Communicative failures caused by ethological factors (on the material of American cinema discourse)

Abstract

The paper reveals and describes communicative failures caused by differences in structures of communicants’ ethological encyclopedic knowledge within the framework of the intersubjectivity paradigm. А communicative failure is viewed as an inability of interacting subjects to make an inference or making a faulty inference in an intersubjective act. An intersubjective act is interpreted as an inter-action, where communicants’ verbal/non-verbal communicative actions are viewed as perceptual stimuli, which trigger parallel conscious/non-conscious inference processes involving cognition, volition and affect resulting in a motivated communicative social action. Inferential analysis applied in the research provides tools for the recreation of communicants’ inferential processes and enables to consider cognitive, perceptual, affective and volitional aspects of interaction stipulating their goal-oriented motivated communicative verbal and non-verbal actions. American cinema discourse represented by the genre of a situation comedy and modeling live communication supplied instances of communicative failures subjected to analysis. We claim that differences in structures of communicants’ ethological encyclopedic knowledge are one of the causes of cognitive communicative failures. Cognitive communicative failures depend on the centrality of the content and structure of encyclopedic knowledge evoked by verbal/non-verbal communicative actions of interacting subjects in an intersubjective act. Centrality depends on how well a particular conceptual content is established in the communicant’s memory as well as on a particular context in which a lingual unit is embedded. We give evidence for ethological knowledge to be of both declarative and procedural nature. We prove that cognitive communicative failures caused by differences in structures of communicants’ ethological encyclopedic knowledge result from the addresser’s ignorance of social values and ethic norms of social behavior