THE LACK/DIVERGENCE OF CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURES OF COMMUNICANTS’ UNIVERSAL ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AS A COGNITIVE CAUSE OF COMMUNICATIVE FAILURES (ON THE MATERIAL OF AMERICAN CINEMA DISCOURSE)

Abstract

The article studies communicative failures resulting from the lack/divergence of conceptual structures of communicants’ universal ontological knowledge from the perspective 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 action. Inferential analysis applied in the research provides tools for the recreation of communicants’ inferential processes and makes it possible to consider cognitive, perceptual, affective and volitional aspects of interaction determining their goal-oriented motivated verbal and non-verbal communicative actions. Analysed communicative failures were supplied by American cinema discourse represented by the genre of a situation comedy, modelling live communication. We prove that communicative failures caused by the lack of conceptual structures of communicants’ universal ontological knowledge result from the addressee’s ignorance of natural and/or social cause-and-effect relationships. This is due to the lack of basic knowledge and corresponding experience, providing relevant conceptual structures in the minds of communicants and responsible for the inferential process. We prove that communicative failures caused by the divergence of conceptual structures of communicants’ universal ontological knowledge are related to the awareness of social cause-and-effect relationships and axiological guidelines and result from the centrality misbalance in the conceptual structures of communicants’ universal ontological knowledge, which are activated in the minds of the addresser and the addressee in the intersubjective act in the process of interpreting the addresser’s verbal/non-verbal action, leading to the activation of a concept different from the one intended by the addresser.