Constructing, Construing, and Communicating: Intercultural Communication in La Paz, Bolivia

423 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002.My central hypothesis is that the officials and representatives will use different discourse cues to signal social meaning and that these differences will sometimes result in miscommunication. Although I find instances where differences in the discourse cues could have led to misunderstanding, it is not always that clear-cut whether they did or not. The expectations that the officials and representatives hold in relation to the situation and each other strongly influence the discourse strategies they use and their willingness to work toward common communicative ground. Their expectations are formulated on the knowledge they have of each other and the situation based on their prior interactions or their knowledge of others' prior interactions. I move beyond my original hypothesis in attributing more agency to the participants than the hypothesis entails. In the speech events that I examine it is entirely possible that the participants are aware of the differences in their discourse strategies and persist despite this recognition and the miscommunication that ensues. Differences in discourse strategies, therefore, go beyond simple linguistic interference. They are linked to the individual's knowledge about the world and are often motivated by conflicting goals and expectations based on this knowledge, and may be actively asserted in the course of the conversation in the face of countering communicative strategies.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD