(Reserve)
If communication consisted of the transmission of information only, both saying NO and interpreting the communicative meaning of NO would not cause any problems, since the communication act NO would present pure information and thus could not cause any threat to the participants' face-wants/needs. However, in real-life communication, the non-acceptance of, e.g., a prior assessment, offer, request or invitation is hardly ever performed baldly on record, but usually mitigated. In a social interaction framework, the investigation of language cannot be restricted to the analysis of the linguistic system, but also has to take into consideration its socio-semiotic function. As a result, the appropriate level of face-work, i.e. the appropriate degree of mitigation, is influenced by the communicative situation of the utterance and its context and thus depends on external factors. The face-needs / wants of the participants are thus strongly influenced by social and cultural values.
If we adopt an ethnomethodological and contrastive / intercultural approach to the investigation of the communication act NO, we have to accept:
that context is both a result and a process which is created both in and through the process of human communication, more specifically the communication act NO. Because of the indexicality of language and thus of linguistic variation, the deep structure meaning NO can be represented in both a more and a less explicit mode.
that different languages employ different communicative strategies for the contextualization of the communication act NO; that is to say they employ both more and less explicit modes of representing NO, and employ either more or fewer turns for representing NO.
The intention of this paper is twofold: first, there is a discussion of the communication act NO which is defined in the framework of the contextual function PLUS/MINUS-VALIDITY CLAIM based on Habermas's theory of communicative action and Halliday's functional approach to language. Secondly, the frame of reference is applied to German and English, although it could, in principle, be applied to any language. There is also an illustration and discussion of preferred and dispreferred modes of representing the communication act No in a media setting (political interviews), an institutional setting (university) as well as informal settings (face-to-face) with special consideration given to potential sources of miscommunication.
This contextually-oriented frame of reference accommodates both language-internal and language-external factors and thus allows an investigation of intercultural and intracultural (mis)communication in the field of preferred and dispreferred modes of linguistic representation.
References:
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