Pragmatic Model

Overview

Pragmatic models of communication are concerned with the connection between signs or expressions and their users. These signs may include the words used to describe an object, a physical reaction when encountering a new event, or a visual depiction, such as an emoji. There are many different pragmatic models of communication. While the specifics of each model differ, they are all designed to help scholars understand the ways that communication is used by real people in day-to-day situations.

Pragmatic models of communication emerge from the field of linguistics. These models are studied and developed by scholars in fields such as communication, languages, linguistics, and philosophy. In each field, scholars are concerned with the day-to-day aspects of communication. This includes the use of causal communication, slang, vulgar language, and cross-cultural communication. For scholars of pragmatic language, it is important to know what was said, as well as who spoke, who they were speaking to, and why the speech was occurring. For example, take the simple phrase “go to sleep now.” This phrase has many different connotations depending on who is speaking and who is being spoken to. It might be a calm, caring statement, spoken from a parent to a child at bedtime, maybe followed by an “I love you” or “sweet dreams.” The same phrase, however, might take on a sinister connotation if spoken by a villain in a movie immediately before he kills another character. For pragmatic scholars, it is important to know what words mean to the speaker in any specific situation. Pragmatic communication models attempt to break through ambiguity by finding out who is speaking, when they are speaking, and for whom their speech is intended.

Many scholars have examined pragmatic communication models. Some have used classical rhetorical tools and applied them to contemporary settings. Others have worked to define new models that allow scholars and students to better understand and study communication. These models are used by scholars to divide the different parts of speech into steps and categories. By doing so, scholars are easily able to speak to each other about a specific part of a speech act. The day-to-day speaker who is not interested in communication theory is unlikely to know that these models exist or to change their speech patterns based on knowledge of communication patterns.

One of the best-known communication scholars who examined pragmatic communication is Wilbur Schramm (1907–1987), a mass communication scholar and founder of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Schramm argued that communication is a process of transmitting information on three levels; the syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic. The syntactic level is concerned with the formal ways that communication assigns signs and symbols. The pragmatic, for Schramm, is the relationship between a speaker and signs. And the semantic is the relationship between the world and signs. For example, we assign many different names to fruits. At the syntactic level, English language speakers call a round, yellow, rind-covered citrus fruit a “lemon.” The assigning of that specific name to the specific fruit is an act on the syntactic level. Unless you produce a brand-new type of fruit, you will probably never get to assign a new sign to a new fruit. However, each of us gets to interact with fruits on a pragmatic level. Your experience with lemons is different from that of everyone else that has ever lived. You have an individual experience with lemons, and when you communicate about lemons that experience informs how you use the word and what you mean by it. Perhaps lemons are your favorite fruit, and every time you get to choose a beverage you choose lemonade. People that know you and know your preferences would therefore know how to interpret your statement such as “she brought a cake that was so lemony.” Knowing that you like lemons, your friends would probably assume that you would also like a lemon flavor cake. However, if you were allergic to lemons, then your friends would know that if you were served a lemon-flavored cake you may have become ill or at least were not happy about the experience.

Personal experiences are critical to Schramm’s definition of the pragmatic level of communication. They may be specific to the individual, or they may more generally apply. For example, if you are in the grocery store looking at cakes mixes there will be many different options, perhaps chocolate, vanilla, and lemon. Because we have a commonly assigned assumption of what each flavor is, the cake mix will not provide a long, detailed description of the flavor. Instead, simply stating “lemon” or “chocolate” will be enough to help you to separate out each flavor and determine which one you would prefer. This is also an example of the pragmatic level of communication.

The third level, as identified by Schramm is the semantic. This is the study of how signs are applied and used in communication. For example, a university student writing a paper about the many interpretations and varieties of usage of the word “lemon” is working at the semantic level of communication. Schramm applied these theories to the ways that international communication occurred, was taught, and was supported through the development of new communication technologies.

In 1948, Claud Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver proposed the Shannon–Weaver model of communication. In this model, scholars are able to break down a communicative activity into the sender, encoder, channel, decoder, receiver, and noise. The mechanical metaphors on which this model is built make sense because Shannon was a mathematician and Weaver was a scientist. While the definition and application of each step is beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to acknowledge the Shannon–Weaver model’s effect on contemporary studies of pragmatic communication.

