Messages as the Outcomes of Signification |
ABSTRACT The term, "message," is misleading. Texts are representations of thinking. They are linked to verbal and non-verbal sign systems. Some texts are discourses. Given these factors, texts cannot be understood independently of cognition |
The term, "message," is misleading.
In Joseph DeVito's Messages: Building Interpersonal Communication Skills, a message is defined as "Any signal or combination of signals that serves as a stimulus for a receiver" (355). This common definition of what is sent and received is strongly associated with an information processing model of communication. This use of the term "message" reduces discourses, texts, and their innumerable genres to a combination of signals. However accurate this may be technically, it is more or less like defining love in terms of bio-chemistry or physiological arousal. In DeVito's own terms, this definition is a "mixed message," that is, "a message that asks for two different (often incompatible) responses" (356). On the one hand, it asks you to understand communication as signals that stimulate responses and on the other (with respect to DeVito's subtitle "building interpersonal communication skills") as "a process of adjustment," serving "a variety of purposes," involving "self-concepts," "self-awareness," "self-disclosure," "self-esteem," and so on. This array of cognitive abilities is reduced to a "stimulus-response" pattern in DeVito's use of the term "message."
In his A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco puts this issue of representation into a sharp focus. In his first chapter he describes a very simple communication situation in which a engineer receives signals from a transmitter about the water level of a dam to inform him whether the watergate needs to be opened or can remain closed.
Since there are at least three codes, a denotative one and two connotative ones, if all three are referred to when interpreting the sign-vehicle, the engineer has got three messages, namely: (i) «the water has reached danger level»; (ii) «you must activate the evacuation lever»; (iii) «there is a flood ».
Thus, a single sign-vehicle, insofar as several codes make it become the functive of several sign-functions (although connotatively linked), can become the expression of several contents, and produce a complex discourse such as: «Since water has reached the danger level, you must evacuate it, otherwise there will be a flood.» I am not saying that a single code can produce many messages, one after the other, for this is a mere truism: I am saying that usually a single sign-vehicle conveys many intertwined contents and therefore what is commonly called a 'message' is in fact a text whose content is a multilevelled discourse. (57, emphasis mine, italics Eco's).
In their, "Understanding Texts," Art Graesser and Pam Tipping make a simi liar case working from Teun van Dijk (a text linguistic) and Walter Kintsch's (a cognitive psychologist's) Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (324-325). They point to "multiple levels of representation."
In this context, using the term, "text," to refer to the outcome of signification and using the term, "discourse," to refer to the content of the text seems appropriate. Or, one might redefine "message" as a brief text, a "text/message."
Texts are the representation of thinking.
As is implied in Eco's remarks, from a semiotic viewpoint, texts are the outcome of the process of signification which is a cognitive ability. Cognitive scientists speak of thinking (understood as information processing) and mental representations of it rather than signifying and texts. No matter whether the terminology used in cognitive science and semiotics differs, both groups credit the mind with the ability to manipulate symbols. A Companion to Cognitive Science (2006) contains entries on "Language Processing" (226ff.) and "Understanding Texts" (324ff.). Both entries make it abundantly clear that text processing—if you will allow the conflation—is a cognitive process.
Texts are linked to verbal and non-verbal sign systems.
Most current textbooks on communication studies have sections devoted to non-verbal human communication. In semiotics, texts are complications of signs drawn from both verbal and non-verbal sign systems. For example, Roland Barthes did a lengthy analysis of The Fashion System in which he analyzed fashion as a sign system as well as a lengthy analysis of a Balzac short story in S/Z.
Whether the text is verbal or non-verbal, its discourse is the outcome of signification, or construing, or the representation of thinking, or the expression of text-processing, all are conceptions of cognitive abilities.
The distinction Eco makes between a text and a discourse hinges on the notion that texts contain discourses. This is a useful distinction, though not necessarily a widely shared one. In Tuen van Dijk's work on "text grammars," a text to be a distinctive combination of sentences and their functions. For example, a narrative has different "sentence functions" than a proposal or a formal argument. In this sense, a text "contains" a "narrative" or an "argument." Narratives and arguments are types of discourse. Texts refer to linguistic units larger than sentences. Discourses refer to the ways specific texts function in communication.
In this sense, texts (the way sentences are combined to form a unit) contain discourses (the way the sentences are used in a communication). From the point of view of the discourse a text contains, they are inseparable from the cognitive process of communication. (See communication matrix.)
Texts cannot be understood independently of cognition
Whatever terminology is employed, what the sender sends the receivers is the outcome of the sender's cognitive abilities.
jjs
Notes:
In Eco's account of codes, he distinguishes between a primary code and a subcode. In this example, the signal denotes «danger level » which connotes «evacuate the water» but which also connotes because of his expectations based on his expertise also connotes «there must be a flood.»
To avoid confusion, the term, "text/message" is used in C-CS. The allusion to text messaging is helpful because it locates messages in a familiar context of experience rather than placing them in a mechanical one.
A Companion to Cognitive Science also contains an entry on "Cognitive Linguistics" (477ff.). According to David Lee, cognitive linguists use the term "construal" to refer to the cognitive abilities associated with text processing.
----- In "Discourse and Relevance Theory," Diane Blakemore observes that, during the heyday of structuralism, the ser arch for rules and conventions that constitute a "well-formed text" dominated linguistics. She distinguishes this approach from one that views discourse as a communicative behavior and seeks to discover the social "acceptability" of discourse. For her, discourse is situated in a context of communication.
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last revised:
September 4, 2007
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