Fundamentals of Human Communication and Linguistic Competence

Communication and Social Interaction

Communication is intended to convey information and establish or maintain social relations.

Verbal Language and Linguistic Signs

Verbal language is the human ability to communicate through linguistic signs and specific rules of combination.

Language vs. Speech

• Language: An abstract code that forms a common ideal model.
• Speech: The actual, concrete, and individual use of language.

The Communication Process

Communication is the voluntary transmission of information. It occurs when a sender encodes a message using a common code and sends it through a physical channel to a receiver, who decodes and interprets it within a specific context.

Communicative Competence

The sender and receiver rely on communicative competence to produce and understand messages. Performance is the practical implementation of this linguistic knowledge.

Linguistic Proficiency and Acceptability

Linguistic proficiency involves expressing and understanding messages that are well-formed according to grammatical rules. Failure to follow these rules results in agrammaticality.

Beyond grammar, social and cultural patterns influence linguistic usage, leading to concepts of correctness and acceptability. Acceptability is linked to processing ability; a sequence is unacceptable when it is difficult for the speaker to comprehend, often due to incompatible semantic associations or contradictory terms.

Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatic competence allows speakers to produce and understand messages appropriate to a specific communicative situation. For a message to make sense, it must relate to the issuer, recipient, and communicative intent.

Elements of Pragmatic Meaning

• Spatiotemporal location: The physical and temporal setting of the speakers.
• Paralinguistic context: Includes oral or written delivery, tone, typography, and proxemics.
• Shared knowledge: The communicative intention, personality, and emotional state of the participants.
• Social context: The nature of the social relations between the callers.

Inference in Communication

The process of linking statements with previous ideas about the context to deduce implicit information is called inference. This process is performed almost automatically to extract meaning not explicitly stated.