Text 4A2-I
No utterance or written text is ever fully explicit,
completely freestanding. To be understood, any text must be read
in the light of prior knowledge, background information,
expectations about genre and about sequence — all the aspects
often considered together as “context”. Many of these factors are
culturally specific, varying across languages and even within the
various English-speaking communities and nations of the world.
Oscar Wilde once called England and the United States “two
countries divided by a common language”, and any American
who has ever been asked by an English host or hostess when he
or she would like to be “knocked up in the morning” knows that
the common language can divide and lead to some potentially
disastrous misunderstandings. We expect problems when
communicating with speakers of other languages; more startling,
however, is that such problems often occur between speakers of
the same language.
These problems grow more acute when one is dealing
with written texts, since the opportunity for clarifying discussion
disappears, and they grow yet more acute with literary texts,
which tend to lack some of the specifying contexts that head off
misunderstandings in non-literary forms of discourse.
Reed Way Dasenbrock. Intelligibility and Meaningfulness in Multicultural Literature in English.
PMLA 102, n. 1, jan, 1987. Cambridge Univesity Press. 1987. p. 10-19. In:
Internet::<https://www.jstor.org/stable/462488>