Need help for my english!

  Could you correct this for me? Thanks!!

September 12nd

When I was a baby I was very shy and I didn’t want to talk with the other children. I don’t remember which was the first word I said and for this reason I asked to my mum to tell me something about this topic. She answered that I started talking when I was two. We were watching a film in our living room when with a sudden scream I said: ”Izio! Izio! Izio!” In the beginning my mother didn’t understand what I was saying but after she realized that I was pronouncing the name of the film’s protagonist that we were seeing.     

I really believe that my mother and all my family influenced me during the initial process of communicating, they usually paid very attention on how I spoke or on how I expressed my self since I was very young. They taught me how to introduce myself to other, how to be polite in communication in order to create e favourable environment in each conversation.

Infant language researchers believe that babies are born with a genetic aptitude for language. Studies have shown that mere hours after birth, a newborn can distinguish his mother's voice from that of another woman.  My father thinks that I was a very scrupulous and open-eyed child because I repeated all the words I heard, I interpreted every single sign or gesture in a particular and personal way.

I’m very interested in the topic of communicating and for this reason I read lots of books inherent to that. I know that babies only  eight  to  nine  months old can remember words from a story or a simple piece of music they have heard previously. By the time they say their first words around  one year of age, children can understand hundreds more words and once the language spigot is opened, the flow continues.

I remember a story of my grandparent regarding a guy who wants to travel in order to learn all the languages existing in the universe. I was fascinated about this boy who left his family to find out his vocation. He travelled all around world, learning new things, communicating with people and knowing lots of different cultures. Only now that I’m 23 years old I understand how important was this story in my life. My grandparent tried to drum into me the awareness that communication with others is fundamental at each stage of the life.

I’m studying languages because I think that communication is the departure point to develop our skills and abilities and to find out new ones.

September 14^th

What about misunderstandings?

I remember my business teacher telling some misunderstandings about Chinese people during a negotiation with an American entrepreneur. During this event, the American tried to familiarize with Chinese staff of the other enterprise. He would have coped with them in the future and for this reason he wanted create a good environment for the negotiation act. The American started making personal questions about the family, interests, hobbies and so on. Chinese staff was shocked about this conduct and decided to interrupt the conversation defining the American rude and ignorant.

The manager of the American company didn’t want to offend the others but only to create complicity with both parts.

With this example I understood how important is communication and how misunderstandings can interfere our business or personal attitude. I also know that as for negotiation in particular, body language can be fundamental: we shouldn’t have an eye contact with a Chinese chief for example   jeans are not acceptable for business meetings subtle, neutral colours should be worn by both men and women we shouldn’t use large hand movements with Chinese people because they do not speak with their hands   it could be better to present and receive cards with both hands…

She affirmed that they can be very different ways to interpret a verbal or non-verbal signal and that every culture does it in his way. I learnt all of these aspects of communication an I really think that in order to a better understanding of the differences in cultures it’s fundamental  to start with the study of body language.

My teacher explained us that non-verbal communication includes facial expression, tones of voice, gestures, and eye contact. It plays an important role in our daily life, sometimes it is even more powerful than the verbal interaction. Different gestures have different meanings. Different nationalities have specific gestures and emotions. However, due to the different background and culture, even the same gesture and emotion has different meaning for different people in certain contexts. Thus, it is very useful for us to understand people by understanding their basic nonverbal communicative skills, for example, Chinese have become more reserved or at least the gestures expressing emotions are comparatively less expressive.

I have made a research about misunderstandings in communication and I found that “When two people who are having a conversation do not understand each other, the usual complaint is that they are not speaking the same language."  This reference to "a common language" generally means that if people are to understand each other, the same vocabulary is essential. I have chosen this example because it’s what is happening to me in this moment. I’m Italian and I’m living in Spain to finish my post degree career. Even if Italian and Spanish are two languages similar in grammar and pronunciation, I really think that misunderstandings in communication are present at all times and stage of my life. 

September 19^th

During my classes of interpreting (I attended these for 3 years) I learnt that translation is a topic that embraces communication. Starting from this point I realized that in the past both matters were characterized by a scientific approach to the meaning, I mean that just coding and decoding were sufficient to interpret a speech act because a word was taught as an orthographic sign with a fixed meaning.

Only with the theory of Functional Approach, word acquires meaning through its context (Nida, 1940). Following this approach, the author highlighted the importance of the sentence’s kernel: it’s the first to be transformed in order to pass the message.

