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Writer's pictureAnna Canton Amela

Linguistic Awareness of Cultures

In intercultural communication, according to Brown (2020), the term “culture” is used in the anthropological sense, whereby culture is defined as the customs, worldview, language, social organization, and other daily practices of people or members of a group. The analysis of intercultural communication may be conducted by focusing on the cultural aspects deemed most pertinent for comprehension. These aspects, or discursive systems, are fundamental elements in the process of communication.


For the phenomenon of interculturality to occur, there is a pressing need for linguistic awareness. Nevertheless, it is important to note that multiculturalism and interculturality do not necessarily signify the same concept. The terms are frequently employed as synonyms, yet they refer to disparate concepts. According to Barret (2013), multiculturalism tends to maintain the separation and isolation of cultures, whereas interculturality emphasizes the interrelation, dynamism, and change between them. "Multiculturalism" does not inherently imply the cohesion, inclusion, and integration of diverse cultural elements. This is why the concept of "interculturality" has been introduced to address this gap.


Linguistic awareness is the capacity that allows a speaker to reflect on oral language, and to identify, segment, or combine the lexical units of learned words to master the communicative competence that occurs in the structure of speech (Müller-Jacquier, 2000). In contrast, cultural awareness denotes the capacity to discern and value the distinctions and similarities between individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds. The conjunction of these two concepts constitutes the title of this article. This piece is based on Bernd Müller-Jacquier's approach, from his study "Linguistic Awareness of Cultures: Grundlagen eines Trainingsmoduls" (2000), which states that intercultural communication “is a key element that requires continuous learning, constant critical reflection and respectful interaction with people from other backgrounds" (2000, p.5). According to Knapp, “participants in intercultural communication view occurring misunderstandings as problems of communication, rather than considering them to be problems of differing cultural or individual values" (1989, p.28). As defined by the studies from Winter (1994) and Thomas (1996), in critical intercultural situations between foreigners, the participants’ culture-specific value systems are responsible for the majority of misunderstandings, which Berndt described as “critical incidents" (2000, p.9). Some factors that influence intercultural interactions are language training, specifically vocabulary and grammar.


Figure 1: Austro-British Society. The true meaning of culture (2021).

This article provides an overview of the previously mentioned Müller-Jacquier's work, elucidating the concepts of “intercultural situations” and “critical incidents”. Additionally, studies on the subject that are relevant to this discourse will be identified and illustrated. The objective is to demonstrate that linguistic awareness of cultures can prevent linguistic and cultural misunderstandings during the process of intercultural communication.


Intercultural Situations and Critical Incidents

There is an interrelationship between linguistic awareness and its impact on intercultural communication. It can be argued that intercultural situations may not occur in the absence of the coexistence and interaction of these two concepts. Intercultural situations are not randomly structured; rather, they are created situationally (Müller-Jacquier, 2000). This author postulates that “certain constellations of source cultures produce very similar 'patterns of interaction' (Gumperz, 1991) in intercultural situations, which in turn give rise to certain types of problems in the evolved "intercultures”. Some intercultural communication problems that can arise from intercultural situations have their roots in differing speech act realizations and discourses styles (Knapp-Potthoff, 1990), culturally distinct patterns of modality, paraverbal communication (Kartari, 1997), and non-verbal communication (Apeltauer, 1997).


Specific intercultural skills may potentially contribute to the avoidance of critical incidents in intercultural communication situations. The ability to observe, engage in self-reflection, ability to alter one's perspective, demonstrate tolerance, exhibit empathy, and cultivate effective communication skills can be acquired through training and developed at academic institutions, workplaces, or specialized training programs such as "Linguistic Awareness of Cultures Training" (LAC). Moreover, real-life situations and traveling experiences also offer invaluable opportunities for the development of intercultural skills. Additionally, Bernd Müller-Jacquier (2000) asserts that foreign cultural behavior is not arbitrary, but rather systematic and analyzable. In the analysis of critical interaction situations, there are often linguistically motivated reasons for a misunderstanding. To illustrate, there is a distinction between social meanings and mental lexicon. Coparticipants use words to express social representations and to evoke these in others through mental imagery and termed culture-specific concepts.


Figure 2: Representation of intercultural communication. Wikipedia Commons (2015).

