Analysis of Two Models of Communication

Communication is pervasive in human beings in daily life. Every day, people communicate information, thoughts, ideas and attitudes with each other. Although all of us have been communicating with others since our infancy, the process of transmitting information from an individual to another is very complex. So it is worth considering the question of how communication is achieved, or whether there can be some theories of communication.

So far, a lot of scholars who are aware of the issue have proposed different models of communication from different perspectives. In general, there are two major models of communication making great impact on the communication studies: the code model and the inferential model (Wong, 1993). “According to the code model, communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages. According to the inferential model, communication is achieved by the communicator providing evidence of her intentions and the audience inferring her intentions from the evidence”(Sperber and Wilson, 1995:24). Here, by the way of contrasting and comparing, this essay will explore the main difference and similarity between the code model and the inferential model. Then it can be seen that both of them are necessary to reflect complicated communication phenomena of human beings.

The main difference between the two models of communication can be analyzed from their specific processes.

The code model treats communication as involving a set of signals, a set of messages, and a code which relates the two. Here is a quotation from Wilson which expresses something like this view:

“In verbal communication, the signals are utterances which can be phonetically represented, the messages are the thoughts that speakers intend to convey and that can be conceptually represented, and the code is the grammar of a language which pairs phonetic representations with thoughts” (1998: 28).

On this approach, utterances and their meanings may be related in arbitrary ways, and understanding is a matter of unintelligent, mechanical decoding. A communicator who wants to convey a certain message transmits the corresponding signal, which is received and decoded by the audience using an identical copy of the code (Wilson, 1998). So, successful code-based communication results in a duplication of messages: the message encoded is identical to the message received.

However, in the case of the inferential model, the situation is quite different. In verbal communication, utterances are not signals but pieces of evidence about the speaker’s meaning, and comprehension is achieved when the hearer infers this meaning from the evidence provided. “An utterance is, of course, a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding. However, the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding is just one of the inputs to a comprehension process which yields an interpretation of the speaker's meaning. Another major input is the hearer’s contextual assumption which may enrich the linguistically coded meaning in a variety of ways”(Wilson and Sperber, 2002: 159). In other words, decoding the linguistic sentence meaning is seen as just one part of the process of comprehension—a process that relies on both this linguistic meaning and on the context in order to identify the speaker’s meaning. Consequently, the inferential communication, unlike the coded communication, is at least partly an intelligent activity, involving an exercise of reason and the imagination.

Suppose that Tim has a train to catch at midday, and it takes him half an hour to get to the station. Then Kate's utterance in (4) may conversationally implicate (5):

(4) It’s nearly half past eleven.

(5) Tim should hurry up and get ready to leave.

In the situation, Tim is justified in inferring that Kate wants him to get ready to leave, because otherwise her utterance would not be relevant to Tim. And it is best handled inferentially, because the connection between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicated is not arbitrary: anyone with access to the appropriate contextual assumptions and general pragmatic principles can work it out.

Apart from the main difference, the main similarity shared by the code model and the inferential model can be analyzed as follows.

Generally speaking, these two models are each adequate by itself to account for some cases of non-verbal communication. For the code model, Leach (1976:10) claims that “all the various non-verbal dimensions of culture, such as style in clothing, village lay-out, architecture, furniture, food, cooking, music, physical gestures, postural attitudes and so on are organized in patterned sets so as to incorporate coded communication in a manner analogous to the sounds and words and sentences of a natural language. Therefore, it is just as meaningful to talk about the grammatical rules which govern the wearing of clothes as it is to talk about the grammatical rules which govern speech utterances.”

Take communication involving traffic lights for example. As is known, traffic lights which are used to control the flow of traffic convey their signals through color. If you ask anyone on the street what “stop” and “go” are on a traffic light, they will probably say “red” and “green” without any thinking. In other words, “red” means “stop” and “green” means “go”. Drivers knowing such kind of traditional traffic rules will be prevented from going continuously down a road and all sides of an intersection can be stopped at once to allow pedestrians to pass safely. So the communication involving traffic lights is adequately described in terms of the code model.

In terms of the inferential model, Searle(1969) states that some very simple sorts of illocutionary acts can indeed be performed apart from any use of conventional devices at all, simply by getting the audience to recognize certain of one’s intentions in behaving in a certain way. Perhaps the clearest cases of inferential communication are non-verbal, involving pointing, mimicry, and other types of ostension or display (Wilson, 1998). When a person takes out a key and walks towards a door, the plausible inference can be made that he intends to unlock the door. When a mother points to a closed window beside her, then the daughter can infer that her mother intends her to open it.

Suppose a student is drawing in his mathematics class and suddenly he finds that his teacher is standing beside him and looking at him seriously. Here the teacher’s behavior is not coded. There is no rule or convention which says that what the teacher does mean that he hopes the student can give up drawing and then returns his mind to mathematics. But in such special circumstance, it is strong direct evidence of the teacher’s intention to inform the student that he has noticed what he is doing and hopes the student can return his mind to the class. Because the teacher’s behavior enables the student to recognize his intention, the teacher successfully communicates with him, and does so without the use of any language or code.

All in all, the colorful and complicated communication phenomena necessitate the existence of the code model and the inferential model. Based on the main difference and similarity analyzed above, the two models can be independent of each other in some cases of non-verbal communication, but can combine in verbal communication which involves both encoding-decoding and inferential processes. Since communication is not merely a matter of a speaker encoding a thought in language and sending it as spoken message through space, or as written message on paper, to a receiver who decodes it, the receiver must not only decode what is received but also draw an inference as to what is conveyed beyond what is stated. Thus neither the code model nor the inferential model should be ignored. Actually both of the two models are important and can make great contributions to the study of communication. And having a good command of the two models will benefit mutual comprehension between communicators.

References

Leach, E. (1976). Culture and Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance, Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford.

Wilson, D. (1998). Linguistic Structure and Inferential Communication. In B. Caron (ed.), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Linguists (Paris, 20-25 July 1997). Oxford: Elsevier Sciences.

Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2002). Relevance Theory. In G. Ward and L. Horn (eds), Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford : Blackwell.

Wong, C. (1993). Review of Communication Model. Journal of English study. 6, 18-24.