This document provides an overview of a lecture on communication and language. The lecture aims to encourage self-reflection on communication and highlight how meaning is created. It discusses how language is used to transmit information, represent the world, influence others' actions, and construct identity. The lecture also explores how context, medium, and the negotiation between speakers affect meaning and whether literal and intended meanings always coincide. It provides examples of how language can be used to obscure meaning and responsibility, and how identity is constructed and displayed through language use.

1. On kissing, snails, and
language: how we mean
Staffordshire University – 28 January 2014
Dr Simone Bacchini
28 January 2014 contact: simone.bacchini@bl.uk

2. Learning Outcomes:
 To encourage self-reflection on both everyday and
professional communication by exploring and
highlighting how meaning is created
 To understand the importance of medium and context
in communication
 To understand how – through language – we construe
reality, build and sustain relationships, construct and
‘perform’ identity.

3. Things this lecture will NOT do:
 Give you a list of things to say and not to say
 Directly teach you ‘communication skills’, such as:
empathic communication, attentive listening, non-
judgmental communication, etc.

4. Activity 1 (time: 90secs;
alone in pairs or groups)
 ‘Thought itself needs words. It
runs on them like a long wire.
And if it loses the habit of
words, little by little it becomes
shapeless, somber.’ (Ugo Betti,
1946, Crime on Goat Island)
Think and make a list of all the
activities you have engaged in since
you woke up this morning that DID
NOT involve language

5. Things we do with language
 We transmit and acquire information (ideational
function)
 We represent the world
 We get people to do things
 We organise and structure knowledge (textual
function)
 We relate to others (relational function)
 We communicate

6. What is communication?
Among other things:
1. The successful exchange of meaning

7. For the language freaks
(one of them is talking to you!)

8. How does communication work?
 Is it like the giving of a
present?
 Is it like a traffic light system?

9. A more appropriate model of communication

10. What does constitute ‘context’?
 Previous speech
 World knowledge (shared or not)
 Previous experience
 Physical environment
 Experiential environment
 Emotional environment

11. Activity 2:
find the questions
How are you?
Where do you live, Mr Smith?
Could you please fill this form?
I don’t think so
How about meeting up tomorrow?
The phone’s ringing

12. Now check this!

13. What is necessary for communication such as the
one in the previous scene to successful?

14. “Meaning is not a thing, like pudding;
It’s an activity, like kissing.”

15.  “Meaning is not something that is inherent in the
words alone, nor is it produced by the speaker alone
or the hearer alone. Making meaning is a dynamic
process, involving the negotiation of meaning
between speaker and hearer, the context of utterance
(physical, social, and linguistic), and the meaning
potential of an utterance.” (Thomas, 1995: 22)
 “Words do not carry meanings on their backs, like
snails carry their houses.”

16. Do LITERAL and INTENDED meaning
coincide?
3 types of meaning:
Literal meaning “The phone is ringing”/Intended
meaning “Can you answer the phone?”/Received
meaning “No I can’t answer it; I’m washing up”

17. Activity 3
Imagine the following situation: a crowded city bus; the
bus driver says:
This bus won’t move until you boys move in out of the
doorway.
What are the and the meanings?
What might be the receiving meanings be?

18. Activity 4
Can you imagine two encounters with a service user
(not the same one) in which different contexts may lead
to different meanings being conveyed/received?

19. How can the channel affect
meaning & communication?

20. Language is a theory of
experience
Through language we and our interlocutors construe
and present world-views.

21. De-responsabilisation through
language in rape trials
Matt: Well, as we were talking our pants were
undone.
[…]
Defense Attorney: All right. What happen[ed] next,
please?
Matt: The sexual activity started escalating even
further.
From: Ehrlich, S. (2001). ‘Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent’ London: Routledge.

22. Strategies used:
Obscuring: Matt uses agentless passives to obscure his role in
the initiation of sexual events. He provides no overt information as
to the cause of these acts.
Matt: Well, as we were talking our pants were undone.
Elimination: Matt turns grammatical subjects into nominalizations,
making the events appear to have no particular cause or agent.
The agents of the actions below are "sexual activity" and
"something sexual," with no reference to Matt's participation.
Defense Attorney: All right. What happens next, please?
Matt: The sexual activity started escalating even further.

23. Language as a means for creating,
maintaining, displaying identity
 Identity = the ways that people display who they are
to each other.
 “A person may have a number of identities, each of
which is more important at different points in time (e.g.
woman, teacher, patient, service user, wife, etc.). The
ways in which people display their identities includes
the way they use language and the way they interact
with people. Identity is something that is constantly
constructed and re-constructed as people interact with
each other. Part of having a certain identity is that it is
recognised by [others]. Identity is a two-way
construction” (Paltridge, B., 2012)

24. Thank you! Any questions?