A Study On Intercultural Communicative Competence From An Adaptation Perspective

With the rapid development of the world economy and frequent contacts between different countries, intercultural communication is getting more and more necessary and important. However, sometimes intercultural communication fails to meet our expectations due to various difficulties and linguistic barriers cropping up in the course of communication. A smooth and successful intercultural communication requires the development of intercultural communicative competence (ICC competence for short). In the past decades, researchers have proposed several different models of ICC competence, focusing on its components. These models have provided many insights on the cultivation of ICC competence. The present study is carried out under the framework of linguistic adaptation theory to investigate how and why communicators engaged in intercultural communication make linguistic choices to adapt to linguistic context and extra-linguistic context to achieve their communicative goal(s).The thesis first reviews the related literature of the notion of communicative competence and intercultural communicative competence. Since the present study intends to explore ICC competence from the perspective of language use in communication, models of communication proposed by different researchers are investigated, including the code model, the inferential model and the ostensive-inferential model. These three models pertain to different aspects of the process of communication and fail to offer a holistic examination and explanation of how language is used in the dynamic process of communication to generate meaning. The adaptation theory proposed by Jef Verschueren is capable of encompassing the social, cognitive and cultural process involved in communication through language; therefore it is adopted as the general descriptive and explanatory framework of the present study.According to adaptation theory, using language must consist of the continuous making of linguistic choices, consciously or unconsciously, for language-internal and/or language-external reasons. The fact that language users can make linguistic choices in communication is because language is characterized by three hierarchically related and fundamentally inseparable notions, i.e., variability, negotiability and adaptability. Language use can be investigated from four angles: contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability and salience of adaptation process. These four angles are in agreement with the linguistic, social, cultural and cognitive elements involved in the dynamic process of language using. The combination of contextual correlates and structural objects of adaptability is the locus of adaptation phenomena because they describe the linguistic and extra-linguistic coordinates in communication.In intercultural communication, the cognitive, social and cultural factors may cause barrier in the interlocutors' choice-making process. This thesis analyzes the linguistic and extra-linguistic correlates in the communication between the English and the Chinese. The communicative context entails aspects of physical, social and mental reality. This thesis probes into the variants in the mental, physical and social world between the English and the Chinese. In the mental world, adaptability in thinking patterns and mental acceptability is analyzed. In the physical world, temporal reference and spatial reference are examined, together with the interlocutors' position in the physical world and the "material" conditions of speech. In the social world, adaptability in the aspects of power and solidarity relationship and cultural norms are investigated.Linguistic adaptability includes choices of style and code, choices of utterance-building ingredients and principles of utterance building. The present thesis analyzes the adaptability of code and style, sound structure, morphemes and words, syntactic construction and discourse organization. Choices at all these levels are interdependent and interadaptable with correlates in the communicative context.In intercultural communication, interlocutors are expected to adapt to the factors in the linguistic and extra-linguistic world. Only in this way can they make appropriate choices and achieve their communicative goal(s).