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I can’t open the door wearing a towel: This is my well-deserved bath, I’m not moving

for the world, and so on. Time (in this case, related to physical and social constraints)

while having a bath. Place: home (of both?). Therefore, in this specific example

interactors communicate more than what their words apparently say.

A: Door! = Go open the door (this could be the end of a previous situation or process

and not the start).

B: I’m in the bath = I can’t/won’t, because I’m having a bath

A: Ok! = I see, I’ll get the door myself then.

We actually don’t select words randomly because of process and situation.

Speaker’s Meaning

It based on assumptions of knowledge, namely hypotheses based on factual evidence

or on previous knowledge shared by both speaker and hearer. The speaker constructs

a message which has an intended meaning which, very often is implied. The hearer

interprets the message and decodes the implied meaning; (when this is not done,

misunderstandings take place!). His/her decoding of the message leads them to

formulate further assumptions and test them through their utterance, and so on and

so forth.

Meaning Potential (Potentiality of Utterance)

Utterances can potentially mean anything, including the opposite of their

surface/propositional meaning. We can’t predict what an utterance is meant to convey

in isolation from a given context. (Jokes, irony, banter, rhetorical devices in general).

CONTEXT

We distinguish 3 related yet distinct types of context: Situation/communicative

context, background knowledge context/knowledge of the world (KOW) and Co-textual

context/co-text

Context influences the way we communicate, It helps reduce the potentiality of

utterance, it allows us to see utterances which are reduced in explicitness and

understand other people’s utterances which are reduces in explicitness. The 3 types

together make up the context of communicative exchanges.

Situational/communicative context

Contextual Variables: Topic, Setting, Participants, Medium. These compose the

situation context.

they influence what/to, whom/how/when/where/why we say something. They’re

variables because if we change one of these, the final result (the context) will change.

Topic

that’s what people are discussing. Of course, it influences the way we communicate if

it’s a general or a specific topic for example a legal issue. Many topics are taboo so we

actually can’t talk about it.

It helps to reduce the potentiality like This place is a greenhouse (at home- it’s too

warm here) (a real estate agent- about selling).

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Reduction in explicitness: She commented about his mistake/ Prepositional Verbs/

Right, she commented on his mistake.

Setting diachronic and

It’s about time and place. In case of time the main reason is

synchronic. It’s the time made for doing something in specific. The same goes for

place. A synchronic approach considers a language at a moment in time without

taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at

a specific point of time, usually the present. By contrast, a diachronic approach

considers the development and evolution of a language through history. Historical

linguistics is typically a diachronic study. It helps for the intended meaning.

Example 1: May rest in peace (church)/amen

Example 2: De Niro is one of the best actor ever/ Amen. Amen has different meaning.

Reduction in explicitness: Are we going there now or later/ Now.

Participants

Different sub-variables influencing communication (What I said, how we say it)

Individual identity

(Personality- shy, talkative ect) it depends by emotions, personality and situation and

also by the time and our emotional state.

Social identity

(Differences in gender, class, religion, ethnicity, age and role, particularity related to

taboo issued).

Personal and/or social relationship between interactions

Relation between Teacher and Students rather than Mom and son.

Presence and absence of an audience during communicative interaction.

When you know someone else is actually listening you put more attention in what you

say or the opposite if there’s someone we won’t not to be listening, we code the

language.

Reduce potentiality is an important goal of this staff as

Examples Given

A person during a row with their friend: If you do that, you can go to hell (very

probably is a metaphor, if you do that thing I don’t want you to do, we’re no longer

friends

A priest during a homily: If you do that, you can go to hell (Intended literally, if you sin

and you do not redeem in time, you’ll be condemned to eternal damnation.

We’ve gotta know who’re participants to understand the potentiality.

Reduction in explicitness

We actually don’t know anything about the subjects they’re talking about but if we

think about personal experience we can admit we do know what they are about. We

can guess and assume what people are doing but about anything. That/ one/ there are

links in the conversation with the world around. To understand them we need to be in

the context. In other case the conversation would need to be more explicit giving the

name/determination to the links. We explicit the terms/ subjects. These words are

Deixis: words that literally point at something around us and link the language to the

external world  Context is necessary. The 3 major categories are Personal, Time,

Place. Whenever we communicate we take whatever we can for granted, namely we

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tend to avoid being over-explicit, for example through deixis. We simplify the

language. Expectation is a sort of reduction of explicitness even with stranger.

