Communication and Context

Pragmatic knowledge is essential for good communication. To make correct pragmatic choices, speakers must be sensitive to context, for context offers us, as listeners, the social information we need to understand speech acts. Context tells us who our communicative partners are and gives us clues about their assumptions and their expectations of us. Table 4.4 shows some of the contextual information that we use to make pragmatic interpretations. This material is drawn from a larger theory of com­munication called the Coordinated Management of Meaning theory, or CMM.

Table 4.4 – Context

Speech Act An act done by the speaker to the hearer. Speech acts identify the speaker's intention. Examples:to persuade, to flatter, to inform, to comfort, to gather information. Episode A sequence of communicative behaviors that exists as a unit and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It simply means the situation we find ourselves in during a given interaction. Episodes identify the purpose of an interaction. Examples: a friendly chat, playing a game, solving a problem. Relationship All of the episodes that can reasonably be expected to occur between self and other, given reciprocal roles. Relationship identifies who communicators are to one another. Examples:friends, lovers, strangers, business associates. Life Script A person’s ideas about the kind of communication that matches his or her personal or professional identity. Life script is the individual’s sense of self. Examples: aggressive executive, creative artist, loving parent, gifted orator, sensitive friend. Cultural Pattern General agreements shared by members of a particular cultural group about how to act in and respond to the world. Cultural patterns legitimize all lower contextual levels. Examples:identity based on class, national, religious, or ethnic membership.  

CMM theory provides a framework for understanding how individuals use con­text to assign pragmatic meaning. CMM theorists believe that to communicate successfully, we must take into account four levels of context: episode, relation­ship, life script, and cultural pattern.

Pragmatic Styles and Structures

As we move from one situation to another, we use what linguists refer to as dif­ferent discourse styles. Just as the basic unit of syntax is the sentence, so the basic unit of pragmatics is discourse. Discourse is a unit of language larger than a single sentence; it consists of connected sentences that form an identifiable structure to fulfill a communicative function. In a typical day, you may read a newspaper article, study a college textbook, listen to a professor's lecture, take part in a group discussion, write a personal essay, give a public speech, or hold a casual conversation. All these activities are forms of discourse, and each has its own structure and rules. As we shall see different commu­nication contexts call for different kinds of discourse. One aspect of being a good communicator is understanding and following the rules that govern com­mon forms of discourse.

Forms of Discourse: Classifying Kinds of Talk

In this section, we'll compare two forms of discourse, one relatively private and the other slightly more public. These two forms of discourse, conversation and classroom interaction, are so familiar that we engage in them effortlessly. Yet when we go from one to the other—when we move from friendly talk with friends to interaction with classmates and teachers—our pragmatic rules change quite dramatically.

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