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■ ■ ■ Understanding as Basis of Intercultural Communication: psycholinguistic, ethnosociocultural aspects and educational solutions
James W. Hynes1, Katerina L. Kabakhidze2, Anastasia Y. Suvirova2
1. Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, USA.
2. Moscow City Teacher Training University (MCU), Moscow, Russia.
Abstract. The authors of the article analyze cross-cultural communication from the viewpoint of social philosophy defining invariant features of cross-cultural communication based on dialogue (Mikhail Bakhtin) and dialect nature of human communication. Theoretical description of the nature of cross-cultural communication is illustrated by live examples of the cultural conflicts borrowed from the history of the Russian diplomacy. Since the consciousness has the communicative nature, whereas cross-cultural understanding is rooted in neuropsychological aspects of cognition, antinomy of "sign-symbol", the article depicts the mechanisms of speech production and speech perception divided between the strata of consciousness and cognition.
The paper underlines the hermeneutic essence of the intercultural dialogue, which is born through understanding between communicators on the conceptual and semantic level, although more importantly intercultural and civilization dimension in the context of the multipolar world, taking into account global tendencies in socio-economic, ethnocultural, political worldorder of the different countries around the world. Internalization of education, information and telecommunication technologies catalyze intercultural communication, as a result form knowledge society inhabited by 'homoloquens'. Intensive intercultural contacts quite often give rise to cultural conflicts. The author categorizes this phenomenon by ranging the mistakes, insufficient understanding, embarrassments and conflicts of intercultural communication, reveals in-depth socio-cultural paradigm, axiological, world outlook and religious aspects that cause negative outcomes of intercultural contacts.
Understanding in intercultural dialogue is composed of ethnosociocultural context and psycholinguistic mechanisms of speech perception and speech production. The operational item of understanding is considered to be a code which has a symbolic nature. The article depicts the interconnection between symbol, code, act of communication, consciousness and national world view.
Keywords; understanding, cognition, intercultural dialogue, consciousness, symbol, national worldview, hermeneutics, ethnos, communication, information society, culture, globalization
For citation; Hynes J.W., Kabakhidze K.L., Suvirova AY Understanding as Basis of Intercultural Communication: psycholinguistic, ethnosociocultural aspects and educational solutions. Communicology (Russia). 2018. Vol. 6. No.2. P. 52-59. DOI 10.21453 / 2311-3065-20186-2-52-59.
Inf. about the authors: James W. Hynes, PhD (Philos.), associate professor at the department of curriculum & instruction, director of the Center for International Education at Sam Houston State University; Ekaterina Lvovna Kabakhidze, Cand. Sc. (Philos.), head of laboratory of
international projects, MCU; AnastasiyaYurievna Suvirova, Cand. Sc. (Psy.), senior researcher at laboratory of international projects, MCU. Address: 129226, Moscow, Selskohozyajstvenny pr., 4. E-mail: kabakhidze@gmail.com.
Received: 16.03.2018. Accepted: 02.04.2018.
To know another language and not his culture is a very good way to make a fluent fool of himself (W. Brembeck)
Globalization has significantly diminished spaciotemporal boundaries of communication through modern means of IT technologies, transport and last but not least by the mobility of students and teaching staff and internalization of education in general, the latter resulting from globalization and simultaneously enhancing it.
Communication represented in the language and culture remains to be the main impediment of globalization. To overcome the language barrier, linguists have undertaken several attempts to create an artificial language like Esperanto but in the long run those attempts failed due to one circumstance - the language cannot exist without a culture and the nation it belongs to. "Language is unified spiritual energy of people" [Humboldt: 346-350]. Language serves not only for communication but most of all it serves as a provider for the world perception of one nation as a prerequisite of communication. The language is an outstanding mark of a nation (=Kennzeichen), it forms unique world outlook (=Weltbild) [Weisgerber]. Every language is a treasury of the people's history, the main indicator of its uniqueness (D. Crystal).
On the other hand, language by itself cannot serve as a powerful unifying instrument to bring peoples and nations together (we know a lot of examples when homogeneous monolingual societies fell apart being torn by conflicts and wars).
This is why the problems and challenges of globalization cannot be solved with the help of the common language - a universe language for all the people of the world. We would like to try and show that understanding is the key to efficient intercultural dialogue, providing access to the ethnic mentality and true communication.
Communication, dialogue pave the everyday life of a human being, enable his existence in a society - Language is the house of Being (M. Heidegger). Postindustrial society on the verge of the XX century entered the era of "knowledge society", which keeps accumulating, transforming and managing the information flows to improve the social institutes, conditions of living. In general, information plays the crucial role in the knowledge society.
