Human communication

This field is related both to philosophy (works of later Husserl, e.g. Ideas II, are devoted to the intersubjective realm of ideas developed in interaction with the world and within the community) and to linguistics (language is the primary to tool for creation and maintenance of meanings). Each communication act is both personal (it necessarily involves at least two persons: the one that provides information, and the one that consumes it) and intersubjective (it is successful, if both sides appreciate similarities and differences between them). The notion of information transmission is significantly reduced without the second person, which has an access to conveyed information and wants to understand it. Carefully planned communication should take into account such an undetermined potential reader and “empathisize” into the way information can be understood by him/her.

My interests in communication studies focus on practices of social communities for creation and maintenance of meanings in the intersubjective space of ideas. In particular, this concerns global communication technologies, which still do not destroy the human factor: information placed on the web should be read by a person interested in it. Global communication technologies alleviate constraints of space: members of a community should not be necessarily located in the same place. However, the notion of a community to establish communication between its members is primary for means through which communication is achieved. On the other hand, such a mean as Internet changes conditions in which persons can access information and understand it. New tools based in Internet include searching for information using structured knowledge sources (for example, natural language access to XML-encoded data) and presenting information (for example, information presentation tailored to target language of the user and his/her level of expertise).

My papers on the topic

Meaning and context in a Husserl-inspired model A draft submitted to the special issue “Context in context” (http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/~bruce/cinc/) The paper draws an opposition between two paradigms in treatment of lexical meanings. The first paradigm models lexical meanings by means of definitions of categories of some sort. According to the second paradigm, lexical meanings are treated as resources for communication. The paper advocates the second paradigm and investigates the relationship between lexical items and context they are used in. A meaning description mechanism proposed in this paper relates meaning-endowing acts (in the tradition of Husserl and Jakobson) and the systemic-functional linguistics (Halliday). This mechanism is discussed in application to tasks of multilingual generation, in which the lexicogrammar serves as an intermediate layer for realization of concepts of the domain model in utterances of different natural languages.

The semiotics of “Choose Multiline from the Draw toolbar” A paper published at the 5th International Congress on Terminology and Knowledge Engineering, Innsbruck (Austria), 24-28 August 1999, pp. 594-602: The paper advocates three theses: (a) the nature of terms is founded in the nature of language as the intersubjective medium for transmission of the social stock of knowledge; (b) relations between notions of a problem domain and their expression in text depend not only on the propositional (ideational) content of words, but also on the interpersonal and textual functions of language; (c) these methodological considerations are helpful for applications in computational linguistics, in particular, in AGILE, our project for multilingual generation of software manuals.

Look at the Map of the site for the relationship between my interests. My complete list of publications is also available.

Some useful links