture that have the strongest influence on communication? • What are Russian basic cultural values and how they shape modern Russian consciousness? • What are the specific communication patterns of modern Russians, including those of public and electronic discourse? • What is important to know about communication with Russians in organizational contexts? Importantly, this course is NOT just a list of practical instructions of dos and don’ts of dealing with Russians. The course contains a substantial academic component introducing the key notions and concepts of the Theory of Communication, which will be extensively introduced throughout the first few modules of the course. These theoretical grounds will be further on used as a tool for analyzing the intercultural communications with Russians.
3.2. Language as a Means of Communication
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来自 National Research University Higher School of Economics 的课程
Understanding Russians: Contexts of Intercultural Communication
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National Research University Higher School of Economics
43 个评分
从本节课中
Theory of Communication
In this week's lectures we will shift our focus, and will be looking at the basics of communication in order to apply them later to the Russian communication style. We hope you will find this information useful for understanding various motives that govern the way people (not only Russians!) interact. Anna Skaya and Michael Johnston will continue to be our experts, and your weekly quiz will await you as well. We wish you a nice learning experience in this section of the course.
与讲师见面
Mira BergelsonProfessor
Philological Faculty
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So if cultural knowledge is so important for making sense in intercultural
communication, then let's look at it from another side.
What for do we need intercultural communication?
Where does it help us to be more effective?
Well, first, it's a method for a more effective professional communication
because professions now go across all the borders.
We deal with people from different cultures with
different backgrounds in our professional work, communication, and
of course, better knowledge, better understanding of other cultures helps us.
It also helps to know the ways how to get our message
across to other audiences, again across the borders of cultures.
It helps us to try to predict the reaction of our audience,
be it in professions where we're really involved in getting message across,
like public relations or marketing or advertising.
But also in any other type of relations where we need to reach people and
we need to make them at least see and understand our point of view.
Also, it helps this,
managing intercultural communication being culturally competent here,
it helps us to look for indicators of communication bumps.
Those potential topics, issues, I don't know, moments where we can stumble
across such a bump and have a communication failure as a result.
It helps us to maximize the common ground in communication when we can empathize
with people's approaches we can see other perspectives and so on.
Generally it helps us to enhance the general communicative competence
that we possess that will make us
move forward as personalities and as specialists in our work.
Now, let's start from, so to say, not exactly beginning,
but looking at more general issues.
Let's look at the nature of communication,
what this understanding will add to our communicative competencies.
If we try to define communication in a most simple and general way,
without being technical, we would say that is a systemic process,
in which individuals interact with and
through symbols to create and interpret meanings.
And I will highlight here three words,
three expressions, systemic process, symbols and meanings.
Meanings are created through use of language and
basically a language is a symbolic system.
So starting with symbols, we immediately
get into the very heart of defining what language is.
On one hand, language is a symbolic system because it operates with symbols.
As soon as you sort of are involved with symbols, you understand that the issue of
interpretations comes forward because symbols ask for interpretation.
Symbols are such type of signals that don't tell us
immediately by their form, by their shape what they mean.
They point to something that we need to somehow interpret and
that's exactly what makes language so special among other communicative systems.
But if we deal with symbols, if we deal with interpretation, it means that we will
be involved with what is so characteristic of every human language.
Polysemy, when one and the same symbol or sign may mean different things.
And polysemy and other things may lead to what we also have in all human languages.
Actually, in all types of human interactions,
we have some kind of ambiguity.
When we cannot be absolutely sure what is the exact meaning,
we have to somehow reconstruct it.
Another way to define language is, you
can see it here as a quotation from Otto Jespersen, philosopher of grammar.
And it was this statement was made as early as 1924.
And it's quite amazing.
This person, Otto Jesperson, was really a great thinker.
Because at that time where not all scholars,
not all researchers of language and
meanings were thinking about language as instrument of communication,
he produced this definition, you can say, that language is an activity.
Not a system, not a structure, but
an activity on the part of one individual to make himself understood by another.
And activity on the part of that other to understand
what was in the mind of the first.
This quotation, this definition already contains the most
important aspects of the modern approaches to verbal communication.
It has the other, the addressee.
It has the activity, which understands communication as a process.
And it also takes in the account that when we are involved in communication, we
need to somehow reproduce
what is going on in the mind of these other, our addressee.
So this approach to language as a process, as the main
instrument of communication which is process, leads us to another topic,
which is communication and intercultural communication as a communication process.
So, verbal communication is a human activity
involving interpretation of symbols.
That's what we can make out of these two different approaches to language that I
just represented and that were sort of represented in the previous slide.