An outstanding American writer and futurist John Naisbitt marked the importance of the transition to information society as a key transformation of the Western society and economics, whereas another American scientist - sociologist D. Bell when describing the major features of the information society, outlined such qualities as value and meaning as well as its role in formation of the scientific knowledge.
The nature of the communicative environment of the modern society is polycultural and multinational as a result of the global integration and interconnection between national economics, ethnos, cultures and policies of soft power applied by the
government of different countries in their foreign policies striving to have an impact on social as political affairs of other states through education and culture.
Preconditioned by the above-mentioned facts, communication becomes an ontological form of the modern society, whereas interlocutory (dialogue) and dialectical essence of intercultural communication become invariant characteristics of the global communication. The word "dialectic" was introduced in philosophy in the wake of the "Dialogues" by Plato, where their participants could defend different viewpoints pursuing the truth through an exchange of opinions, at the same time interlocutory appeared in the wake of works by M. Bakhtin who stated that this is a universal foundation for understanding between human beings as the dialogue penetrates through the life being of a person, all that has a sense and meaning...where the consciousness starts the dialogue begins [Bakhtin: 19].
To sum it up, dialogue and dialectic have become a philosophical ground for intercultural contacts in the XXI century, where an aspiration for understanding has become a basis for intercultural communication of the XXI century: "International relations have spread significantly, now to solve this or another international problem the majority of the countries have to be engaged". It is much more difficult now to bring different opinions to one and the same denominator and it takes more time now. [Popov: 91]. Famous Russian diplomat underlines the necessity to include a number of states to solve global problems of ethnoculture, by meeting national mentalities and crush of stereotypes, clash of different languages and world pictures. Taking this into account the mechanism of understanding is becoming key condition of the successful intercultural dialogue.
Intensive external intercultural contacts may result in conflicts of cultures and diplomatic embarrassing situations as diplomacy is a field of negotiations, climax of interrelations of mentalities, value and culture attitude, world outlooks.
Intercultural mistakes can be regarded as situations where misunderstanding between the parties did not cause personal insult to a representative of another culture, that can be equated to the communication mistake.
Intercultural mistakes result from unawareness that behavioural models in different cultures are not equal, on the contrary "every culture has its unique set of rules, conventions, models of behavior, that reflect in general the set of values of the given society" [Molchanova: 12]. Such a phenomenon is called sociolinguistic relativity.
Thehistoryofcivilizationsknowsagreatdealofexamplesofinterculturalconflicts that have had dreadful consequences along with intercultural pratfalls that ended up with conventional apologies or jokes.
The fundamental reason lies in the field of absence of understanding between the representative of different cultures, which can be a result of a) unawareness of sociocultural, ethnopsycological and other paradigms of other cultures;
b) sociolinguistic and pragmatic transfer of the norms and rules from different cultures;
c) rejection/abruption of the norms and rules, models of behavior and conventions of other cultures норм и правил, моделей поведения и конвенций другой культуры ( as a rule, this is typical of the situations where communication target is not being pursued)
d) linguistic barriers of communication preconditioned by insufficient knowledge of a foreign language, business etiquette of communication, improper use of the stylistic devices and others e) psycholinguistic and neuropsylinguistic aspects of the coding and decoding of the speech message to/from foreign language.
As a result understanding in intercultural communication can be characterized by the two key aspects: psycholinguistic and ethnosociocultural.
It is important to notice the contingency, synergy of two concepts: understanding and cognition, the latter as a step to understanding, and to constitute the epistemological nature of understanding: "The initial form of spiritual needs in the ontogenetic development seems to be delivered in the functional necessity for self-orientation and cognitive activity, also in the need for external impressions, and never the material needs for food, clothing and shelter" [Ufimceva: 174]. Understanding is the reflection of higher spiritual need, at the same time it is possible to understand only those things that have been previously cognized and now are known to an individual, without the latter understanding cannot exist (even an emotional response in the soul can be caused only by those phenomena that were previously understood or experienced by the individual). According to Rene Descartes, the understanding is identified with cognition, intelligence, and thinking, and in its turn, implicitly includes what is now usually called consciousness. We can build the following chain of cognitive processes: perception (rational or irrational, i.e., feeling) - cognition - understanding - consciousness.
We have touched upon the ethnosociocultural characteristics of understanding above, now we will consider more psycholinguistic aspects of understanding.
According to R. Penrose, consciousness is continued in the intellect.