Shannon and Weaver were interested in describing how communication occurs so that they could improve communication activities. They identified three different problems that might occur: technical problems, semantic problems, and effectiveness problems. Each of these problem categories is designed to determine what went wrong during a communication activity and find a remedy to that problem. For example, a semantic problem occurs when a message is sent in one way and received in a different way. At a pragmatic level this problem might occur when the sender and receiver are using different signs. For example, communication often breaks down over the concept and application of time periods. For the sender, “do it soon” might mean that the sender expects the action to be completed by the end of the day, whereas for the receiver, “soon” might mean tomorrow, next week, or next year.

Later scholars, such as Joel Bowman and Andrew Targowski (1987) studied Schramm’s work, and while they generally appreciated his model, they found that it did not adequately consider the connection between communication and decision-making. Bowman and Targowski argued that, while many scholars were documenting communication as it occurred, they were not drawing meaningful connections between communication and the effect that it had on the audience. Because of this, they suggested that scholars needed a new approach to understanding the ways that pragmatic communication occurs. To explain their model, Bowman and Targowski asked readers to imagine an individual who was participating in a “information-steering process.” This means that an individual was managing many different types of information and attempting to navigate through that connection to data. The individual was engaged in a “cognitive management apparatus” which is detailed by Bowman and Targowski through a complicated set of steps and subdivisions. These models assist scholars in being very specific about the communication activities which they are studying.

Applications

Deborah Tannen (2017) has focused on cross-cultural communication and intergenerational communication. In both settings, she is concerned with the ways that speakers attempt to persuade someone to ask in a different way. While she pays attention to the words that are said, she also pays attention to other parts of the pragmatic model. For example, she examines the ways that speakers in cross-cultural exchanges determine when they can or should speak. For example, what happens when two people from different cultures are sitting together quietly? One individual might think that the silence is awkward and be thinking about what he can say to “break the ice” or otherwise begin a conversation. The other individual, however, might be from a culture where it is perfectly normal to sit quietly for a long period of time, and she, therefore, might not be busy thinking about something to say; for this individual there is no ice to be broken.

Tannen has also studied intergenerational communication, particularly amongst family members. She has engaged in a long-term study of communication between mothers and daughters. Her book You’re Wearing That? (2006) exemplifies what she calls the “big three” of communication issues between mothers and daughters: clothes, hair, and weight. She examines how, when, and at times if each of these topics are discussed within family communication and how these communication patterns differ between different pairs of mothers and daughters. She has also spent time examining the different communication skills used between men and women and has applied pragmatic models of communication to explain these differences.

While many scholars address the verbal aspects of pragmatic communication models, there is also space for the analysis of nonverbal communication within a pragmatic model. For example, imagine that a principal is standing on stage delivering a long, somewhat boring speech at a high school graduation. Also seated on stage are teachers from the school. Those teachers are part of the communication process, even thought they are not speaking. They might look like the are paying attention. Sometimes they might nod their heads in agreement. Or, they might look bored by the speech as identified by eye rolling, checking their watches or even falling asleep. If the speech is especially bad, some teachers might become upset and start shaking their heads in anger, raising their fists, or otherwise showing the audience that they disagree with the principal. In each of these nonverbal acts, the teachers sitting on the stage are informing the audience about the principal’s speech and are influencing the audience’s reception of the speech. Yet, to properly interpret each of these actions, the audience members must use pragmatic models of communication that are culturally acquired. For example, they must know and agree with the teachers about what an eye roll means to be able to properly understand the nonverbal action.

Issues

Pragmatic communication models have been used to explain communication in many settings. One new area of research is amongst children with autism spectrum disorder. These children often develop differently than other children in terms of how and when they speak. They also differ in narrative patterns, which can be examined through pragmatic communication models. For example, Conlon et al. (2019) have found that girls with autism spectrum disorders have different narrative skills than boys with similar medical diagnosis: girls tend to be better at developing narration, showing how planning occurs in a story, or how the storyteller intends for a story to be presented. However, it is not enough to focus on a gender difference, or on a medical diagnosis. Instead, researchers need to account for many things, such as how children are raised and the different expectations that they encounter based on their gender, medical diagnosis, school settings, and interactions with the researchers. Pragmatic models of communication, which include many different factors, are a useful tool in accounting for each of these differences.