Following Müller Jacquier's study (2000), another factor to consider is the speech act. The linguistic action of a speaker can be analyzed in terms of various sub-acts. Each speaker occupies a specific role, and as speakers, we engage in a range of activities and exhibit a variety of behavioral intentions. Behavior intentions and their realization cannot be distinguished through verbal and non-verbal expressions even in the context of one's native language. Furthermore, the structure of the conversation may prove to be a pivotal aspect in the realm of intercultural communication. Additionally also in his study from 2000, the author states that the sequencing, the act of speaking simultaneously, and the presence of any interruption can result in alterations to the process of communication. In any kind of communicative interaction between cultures, it is essential for speakers to consider the topic and the situation, as topics are often sequenced differently in face-to-face interactions with variations across speech communities. Factors such as politeness, degrees of directness, and the register may be perceived as "complaints" under the cultural norms or the specific social context. Moreover, speakers should also consider functional language variants. For example, factors such as the situation, age, position of power, gender, or the chosen register level of previous co-actors's language use may also be relevant.


Paraverbal factors and non-verbal factors must be considered as well. Bernd Müller-Jacquier (2000) also shows that the elements of volume, tempo, intonation, pauses, speaking louder or faster, and facial expressions, gestures, proxemics, eye contact, and clothing play a significant role in the dynamics of a conversation. In intercultural contexts, non-verbal communication serves to augment the intended meaning of the verbal modified expressions. Ultimately, culture-specific actions and action sequences can be observed from a foreign perspective as typical for the representatives of certain cultures. It is indeed crucial to develop the ability to discern what is foreign in our everyday lives, to isolate individually perceived actions and situations, and to evaluate them objectively according to the context.


Figure 3: Representation of a cultural misunderstanding. Dreamstime (2013).

Mental Lexicon vs Social Meaning

This article focuses on some of the linguistic awareness aspects referenced in various studies. Some potential conflicts or “critical incidents” that can arise between social meaning and the mental lexicon will be mentioned and developed. In his previously mentioned study from 2000, Müller-Jacquier proves that two homophone words can have entirely disparate meanings. The word "concept" in French has a completely distinct meaning from its English counterpart. In French the term signifies "Représentation mentale, générale et abstraite d’un objet" (Robert, 1989), which means mental representation, general or abstract of an object. In contrast, in English, it is used to denote a "first draft, first version" (Barmeyer, 1996, p. 26). Furthermore, it is imperative to conduct a thorough examination of certain seemingly universal "international" terms to ascertain their conceptual consistency across diverse cultural contexts. For example, consider the words "Sunday", "dimanche", and "Sonntag", as well as "friend", "Freund/in" and "ami, amie" (Müller-Jacquier, 2000). They are more or less relevant depending on the language, and their social meaning affects the degree to which they are integrated into our mental lexicon. In the case of certain abstract concepts, the difference between social meaning and mental lexicon can give rise to the formation of stereotypes. However, the social meaning of the concept can vary depending on an individual's personal identity, social identity, and cultural identity (Scheitza and Leenen, 2008, p. 1-2), and the same can be said of stereotypes. In the following paragraphs some examples of the impact of linguistic awareness in an intercultural situation will be presented, outlining how a cultural misunderstanding or its resolution arises from the correlation between social meaning and mental lexicon.


Mental Lexicon

Considering Libben's study from 2008, the mental lexicon can be defined as the stored mental representation of each word known in a given language, that is to say, it can be considered a repository of all lexical knowledge possessed by an individual speaker. According to Coltheart et al., (2001, p.47), "the notion of a mental lexicon was first introduced into the psycholinguistic literature by Ann Treisman in her 1961 doctoral dissertation". In her studies, Libben (2008, p.14), referred to "the intuition that the human mind must possess a knowledge store which functions as a dictionary in the mind, one which allows easy access to written and oral forms of individual words and associates those forms to meaning".


Figure 4. Red Shoe Movement. Example of a cultural difference in the workplace (2016).

Nevertheless, there is a discussion regarding the number of mental lexicons an individual can possess, which is contingent upon the representation of words in the minds of bilinguals and multilinguals. Recent studies seem to indicate that a person has a single integrated mental lexicon with individual words that belong to each language (Dijkstra et al., 2005). In contemporary linguistic theory, the mental lexicon is considered "a knowledge store that constitutes the ability for lexical activity" (Jarema & Libben, 2007). According to this last author, lexical activities encompass not only the processes of speaking and/or writing but also the act of recognizing a word. Therefore, it is postulated that the mental lexicon is not a dictionary nor a list, but rather a vital construction for understanding the nature of lexical knowledge and the union of its words.


