Two Models of Linguistic Communication

According to the coding model, communication consists in a sender and a receiver sharing a common code or language and a channel, so that the former encodes the message and sends it for the latter to decode it. Communication is, following this picture, quite an easy matter. It just amounts to knowledge of language and a safe channel — i.e., without too much ‘noise.’ If sender and receiver share the knowledge of the code and the message makes its way through the channel the success of communication is guaranteed.

One of Grice's major contributions to the theory of communication was provision of an alternative to the Locke-Saussure model of communication as a coding and decoding of thoughts. One can think of the alternative either as a supplement or a replacement for the coding model.

Intentions and their recognition are at the heart of Grice's alternative. Even if the interpreter's reasoning is guided by the conversational principle or maxims, as Grice thought, intention-recognition is not basically a matter of following conventional rules, but ampliative reasoning about what is going on in other minds.

But how do the two models fit together? Is language mainly and centrally a matter of deduction, of coding and decoding according to the conventions of meaning, with a little intention-recognition around the near and far edges to take care of ambiguity and implicature? Or is communication mainly a matter of acting in ways that get one's intentions recognized, with the conventions of language being just a helpful resource for accomplishing this?

In the classical period, near-side pragmatics tended to be ignored, and the Gricean model applied only to issues beyond saying; all of this is consistent with the first picture. Many neo-Griceans still adopt much of the first picture, and see the core of language as an autonomous realm studied by semantics, in which the meanings of parts compositionally determine the meanings of wholes, the fundamental concept of meaning being the truth-conditions of sentences. Grice's work is often used to bolster this picture; Gricean considerations serve as a sort of shock-absorber, where apparent data that are difficult to handle on the autonomous-semantics picture are treated as merely apparent, resulting from mistaking implicatures for ‘semantic content.’ Recanati calls such theorists ‘minimalists’ [2]; while no one denies that contextual facts and pragmatic reasoning are needed at the near side of what is said, according to these theorists, there is minimal intrusion of such considerations on autonomous semantics.

References

1. Carston R. Relevance Theory, Grice and the Neo-Griceans : A Response to Laurence Horn’s “Current Issues in Neo-Gricean Pragmatics” / Robyn Carston // Intercultural Pragmatics. – 2005. – vol. 2/3. – P. 303-319.

2. Recanati F. Literal Meaning / François Recanati. – Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004.

8. D. Sperber, d. Wilson and Relevance Theory