Speech Personality. Precedent Texts

The interactive model of information processing and comprehension enhancement has been elaborated and investigated in terms of interrelated concepts of non-linear vertical context (Ахманова О.), precedent texts and language-cultural personality (Караулов Ю.). Vertical context is treated in philological and socio-historical dimensions. The former as the imaginary world in literary works and their authors, the latter as the real world, real people and events. Homo Loquens is a triple unity of language personality, speech (discourse) personality and communication personality. Language personality is a basic point of communication. The structure of language personality is three-dimensional. It includes the following levels: verbal-semantic, cognitive and pragmatic. A verbal-semantic level presupposes the knowledge of the linguistic code. A cognitive level covers concepts, notions, ideas etc. A pragmatic level includes aims and intentions of the speaker. The speech (discourse) personality is shaped by language personality and one’s belonging to a specific social group which predetermines the individual’s discursive strategies and repertoire.

The notion of precedent text elaborated by the Russian scholar Yuriy Karaulov contributes to a better understanding of the mechanism of information processing and comprehension in the process of communication. Precedent texts (PT) are defined as a set of cognitive schemata (frames) typical of one ethnic culture (sometimes present or unknown in other cultures). They reflect a particular way of world perception, including values, attitudes and beliefs. PT is viewed as a mechanism of generating and interpreting implicit meanings and sense nuances. In other words, precedents are verbal models stored in memory. PT identifies a socio-cultural dimension of an individual, a personality pattern.

The corpus of PTs is rather broad. It includes citations form works of fiction, movies, titles of famous books, popular songs, names of characters, slogans, familiar quotations as well as metaphors. Quotations can be graphically marked in inverted comas or unmarked reproduction of somebody else’s text to create a specific association, allusion, or image. Precedent texts in media genre (newspapers, journals, magazines) are of special interest. Precedent phenomena can be classified into: universal (biblical, generally accepted, universally known) and specific (ethnic, professional, business etc). Ethnic PTs are well-known only in one ethnic culture while international PTs are recognized in two or more cultures. Classical literature of various periods may be an example of the latter (e.g. William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy).

An essential feature of PTs is their strong associative potential which can be positive (Christmas, Santa Clause, Princess Di etc) and negative (Chernobyl, Hitler), mixed (war in Iraq, Euro Disney in France, Siberia as a far-away exile place or the concentration of huge natural resources of oil and gas); tragic (Titanic- a title and an event), and humorous (Charlie Chaplin). They may be chronologically marked (as rich as Croesus- a local Rockfeller). PTs are familiar and essential to the representatives of some cultural society, or a social group.

Precedent texts belonging to one culture may be misunderstood or misinterpreted by people from other cultures or by members of the same cultural ethnic society,which results in a communicative failure – the inadequate decoding of the message. This will be illustrated by some fragments of workshops in Business English and Business Communication in some Ukrainian universities. The precedent phenomena are present in 1) the text title and 2) the text body. The students were given two types of business texts on doing business internationally in foreign countries (West and East) as well as in Ukraine (and Russia) as mirrored in Western press. In some cases, the response of the students was positive (to mutual pleasure of the students and the professor) but in some cases – negative as a consequence of insufficient background knowledge.

Practically all the students interviewed, including groups of Applied Linguistics, Economics &Management, and Computer Engineering – all taking a course in Business English – experienced no difficulty decoding the precedent element (Shakespeare’s immortal question) in the title of the research paper on business education in Brazil: M.B.A.: To Be or Not To Be? But when analyzing the concepts of brand image and brand management outlined in an article in The Economist, 24 out of 25 business students and 65 out of 93 applied linguistics students at Lviv Polytechnic National University “did not” hear the paraphrase of Shakespeare’s memorable verses from Romeo and Juliet:

“ What’s in a name?

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (Що є ім’я? Хоч як назви троянду не зміниться в ній аромат солодкий – І.Стешенко)

in the fragment below:” Brands add value by making customers loyal and, often willing to pay more for the things branded. Roses by any other name might smell as sweet (emphasis added) but they would no longer fetch $30 a dozen ”. Ignorance of a world literary tradition is insufficient excuse, at least in this case, for not recognizing the metaphoric and allusive possibilities of the usage.

In the title of the book by J.Mole When in Rome… A Business Guide to culture and customs in 12 European nations (1991) only the initial part of the popular saying has been used as a sigh of good style strongly supported by George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language: «Never use a metaphor, simile or any other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print».

