Understanding Intercultural Communication From The Perspective Of Semiotics

As the world develops, the research on intercultural communication plays an increasingly important role, for successful intercultural communication is essential for human's survival and development. Now intercultural communication study has moved on to a stage of multidisciplinary development. One of the most notable trends is that some scholars began to study intercultural communication from the perspective of semiotics. As one of the very important theories in contemporary Western humanities, semiotics influences various fields of human and social sciences. In fact, semiotics and intercultural communication study are closely related to each other. They both study the production, transmission and interpretation of meanings.This paper probes into the feature, process, miscommunication and competence improvement of intercultural communication from the perspective of Saussurean semiotics. The nature of intercultural communication is a sign exchanging process, with semiotic being its most striking feature. We understand the world and communicate with others through signs. Sign is the precondition for intercultural communication. This paper establishes a model from semiotic viewpoint, showing the process of intercultural communication. This model includes all the major factors in intercultural communication process: context, sender, Code 1, encoding, signifier, receiver, Code 2, decoding and signified. The author further distinguishes the non-correspondence of signifier and signified in different cultures: the lack of signifier in one culture; the same signifier having different signified in different cultures; different signifier in different cultures having the same signified. Based on this process model, the author investigates the reasons of misunderstandings in intercultural communication from the angles of context, code, signifier and signified by analyzing seven cases and proposes several suggestions on the improvement of intercultural communication competence. This research can help to form a systematic understanding on intercultural communication and eventually help people to improve the intercultural communication competence.