Yevgenia Vinokurova
Donetsk National University (Vinnitsia)
Scientific Supervisor: B.Sc, VinokurovaY.V.
COMMUNICATIVE FAILURES PHENOMENON IN “THE BIG BANG THEORY” SERIES
The term of communication serves as a universal and cross-disciplinary one. In the present being it touches humanitarian, social, psychological and natural science. One of the most essential issues in the process of communication is a problem of misunderstanding, literal perception, information exchange and communication effectiveness.
Keywords: Communication, phenomenon of misunderstanding, communicative failures, speech act theory,communicative aim.
In interpersonal relationscommunicative failures are a very frequent phenomenon, because misunderstanding, inability to listen and express thoughts and ideas clearly serve as a permanent companion of the dialogical communication.
This phenomenon attracted attention of science in the middle of the 20th century. In the present being it is also actively studied by language scholars and every scholar gives his or her own interpretation of this term. However all of them concurred that communicative failure – is a partial or complete failure to express the communicative aim due to particular linguistic or paralinguistic factors.
The subject of research: Communicative failures in “The Big Bang theory” series.
The object of research: Semantic and pragmatic peculiarities of communicative failures.
The aim of this research is to indicate factors, which cause communicative failures, and to identify the most frequent types of communicative failures in “The Big Bang theory” series.
Such scientists as Geoffrey Neil Leech and John Rogers Searle, who are considered as the founders of the speech act theory, and Herbert Paul Grice, who developed principles and postulates of dialogical communication, gave the grounding for communication failure phenomenon study. However this issue was studied thoroughly later by the soviet scientists such as Gorodetskiy, Yermakova, Poliakova and Vechkina, who developed the typology of communicative failures and applied it to the dialogical communication.
As a research material we used the scripts of “The Big Bang theory” series. We have thoroughly studied 100 episodes, identified and analyzed 200 samples of the most frequent communicative failures. Having conducted the research, we got the following results:
31%(62): Comprise failures to comply with Grice’s principles and postulates;
20%(40 units): Comprise the differences in profession;
16%(32 units): Comprises the failure to comply with the rules of decorum;
13%(26 units):Comprise the differences in communicants’ background knowledge;
11%(22 units): Comprise the failure to comply with lexical and sematic principles;
8%(16 units): Comprises the different territorial belonging;
1%(2 units):Comprise the communicative failures, caused by the communication facilities (computer, telephone etc.)
References
- Leech G. Principles of Pragmatics. – L., 1983. – 82 p.
- Searle J. Speech Acts. An essay in the philosophy of language. – Cambridge, 1970. – 203 p.