The impact of culture on communicative behaviour of the speaker

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Chelyabinsk State University

The impact of culture on communicative behaviour of the speaker

Vlasyan Gayane Rubenovna, Ph. D. in Philology, Associate Professor

VlasyanGR@yandex.ru

Annotation

Communicative behavior of the speaker mostly depends on the national culture to which he/she belongs, which norms and conventions, values and rituals are accepted in his/her society. In the process of communication we use not only universal and individual strategies but ethno-cultural as well. No two national groups see the world in exactly the same way. The greater is the difference in background between senders and receivers, the greater is the difference in meanings attached to particular words and behaviors.

Key words and phrases: culture; values and rituals; communicative behaviour; ethno-cultural differences.

speech language ethnic culture

Аннотация

ВЛИЯНИЕ КУЛЬТУРЫ НА КОММУНИКАТИВНОЕ ПОВЕДЕНИЕ ГОВОРЯЩЕГО

Власян Гаянэ Рубеновна, к. филол. н. доцент

Челябинский государственный университет

VlasyanGR@yandex.ru

Коммуникативное поведение говорящего в большой степени обусловлено тем, к какой национальной культуре принадлежит коммуникант, какие нормы и конвенции приняты в обществе, частью которого он является. Чем больше мы будем знать о правилах речевого поведения носителей языка, тем эффективнее мы сможем общаться с ними, используя различные языковые средства, приемлемые для данного общества.

Ключевые слова и фразы: культура; ценности и ритуалы; коммуникативное поведение; этнокультурные особенности.

Communication is at the heart of all human contact. It's your ability to share your beliefs, values, ideas, and feelings. It also plays a role in determining and defining your identity. Communication can be seen as a form of activity which is carried out by people and is characterized by information exchange, mutual interference and understanding between participants. This is two-way activity of people which meets different challenges: exchange of information, expressing of relationships, mutual interference, compassion etc.

Communication includes sending both verbal messages (words) and nonverbal messages (tone of voice, facial expression, behavior, and physical setting). It has the following aspects:

• informational (exchange of information between communicators occurs);

• interactive (it is a cooperation of individuals);

• epistemological (a person is a subject and object of socio-cultural cognition);

• axiological (communication is a process of changing values); * normative, which shows roles of participants in the process of communication, and process of establishing behavioral stereotypes; * semiotic (communication is a specific symbol system and intermediary in the process of different symbol systems functioning);

• practical (process of communication is seen as exchange of skills, experiences, practices, outcomes of the action etc.).

Every particular communicative act is predetermined by cultural differences of interlocutors.

Culture has been defined in many ways. One of the anthropological definitions runs as follows: “Culture consists in patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values” [2, p. 86].

R. Porter and L. Samovar define culture as “the deposit of knowledge, experiences, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, timing, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a large group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving” [4, p. 8].

We treat culture after G. Hofstede as “the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” [1, p. 9].

Culture is realized in patterns of language and in forms of activity and behavior that enable people to live in a society at a particular moment in time. Culture also specifies and is defined by the nature of material things that play an essential role in common life. Such things as houses, instruments and machines used in industry and agriculture, forms of transportation, and instruments of war provide a material foundation for social life. The effect of culture on our lives is largely unrealized.

Culture manifests itself in values, rituals, heroes, and symbols.

A value is a conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means and ends of actions [2, p. 395]. Values represent morality, ethics, and aesthetics. Each person has a set of unique, personal values and a set of shared, cultural values. The latter are a reflection of the rules a culture has established to reduce uncertainty, lessen the likelihood of conflict, help in decision making, and provide structure to social organization and interactions. Cultural values are a motivating force behind our behaviors [4, p. 14].

Rituals are the socially essential collective activities within a culture, keeping the individual bound within the norms of the collectivity. Ways of greeting and paying respect to others, social and religious ceremonies are examples of rituals.

Heroes are persons, alive or dead, real or imaginary, who possess characteristics that are highly prized in a culture and thus serve as models for behaviour.

Symbols are words, gestures, pictures, and objects that carry often complex meanings recognized as such only by those who share the culture [1, p. 10]. The words of a language, books, pictures, films, flags, status symbols, gestures, dress, objects, religious icons, and the like belong to this category. The important thing to remember is that symbols are symbols only because a group of people agree to consider them as such. A symbol is anything that carries a particular meaning recognized by people who share culture.

Culture and communication are inseparable because culture not only dictates who talks with whom, about what, and how the communication proceeds, it also helps to determine how people encode messages, the meanings they have for messages, and the conditions and circumstances under which various messages may or may not be sent, noticed, or interpreted.

Communicative behavior of the speaker mostly depends on the national culture to which he/she belongs, which norms and conventions, values and rituals are accepted in his/her society. In the process of communication we use not only universal and individual strategies but ethno-cultural as well. For example, in some eastern societies the off-record-indirect strategy will place on your hearer a social obligation to give you anything you admire. So speakers learn not to express admiration for expensive and valuable things in homes that they visit.

Strategies are realized through some tactics and are connected with language and culture. Comparative researches prove that it is typical of Englishmen to use implicit and non-categorical statements and indirect speech acts, e.g. Would you kindly stop smoking, please? / Could you tell me the number of your friend, I need to talk to him.

