CONCEPTUAL ADAPTATION IN THE ASPECT OF INTERCULTURAL SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION

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The purpose of the study was to distinguish certain theoretical
regularities of the conceptual adaptation in intercultural scientific
communication problem and infer a principle of its conceptual
analysis. Theoretical analysis method is used. The following
theoretical regularities were concluded.
1. Understanding regularity. Understanding is stipulated by
general cognitive-discoursive regularities of knowledge
acquisition and use. These regularities refer to the general
cognitive organization of human knowledge and the specific
organization of collective scientific knowledge that forms definite
general ground for all people of science and for the members of a
scientific community understanding.
Difficulties of understanding are revealed when certain specific
cognitive-discoursive features come to a contradiction. Some
discrepancies are revealed within particular specifics of content,
compositional, and modus features of a scientific text, lexical
representation of some scientific concepts as terms, linguistic
similarities that cause conceptual interferences, and particular
discoursive traditions.
2. Sociocultural regularity. Sociocultural commitment of
cognitive linguistics (N.N. Boldyrev and O.G. Dubrovskaya)
logically comes from other commitments and principled
fundamentals, takes the account of language as cognitive and
social one, and individual knowledge as an individual
configuration of collective knowledge, and states that cognitive
and sociocultural regularities influence cognitive contexts
formation and function in the dimensions as static vs dynamic,
collective vs individual, and metaconceptual structure.
3. Conceptual adaptation regularity. Understanding in
communication is concerned with adaptation. The adaptation
demands consistencies and inconsistencies detecting, is ensured
by language interpretation, demands mutual participants’
conceptual alignments, in particular the alignments of dominant
cognitive structures, and is manifested on conceptual and
linguistic levels. Consistencies ensure consonance;
inconsistencies further cognitive activity. Interpretation ensures
conceptual adaptation accomplishment.
4. Conceptual adaptation in intercultural scientific
communication. That is specific within two cross-related
contexts. They are science and culture. Both must ensure
conceptual consistencies and cause inconsistencies. The former is
grounded by the general regularities of encyclopaedic and
scientific knowledge and language acquisition and use, and
cognitive-discoursive activity in communication. The latter
concerns with their specifics that are determined by the factors of
a cultural language used in communication by the participants,
national-cultural traditions manifested in their scientific
knowledge, and their individual knowledge.
General knowledge of science must contribute understanding as it
is the participants’ collective knowledge but a language may
cause conceptual interferences. Subjective knowledge may cause
inconsistencies but that is a factor motivating the communicators’
cognitive-discoursive scientific activity.
Since communicators share a language, that language activates
the conceptual domains in their cognitions. Since that language is
native either only for one of them or neither of them, the
interlocutors have to adapt their conceptual systems to the means
of that language, considering the need of adaptation to the set of
other discourse context conditions. Since a language influences
how its users conceptualize, categorize, and interpret information,
and how they perform the acquired knowledge in discourse, then
consistencies and inconsistencies are expected within all these
processes.
From the above mentioned it follows: understanding in
intercultural scientific communication, as in any other kind of
social verbal communication, is achieved by conceptual
adaptation which is ensured by consistencies and inconsistencies
detecting, and interpreting them adequately to a communicative
context; external contexts and cognitive contexts, and collective
and individual language knowledge “what” and “how” influence
the success of that; in intercultural scientific communication these
contexts are science and culture.
To study the specifics of conceptual adaptation in intercultural
scientific communication practically, the levels of that adaptation
should be considered within the conceptual analysis principle
“from discourse performance to conceptual sense”. The levels are
assumed: text or utterance format within its thematic context,
lexical-grammatical categorization, lexical-semantic
conceptualization, cognitive contexts content and structure
formation, modus interpretation, sense inference.
Keywords: intercultural scientific communication,
understanding, the context of science and culture, conceptual
adaptation, interpretation

Daria E. Barasheva
Sevastopol State University
Sevastopol, Russia
e-mail: varvaraverevkinaV@yandex.ru

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