Nida reported that to analyze a sentence and its meaning we must define four classes of elements: events, objects, abstracts, relationals.

Besides he gave two important definitions in order to obtain the equivalence of the message in both source and target text: formal equivalence (the utterance) which is focused on the message itself and dynamic equivalence (the sentence)  to create an equivalence effect. Relationship between receptor and message should be the same existing in original receptors and the source message.

I think that the theory of Nida is very important to a better understanding of communication even if he referred to translation.

Inference process is also important in the exchange of messages because different contexts can bring to different situation as Nida explained with his Semantic structure analysis. It refers to find meanings with reference to the situation (for example, the word spirit can have different meanings according to the context: demon, alcohol or angel).

An other important author is Hallidays who, with his systemic functional model based the communication on discourse analysis. He explained that there’s a strong interrelation between the surface-level of language and the sociocultural framework and it’s for this reason that the past theory of the merely act of communication by decoding and coding was not sufficient enough. Environment is based on lots of factors such as genre of communication, discourse semantics and lexicogrammatical  choices.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_theory

Relevance theory  is a proposal by  Dan Sperber  and Deirdre Wilson that seeks to explain the second method of communication: one that takes into account implicit  inferences. It argues that the hearer/reader/audience will search for meaning in any given communication situation and having found meaning that fits their expectation of  relevance, will stop processing.

What is a Speech Act?

We perform speech acts when we offer an apology, greeting, request, complaint, invitation, compliment, or refusal. A speech act is an utterance that serves a function in communication. A speech act might contain just one word, as in "Sorry!" to perform an apology, or several words or sentences: "I’m sorry I forgot your birthday. I just let it slip my mind." Speech acts include  real-life interactions  and require not only knowledge of the language but also appropriate use of that language within a given culture.

A  speech act  is a minimal functional unit in human communication. Just as a  word    (refusal)  is the smallest free form found in language and a  morpheme  is the smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning (-al in refuse-al  makes it a noun),  the basic unit of communication is a speech act (the speech act of refusal).

According to Austin's theory (1962), what we say has three kinds of meaning:

1.            propositional meaning  - the literal meaning of what is said         

    It's hot in here.

2.            illocutionary meaning  - the social function of what is said                                                     

'It's hot in here'      could be:   

- an indirect  request  for someone to open the window                                                                                                                       

- an indirect  refusal  to close the window because someone is cold                                                                                   

- a  complaint  implying that someone should know better than to keep the windows closed (expressed emphatically) 

3.            perlocutionary meaning  - the effect of what is said 

  'It's hot in here'  could result in someone opening the windows 

Some notions remain unquestioned throughout otherwise highly divergent schools of thought within the domain of linguistics and in neighboring disciplines. One such central complex of notions is the standard view of linguistic communication. Although many differences can be noted between competing approaches (for an -incomplete- overview, see Berge 1998), most models have, often implicitly, at least the following core features in common (for a remarkably explicit version of this ‘standard’ view, see Levelt 1989):

- communication is localized in two distinct psychological units (two subjects), the speaker and the addressee

- these units interact by means of the transfer of information:

- the speaker codes (‘packages’, ...) a ‘prelinguistic intention’ of his in such a way that this content (‘message’) becomes available to the addressee

- the addressee in his turn ‘decodes’ (‘interprets’, ...) the message

- the message itself is conceived of as being an object with an independent status from both speaker and addressee.

Of course, lately, the psycholinguistic modelling of this coding-decoding process has evolved into a much more complex matter than the classic semiotic model: the attention has shifted away from the speaker towards the addressee, in that the coding process on behalf of the speaker is now conceived of as implying extensive monitoring of the addressee’s cognitive state (see e.g. Brown 1995). Still, the psychological subject is the ultimate locus of the ‘sense’ of discourse, in that it is defined in terms of the intentions of the speaker and the interpretation of these intentions by the addressee. Furthermore, the psychological subject is nowadays often understood as corresponding to an underlying biological organism, mostly only considered in neurological terms, i.e. mainly as a brain.

The purpose of this paper is a modest one. It is not intended to offer conclusive evidence against any of the views under scrutiny, and no systematic attempt will be made to offer a full-grown alternative for the prevailing paradigm. However, I will bring together various elements that point toward an alternative conception of the phenomena, and thus will try and show that the speaker-addressee doctrine is not a necessary one and depends on specific methodological/epistemological choices.

  Thanks for your help!