On Communicative Failures in Cross-Cultural Discourse

Abstract

The authors of the article address an urgent problem of communicative interaction in the context of existing discursive differences defined by characteristic intra-cultural methods of coding cultural phenomena. The fact that communicative failures are predetermined, first of all, by the asymmetry of evaluation and perception of cultural phenomena, which the representatives of different cultural and linguistic communities directly find in cross-cultural interaction, is undoubted. The paper provides insight on the potential of including data from the analysis of particular cases of knowledge about language and the surrounding world, which are used to identify a referent in the discourse by a speaker or a listener, when organizing cross-cultural communication within the framework of pedagogical discourse. The analysis of particular communicative failures in the process of cross-cultural natural language interaction allows for the creation and / or correction of tactics of verbal behaviour that can be effectively used in teaching Russian as a foreign language, for example, when studying a speech genre such as “congratulations”, as well as the communicative topic “Holidays”.