How to achieve effective communication?

There are many views on what language exactly is. Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntarily produced symbols. These symbols are, in the first instance, auditory and they are produced by the so-called organs of speech. One of the biggest problems in modern day society is miscommunication. Failure to communicate with another individual can happen on many levels, which may include linguistic and non-verbal behaviour. In verbal and non-verbal communication, there are distinct differences in the way all individuals communicate. Diversity within a language may be due to geographical location, class, sex or ethnic background. Geographical location is perhaps the most obvious - the English spoken in Surrey is different from the English spoken in Belfast or Glasgow, or New York or South Carolina. Standard English is itself a dialect and like all other dialects is subject to regional variation. Consider the following grammatical contrasts between American, Scottish and English Standard English:

• American Standard English: "He'd gotten it"

• English Standard English: "He'd got it"

• Scottish Standard English: "You had a good time, hadn't you"

• English Standard English: "You had a good time' didn't you"

Human communication is not a set, meaningful fact. Only he himself gives meaning to it. Communication is an unclear concept at times. To try and give a better concept of communication, we can say that communication occurs when one organism (the transmitter) encodes information into a signal which passes to another organism (the receiver) which decodes the signal and is capable of responding appropriately. If one wants to analyse the communicative act, it can be done by breaking it down into three acts:

• A sender who encodes information into a signal;

• The physical sending of the signal;

• A receiver who decodes the signal, interprets the signal into information, and responds appropriately.

A medium could be anything from a word, text, etc. that sends a message towards the listener or receiver.

A potentially available response is sufficient to define a communicative act. Very often communication occurs without the receiver giving any overt indication that anything has happened. Without proper feedback from the listener, the speaker would not be able to achieve effective communication. For any communicative situation, whether verbal or non-verbal, to be successful there needs to be feedback from both the speaker and listener respectively.

Figure 2.2 A diagram of Interpersonal communication

Message: “Hello John”

Mediums used:speech,fax, e-mail,telephone, writing…

Speech, email, telephone, fax

Sender writing, etc.

Decoding

Encoding

Feedback: “Good morning Fred”

Oxymchuk C.

(Vinnytsia)

LINGUOCULTURAL CONCEPT through the prism of LANGUAGE, consciousness AND CULTURE

The linguocultural concept is a conventional mental unit aimed at the complex studying of language, consciousness and culture (Stepanov 2007). The correlation of the lingoucultural concept with the three named below spheres may be formulated in the following way: 1. Consciousness is the sphere of an objective reality, a kind of concept location, as the concept “exists” in consciousness. 2. Culture determines the concept, in other words, the concept is a peculiar mental projection of cultural elements. 3. Language and speech are the two spheres where the concept is formed and realized.

Still, such categorization is conventional as there are difficulties of the correlation of the two phenomena - “language” and “culture”, because 1) language serves simultaneously as a part and also an outer factor of culture; 2) there is a two-way communication between language and consciousness, as consciousness categories are realized in language categories and at the same time are determined by them.

The concept does not necessary have an obligatory connection with other language means of verbalization. A communicatively relevant part of the concept is verbalized in/via speech acts. The description of the conceptually verbalized part occurs while studying the semantics of the units. The reasons for the verbalization or non-verbalization of the concept does not influence the reality of its existence in consciousness as the unit of thinking. At the same time there is a great amount of non-verbalized concepts in consciousness. A considerable quantity of personal concepts is beyond the verbalization.

A great number of the nominations of this or that concept is the evidence of its high nomino-typical alkalinity of this particularly area of the language system and reflects the topicality of the concept that is verbalized for people (Karasik 2005).

Concepts are realized directly from people’s experience, from the activities and mental operations with other concepts that exist in the memory, from communication, from the learned meaning of the language units.

So, language is only one of the other methods of concepts’ formation.The concept has a peculiar but not strict structure and passes several phases of its development before appearing in the view of the conceptual system.

Олищук Ирина

(г. Винница)