Communicative Intention And The Development Of Intercultural Communication Competence

Successful intercultural communication is closely associated with expression and recognition of communicative intention (CI). This thesis investigates the close relationship between CI and the development of intercultural communication competence (ICC). From this perspective, the development of ICC involves two broad aspects: appropriate expression and correct recognition of CI, both of which are culture-loaded in characteristics.Enlightened by the researches into CI, such as Sperber and Wilson (2001), Verschueren (2000), Lin Bo (2002) and Zhang Delu (1998), and by the theoretical researches of ICC by various scholars such as Byram (1997), Chen Guoming (1997), Jia Yuxin (1997), Lustig and Koester (1999), Chen Shen (1999), Samovar and Porter (2004) and Moran (2004), and considering the present deficiency of CI expression and recognition research in association with culture, the author of this thesis explores ICC development in relation to culture-loaded CI. In this thesis, the seven competences of ICC are studied from the perspectives of both culture-loaded expression and culture-loaded recognition of CI. Moreover, the thesis investigates the common unconscious tendency of using the speaker's or the hearer's own culture as the standard both for the organization of expression and the proceeding of interpretation of CI, and analyzes how this tendency leads to intercultural communication failures. It is further argued that for the development of ICC in relation to CI, exercising cultural empathy in both expression and recognition of culture-loaded CI is of fundamental importance because of the mutually enhancive relationship: the speaker's expressing the CI from the hearer's perspective and the hearer's interpreting the CI from the speaker's point of view are of vital value for the necessary cultural adaptations to make intercultural communication smooth in progression.The main significance of this research is the investigation of ICC development from the perspective of expressing and recognizing culture-loaded CI by associating cultural differences in aspects such as cultural presupposition. It is proposed that in...