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The Problem of Linguistic Communication. Linguistic Communication is easily accomplished but, as it turns, not so easily explained. Any theory of linguistic theory must attempt the following questions: How does successful communication work?
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The Problem of Linguistic Communication Linguistic Communication is easily accomplished but, as it turns, not so easily explained. Any theory of linguistic theory must attempt the following questions: How does successful communication work? What makes it possible for the speaker to communicate this to the hearer?
Message Model of Linguistic Communication • Message Model accounts for certain commonsense features of talk-exchanges: it predicts that communication is successful when the hearer decodes the same message that the speaker encodes; and it predicts that communication breaks down if the decoded message is different from the encoded message. • It portrays language as the bridge between speaker and hearer.
How Message Model Work? A speaker has some message in mind that she wants to communicate to hearer. The speaker then produces some expression from the language that encodes the message as its meaning. Up on hearing the beginning of the expression, the hearer begins a decoding process that subsequently identifies the incoming sounds, syntactic categories, and meanings, then composes these meanings in the form of the successfully decoded message.
Problems of Message Model (1) • Since many expressions are linguistically ambiguous, the hearer must determine which of the possible meanings of an expression. • The Message Mode does not account for the fact that the message often contains information about particular things being referred to, and reference is rarely uniquely determined by the meaning of expressions.
Problems of Message Model (2) • Message Model represent successful communication as simply producing, hearing, and understanding meaningful expressions. But this is not all there is to communication. What missing is communicative intention. • Message Model does not account for the fact that we often speak nonliterally. • Message Model does not account for the fact that we sometimes mean to communicate more than what our sentences mean. • Communicating message is not always the purpose of our remarks.
