Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1. Language – a fundamental dimension of our existence

1.2. The lost paradise of the original linguistic unity. The Babel myth and
subsequent nostalgia
1.3. Language as sound and meaning. The linguistic sign. Ferdi-nand de
Saussure and Louis Hjelmslev
1.4. Language in the process of communication
1.5. Language and writing

1.3. 1.4. Language in the process of communication

Language is obviously the main system available for us, not only for knowing the
world and understanding it, but also for accumulating, storing and communicating
information. Language can thus be understood as the main system we have for
communicating among us. All the other systems of conveying information are actually
based on this essential, fundamental one. Communication by means of language can thus
be understood as a complex process actually consisting of several stages. Any act of
communication basically takes place between two participants: on the one hand we have
the source of the information, the person who has to communicate something, the sender
of the message that contains the information, and on the other hand we need a second
party, the recipient, the addressee of
the message, the beneficiary of the communication act, in other
words the person(s) to whom the information contained in the message is addressed.
Since the sender has to convey a message, and the transmission is to take place on
the basis of a system of signs (a code), the first thing the sender has to do is to encode or
codify his message, in other words to render the contents of the message by means of the
signs of the respective code (the language) .The next stage is obviously represented by
the transmission of the message proper, which can be achieved in several ways
(depending of the type of communication; e.g. written or oral). Once the message reaches
the recipient, the process should unfold in the opposite direction. That is, the message
gets to the recipient in an encoded form so that the recipient has to decode it and grasp its
meaning.1

1
Referring to the way in which communication is achieved, Saussure distinguishes among
psychological, physiological and physical processes: the first category would include the mental association
between the concept and its acoustic image in the brain of the speaker and, conversely, the association
between the acoustic image that was conveyed to the listener and the concept in the latter’s brain.
Physiological processes will include the mechanisms of phonation (articulation of the words) as far as the
speaker is concerned, and audition, respectively, in the case of the listener. The propagation of sound waves
from the speaker’s speech organs to the listener’s auditory system is a physical process. Saussure
schematically represents the process like this, the two participants acting as speaker/listener by turns
(1965:28):
 Remembering Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign and of the act of
communication, we can refine the analysis above and say that the encoding and decoding
processes themselves consist of several stages, respectively. When he wants to convey his
message, the sender has to select the concepts (notions) he wants to transmit. For
instance, if he wants to convey the information that “the door is open” he should select
the appropriate words sending to the concepts of “door”, the quality of “being” and the
idea of “openness”. This would represent the first stage of the encoding of the message,
namely the semantic encoding. Then the respective words should be given a form in
accordance with the rules of grammar. It is obvious that if we say “the door was open”
instead of “the door is open” we do not convey the same idea. The correct choice of the
appropriate tense form pertains to the domain of morphology. If, on the other hand, we
say “door open the is”, the form of the message is clearly ungrammatical since it blatantly
violates the rules of syntax (word order in the given case). Both morphological encoding
and syntactic encoding can be considered as stages of what we can call grammatical
encoding. Once it has an appropriate grammatical form, the message has to be given a
phonetic shape, in other words the ideas we have to convey must be put into sounds. This
last type of encoding is called phonological encoding. Some linguists describe the
translating of concepts into words and the assigning of a phonological shape to those
words respectively as two different types of articulation and they speak about the double
articulation of the language. Thus, according to André Martinet, the first articulation of
language will include the segmenting of the content level by a given language-system and
the association of acoustic images to the concepts thus obtained. The minimal units for
this articulation are the words, having both meaning and a phonetic structure. The next
articulation will imply the segmentation of the acoustic image into contrastive units, the
phonemes. Though devoid of meaning themselves, these units have the essential function
of keeping different words apart. Martinet convincingly argues that languages display
remarkable economy at the level of the second articulation since acoustic images are
decomposed into a limited number of significant units, the system making use of the
latter’s extraordinary combinatorial possibilities instead of associating each acoustic
image to a different unit.2
After the transmission of the message, the recipient has to decode it, performing the
same operations, but in the opposite order. He first has to decode the message

2
Martinet. 1970:13-15. These notions will be subsequently explained in further detail.
phonologically, then to decode it grammatically and then semantically, reaching thus the
actual informational content.
Summarizing, we can say that the communication process takes place according
to the following pattern:

Recipient of the
Sender of the
message
message

→
1. Semantic encoding of the 1. Phonological decoding of the
message message
2.Grammatical encoding of the 2.Grammatical decoding of the
message message
3. Phonological encoding of the 3.Semantic decoding of the
message message

→
Transmission of the message