Intention, common ground and the availability of semantic content : a relevance-theoretic perspective

Abstract

By its very definition, communication involves the transmission of information from one agent to another; if the communicator had no means of making some piece of information available to an audience, there would a priori be no possibility for communication to ever take place. Admittedly, in most its instances in nature, communication is achieved through the use of a common underlying code which allows the straightforward transmission of a message to an audience. Take for example the classic case of honeybees: A bee lets its beehive know the whereabouts of a good supply of nectar by moving its body in some particular manner. In this setting, communication occurs through the encoding of the information that is to be communicated (i.e., the location of the nectar) into a specific “dance”, which the audience bees are able to decode through the implementation of an identical copy of the code that the communicating bee is using. From a first look, human verbal communication can also be treated with a similar rationale, according to which the existence of a common linguistic code between two interlocutors suffices on its own to guarantee their successful communication. In such an account, all that the speaker has to do is encode her message into a natural language sentence and utter it. The hearer will in turn decode the utterance’s meaning and faithfully reconstruct in this way the speaker’s original message.