Author: Paul WatzlawickPublisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393707075
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
The properties and function of human communication.
Author: Paul WatzlawickHuman Communication Across Cultures
Author: Vincent Leonard RemillardPublisher: Equinox Publishing
ISBN: 9781781793541
Category : Communication
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
A highly interactive textbook and workbook on how human communication takes place. Unlike other textbooks which focus only on sociolinguistics this employs both sociolinguistics and pragmatics. Each section includes a brief introduction, a discussion of the topic, references for further research and an extensive collection of activities designed for both in-class usage and homework assignments.
Cognitive Pragmatics
Author: Bruno G. BaraPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262014114
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
An argument that communication is a cooperative activity between agents, who together consciously and intentionally construct the meaning of their interaction. In Cognitive Pragmatics, Bruno Bara offers a theory of human communication that is both formalized through logic and empirically validated through experimental data and clinical studies. Bara argues that communication is a cooperative activity in which two or more agents together consciously and intentionally construct the meaning of their interaction. In true communication (which Bara distinguishes from the mere transmission of information), all the actors must share a set of mental states. Bara takes a cognitive perspective, investigating communication not from the viewpoint of an external observer (as is the practice in linguistics and the philosophy of language) but from within the mind of the individual. Bara examines communicative interaction through the notion of behavior and dialogue games, which structure both the generation and the comprehension of the communication act (either language or gesture). He describes both standard communication and nonstandard communication (which includes deception, irony, and "as-if" statements). Failures are analyzed in detail, with possible solutions explained. Bara investigates communicative competence in both evolutionary and developmental terms, tracing its emergence from hominids to Homo sapiens and defining the stages of its development in humans from birth to adulthood. He correlates his theory with the neurosciences, and explains the decay of communication that occurs both with different types of brain injury and with Alzheimer's disease. Throughout, Bara offers supporting data from the literature and his own research. The innovative theoretical framework outlined by Bara will be of interest not only to cognitive scientists and neuroscientists but also to anthropologists, linguists, and developmental psychologists.
Origins of Human Communication
Author: Michael TomaselloPublisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262261200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409
Book Description
A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.
Pragmatic Aspects of Human Communication
Author: H.B. CherryPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 9789027705204
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
'Human Communication' is a field of interest of enormous breadth, being one which has concerned students of many different disciplines. It spans the imagined 'gap' between the 'arts' and the 'sciences', but it forms no unified academic subject. There is no commonly accepted terminology to cover aU aspects. The eight articles comprising this book have been chosen to illustrate something of the diversity yet, at the same time, to be comprehensible to readers from different academic disciplines. They cannot pretend to cover the whole field! Some attempt has been made to present them in an order which represents a continuity of theme, though this is merely an opinion. Most publications of this type form the proceedings of some sympo sium, or conference. In this case, however, there has been no such unifying influence, no collaboration, no discussions. The authors have been drawn from a number of different countries. The first article, by John Marshall and Roger Wales (Great Britain) concerns the pragmatic values of communication, starting by considering bird-song and passing to the infinitely more complex 'meaningful' values of human language and pictures. The 'pragmatic aspect' means the usefulness - what does language or bird song do for humans and birds? What adaptation or survival values does it have? These questions are then considered in relation to brain specialisation for representation of experience and cognition.
Author: B. Aubrey FisherHuman Communication as Narration
Author: Walter R. FisherPublisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1643362429
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
This book addresses questions that have concerned rhetoricians, literary theorists, and philosophers since the time of the pre-Socratics and the Sophists: How do people come to believe and to act on the basis of communicative experiences? What is the nature of reason and rationality in these experiences? What is the role of values in human decision making and action? How can reason and values be assessed? In answering these questions, Professor Fisher proposes a reconceptualization of humankind as homo narrans, that all forms of human communication need to be seen as stories—symbolic interpretations of aspects of the world occurring in time and shaped by history, culture, and character; that individuated forms of discourse should be considered "good reasons"—values or value-laden warrants for believing or acting in certain ways; and that a narrative logic that all humans have natural capacities to employ ought to be conceived of as the logic by which human communication is assessed.
New Perspectives on (Im)Politeness and Interpersonal Communication
Author: Lucis Fernández AmayaPublisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443844357
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 285
Book Description
New Perspectives on (Im)Politeness and Interpersonal Communication gathers eleven studies by prominent scholars, which explore issues related to (im)politeness in human communication. The study of linguistic (im)politeness is undoubtedly one of the central concerns in the field of pragmatics, as attested to by the numerous conferences and journals currently dedicated to the topic, the various theoretical models and approaches developed or developing so far, and the seemingly endless list of insightful and inspiring empirical studies tackling the topic from a wide variety of angles. This volume contributes to the subfield of social pragmatics by putting together works that review the state of the art of (im)politeness studies, analysing (im)politeness in media contexts like the Internet or dubbed films and other contexts, looking into the effects and consequences of some speech acts for social interaction, drawing implications for language teaching, and approaching some of the linguistic mechanisms which help to communicate (im)politeness. Resulting from the efforts made by specialists in the field, the chapters in this volume offer additional evidence that examining the complexity of interpersonal communication from different standpoints can benefit a more complete understanding of social interaction in general. Their scope and practical applications demonstrate the transversality and versatility of interpersonal communication. The editors hope that these works will retain scholars’ interest and attention for some time to come and spark off further research.
Critical Pragmatics
Author: Kepa KortaPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139498509
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Book Description
Critical Pragmatics develops three ideas: language is a way of doing things with words; meanings of phrases and contents of utterances derive ultimately from human intentions; and language combines with other factors to allow humans to achieve communicative goals. In this book, Kepa Korta and John Perry explain why critical pragmatics provides a coherent picture of how parts of language study fit together within the broader picture of human thought and action. They focus on issues about singular reference, that is, talk about particular things, places or people, which have played a central role in the philosophy of language for more than a century. They argue that attention to the 'reflexive' or 'utterance-bound' contents of utterances sheds new light on these old problems. Their important study proposes a new approach to pragmatics and should be of wide interest to philosophers of language and linguists.
