Affective-volitional communicative failures in American comedy series

Abstract

The article reveals and describes communicative failures caused by affective-volitional factors within the intersubjectivity paradigm. The study of live communication suggests that the generation of meaning in communication is a complex process of a dynamic interaction with the world and other subjects, taking place on both conscious and nonconscious levels and governed by communicants’ cognitive experience, intuition, free will, needs and desires, emotional and affective states and the intersubjective model of cognition and communication accounts for these findings. А communicative failure is viewed as an inability of interacting subjects to make an inference or making a faulty inference in an intersubjective act. An intersubjective act is interpreted as an inter-action, where communicants’ verbal/non-verbal communicative actions are viewed as perceptual stimuli, triggering parallel conscious/non-conscious inference processes and involving cognition, volition and affect resulting in a motivated communicative action. Inferential analysis applied in the research supplies tools for the recreation of communicants’ inferential processes and provides for considering cognitive, perceptual, affective and volitional aspects of interaction stipulating communicants’ goal-oriented motivated verbal and non-verbal communicative actions. American cinema discourse represented by the genre of a situation comedy and modelling live communication supplied instances of communicative failures subjected to analysis. The results of the inferential analysis reveal four types of communicative failures, which are identified in accordance with the element of the physical or mental experience of the participants of the intersubjective act, which plays a privileged role in causing a communicative failure: perceptual, lingua-cognitive, cognitive and affective-volitional. We prove that affective-volitional communicative failures stem from communicants’ feelings, emotional states, interests, needs and desires, shaping their motives and determining their verbal or/and non-verbal communicative behaviour.