«YOU MISUNDERSTAND ME»: IMPLICATION AND INTERFERENCE AS SENSE FORMING OPERATIONS IN THE PROCESS OF COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Any type of speech interaction consists not only in generating utterances, but also in the listener’s adequate understanding of what is being said. The degree of speech eff ectiveness is much determined by the addressee’s equivalent interpretation of the message transmitted in the process of dialogue interplay. The given work is focused upon the problem of the listener’s adequate perception of speech messages sent by the speaker. The urgency of the research undertaken follows from the absence of universal theoretical conceptions of decoding the sense of the utterance and is also motivated by the practical needs of optimising speech communication. Our object of study is the original English literary dialogue, and the subject of investigation is verbal and non-verbal means indirectly infl uencing the sense of the message. The objective of this paper is uncovering intra- and extra-lingual factors determining the individual perception of the utterance. In the course of study, we have used such methods as linguistic observation and description, contextual and communicative approaches, quantitative and qualitative analysis. Since it is an often case that a greater part of the intended message remains unsaid and requires mental restoration from the listener, we found it necessary to study the logical operation of implication. It was found out that extra-lingual interference, such as background knowledge of the interlocutor’s identity and the topic of conversation, plays a domineering role in deducing implicatures and decoding the sense of the utterance on the level of personal interpretation of the message.