The least polite English constructions are interrogative imperatives with speech predicates (e.g. Tell me, I want you to tell me). When inducements are expressed with imperatives we can clearly observe the break of noninterference principle; so imperatives are legitimized only in close relations of peer communicants or of senior to junior relations. In any case the imperative utterance will not sound polite.

The main means of expressing request in Russian is imperative. It is important to notice that English and Russian imperatives have many differences. In the English culture the usage of imperatives will almost definitely worsen the communicative situation, while the Russians will perceive imperatives quite differently, depending on the communicative situation, linguistic, and extralinguistic factors.

The word пожалуйста (`pozhalujsta' - please) can be used independently, making a speech act sound more polite. English please and Russian пожалуйста have different meaning, though these two words are absolute lexical equivalents. Russian пожалуйста can transform an imperative command into a mild request; it can make an imperative sound less categorical. Пожалуйста has a stronger pragmatic force than please.

Nonverbal communication is also very important to the study of intercultural communication because people make judgments about others based on their nonverbal behavior and nonverbal messages.

Most classifications divide nonverbal messages into two comprehensive categories: those that are primarily produced by the body (appearance, movement, facial expressions, eye contact, touch, and paralanguage), and those that the individual combines with the setting (space, time, and silence) [3, p. 250].

Eye contact is one of the forms of nonverbal communication where the differences are most striking. Eyes serve a number of communication functions. The number of messages you can send with your eyes is nearly limitless. They express emotions, monitor feedback, indicate degrees of attentiveness, influence changes in attitude, define power and status relationships, etc. Degree of eye contact during conversations is culturally conditioned. For the most part in American culture, making eye contact is a sign of attentiveness and courtesy, as long as you aren't staring, leering or ogling. In many Asian cultures, direct eye contact is a taboo or an insult. In Japan, for example, prolonged eye contact is considered rude, threatening, disrespectful, and even a sign of belligerence.

Hand signals also vary from culture to culture. For example, nodding your head in Bulgaria, Turkey and China is by no means an affirmative gesture. Instead it means 'No'. Logically, shaking your head means 'Yes'.

As L. Samovar, R. Porter and M. Edwin state “when American troops drove through the streets of Iraq, they thought they were being greeted by throngs of happy children. They observed hundreds of children lining the streets of Baghdad giving them the “thumbs-up” sign. The Americans did not realize that in Iraq the thumbs-up sign traditionally was the equivalent of the American middle-finger salute” [Ibidem, p. 243].

In some cultures touching is an important aspect of communication, while in others public physical contact is unacceptable.

E.g. In public places, the English make strenuous efforts not to touch strangers even by accident. If such an accident should occur, apologies are fulsome but should never be used as an excuse for further conversation. On crowded public transport where it is sometimes unavoidable, physical contact with a stranger is permitted, but in such circumstances, eye contact should be avoided at all costs.

The Russians are quite tolerant of touching and usually do not find it necessary to apologize except for situations resulting in possible physical pain or damage to belongings.

No two national groups see the world in exactly the same way. Perception is the process by which each individual selects, organizes, and evaluates stimuli from the external environment to provide meaningful experiences for himself or herself. Perceptual patterns are neither innate nor absolute. They are selective, learned, culturally determined, consistent, and inaccurate.

Deborah Tannen in her book You Just Don't Understand shows how men and women from the same culture, even from the same families, often misunderstand each other because of different assumptions they make about the purposes or goals of their communication. A man may wish to make a woman happy by giving her a gift of something she really wants. He asks her what she would like to have for her birthday - she can ask for anything [5].

Unfortunately, what she wants more than anything else is for him to know intuitively what she would like to have. According to D. Tannen, men and women, at least in North American society, tend to differ in their concern for explicitness or for indirection. A woman is likely to think it is important for someone to show how well he knows her by not having to ask explicitly what she wants. A man in that situation, however, feels best about the situation if he is told quite directly and explicitly how he can make her happy.

Language is ambiguous. This means that we can never be certain what the other person means whether in speaking or writing.

In the first place it should be clear that communication works better the more the participants share assumptions and knowledge about the world.

Where two people have very similar histories, backgrounds, and experiences, their communication works fairly easily because the inferences each makes about what the other means will be based on common experience and knowledge. Two people from the same village and the same family are likely to make fewer mistakes in drawing inferences about what the other means than two people from different cities on different sides of the earth. The greater the difference in background between senders and receivers, the greater the difference in meanings attached to particular words and behaviors.

In the contemporary world people are in daily contact with members of cultures and other groups from all around the world. Successful communication is based on sharing as much as possible the assumptions we make about what others mean.

References

1. Hofstede G. Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003. 596 p.

2. Kluckhohn C. K. Values and Value Orientations in the Theory of Action. // Toward a General Theory of Action / ed. by T. Parsons and E. A. Shils. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. 433 p.

3. Samovar L. A., Porter R. E., Edwin M. R. Communication between Cultures. 7th ed. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2010. 463 p.

4. Samovar L. A., Porter R. E., McDaniel E. R. Intercultural Communication: a reader. 13th ed. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning, 2012. 518 p.

5. Tannen D. You Just Don't Understand. Women and Men in Conversation. N. Y.: Ballantine Books, 1991.156 p.

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