36 Jamaican Creole Proverbs from the Perspective of Contact Linguistics that govern the proper use of any language (Gumperz 1964: 137), and also knowledge of the non-linguistic context. This leads us to Chruszczewski’s observation that, apart from communicative competence, there seems to exist a non-verbal phenomenon that he calls cultural competence (2001: 94) which constitutes a prerequisite to full understanding and proper use of any language in different cultures. 2.3.2.1. Units of analysis in the ethnography of communication “Doing the ethnography of communication” necessarily involves analyzing human communication at three levels: (1) description of communicative situations which constitute the context within which communication occurs; examples include holiday celebrations, important rituals, court trials (Saville-Troike 2003: 23–24); (2) description of communicative events which constitute specific contexts “in which communicative exchanges between two or more people occur” (Findlay 1998: 61). Saville-Troike (2004: 23) states that it is the fundamental unit for descriptive purposes. The communicative event involves the same participants, the same general topic and the same rules for interaction. An event ends whenever there is a change in major participants and setting, e.g. a conversation between a student and a professor may be interrupted by a telephone call. The professor then participates in a different event with the caller ibidem); (3) description of communicative acts produced by individuals from the speech community. Single sentences may be analyzed according to broader frames of reference (Findlay 1998: 60–61). The study of language in a society requires precise identification of the speech community in question. There are a few important issues that one must confront when dealing with speech communities. These refer to “[…] their identification, characterization and boundaries and to the criteria for membership” (Madera 1996: 169). A speech community refers to all people who share the same mother tongue and its varieties (Kloss 1986: 92). However, one can find more specialized definitions of the term in question. According to Duranti (1997: 72–83) and Gumperz (1964: 140), a speech community is characterized by the following criteria: (a) frequent purposeful interactions of its members; (b) a shared system of signs; and (c) differing from other communities (groups) in patterns of language use (see also Chruszczewski 2006: 51–57). In light of Ludwik Zabrocki’s concept (1962; in Bańczerowski 1980: 18), speech communities can be divided into active vs. passive (active means that the information exchange is efficiently carried out); durable vs. shortlived (within a durable speech community the need to communicate makes
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