Finally, we are going to discuss the elements that interact in any communicative situation.
Communication, the exchange of meaning between individuals through a common system of symbols, concerned scholars since the time of ancient Greece.
1. Shannon and the Communication Theory
Claude Shannon opened the way to the development of communication theory in the 1940s with his article "A Mathematical Theory of Communication''.
On the same, he argues that human communication can be broken into six key concepts: sender (information source), encoder (transmitter), channel, noise, decoder and receiver (destination); and represented communication as the process between the sender and the receiver.
To complete the same, he introduced the entropy rate (which is the amount of information you wish to transmit) and the channel capacity; and showed that if the entropy rate exceeds the channel capacity, then there will be unavoidable errors in the transmission.
2. Key factors
Finally, we are going to analyse the intended effects of our communicative interactions (speech acts) and the environment in which they are exchanged (social context).
Austin’s (1962) speech act theory arose from his observation that it simply is not possible to determine the truth value of many utterances. This led Austin to propose a distinction between performative utterances (used in order to perform some act: promises, warns, etc.) and constative utterances (for which a truth value conceivably could be determined: declarative sentences, statements, etc.).
However, he abandoned this distinction in favour of his theory of illocutionary forces or speech acts. On this view, all speech has a dimension of meaning and a particular force; and any utterance involves the simultaneous performance of a number of different acts. This way, a general act (locutionary act) that a speaker performs, includes a particular intention in making the utterance (illocutionary force) and the production of a particular effect in the addressee (perlocutionary act). For example the phone ringing will be the locutionary act, someone’s request the illocutionary force and the act of picking the phone will be the perlocutionary act.
Apart from speech acts, there is another factor that can condition any communicative situation: the context. We could find two types of contexts: the linguistic context, and the context of situation. This way, Halliday offers three headings for the analysis of the context of situation: the field of discourse (the nature of the social action that is taking place), the tenor of discourse (the nature of the participants, their statuses and roles) and the mode of discourse (the function of the text in the event).
To end with, it could be said that linguistic context may not be enough to fully understand an utterance understood as speech act, so linguistic elements in a text may refer not only to other parts of the text, but also to the outside world, to the context of situation.
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