Social Meaning

A relationship exists between semantic and social meaning in linguistic forms. Some linguistic forms reference properties that concern speakers' positioning in the social world and many social meanings are tied to linguistic expressions via an indexical relationship (Silverstein, 2003). The indexical associations that underpin linguist forms can be reevaluated and are subject to mediation by speakers' ideological views, since language users may differ in their interpretation of the social significance of speech forms. The structure of indexical meanings differs from their semantic counterparts. Silverstein (2003) also shows that each social meaning can be recruited creatively and speakers can recombine it to make social moves and construct identities. In contrast to semantic meanings, social meanings do not adhere to form-to-meaning mapping. Two relevant domains of differentiation must be taken into account for the social meaning conceptualization: intentionality versus legibility and minimal units and compositionality.


The initial domain of differentiation refers to how meaning is associated with intentionality: "The communication of semantic content crucially presupposes the speaker's intention to do so, as well the listener's recognition of this intention" (Grice, 1957, p.35). However, social meanings do not require intentionality, as many of them are employed without any particular intention from the speaker. For instance, Eckert (2019) demonstrates that particular accents or the use of morphosyntactic and lexical elements belonging to a variety of languages from a particular group of speakers do not happen intentionally. Consequently, social meanings do not necessitate intentionality, rather they demand legibility: "It is sufficient for these meanings to be recognizable by listeners, regardless of the degree to which the speaker intended for them to be recognized" (Eckert, 2019, p.52).


Figure 5: Representation of the mental lexicon in our brain. Wikiversity (2023).


The second domain of differentiation, minimal units, and compositionality addresses the units that carry each type of meaning and how these units are combined to form meaningful constructions. The combination of morphemes (the smallest elements of meaning) occurs in accordance with the principle of compositionality (Frege, 1892): the meaning of a complex unit -or a sentence- is a function of the meaning. By contrast, social meanings are carried by variables: "contrast sets which include alternative realizations of the same underlying form, or, more informally, alternative ways of ‘saying the same thing’" (Labov, 1972, p. 272). Human behavior, clothing, activities, and habits may belong to the field of social qualities if they exhibit a contrast with a set of alternatives that are distinct, and simultaneously connected on a social plane (Gal & Irvine, 2019).


Critical Incidents Examples

As per social meaning, the use of the discourse marker "dude" is indicative of friendship or a relationship of camaraderie between the speaker and the hearer (Kiesling, 2004). This illustrates that language can index aspects of the social relationship between interlocutors. This sort of indexical association acts as the beginning of the process through which numerous speech forms within our mental lexicon become socially meaningful. Furthermore, the social meaning of a concept is constructed by the interlocutor's memory of it. In the article entitled "Mental Lexicon: How are words stored in memory?" published in 2024 by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the author clarifies that the term "ice" has the potential to evoke disparate recollections, contingent upon the associations that have been imprinted upon the fabric of one's memories. These recollections may pertain to the consumption of ice cream, the experience of summer or winter, or other related experiences. According to the same study, adults have an average of 40,000 words in their mental lexicon, which enables them to communicate swiftly and efficiently, between cultures and in different languages. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have developed a system to capture the mental lexicon of individuals of all age groups. Their participants were requested to provide the first three associations that came to mind for a total of 18 terms, such as "ice", "swift", and "freedom". With the analysis of these associations, researchers can determine how these words are stored in our memory and how our mental lexicon is structured. This is because when a person hears or reads a word, related words or concepts are instantly activated. This is the point at which social meaning is derived.


The study by Hong Gao (2002) entitled "Language Contact - Misunderstanding, Confusion and Conflicts" seeks to demonstrate the prominence of cultural issues in language contact and to identify instances of misunderstanding during a cultural exchange resulting from a lack of linguistic awareness of cultures. The study is based on a series of illustrative examples drawn from the United States and China. The participants in these examples are bilinguals with Chinese or English as their first or second language, although in Gao's study examples in other languages ​​are also presented. For example, in English, requests are often made indirectly, as in the following example: "Can you tell me the time?" (Clark & Schunk, 1980, p.111). Conversely, the use of a direct form may be perceived as a lack of politeness, potentially leading to a future language conflict. Nevertheless, there are countries or regions in the world, such as Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, where speakers can communicate effectively despite speaking different languages (Wardhaugh, 1993, p.134).