Operating unit of understanding is the code that has a symbolic nature: "Symbol is always something that we do not fully understand, but what we are as someone who understand, who exist" [Mamardashvili: 35]. Thus, from our point of view, the understanding and consciousness operate with one and the same instrument - symbol. The act of communication cannot take place if the message is not encoded (i.e. not transformed into symbol): "Code is a key concept in intercultural communication...a message should be coded, i.e., to be expressed by the code and decoded, i.e. be understood...thus the encoding in intercultural communication is the conversion of the first signal system to another by using the internal (the "language of thought") and external (verbal and non-verbal forms) codes. Cultural and language codes depend on the national picture of the world" [Molchanova: 71].
There are lots of great works about consciousness from the philosophical, psychological, socio-cultural points of view, in this article we will touch upon only two facts of consciousness: 1) consciousness is social by its nature (there are public and individual consciousness), it arose in the process of collective human existence, reflection of reality 2) consciousness has a communicative nature (as a consequence of socialization of the individual), which is reflected in the word consciousness (co-knowledge), i.e. a joint knowledge that can be passed to the recipient by means of words, signs, or other visual images, charts, gestures, facial expressions, etc. [Sedov: 138].
According to M.M. Bakhtin, "consciousness is developed and performed in symbols created in the process of social communication of organized team...Individual consciousness feeds on the signs, rooted in them, reflects their logics and regularity. National language is thus composed of ideal symbolic content of consciousness".
By relying on the theories of speech production of prominent Russian and Soviet scientists, we will present a scheme of the verbal statement production in the conditions of intercultural dialogue.
1. Behind any verbal statement lies the idea or motive. Thus, the motive of the speech act is the starting point of the formation of thoughts. The motive lies outside of consciousness, according to K.F. Sedov, and appeals to both hemispheres. Of course, there are cases when the motive is quite conscious and is lying in a field of consciousness. But most often the motive is a result of subconscious activities, and in this case it is directly linked with the right hemisphere of the brain [Sedov: 114].
2. The primary stage of the formation of thought also includes the next stage - the formation of communicative intention, which is located in the right part of the brain. The communicant at this stage makes decisions such as willingness/unwillingness to communicate. We can claim with certain degree of probability, that at this stage the leading role belongs to the right hemisphere of the brain that is responsible for thinking processes, in this case, this is the stage where a decision about the emotional color of the future utterance, intonation and modality is made. At this stage the mind of the speaker defines for itself the aim of statement. It is most likely that here thought in the bright field of consciousness is transformed in understanding intention, i.e. the communicant, knowing his personal idea, encodes it in a particular sign system. This stage also takes place in the right hemisphere and here there are not any traces of the national language.
3. The next stage is the primary idea when the speaker already knows for what purpose he intends to say, which extra-linguistic features of discourse to involve, but does not know what he will say exactly. Here a coherent semantic model of the utterance it formed, the semantic content of the utterance is formalized. This stage is a line between thought and word. Future speech here is encoded in the form of diagrams, signs, sensations, images.
4. The next step is verbalization of the idea. It is here where the language of sense shaped in images, diagrams, signs is translated into specific national language - the language of values, understandable for the recipient. One should say that the whole scheme of speech production is a race where the real war is between personal meaning and the conventional meaning. Verbalized statement construction at this stage consists of phrases' parts, carrying core sense of key concepts, i.e. a communicative core of future statement is formed. This stage has reference with internal speech of L.S. Vygotsky.
5. At the subsequent stages occurs the unfolding of the communicative semantic core into speech utterance: the thought is reborn in the word. It is reborn, formed, it does not transit ready-made.
6. The grammatical construction of the phrase begins with the syntax. Internal words-images find their place in the syntax of the national language. If on the 4th
stage the right hemisphere's grammar was used, here left-hemisphere's grammar is involved, by means of which sense becomes the meaning, here appear the syntax and lexical variation.
7. Next such grammatical categories as the vocabulary and morphemes are used.
8. As a result, there goes syllable motor development of speech carried out by the left hemisphere of the brain.
9. As a final part of this long chain of speech development is control over semantic and formal sides of discourse. This function is divided between the left and right hemispheres where the left is responsible for the formal-grammatical design of the discourse, and the right - for the semantic content.
Thus, the path from thought to word is a transformation of the sensory image into disembodied thought, and undifferentiated word - into dismembered sentence with subject-object structure. In this way the unconscious becomes conscious.
Scheme 1. Scheme of Speech Production (производство речи)
Scheme 1. Scheme of Speech Perception (восприятие речи)
Understanding, most probably, is the form of existence of the individual in the social world: "And since human is conceived as ... free being, the interaction with their own kind is built not according to the principle of "stimulus-reaction", but the principle of "addressing-understanding". Therefore, human interaction becomes communication" [Ufimceva: 19]. Thus, understanding is primary in relation to communication. Human as being a "social animal" with the natural intention to understand themselves and the world, faced the need to create a language, where understanding, by contrast, has pre-language basis.
