A study of the role of the context in the adequacy of the representation of foreign speech in indirect communication
This article is devoted to the consideration of the role of context in oral-speech foreign-language communication. It is shown that contextual factors have a significant influence on the success of the recipient's perception of a foreign speech. From the perspective of the theory of pragmatics and the sociocognitive approach (I. Kecskes), the context has a significant role in the adequacy of intercultural communication. The article describes an experiment in which the adequacy of the perception and interpretation of an oral foreign language message by bachelor students (24 people) studying English as a foreign language was studied. Considering the dynamics of interaction between the situational contexts of the speaker, belonging to one linguistic culture and the recipient belonging to a different society, the authors hypothesize that the process of the transmission of foreign direct speech and the implicit nucleus embedded in the utterance in this type of indirect intercultural communication is a complex cognitive task, because it depends on the ability of the person who perceives information to the process in accordance with the situational context and the realities of the communicative situation. A tool for assessing the adequacy of the representation of a foreign language expression in indirect communication is the discourse analysis of the linguistic means used to characterize indirect speech in English. Verbs that are of particular importance for the transmission of the implicit core of the original utterance are distinguished. A content analysis of the verbs used in the representation of a foreign direct speech in indirect speech by the participants of the experiment was conducted. It was revealed that, in addition to the traditional verbs, denoting the action of the addressee, such as say, ask, the participants of the experiment used the following range of verbs: advise, affirm, allow, beg, claim, confirm, declare, insist, mention, prevent, prohibit, refuse, suggest, suppose, tell, think, threaten, utter, want, warn, wonder. An analysis of the examples given shows that the contextual assumptions are in a "dynamic deployment", corrected in the process of interpretation. The authors establish that, largely, this is due to the personal character of the cognitive process of perception of foreign speech by the learner, his possession of language tools that help to convey the speaker's intension.
Keywords
прагматика, непрямая коммуникация, контекст, иноязычное высказывание, восприятие речи, репрезентация, речевая деятельность, интерлингвальная косвенная речь, дискурс-анализ, pragmatics, indirect communication, context, foreign language utterance, speech perception, representation, speech activity, interlingual indirect speech, discourse analysisAuthors
Name | Organization | |
Obdalova O.A. | Tomsk State University | O.Obdalova@mail.ru |
Minakova L.Yu. | Tomsk State University | ludmila_jurievna@mail.ru |
Soboleva A. V. | Tomsk State University | alex_art@sibmail.com |
References

A study of the role of the context in the adequacy of the representation of foreign speech in indirect communication | Yazyk i Kultura – Language and Culture. 2017. № 40. DOI: 10.17223/19996195/40/6