PERCEPTUAL CAUSES OF COMMUNICATIVE FAILURES

Abstract

The article reveals and describes communicative failures caused by perceptual factors within the framework of the intersubjectivity paradigm. А communicative failure is viewed as an inability of interacting subjects to make an inference or making a faulty inference in an intersubjective act. An intersubjective act is interpreted as an inter-action, where communicants’ verbal/non-verbal communicative actions are viewed as perceptual stimuli, which trigger parallel conscious/non-conscious inference processes involving cognition, volition and affect resulting in a motivated communicative social action. Inferential analysis applied in the research provides tools for the recreation of communicants’ inferential processes and enables to consider cognitive, perceptual, affective and volitional aspects of interaction stipulating their goal-oriented motivated communicative verbal and non-verbal actions. American cinema discourse represented by the genre of a situation comedy and modeling live communication supplied instances of communicative failures subjected to analysis. We prove that communicative failures caused by perceptual factors come either from inner (psychological and psychophysiological) or outer (technical) sources. Psychological causes of communicative failures are connected with the addressee focusing his/her attention on subject matters going beyond the communication involved, thus preventing him/her from active participation in the process of communication. Psychophysiological causes of communicative failures result from abnormal psychological and/or physical state of an addresser or addressee, which prevents them from participating fully in the communication process. Technical causes of communicative failures are caused by the hindrance in sensory channels available to the communicants in the process of communication.