Other pragmatic scholars have asked how pragmatic communication models differ when they are applied to social media. For example, some platforms allow researchers to access a wide variety of information about a speaker, whereas other platforms emphasize the value of anonymity. This anonymity may encourage speakers to be more aggressive, abusive, or at times violent. Researchers are interested in how these changes in speech and audience affect what is said. They are grappling with finding the best ways to analyze speech when they are not able to access all of the necessary information about a speaker. For example, how seriously should one take a speaker who may have made a violent threat or may have thought that he was making a joke. If the scholar was assessing an in-person discussion, it might be easy to determine how serious the speaker was. But when analyzing online speech, scholars have to do additional research and sometimes are not able to find all the information that they need.

Terms & Concepts

Cross-cultural Communication: This type of communication occurs between members of different cultural groups. This is often though of as occurring between very different ethnic or cultural groups. For example, a president from an African nation meeting with a president from an Asian nation. But cross-cultural communication can also occur on a more local level; such as when a high school student who self identifies as a “goth” interacts with a member of the same school who self identifies as “emo.”

Nonverbal communication: The aspects of communication, including gestures, a speaker’s posture, and nonverbal utterances such as a sigh, grunt, or throat clearing. Each of these effects and informs verbal speech. Sometimes nonverbal communication is assessed alongside verbal communication, and other times nonverbal communication is independently assessed.

Sign: The term sign is used to describe anything that attaches meaning to something other than itself. For example, the word apple is a sign for a red fruit. Or if you roll your eyes during a long lecture you are using a sign to say “I’m bored.”

Signifier: The physical form of a sign is called the signifier. For example, if you want to ask a friend to bring you an apple, you might text her the word apple or an emoji of an apple, or send a voice message in which you say “apple.” These are all signifiers for the sign that is an apple.

Pragmatic: The ways in which things actually happen, are spoken about, and depicted. This is different from how things might ideally be structured or formed.

Semantic: The study of linguistics and the ways in which language occurs and the meaning attached to language.

Bibliography

Bergman, M. "Melioristic Inquiry and Critical Habits: Pragmatism and the Ends of Communication Research." Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, vol. 7, no. 2, 2016, pp. 173–188, Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=120037932&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Bowman, J. P., & Targowski, A. S. "Modeling the Communication Process: The Map Is Not the Territory." Journal of Business Communication, vol. 24, no. 4, 1987, 21–34, Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=5761639&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Burgoon, J. K., Guerrero, L. K., & Floyd, K. Nonverbal Communication. New York, NY: Routledge. 2016.

Conlon, O., et al. "Gender Differences in Pragmatic Communication in School-Aged Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)." Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 49, 2019, pp. 1–12. doi: 10.1007/s10803-018-03873-2. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Dewaele, Jean-Marc. "Pragmatic Challenges in the Communication of Emotions in Intercultural Couples." Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 15, no. 1, 2018, pp. 29–55, Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=129196588&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Işik-Güler, H., & Ruhi, Ş. "Face and Impoliteness at the Intersection with Emotions: A Corpus-Based Study in Turkish." Intercultural Pragmatics, vol. 7, no. 4, 2010, pp. 625–660. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=54970846&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Massey-Abernathy, A. R., & Haseltine, E. "Power Talk: Communication Styles, Vocalization Rates and Dominance." Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 48, no. 1, 2019, pp. 107–116. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=134765735&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Rich, M. H. "McKeon’s Semantics of Communication: A Pragmatic Exploration of the Communicative Arts." Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication, vol. 9, no. 1, 2018, pp. 5–24. Communication and Mass Media Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ufh&AN=129752258&site=ehost-live. Accessed 23 Aug. 2023.

Tannen, D. You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships. New York, NY: Ballantine Books. 2017.