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Communication

Autor:   •  April 29, 2018  •  892 Words (4 Pages)  •  421 Views

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produced by the speaker

ii. Resolve ambiguities, both lexical and structural

iii. Resolve context-dependent elements (i.e. vagueness)

iv. And if steps (1)-(3) are insufficient in retracting the communicative intentions of the speaker, look for indirect messages and nonliteral uses of language.

3. With this model in mind, we can approach three levels of communication with greater flexibility:

a. Direct literal communication

i. A: where have you been?

B: I went to the supermarket.

ii. B communicates that there was only one contextually salient supermarket, and that he went to it. This is contextually appropriate, since it answers A’s question, so we can conclude that that was his communicative intention.

b. Nonliteral communication

i. (A and B return home to find the kitchen in a mess after C’s cooking experiment. A says to B: C is an animal)

ii. There are three possible communicative intentions:

1) A could be trying to communicate that C is a human animal. This is rather uninteresting.

2) A could be trying to communicate that C is a nonhuman animal, which is literally false.

3) A could be trying to communicate that C shares properties with a nonhuman animal (e.g. primitive behaviour), and is expressing her displeasure with it. This is the most contextually appropriate out of the three possible intentions.

c. Indirect communication:

i. A: would you like some coffee?

B: Coffee will keep me awake.

ii. There are two possible communicative intentions from B’s utterance:

1) Coffee will keep her awake. This is flouting Grice’s maxim of relevance, as it does not answer A’s question at all.

2) If A knew that B was about to embark on a long bus ride, and it is already late, B could be intending to communicate that coffee keeping her awake will help with the journey. This is the more contextually appropriate intention, though there are extra nuances involved.

4. In conclusion, pragmatics is the study of language, particularly how people communicate so effectively even when we don’t always mean things in the literal sense. This is precisely why the code model fails, because it assumes that all uses of language are literal. We don’t always say what we mean. As such, the inferential model of communication is more flexible in approaching human communication. It allows us to fill in the ‘gaps’ caused by ambiguity and vagueness, based on the notion that all interlocutors are communicating rationally.

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