Verbal information transmission without communicative intention

Abstract

Language use and communication cannot be equated entirely, since verbal communication is not the only form of language use. There are several other kinds of language use including the use of language to inform, think, memorize, learn, take notes, play, sing for fun or in psycholinguistic experiments, as has been exemplified and argued for in some grammatical and pragmatics traditions. The present paper attempts to characterize a non-communicative form of language use, namely, informative language use. First, with the help of re-analyses of various example types previously analyzed from different perspectives in the pragmatics literature, the paper illustrates the real, independent existence of informative language use. Second, relying on these re-analyses of examples, and also applying a definition of ostensive-inferential communication, informative language use and communicative language use are distinguished. Third, the paper characterizes informative language use in detail and demonstrates what similarities and differences informative versus communicative forms of language use have. The conclusion of the research presented here is, on the one hand, that people's verbal behavior cannot be evaluated independently of their intentions, and, on the other hand, that utterances in a verbal interaction should be analyzed individually, and relying on the speakers' intentions that can be identified only by considering various linguistic and non-linguistic factors. For example, one and the same utterance can be treated as a manifestation of communicative language use toward an addressee and at the same time, as a manifestation of informative language use toward another person. It should also be emphasized that making a distinction between the informative and communicative forms of language use, first, has indisputable advantages in explaining the phenomena in language use, and second, results in a more comprehensive modeling of pragmatic competence.