pragmatics for communication service providers

The scholarly field of pragmatics emphasizes the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning in communication. Pragmatics emphasizes that circumstantial factors are crucial to interpretation of sentences. What does “look at this” mean? Does “it’s midnight” mean it’s time to go home, or time to party?

Communication service providers might take from pragmatics the importance of conveying not just sentences, but also circumstances of communication. State information in presence indicators might do this. Background noise captured in a mobile phone conversation might do this. A show-and-tell communication device, rather than a camera phone, might do this.

Pragmatics also shows the dominance of interpretation in thinking about communication. The philosopher Paul Grice, a seminal figure in pragmatics, modeled communication as a rational activity conveying meaning based on a cooperative principle and conversational maxims. Examples of Grice’s conversational maxims are “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required” and “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.” Have you seen any violations of these maxims in blogs lately?

Relevance Theory is a more recent development in pragmatics. According to this theory:

the very act of communicating raises precise and predictable expectations of relevance, which are enough on their own to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning.

Relevance Theory argues that the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning is larger than Grice supposed. It also includes explicit recognition that bodily processing effort affects choices in communication.

The scholarly field of pragmatics seems to offer nothing in communication outside of meaning, nothing about the production of presence. Developing the pragmatics of presence is up to communications service providers.

With honor to A.E. Housman and the scholarly field of pragmatics, here’s the Galbi Think! Poem-of-the-Month:

Oh, many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man.
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think