Communication Noise as a Discourse Component

Abstract

The paper focuses on the investigation of communicative noise at various levels of monocultural and intercultural communication. Communication noise is seen as a component of a communicative event, functioning as obstacles of different nature that lower the effectiveness of communication, destabilize it and are able to cause communicative conflict or the breakdown of communication. In linguistic pragmatics the main features of communication noise have been identified as vagueness and ambiguity of a message: vagueness is characterized by a bigger degree of noise than ambiguity. The authors of the article have tried to probe more deeply into the area of communication noise by singling out levels of communicative situation. The article offers a differentiation of five discourse levels: verbal-semiotic, cognitive-interpretational, interactive, ontological and sociocultural levels. The main part of the paper analyzes the barriers that cause communication noise at each of the offered levels of communicative situation. The raised issues offer prospects for further research, such as investigating of noise effects in real communication, identifying a set of causes leading to communication noise, as well as noise-resistant factors, preventing or removing it.