Part II. Theory of Information

We have seen that the term Decoding Stylistics is convenient because it reveals the connection of text interpretation with information theory and also shows which end of communication process the attention of that branch of Stylistics is focused on, that our major interest is concentrated on the receiving end.

The Process of Communication

It seems obvious enough that language is used for communication and sharing experience. The process of communication is studied not only in linguistics but also in semiotics, in the Theory of Information, and many other disciplines. Information theory is actually a branch of mathematical physics that has emerged to meet the demands of modern engineering but very soon proved to be of very general usefulness. Its principles, ideas and notions are applied in many different fields. Not only it is the basis of cybernetics but becomes more and more indispensable in biology and semiotics, economics and warfare, medical sciences and last but not least linguistics.

It is necessary to emphasize and remember that Decoding Stylistics, we discuss, is interested not in the engineering possibilities of Information Theory but in its philosophical and heuristic possibilities. Moreover, this does not mean that all other critical approaches should be cast aside in worshipping what is new.

One should not confuse this application of Information Theory with its use for information retrieval, machine translation or any other use of computers in applied linguistics. There exists nowadays computer-oriented stylistics but we shall not discuss it here.

It may be helpful to note in this connection that the first to mention the importance of Information Theory for linguistics were not linguists but mathematicians – those who created Information Theory. Claude Shannon and H. Weaver in their classical book The Mathematic Theory of Communication, (Urbana, 1949) pointed it out that the analysis of communication will pave the way for a theory of meaning.

Information Theory is steadily making its way into poetics and linguistics. To prove that one could list quite a number of names A.N. Kolmogorov, R. Jakobson, V.V. Ivanov, J.M. Lotman, I. Galperin, I. Levi, V.A. Zaretsky, A.M. Kondratov, J.A. Filippov and many other scholars in this country and abroad made good use of its possibilities. Not to mention many scholars dealing with the application of Information Theory in aesthetics, such as Moles or M. Bruce.

The important thing is for a scholar to be sufficiently acquainted with the notions he transfers from other areas into his own. Amateurish showing off and snobbishness does more harm that anything else. Using terms without understanding them is a sort of modern malapropism not to be tolerated.

Information Theory makes use of such terms as information, message, code, communication, channel, encode, decode, feedback, redundancy and some others that are less important for our needs. We shall explain these terms by and by and see their relevance for linguistics, stylistics and text interpretation.

Their importance and value for us depends on the possibility they give to grasp common features in apparently different phenomena, make new powerful generalizations and formulate laws common to different branches of knowledge in a united system of terms and notions. This permits very different and distant branches of knowledge to cooperate in development.

As an example of this cooperation one might consider the scheme of communication offered by Claude Shannon and mentioned in the opening paragraph of this lecture, and some of the many adaptations of this scheme by linguists.

Source of  TransmitterSignalChannelSignalReceiverAddressee

Information

Message  Source of noise  Message

Roman Jakobson adapted this scheme for linguistics in the following form:

Addresser  Context  Addressee

Message

Contact

Code

Ivor Richards gave a more elaborate variant, considering not the participants or means of communication but the process itself:

Source  Selection  Encoding  Transmission  Reception  Decoding  Development  Destination.

The most interesting additions are context with Jakobson and selection and development with Richards.

The adaptability of the scheme for the literary process from the point of view of the theory of reflection is comprehensibly analyzed by I. Levy, although he emphasizes that this does not yield the whole truth about literature because in his opinion it is unable to show the historical conditioning of literary facts. However, the fact that this scheme has not been used to show this conditioning does not mean that it cannot be used.

The element of development introduced by Richards is of great importance because it permits to account for that distinguishing feature of literary perception – imagination based on imagery (I.A. Richards Variant Readings and Misreading. Style in Language. Th. A. Sebeok (ed)., 1960).