Shovak O. I. Fundamentals of the Theory of Speech Communication

-Implicature: referring to an indirect or implicit meaning of an utterance derived from context that is not present from its conventional use.
The pragmatic principles people abide by in one language are often different in another. Thus, there has been a growing interest in how people in different languages observe a certain pragmatic principle. Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural studies reported what is considered polite in one language is sometimes not polite in another. Contrastive pragmatics, however, is not confined to the study of certain pragmatic principles. Cultural breakdowns, pragmatic failure, among other things, are also components of cross-cultural pragmatics.
Another focus of research in pragmatics is learner language or interlanguage. This interest eventually evolved into interlanguage pragmatics, a branch of pragmatics which specifically discusses how non-native speakers comprehend and produce a speech act in a target language and how their pragmatic competence develops over time.
Functional linguistics
Those who call themselves functional linguists differ on many aspects of linguistic theory, but the one central principle they all share is the answer to the question: “What constitutes a satisfactory explanation for the observable facts about language?” Functional explanations are based on communicative function. Languages around the world are in some ways very similar and in other ways radically different because they have been shaped by differing social, and historical processes, but for the one universal purpose of communication based on human cognition. This is in contrast to a formalist explanation that seeks to explain observable (surface) facts about language in terms of a deeper (underlying) level of language.
The core principles that characterize Junctional linguistics:

• 
  All areas of linguistics (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse) are interrelated. There are no clear-cut boundaries between them. Language similarities are based on similar human needs for communication and on general cognitive functions of the human brain.
  
• 
  Diachronic processes (language evolution) must be taken into account for a complete understanding of a language at any given time. This is in contrast to formalist approaches that attempt purely synchronic (language use at a given point in history) explanations of language.
  

Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is the the study of psychological aspects of language. Experiments investigating such topics as short-term and long-term memory, perceptual strategies, and speech perception based on linguistic models are part of this discipline. Most work in psycholinguistics has been done on the learning of language by children. Language is extremely complex, yet children learn it quickly and with ease; thus, the study of child language is important for psychologists interested in cognition and learning and for linguists concerned with the insights it can give about the structure of language. In the 1960s and early ’70s much research in child language used the transformational-generative model proposed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky; the goal of that research has been to discover how children come to know the grammatical processes that underlie the speech they hear. The transformational model has also been adapted for another field of psycholinguistics, the processing and comprehension of speech; early experiments in this area suggested, for example, that passive sentences took longer to process than their active counterparts because an extra grammatical rule was necessary to produce the passive sentence. Many of the results of this work were controversial and inconclusive, and psycholinguistics has been turning increasingly to other functionally related and socially oriented models of language structure.
Self-check test

1. 
   Describe the origin of communication theory.
   
2. 
   Characterize mechanistic, psychological, social, and systemic views on communication.
   
3. 
   Describe ontology, epistemology, sociology.
   
4. 
   Point to the connection of communication theory with other disciplines.
   

Reccomended Readings

1. 
   DeLancey S. On Functionalism / Functional Syntax Lectures / Online: http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~delancey/sb/fs.html, 2001.
   
2. 
   Dryer M.S. Functionalism and the Theory - Metalanguage Confusion / Phonology, Morphology, and the Empirical Imperative / Taipei: The Crane Publishing Company, 2006. P. 27-59.
   
3. 
   Givon T. Syntax: An introduction. - Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001.- 500 p.
   
4. 
   Griffin. E. A first look at communication theory. - New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997- 214 p.
   
5. 
   Harris R. The Linguistic Wars. - New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. - 238 p.
   
6. 
   Haspelmath M. Does linguistic explanation presuppose linguistic description? Studies in Language, 2004. - 341 p.
   
7. 
   Leech G. Principles of pragmatics. - London: Longman, 1989. — 250 p.
   
8. 
   Miller K. Communication Theories: Perspectives, Processes, and Contexts. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005. - 352 p.
   
9. 
   Sperber D., Wilson D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. - Basil Blackwell, 1986. -320 p.
   
10. 
    Werner E. Toward a Theory of Communication and Cooperation for Multiagent Planning / Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge / Proceedings of the Second Conference. — London: Morgan Kaufman Publishers, 1988. — P. 129- 143.
    

Lecture 2