References
Averincev S.S., Davydov YN., Turbin V.N. et al. (1992). M.M. Bakhtin as a Philosopher. Coll. Papers Inst. of Philos. RAS. M.: Nauka (in Rus).
Bakhtin M.M. (1979). Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M.: Hudozhestvennaya Literatura (in Rus). Bell D. (1973). The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. A Venture in Social Forecasting. N.Y, Basic Books, Inc.
Man yesterday and today. (2014). Interdisciplinary research papers, RAS Inst. of Philos, Issue 8 / ed. M.S. Kiseleva. M.: IFRAN. P. 18-29.
Humboldt V. (1985). Language and Philosophy of Culture. M.: Academic prospect. P. 346 - 350 (in Rus).
Mamardashvili M.K. (2011). Soznanie I civilizaciya. SPb.: Azbuka, Azbuka-Attikus (in Rus). Molchanova G.G. (2014). Cognitive polycode intercultural communication: verbal and non-verbal. M.: OLMA Media Grupp (in Rus).
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Ufimceva N.V. (2011). The linguistic consciousness: dynamics and variability. M.: RAS. - (in Rus.). Weisgerber I. (2009). Native Language and Spirit Formation. M.: Lobrikom (in Rus).
■ ■ ■ Понимание как основа межкультурной коммуникации: психолингвистические, этносоциокультурные аспекты и образовательные решения
Хайнс Д.1, Кабахидзе Е.А.2, Сувирова А.Ю.2
1. Государственный университет имени Сэма Хьюстона, Хантсвилл (Техас), Соединенные Штаты Америки.
2. Московский городской педагогический университет, Москва, Российская Федерация.
Аннотация. Авторы статьи анализируют межкультурное общение с точки зрения социальной философии, определяя инвариантные черты межкультурной коммуникации на основе диалога (Михаил Бахтин) и диалектной природы человеческого общения. Теоретическое описание характера межкультурного общения иллюстрируется живыми примерами культурных конфликтов, заимствованных из истории россий-
ской дипломатии. Поскольку сознание носит коммуникативный характер, тогда как кросс-культурное понимание уходит корнями в нейропсихологические аспекты познания, антиномию "знака-символа", в статье показаны механизмы воспроизведения и восприятия речи, находящиеся между сознанием и познанием.
В статье подчеркивается герменевтическая сущность межкультурного диалога, порождаемая пониманием между коммуникаторами концептуально-семантического уровня, хотя более важно межкультурное и цивилизационное измерение в контексте многополярного мира с учетом глобальных тенденций в социально-экономическом, этнокультурном, политическом устройством в разных странах мира. Интернационализация образовательных, информационных и телекоммуникационных технологий стимулирует межкультурную коммуникацию, что в результате формирует общество знаний, в котором живут "люди говорящие" (homo loquens). Интенсивные межкультурные контакты нередко порождают культурные конфликты. Автор классифицирует это явление, варьируя ошибки, недостаточное понимание, смущение и конфликты межкультурной коммуникации, раскрывает социокультурную парадигму, аксиологические, мировоззренческие и религиозные аспекты, которые вызывают негативные последствия межкультурных контактов.
Понимание в межкультурном диалоге состоит из этносоциокультурного контекста и психолингвистических механизмов воспроизведения и восприятия речи. Рабочий элемент понимания считается кодом, который носит символический характер. В статье изображена взаимосвязь между символом, кодом, актом коммуникации, сознанием и национальным мировоззрением.
Ключевые слова: понимание, познание, межкультурный диалог, сознание, символ, национальное мировоззрение, герменевтика, этнос, коммуникация, информационное общество, культура, глобализация
Для цитирования: Хайнс Д., Кабахидзе Е.А., Сувирова А.Ю. Понимание как основа межкультурной коммуникации: психолингвистические, этносоциокультурные аспекты и образовательные решения // Коммуникология. 2018. Том 6. №2. С. 52-59. DOI 10.21453/2311-3065-2018-6-2-52-59.
Сведения об авторах: Джеймс Хайнс, доцент кафедры учебных программ и методики преподавания, директор центра международного образования Государственного университета имени Сэма Хьюстона; Екатерина Львовна Кабахидзе, к.филос.н., заведующая лабораторией международных проектов, Московский городской педагогический университет; Сувирова Анастасия Юрьевна, к.п.н., старший научный сотрудник лаборатории международных проектов, Московский городской педагогический университет. Адрес: 129226, г. Москва, 2-й Сельскохозяйственный пр, д. 4. E-mail: kabakhidze@gmail.com.
Статья поступила в редакцию: 16.03.2018. Принята к печати: 02.04.2018.
