Paradigmatic Analysis - Jakobson and Ritchie

Jakobson and Ritchie

Roman Jakobson introduced a theory to explain the function of spoken language in human communication. This model has two levels of description:

• the various component elements forming language, and
• what humans do with the language when they use it.

In the first place, every language has a vocabulary and a syntax. Its elements are words with fixed denotative meanings. Out of these one can construct, according to the rules of the syntax, composite symbols with resultant new meanings. Secondly, in a language, some words are equivalent to whole combinations of other words, so that most meanings can be expressed in several different ways. Studies of human perception show that to some extent, what people perceive depends on what they expect to perceive. L. David Ritchie proposes that communication creates relationships between what is perceived or known by one person and what is perceived or known by others; the form of the communication will be determined in part by whether there are pre-existing relationships between the communicator and the audience. The receiver and originator of a message must work from some common understanding of what sorts of patterns are used to communicate and how these patterns are related to other events. Communication has to do with community both in the sense that it relies on having something in common in the first place and in the sense that it can influence what the communicants subsequently have in common.