The Linguistic Form - Successful Cross-Cultural Communication
Ways of Expressing Ideas: The Linguistic Form
Every message is “encoded” and “decoded” around seven main areas of human experience. Let’s look at “The Linguistic Form” which is the way people express ideas.
Linguistic structures tend to reflect what is significant in a given culture.
For example, European cultures tend to be very time oriented and have complex verb structures. Many African tribal languages reflect less emphasis on time in their verbal patterns (and even a lack of future tense in some).
Learning a language goes far beyond one-to-one word associations - - it involves cultural meanings and value systems as well.
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