Chapter I
Introduction

Although there are various communication activities and various media for human beings to employ in the process of information exchange, language is widely acknowledged as one of the most essential communication media for them. That is why language has attracted attention and interest from a large number of researchers such as philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and even mathematicians. But the genuine in-depth study or rather a great breakthrough in the investigation of language was made by the Swiss linguist, F. de Saussure, who is generally recognized as the father of modern linguistics. In his seminal posthumous book Course in General Linguistics, he established linguistics as an independent discipline, and thus laid the foundations in modern linguistics for ensuing investigations such as Trubezkoy's (Prague School) research in phonetics (in parole) and phonology (in langue); Hjelmslev's (Copenhagen School) three planes (content, form and substance) of language and their reciprocal relations of realization; Chomsky's division of competence (langue) and performance (parole), Firth's, Hymes' and Halliday's influential work in the study of contexts (inspired by Saussure's definition of language as socially established code and the concept of system); as well as Bloomfield's the American descriptive structuralist linguistic study. As can be seen in the literature of modern linguistics, a large number of achievements have been made in the area that Saussure opened up.

According to Saussure, who made the dichotomy between langue and parole and who is believed to have included language in the general semiology, language is a system of signs (consisting of a varieties if sub-systems of signs). Language is a system of relations, language is form, and language is negative. More enlighteningly and revealingly, F. de Saussure formulates a paramount assertion that language is a meaningful system, a homogeneous one consisting of signs or sets of signs expressing meaning. Linguistic signs, as the Saussurian semiological perspective of language cogently exhibits, possess both form and meaning (content, concept or sound-image) 。

Is this type of meaning, to be precise linguistic meaning, equal to the communicative meaning or contextual meaning that the language user intends to convey in the communication activities? We do not believe so, but unfortunately most researchers do. This phenomenon is due to the fact that there exists a widespread inadequate understanding of the abstruse Saussurian concept of signs, the profoundness of which will be elaborated upon in detail in Chapter II of the present book.

In actuality, our investigations, though tentative, demonstrate that once language consisting of signs of meaning (that is with both form and content) is employed in communication activities, it itself becomes a form, and henceforth it serves as a vehicle for language users to convey communicative intentions, or more technically, communicative meanings, another form on a higher level. The diagram that we draw below will offer a clearer picture of that vehicle used in communication (cf. Cheng Yumin 1991):

Or, alternatively, as Roland Barthes'(1964(7)) table that we have reformulated below suggests,

the signified of Level 1 sign is the linguistic meaning, and the signifier is the form; the signified of Level 2 sign is the communicative meaning or intentions, and the signifier is the language system which possesses its own meaning.

In sum, we can arrive at a tentative conclusion that communication is a process in which language users employ a language system which is meaningful (on Level 1 of the Sign) in itself to convey their communication meanings (on Level 2 of the Sign).

What are the features of linguistic meaning (on Level 1 of the Sign) and communicative meaning (on Level 2 of the Sign)? And in what way(s) these two types of meaning cooperate or interact? These questions will be investigated and resolutions for them will be tentatively discussed in this present book.

In order to come up with a detailed convincing discussion in the book, we will first and foremost (in Chapter II) dwell upon properties of language as an information exchange medium. Secondly, we will focus our attention on description and evaluation of three communication models (in Chapters III，IV and V) which academic researchers have hypothesized so far because we believe that communication is not so simple a process of encoding and decoding, but rather a sophisticated process of conveying intentions and making inferences or intention recognition, so to speak. Thirdly, in Chapters VI, VII and VIII, we devote much space to the revelation that language system is inadequate when employed in complicated communication process in which precise information is conveyed by means of a general imprecise language system. In this part we also come to the conclusion that communication, as a cognitive activity, requires that the speaker conveys his information with heavy reliance on the situation in which he conducts communication activities and that the hearer draws inferences based on contextual assumptions. Alternatively, discourse interpretation is, in reality, the process of coherence recognition and coherence establishment. Once coherence in discourse is set up, understanding between the communicators is duly realized.

In the final analysis, in the process of communication, language acts more as a system indicating clues for the interlocutors than as a deciphering code. For any communication to be carried out successfully, or rather, for any language user to successfully employ language in information exchanges, cooperation, or interaction between language (or rather linguistic meaning) and cognitive environment (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1986) becomes indispensable. iM1Fq3nIu1j/PZupPKNLoI2EH/fpmOvgBOXWJmYdNu3z0KTlaFPiJ1BHw1A+//hR