JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Kristiina Jokinen & Graham Wilcock

Contextual Inferences in Intercultural Communication

            This paper discuss about intercultural communication using the notions of high context and low context cultures. Beside that how the way, the dialogue strategies, relative speaker and hearer responsibilities from English and Finnish when they are in a conversations also discuss in this paper. The examples in this paper show that the cultural presuppositions influence and give the different interpretations, and it can be concluded that the Finnish communication style falls into the typical of high context culture.

Intercultural communication studies actually have related communication differences not only to the cultural aspects but also to the role of social context in interpersonal communication. Beside that the successful in a conversation depends on the individual’s communicative behavior such as speaking style, and also to the knowledge about suitable and polite communication strategies.

         

        There is two classic patterns in intercultural communication, low context cultures and high context cultures. The anthropologies Edward Hall (1976) delivered the differentiations of the two patterns. He delivered that in the low context culture, everything is fully spelled out: ideas, thoughts, and request are made explicit, and the actions depend very much on what is said or written. In a high context culture the communicators assume a lot of shared knowledge, experience, and world view, and thus less is made explicit and much more is implicit or communicated in indirect ways. Beside that the roles and communicative obligations of the speaker and the listener are also different: in a high context culture, the speaker is responsible for the emotional impact of the message, while the listener is responsible for understanding and providing acknowledgement of the message.

         

Examples of low context cultures are taken to be North American, German, Swiss and Scandinavian cultures, whereas Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, French, Mediterranean, and Latin American cultures are examples of high context cultures.

         

In this paper we will discuss and analyze three dialogue examples between Finnish and British English conversational strategies and show the fact about the opinion that tells Finnish is typical of high context cultures and British English is low context cultures. 

Another example of the different contextual reasoning hearer or speaker divisions of labor in conversations can be found in the topic introduction. The introduction of the topic is the most important part in conversations because this part is as a clue where the conversations is will going on.

In low-context cultures, the topic introduction of conversation should start with a suitable introductory remark which directs the hearer’s attention to the actual topic. It is very different in the high context cultures where the speakers do not express they wants and needs explicitly.

COMMENT

            This paper is a nice and important paper because this paper discuses about the intercultural communication using the notions of high and low context cultures. We know there is some differentiation in communication that use high context culture and low context culture. Not only that this paper also discuss about how the way, the dialogue strategies, relative speaker and hearer responsibilities from English and Finnish when they are in a conversations.

            Based on the example in this paper we can make a conclusion that Finnish language including in the typical of high context culture and the British English is the typical of low context culture. This fact finally change our opinion about the English language where we suggest that English language is a type of high context culture.

� & f c � `�� made us has opinion like that because Finnish and Irish is different country. But on the other hand this article broke that opinion and gives several facts that shown relationship between this two languages. This article also explains about the terms that use in Finnish and Irish grammarians respectively, namely ‘passive’ and ‘autonomous’ to describe the verbal morphology involve. The others found such as ‘impersonal’ are also found, some of the others terms be found to be more adequate.