A more sophisticated case of a PT, or, in other words, vertical context, has been found in Randall Jarrell’s essay A Sad Heart at the Supermarket on the consuming nature of the American nation:

They are well on their way to becoming that ideal figure of our culture, the knowledgeable consumer. Let me define him: the knowledgeable consumer is someone who, when he comes to Weimar, knows how to buy a Weimaraner. Daisy’s voice sounded like money; everything about the knowledgeable consumer looks like or sounds like or feels like money, and informed money at that. To live is to consume, to understand life is to know what to consume: he has learned to understand this, so that his life is a series of choices – correct ones- among the products and services of the world.

The students managed to decode the message easily with one exception: Daisy’s voice sounded like money. Who’s Daisy? For two applied linguistics students only (out of 91) taking a course in Business English (and in American Literature) it rang a bell: the Daisy from The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald as a symbol of huge money and absolute, overwhelming, consuming instincts. The author of the essay used this character for emphasis in parallel constructions: everything looks like or sounds like or feels like money.

Actually, none of the Ukrainian readers was able to decode appropriately the introductory sentence in The Economist article “The Caring Company”:

The greeter at a Wal-Mart store might be surprised to know he is a living proof of one of the oldest saws of management (emphasis added) as the very denotatum is absent from the Ukrainian customer service practice and, correspondingly, the Ukrainian language. This is a case of cross-cultural communication where the nuances of a different culture are critical for proper understanding. Its misunderstanding creates a communicative barrier and results in miscommunication. Culture note: Wal-Mart.trademark. A large store in the US that sells many kinds of goods at low prices. A Wal-Mart greeter is a volunteer, usually retired, who meets and greets customers at the entrance and offer them assistance in doing the shopping without any payment.

A separate group of samples is made up by texts on Ukraine (and Russia) in Western press. Unfortunately, Ukrainian students may have difficulty decoding the cognitive structure of the information about their native country and Russia. A very apt expression used in the title of the article on Russia’s aggressive international politics in the “European Business” section in Business Week: Russia: How Not to Win Friends is an ironic paraphrase of one of Dale Carnegie’s books How to Win Friends and Influence People extremely popular in Russian translation among Soviet middle class members and Soviet students in the early 80-ies of the 20th c. The book was republished in the post-Soviet period. The title and the author are familiar to many students but unfortunately, very few students read it to improve their communicative and interpersonal skills.

A vivid example below which is the title of the article about Ukraine GAS Victor? published in The Economist proves the assumption that the reason for inadequate processing of the information is not an individual’s word stock of the English language but rather a narrow scope of knowledge of the facts, events and trends in the economy, politics, and social life in Ukraine. For those readers (recipients) who are not Ukrainians, who do not live in Ukraine, or are not experts on international, in general, and East European economic and political issues, in particular, it is difficult to presuppose the content structure of the information which is quite pardonable. But Ukrainian citizens (Ukrainian students part of them) cannot but hear and watch in numerous news program the fight between Russia and Ukraine on gas supply and transfer and a danger of a new increase in the cost.

Ukraine’s president has made a surprising breakthrough, by gaining Russian agreement to oust gas-trade intermediary RosUkrEnergo in favor of direct sales at the current price, which is less than two-thirds of the tariff paid by EU states. However, many important aspects remain undecided, including when RosUkrEnergo will be removed and the share of its domestic market that Ukraine must cede to Gazprom in return. In conjunction with the Russia-Ukraine competition, there is also an intra-Ukrainian struggle between President Victor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Mr.Yushchenko achieved a key Ukrainian objective in talks with his Russian counterpart on February 12…

Thus, a stylistic figure of text polyphony, a play of words (Victor – Vector) has been employed to predict whose gas policy, or gas vector, Victor Yushchenko’s or that of Yulia Tymoshnko will take over.

There are abundant examples of the titles of articles in international business periodicals when a stylistic technique of paraphrasing, a subtle meaning transformation, has a mental image behind it which makes its use in discourse understandable and connotatively colored: The Spare Sex: Women in Management - Fair Sex; The Purest Treasure - Pure Pleasure.

As it has been mentioned above, the target audience of the internationally recognized business editions is supposed to have an extensive cultural and intercultural background knowledge. There are many examples of times when business people, in creative ways, need to employ their knowledge of literature, vivid literary characters, metaphors and quotations to cross the boundaries of shoptalk, and, when necessary, to treat professional issues from a fresh perspective. The fact that we are professionals does not excuse us from the reality that we are human beings. Education should not consist in learning a trade only. Cardinal Newman wrote that a university education “gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them” (“An Idea of University”).

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14