The ease of communication between them is enhanced by the fact that, in addition to the similarities of their languages, they belong to the same cultural groups. When considering speakers from disparate cultural groups, the potential for misunderstanding is heightened. This risk can be mitigated through a conscious linguistic awareness of the cultural nuances involved. Pederson (1983) offers the English and Chinese languages as an example, stating the following: "Even when the words in Chinese and English were the same, the contexts in which the words were interpreted were completely different. Some of the more common counseling words such as concern (e.g., I am concerned about you) simply do not exist in Chinese" (p.405). This can easily lead to a communication problem due to language differences if the speakers do not have some linguistic awareness skills. In this case, a real solution would be to find a synonym in order to avoid a critical incident.



Figure 6: Visualization of word representations on the topic of ice, Samuel Aeschbach / MPIB (2024).

The final example that Gao presents in his study (2002) is that of Eva Hoffman, a Polish-born American writer who immigrated to North America with her family: "I learnt that certain kinds of truths are impolite. One shouldn't criticize the person one is with, at least not directly. You shouldn't say 'You are wrong about that' though you might say, 'On the other hand, there is that to consider'. You shouldn't say, 'I like you better in that other outfit'”. I learn to tone down my sharpness, to do a more careful conversational minuet" (Hoffman, 1989, p.146).


Conclusion

In summary, it is commonly accepted that the distinction between social meaning and mental lexicon can give rise to cultural discrepancies and critical incidents. The social meaning of a given concept may vary considerably between different cultures. It is therefore possible to avoid potential conflicts by recognizing and analyzing certain factors before or during interaction in specific contexts. Although sometimes the acquisition of this knowledge may only be achieved over time through experience, there is always the possibility of learning and preparation. This can be achieved through the acquisition of Linguistic and Intercultural Awareness”: "'LAC-training' represents an optimal integration of behavior-oriented foreign language teaching and intercultural training oriented towards culture standards and regional studies” (Müller-Jacquier, 2000, p.44). Linguistic awareness of cultures is essential in oral communications and also for effective translation and localization. Understanding the cultural nuances and details of the target language culture is crucial to ensure smooth intercultural conversations and also accurate written translation activities. Linguistic awareness of cultural differences when translating content and communicating effectively both in personal and professional communication, are crucial elements for successful intercultural communication and both the social meaning and the mental lexicon play an important role in this process.


A variety of factors may give rise to instances of linguistic misunderstanding, confusion, and conflict (Gao, 2002). Gao's study demonstrates that conceptual differences between cultures may increase the probability of language conflict, since "a bilingual person is not invariably to be bicultural, and then there is a prominence of cultural issues in language contact by analyzing the relation between language and culture" (2002). However, if speakers possess or develop specific skills in terms of linguistic awareness, critical incidents could be avoided. Although a given culture is characterised by a specific set of norms, the awareness of linguistic and cultural strategies can facilitate the minimisation of discrepancies and the emergence of commonalities. It would be much easier and considerably more straightforward to achieve effective communication if there were an awareness of the potential conflicts that may occur due to cultural and linguistic differences.


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Visual Sources

Figure 1: Austro-British Society (2021). The true meaning of culture. https://www.oebrg.at/the-true-meaning-of-culture/


Figure 2: Wikimedia Commons (2015). Interculturelle Communication. Wikipedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Communicationinterculturelle.jpg


Figure 3: Dreamstime (2013). Cultural misunderstanding. Dreamstime.

https://www.dreamstime.com/illustration/cultural-misunderstanding.html


Figure 4: Red shoe movement (2016). Cultural differences in the workplace. https://kellyjaggersblog.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/cultural-differences-in-the-workplace/


Figure 5: Wikiversity (2023). The mental lexicon. Wikiversity. https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/The_Mental_Lexicon


Figure 6: Max-Planck Gesellschaft (2024). Visualization of word representations on the topic of ice, Samuel Aeschbach / MPIB. https://www.mpg.de/22244784/small-world-of-words












5 Comments


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Nov 24

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