Cross-cultural expectations

1.Conversational inference is 'the "situated"' or context-bound process of interpretation by means of which participants in a conversation assess others’s intentions, and on which they base their responses'.

Because of its cultural base, the 'meaning’ that emerges in a conversa-tion is likely to be different for different participants if they are not mem-bers of the same speech community. Examples of cross-cultural (mis)communicative events serve to highlight the importance of such fac-tors as the information or presuppositions the communicators bring to the task, the extralinguistic context, and nonverbal cues. For example, the following exchange in a kindergarten classroom on the Navajo Reserva-tion:

A Navajo man opened the door to the classroom and stood looking at the floor. The Anglo-American teacher said and waited expectantly, but the man did not respond. The teacher said 'My name is Mrs Jones,' and again waited for a respond. There was none.

In the meantime, a child in the room put away his crayons and got his coat from the rack. The teacher, noting this, said to the man,’Oh, are you taking Billy now?’ He said,’Yes’.

The teacher continued to talk to the man while Billy got ready to leave, saying, 'Billy is such a good boy,' 'I'm so happy to have him in class,' etc.

Billy walked towards the man (his father), stopping to turn around and wave at the teacher on his way out and saying, 'Bye-bye.' The teacher responded, 'Bye-bye.' The man remained silent as he left.

From a Navajo perspective, the man's silence was appropriate and re-spectful. The teacher, on the other hand, expected not only to have the man return her greeting, but to have him identify himself and state his reason for being there. Although such an expectation is quite reasonable and appropriate from an Anglo-American perspective, it would have re-quired the man to break not only Navajo rules of politeness but also a traditional religious taboo that prohibits individuals from saying their own name. The teacher interpreted the contextual cues correctly in answer to her own question ('Are you taking Billy?') and then engaged in small talk in an attempt to be friendly and to cover her own discomfort in the situa-tion. The man continued to maintain appropriate silence. Billy, who was more acculturated than his father to Anglo-American ways, broke the Navajo rule to follow the Anglo-American one in leave-taking.

This encounter undoubtedly reinforced the teacher's stereotype that Navajos are 'impolite' and 'unresponsive,' and the man's stereotype that Anglo-Americans are 'impolite' and 'talk too much.'

2. Formal ritual events in a speech community have more clearly de-fined boundaries than informal ones because there is a high degree of predictability in both verbal and nonverbal content of routines on each occasion, and they are frequently set off from events which precede and follow by changes in vocal rhythm, pitch, and intonation. Brief interac-tions between people almost always consist of routines, such as greetings and partings, and the boundaries of longer and most informal communica-tive events, such as conversations, can be determined because they are preceded and followed by them. Since the discovery of communicative norms is often most obvious in their breach, examples of boundary viola-tions may highlight what the appropriate boundary behavior is. Some people are annoyed with what they consider to be premature applause by others at the end of an opera, for instance, which indicates differences in what 'the end' of the event is perceived to be: the end of the singing or the end of all music. Still others may whisper through the overture, since for them the event has not yet begun. Christina Paulston (personal communi-cation) reports the occurrence of a serious misunderstanding between

Jewish and Christian parents attending an ecumenical service because the Jewish parents continued conversing after entering the place of worship, while the Christians considered this inappropriate behavior once the phys-ical boundary into the sanctuary was crossed.

Micro-analysis of boundary signals is less formal situations common-ly requires filming a communicative situation, and then asking partici-pants to view the film themselves and to indicate when 'something new is happening.' The researcher then elicits characterizations of the event, and expectations of what may happen next (and what may not happen next), in order to determine the nature of the boundary signals, and how the con-text has changed from the point of view of the participants.

The communicative events selected initially for description and anal-ysis for one learning to use this approach should be brief self-contained sequences which have readily identifiable beginnings and endings. Fur-ther, they should be events which recur in similar form and with some frequency, so that regular patterns will be more easily discernible: e.g. greetings, partings, prayers, condolences, jokes, insults, compliments, ordering meals in restaurants. More complex and less regular events yield themselves to analysis more readily after patterns of use and norms of interpretation have already been discovered in relation to simpler and more regular communicative events. Components of communication:

1. The genre, or type of event (e.g. joke, story, lecture, greeting, conversation).

2. The topic, or referential focus.

3. The purpose or function, both of the event in general and in terms of the interaction goals of individual participants.

4. The setting, including location, time of day, season of year, and physical aspects of the situation (e.g. size of room, arrangement of furni-ture).

5. The key, or emotional tone of the event (e.g. serious, sarcastic,

jocular).

6. The participants, including their age, sex, ethnicity, social status, or other relevant categories, and their relationship to one another.

7. The message form, including both vocal and nonvocal channels, and the nature of the code which is used (e.g. which language, and which variety).

8. The message content, or surface level denotive references; what is communicated about.

9. The act sequence, or ordering of communicative/speech acts, in-cluding turn-taking and overlap phenomena.

10. The rules for interaction, or what properties should be observed.

11. The norms of interpretation, including the common knowledge, the relevant cultural presuppositions, or shared understandings, which allow particular inferences to be drawn about what is to be taken literally, what discounted, etc.

(from “Ethnographic Analysis of Communicative Events” by M. Saville-Troika)

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