About reasons of communication failures

This article focuses on communication failure situations and their reasons. Communication failure is defined as a complete or partial failure to understand the communication partner’s utterances. The reasons leading to misunderstanding are the basis for the classification of communication failure situations. These reasons can be extralinguistic and linguistic. The most important of them are the difference in worldview and in mental models, and breaches in verbal behavior. The author gives a lot of examples demonstating the process of communication failure situations and looks for the ways to overcome them. The article is meant for students and post-graduate students studying intercultural communication matters.