Pragmatic Aspects of Human Communication

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-IX

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2. Pragmatics as Biology or Culture

   • John C. Marshall, Roger J. Wales

   Pages 1-13

3. From Animal Communication to Human Speech

   • Isaak Revzin

   Pages 15-26

4. Experiments with Everyday Conversation

   • Dennis Dicks

   Pages 27-50

5. Interviewing and Memory

   • Aaron V. Cicourel

   Pages 51-82

6. Fifty-Two Oppositions Between Scientific and Poetic Communication

   • Solomon Marcus

   Pages 83-96

7. Experimental Issues in Sentence Comprehension : Complexity and Segmentation

   • Merrill Garrett

   Pages 97-114

8. Linguistic Structure and Sentence Production

   • Kenneth I. Forster

   Pages 115-143

9. Information, Decision, and the Scientist

   • J. Marschak

   Pages 145-178

10. Back Matter

    Pages 179-179

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'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.

• START
• brain
• cognition
• communication
• complex
• complexity
• culture
• experiment
• information
• interview
• language
• linguistics
• memory
• production

• Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, UK

  Colin Cherry

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