Year: 2003
Type: article
Abstract: Communication is traditionally defined as the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver by means of a (linguistic) code. This classical definition belongs to what Sperber & Wilson (1986) call the code model. Specifically, this model presupposes that the hearer’s retrieval of a codified meaning ‘packed up’ in a linguistic string is such that the speaker and the hearer will share exactly the same thought once the process of decoding is completed. The aim of pragmatics since the 1960s is to show that at the discourse level—and recently at the lexical level—there is no one-to-one mapping between linguistic meaning and utterance meaning. In other words, there is a gap between semantically-underspecified meaning and speaker meaning that can only be bridged by pragmatic inference. Consider:
Author: Sergio Maruenda-Bataller
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W23109168