Core Principles of Communication and Speech Acts

The Process of Communication

Communication is a process by which a sender conveys a message to a recipient with different intentions. Among these, the most prominent are to convey information and to establish, maintain, or modify social relations. The communication system used is language. Human beings possess the power to communicate through language, which has various manifestations that are called languages.

Understanding Speech Acts

Speech acts occur each time that we construct and issue a message for any purpose. The speech act is the minimal unit of linguistic communication. We can distinguish: what we say (statement), what we do (communicative action), and what we get (effect). There are different types of speech acts, such as representative, directive, commitment, expressive, and performative.

Literal and Pragmatic Meaning

• Literal meaning: Obtained from the application of the rules of semantic interpretation of each language, which are part of the linguistic competence of speakers.
• Pragmatic meaning: It derives from the precise terms in which communication occurs. In certain situations, statements are not used to ask, but are used for other intentions.

The Primary Functions of Language

• Phatic function: For communication to take place, there must be contact between the sender and receiver. The purpose of some statements is precisely to initiate, maintain, or terminate the contact between the emitter and receptor. The phatic function is predominant in greetings, congratulations, etc.
• Expressive function: Language also serves to express the speaker's mood. Except in very simple statements, this feature is seldom found as an isolated expression. It can be said that expressiveness is a nearly constant component of speech.
• Conative function: In this function, statements are intended to achieve a target so that the receiver behaves in a certain way.
• Informative function: This occurs in messages that serve as a vehicle for the transmission of information about reality.
• Poetic function: This is characteristic of messages where the sender wants to attract the attention of the recipient to the message itself, as seen in literary texts.