But what is important to add here, what is crucial,
is that it is a successful human activity,
otherwise we would be using something else if it were not successful.
So it's a successful human activity and it is based on cooperation.
Without cooperating, we won't be able to produce and construct meanings
together in the citation of communication when we take account of our addressee for
when we need to understand what is going on in his or
her mind at the very moment of communication.
It's called a dynamic model of the other, or fear of mind, as psychologists put it.
Then what is successful communication?
That's the question that we need to address now because if we use this idea
of successful human activity, then we need to get some understanding,
to give definition what is successful communication?
And, of course, what is communication failure?
We will approach it and we will approach it not by giving definitions or
getting more detail out of these definitions, but
at looking at various aspects of communication process.
The second issue or problem,
and the next issue that we need to approach in order to be able to describe
communication from from various points of view, for
looking at it from various points of view, is looking at communication
as a process, and as a process of interpretation.
So now, interpretation.
What allows use to us this, and
to consider it to be in the heart of any communication success,
or if not performed correctly, or for communication failure.
What is interpretation, when we're talking about verbal communication?
Interpretation is drawing inferences.
We listen, we look, we see,
we're participating in the situation of communication.
And we make sense of what's going on by drawing inferences of
what this person means and what the communication leads to.
Drawing inferences is a must, without them we cannot actually move any, we cannot
make a single small step in developing communication and developing discourse.
And these inferences are fixed, not tentative.
Human mind doesn't work as a parallel processing machine, as a computer,
when we are simultaneously developing one understanding, one meaning and another.
At any point in this course, we're actually deciding what we think about it,
what is the meaning of this word.
We are not working developing interpretation of the sentence
with two meanings of the word then had, as computers now can do.
And also, inferences must be drawn very quickly.
That this process that I've been
describing just now actually takes place very fast.
We don't have much time to think.
Later, when we kind of re read, for instance, what we've written or
a letter that we've got, we can allow to sort of contemplate what the person meant.
But this is another level of interpretation.
I'm not talking about this one.
Of course, interpretation depends on knowledge.
And this is not just knowledge of the facts of the language, or
the facts of the outer world,
it's also knowledge of reciprocal contexts that take place in this communication.
The communication situation takes place here and now.
And all this, all this happens, takes place in the situation,
the presumption of, or the fact that language is inherently ambiguous.
We can never be certain for 100% that what was meant by a person
who spoke to us just now, what was in her mind is exactly
what I've understood out of it because this is my interpretation of the words.
In most cases, our interpretations are more or less close.
But if we take this example,
I already made it, about very simple thing like let's go to lunch, okay, great.
Let's meet at one o' clock and go to this restaurant.
Again, the idea of the lunch that is in the head,
in the mind of my friend who suggested this may be slightly different from
the idea of a lunch that I have when I say the same things.
But even if it's not 100% the same, it is enough for
us to be able to understand each other,
to interpret each other's utterances and make some conclusions.
Some inferences that would allow us a common activity, going for lunch together.
But this was a conversation between two friends or people working together.
We are least certain, we are least certain about interpretation and
the contexts with strangers.
And intercultural communication is a communication with strangers,
with people with whom we share less common knowledge, less common context than usual.
Coming back to the issue of language ambiguity,
lets look at the levels of language ambiguity.
The first logical level to start with would be word level.
Words are prototypical symbols of course.
They are prototypical symbols that we find in the language.
Language as linguists used to say, quite recently,
not so long ago, language consists of words, so to say.
Let's look at the word coffee, what it can mean.
It can mean anything.
It can mean a powder, or a drink, or beans.
And these are all the meanings that a dictionary will give us.
If we go further and look at the the sentence level, for instance,
give me coffee, please, there is already probably less ambiguity.
You would say that it may mean drink, give me coffee, but,
well, still, it depends on the context.
By default, you would probably decide it is a cup, but
if I say, give me a cup of coffee, of course.
Or if this sentence is pronounced in a cafe where we're sitting at the table.
But what if we, you and I, are working at the supermarket,
and at night we need to move bags or cartons with the coffee beans.
Then give me coffee please as a conservation between two people working,
there it would mean something else.
Then, let's look at the discourse level.
Forget about coffee.
What happens if you hear such a question, such a conversation, can you drive?
And the answer is yeah, my dad taught me.
But there may be another answer to it.
Let's say again, can you drive?
Don't worry, let's go.
Both answers make sense, but these answers belong to different contexts,
and they have different meaning, and different interpretation.
Why in one case we choose an answer to the question
providing information exactly about what was asked, but
in the other situation we suggest, don't worry, let's go.
Even here, even at the discourse level, just language context doesn't help us.
We need to go beyond the language circle.
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