Читать книгу Applying Phonetics - Murray J. Munro - Страница 17

Several decades ago, we would have stopped with the four‐way classification of communication types that we have developed so far. But contemporary technology is changing our understanding of the nature of communication. Suppose that an animated character in a movie or a video game displays facial expressions and gestures indicating anger or a threat of violence. Of course, the character itself has no feelings or desire to communicate, but the animator has created a representation of non‐linguistic, non‐vocal communication that is readily grasped by viewers. In a similar vein, computers do not volitionally use speech with an intent to communicate (at least, not at present!). However, we have no problem calling artificially‐created utterances speech, even though they can be generated entirely without a vocal tract. Such utterances have a communicative function, whether the purpose is to give voice to a human user who cannot speak, to “read” a text aloud to a blind person, or to convey an account balance to a bank customer over the phone. We can capture these recent developments by adding a third category to the vertical dimension of the grid to cover synthetic communication types, both non‐linguistic and linguistic.

To sum things up so far, communication refers to the transmission of a message from one organism or entity to another; language is a means of communication that uses arbitrary symbols; and speech consists of communicative sounds produced in the vocal tract or synthetically.