Communication Scenarios of Misunderstanding

Introduction. The proposed paper discusses communication situations of mutual misunderstanding up to mutual rejection of each other by the parties. The research assumption is that misunderstanding in human communication is not necessarily accompanied by its overcoming. “Miscommunication communication” forms a communicative space that reveals the diversity of practices of personal self-realization, intergroup and intercultural interaction, while retaining the perception of the other side as incomprehensible.

Methodology and sources. The methodological framework for analysis is a social constructionalist approach to the study of social reality, offering a conceptualization of the practical and observable actions of individuals or, in other words, “what people do when they act”. According to pragmatically oriented methodology, we cannot make an exhaustive conclusion about the internal reasons that motivate people to act in one way or another, but we can consider linguistic and non-linguistic actions that are perceived and interpreted by them as having a certain meaning and, therefore, trigger a certain response. The meanings that communicators give to a message are not pre-defined, but are created, produced, and constructed in a communicative interaction through contextspecific discursive procedures and practices, while also triggering specific socially recognizable types of contexts.

Results and discussion. The variant of classification of various types of cognitive and communicative experience acquired by people in situations of misunderstanding is offered. Empirical data are the records of interviews, conversations, and comments that are at our possession. The basis for distinguishing between communicative scenarios of misunderstanding is the values in the range of “expanding one's own experience” ↔ “isolation from others' experience”. The structure of description of the selected situations includes: communicative status of the participant; verbal formulas that determine the choice of vector by the participants of the communication; characteristics of cognitive and communicative experience generated by a situation of misunderstanding; examples and illustrations containing replicas, comments, description of life situations of collision with misunderstanding, corresponding to a specific communicative scenario.

Conclusion. Situations of misunderstanding are developed in scenarios that provide their participants with the resources to cope with the threat of risk to their personal or group (cultural) identity. The range of cognitive and communicative practices ranges from recognizing the value of cultural (social) diversity for social and personal development to discriminating against others, including violence and the exclusion of the incomprehensible from interaction. Discussion of the issue of “understanding misunderstanding” makes it possible to fit misunderstanding into the social fabric  of human behavior practices as a vital resource for any social community.

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