Examples Given

-Shall we meet in front of the Orient Express at 8:30 pm? (Here, I need to be specific?

This is a relationship we don’t go to much close).

-Same place same time? (we do it all the time, I don’t need to be specific).

-See you in five minutes

-Can you pass me that?

-Where can I find them?  Over there

Medium

Written Texts (Organized, complex structure, linear progression, grammatical

accuracy)

Spoken Texts (Disorganized, simple structure, subject changing, grammatical

inaccuracy. Generalized vocabulary). Medium is how a certain message is delivered,

the channel is the physical way by which the message is delivered. When we speak we

don’t have much time to think what we need to say so we have short phrase, we go

back, repeat and so on. Spoken language is unplanned. In written language we use

linking words, we plan the discourse. Otherwise we can mix them a little bit giving a

look to the context.

Background knowledge context/knowledge of the world (KOW)

It is constituted by everything we know about the world, all the information that we

possess and that

Influences our communicative behaviour, allow us to reduce the potentiality of

utterances and to perform utterances reduced in explicitness and understand other

people’s utterances which are reduced in explicitness. Background knowledge is about

social notions, not of linguistic matter. This provide the social notions that represents

our personal packet. This is always expanding because every day we have new

experiences and also, we forget about something every day. It always changes and it’s

all about expectation. it is the knowledge about how things usually go in the world

which we update with every new experience we make; it is stored in our memories and

helps us fill in the missing links in communication and understand the intended

meaning of utterance. This is important with participants: the more is KOW the more

we have reduced explicitness and so on. Share knowledge is extremely important.

Cultural/ Encyclopaedic KOW

Open-access knowledge shared by the members of the same group or community

(Which may vary in size) Shrek is likely to be known by half the globe, acquired

through school, books, tv, radio, cinema, internet...

Interpersonal

KOW knowledge acquired through previous conversations and social activities, which

includes personal knowledge about the interlocutor; it is the knowledge, different and

unique, which each of us possesses.

Example Given

Tell us about your favourite fairy tale / It is about a wonderful prince. He is tall and

big, fat and green and stinks / Yeah, I like Shrek very much too. This last is all about

background.

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Co-textual context/co-text

It is the context of the text itself; it is constituted by only linguistic information,

namely the words/sentences/utterances which constitute the rest of the text and come

before and after the utterance we are considering. The difference with the previous

two types of context is that the situational and background knowledge contexts

include non-verbal/ non-linguistic elements. Co-text is the whole text from the

beginning to the end as we can understand it all without knowing the background. The

co-text is the previous or following part of utterance that can helps us to understand a

particular utterance. Context is therefore the dimension of communication which turns

language as a formal system into a means of communication (Saussure).

A: Door! / I’m in the bath / Ok (all this is the co-text)

let’s change the co-text

B: Door! / Oh my gosh thank you! I hadn’t realized there was a glass door! / Yeah, I

know I could see that, you were clearly going to crash against it… now you owe me

one

In other words, a change in co-text implies a change in the whole communicative

exchange and in the intended meaning of utterance (even of the same utterance).

DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Coherence

it is in the meaning, the text needs to show unity of meaning and thematic and logical

progression to be considered coherent (This is the Discourse Analysis approach,

Pragmatics considers Coherence as Relevance). This is not about the form of the text.

It’s about just the meaning, there’s a revolution in the meaning of the text, logical and

consequential. Meaningful means that something has meaning, coherence means that

there’s progression in meaning.

Discourse

It is different from Speech. D. is meant how communication can be used to drive

people to words, a certain opinion or another and concern written communication for

the most.

Cohesion

Grammatical and lexical unity of the text- the way the text makes links with and within

itself. In other words, it is the way the co-text hangs together. It’s the way it’s making

its grammatical and lexical relationship explicit. It is represented by all the verbal

signals present in the text (remember co-text is only made up of linguistic elements).

Cohesive Devices

These are language terms which refer to other lan