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Certainly the communication going on between sender and receiver of
flowers is different than that between WWW author and browser. One
important difference is that flowers, like spoken ORAL LANGUAGE
happen in the moment between two people who know one another. The WWW,
like libraries, contain WRITTEN LANGUAGE which communicates
between readers and writers separated by arbitrary amounts of time and
space . Differences between ORALITY AND LITERACY are some of the
most important to understand if FOA is to become a part of traditional
linguistics [REF803] .
An important
dimension of the difference between oral and literate communication
concerns the ATTENTIONAL FOCUS of sender and receiver, and just
how and when it is given. Before any symbols can be exchanged, the
sender must apply attention to the construction of a message, and before
a receiver can understand it they must be ``listening.'' Communication
is a demand for attention, by the author and of a reader.
Grice has
defined what he calls the COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE to make explicit
the co-dependence of sender and receiver's communicative tasks [Grice57] [Grice75] . GRICE'S MAXIMS (see
Table (FOAref) ) help to codify ways in which this tacit
contract can lead to meaningful communication, or be broken.
While these were drafted with oral communication in mind, they remain
(with Struck and White's Elements of Style [Strunk79] ) excellent advice to authors
as to how to write clearly.
A second important difference between oral
and written communication is its intimacy. Spoken language is imagined
to be a quiet act, between a particular speaker and listener. The FOA
communicative acts with which we are most concerned involve much more
public displays of language. Saracevic has talked about this as
communicating PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE , a concept ``as pertinent now as
when it was written'' [Saracevic75] (in 1975) [SparckJones97] .
The author had an
intended audience in mind when they wrote, but once written and
published, the artifact is (like graffitti!) there for all to read.
Search engines connect huge sets of authors with vast audiences of
readers. The language used in queries and indexing vocabularies is bound
to be loud and broad.
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Speech acts