Zegarac, Vladimir (2007) “A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture” in Handbook of Intercultural Communication (eds.) Helga Kotthoff & Helen Spencer-Oatey: 31-53. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co.

1. Introduction

For example, the wink of an eye. Is it a physical reflex from dust in the eye? Or an invitation to a prospective date? Or could it be someone making fun of you to others? Perhaps a nervous tick? The wink itself is real, but its meaning is attributed to it by observers. The attributed meaning may or may not coincide with the intended meaning of the wink. Effective social interaction, though, depends on the attributed meaning and intended meaning coinciding. [emphasis VZ] (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner 1997: 24) - 32

The concept of communicative intention is important, because people generally pay attention to those phenomena which are evidently produced with the intention to convey information. – 32-33

2. Examples of relevance-theoretic account of (inter-cultural) communication

an act of ostensive behaviour (such as pointing gesture, a [deliberate] wink, or an utterance) makes evident the communicators’ intention to inform the addressee/audience of something. Comprehension is an inference (i.e. reasoning) process which takes the evidence presented by the communicative act (i.e. an ostensive stimulus) and the context as inputs, and yields interpretations as outputs. – 33-34

3. The epidemiological approach to culture

4. Relevance in cognition

5. Relevance in communication

the cultural environment of an individual is a subset of that individual’s cognitive environment, and the mutual cultural environment of two or more people, is a subset of their mutual cognitive environment. The terms cultural environment and mutual cultural environment are useful because they provide a principled basis for distinguishing between issues relating to context selection in inter- and intra-cultural communication. – 50

6. Conclusion