Some things to consider with regard
to communication:
A text, whether spoken or
written, is not itself a message but only a vehicle for a
message. Also, it is not independent of speaker and hearer. In fact, in
any act of discourse, we have to recognize not only the message but:
the sender and the receiver and their relationship;
the code (the words themselves--lexical choice, sentence structure,
intonation, etc.; also, which language is in use);
the verbal context (other related
messages, or other parts of the same message, and you can draw circles
outward to include the entire linguistic history of both participants);
the channel or medium;
and the concrete context (actual
objects and events in the participants' environment[s] and known to
them--and circles could be drawn outward to include the whole
culture[s] in which the participants live and move).
All of these elements affect the
outcome. Think how much is going on in each; there can be particular strain
arising from any of them. Consider just the code, for example:
supposing the sender's use of pronouns lacks cohesion, or there are
fewer connectors than usual, or she is using a particularly high or low
register of formality, or he resorts to puns, abbreviation, ellipsis,
idiosyncratic word choices, malapropisms, etc.
The verbal context always
constrains the sense of individual words or phrases or sentences.
Temporary conventions arise, for instance, either implicitly or
explicitly, some of which may even conflict with longer-term
conventions. As for the larger verbal context consisting of the
language history of each participant, one of them may deliberately draw
in other messages, by means of quotation or allusion, say, that the
other has no access to. And of course they will each be accustomed to
certain ways of using words.
Or the message itself can be a very
difficult one to encode and decode. It might be a surprising or complex
or unpleasant message. It can include things that have not been
experienced or imagined by the receiver.
When participants have a "long and
broad" shared verbal context that makes them likely to use the code in
similar ways, when they have good command of the code itself, and when
they are operating in similar concrete contexts, the communicative
results will obviously be much better than they are otherwise. Using a
channel that reduces ambiguity also helps ensure that what the sender
sends is received by the receiver. For example, face-to-face
talk provides lots of redundancy in the form of voice, gesture, facial
_expression_, etc. to disambiguate the message, and also means that there
is a shared [immediate] concrete context.
Under the sender and
receiver themselves we can consider, among many other things, their
state of mind, motives, etc. on the given occasion. If there is
limited good will or confidence, for example, all of the other
variables can be favourable and the result will still be poor.
Additional note: translation will
magnify any strain already arising from other elements. It is the
source of strain in its own right as well, since different languages
are spoken by groups that live or have lived together and therefore
entail different concrete contexts.
Debbie
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