Discourse as a unit of communicative and cogitative processes in interaction between the representatives of different linguocultures

Discursive-cognitive approach is aimed at a foreign language as an object of study and comprehension; and the study of cognitive processes responsible for communication activity. The paper describes discourse as an element of the communication process, suggests factors that have an immediate impact on communicative process and play an important role in the success of foreign authentic discourse perception. The analysis of works by contemporary Russian and foreign researchers made it possible to determine groups of factors of communicative process, mediated with foreign discourse, that affect the intercultural communication success. The first group of factors is due to communication as a process of information exchange; it is connected with communicants' linguistic consciousness; another group is concerned with cognition as the mode of recognition, perception and inference; the third deals with pragmatics that is responsible for the knowledge of communication subject-matter and the ability to apply this knowledge in practice; the fourth group is due to socio-cultural characteristics, covering both the actual communicative and extralinguistic factors, manifested in social, textual, discursive aspects of speech activity by communicants in specific communicative situations. The central concept of the factors suggested is discourse which is a key unit of the communicative and speech producing processes in terms of intercultural communication. Foreign language authentic discourse meaning inference by the recipients belonging to different linguistic communities goes through three stages. Semantization deals with explicit level of meaning; the values of linguistic units that make up a statement are comprehended with the help of presuppositions - knowledge of language and the world, forming an utterance linguistic content. The stage of the cognitive comprehension is due to cognitive context, determined by communicants' consciousness. It testifies to the common understanding of the message content. The final stage - inference - is related to the semantic level of comprehension; inference is reached with the help of guesswork, logical consequence and all the contextual information. The success of intercultural dialogue will mostly depend on the conditions in which the text is reproduced as well as the success of the communicants' cognitive-discursive activity, determined by the interaction of suggested groups of factors that mediate the intercultural interaction between the representatives of different linguistic communities.

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