Pragmatic Aspects Of Human Communication

'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.

The properties and function of human communication.

This new landmark series of thirteen self-contained handbooks provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the entire field of pragmatics. It is based on a wide conception of pragmatics as the study of intentional human interaction in social and cultural contexts. The series reflects, appraises and structures a field that is exceptionally vast, unusually heterogeneous and still rapidly expanding. In-depth articles by leading experts from around the world discuss the foundations, major theories and most recent developments of pragmatics including philosophical, sociocultural and cognitive as well as methodological, contrastive and diachronic perspectives.

The properties and function of human communication.

The second edition of this prestigious title, INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION, by one of the beloved scholars in the field, the late B. Aubrey Fisher, has been revised and rewritten by one of Fisher's doctoral students, Kathy Adams. Now aimed at second-level interpersonal communication courses, the revision retains Fisher's pragmatics perspective and personal examples and anecdotes. At the same time, Adams has extensively revised the book. Specifically, the pragmatics perspective has been developed more fully and consistently throughout. Overall, the book has been reorganized and streamlined from 15 chapters to 11 - to eliminate redundancies. Part III has been updated to reflect the most recent research and literature on relationships, particularly maintenance, and communication competence.

The ten volumes of "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this first volume reviews basic notions that pervade the pragmatic literature, such as deixis, implicitness, speech acts, context, and the like. It situates the field of pragmatics, broadly defined as the cognitive, social, and cultural science of language use, in relation to a general concept of communication and the discipline of semiotics. It also touches upon the non-verbal aspects of language use and even ventures a comparison with non-human forms of communication. The introductory chapter, moreover, explains why a highly diversified field of scholarship such as pragmatics can be regarded as a potentially coherent enterprise.