"Soviet and American Expression of Personal Involvement: Some Implications for Cross-Cultural and Cross-Gender Communication"

This paper reports some results of an investigation of speakers’ expressions of their relationship to utterances in a cross-cultural context. The frequency and manner of use of Personal Involvement Predicates by participants in a Soviet-American ‘spacebridge’ were analyzed to determine the extent and type of cross-cultural (Soviet vs. American) and cross-gender (Soviet and American male vs. Soviet and American female) variation. The study suggests the heuristic value of Personal Involvement Predicates for understanding the socially constructed nature of speaker’s utterance and perceiving utterances as creators of evolving social roles. The results highlight differences between various aspects of Soviet and American expression of personal involvement and Soviet-Americans similarities through analysis of gender variation that seems to hold across cultures and which could provide a useful basis for improving cross-cultural communication.