SOCIOL 41 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Arthur Schuster, Lemonade, Functionalism Versus Intentionalism
Document Summary
The degree to which the message inferred by the listener matches the message intended by the speaker. The speaker wants his/her messages to create a mental image/feeling that he/she intends to convey. The primary influence on accuracy is codability, which is the extent of interpersonal agreement about what something is called. The basic unit of communication is the message, which has its origin in the desire of the speaker to communicate. There is not a fixed, one-to-one relation between words and intended effects. The speaker can use a variety of messages or utterances to achieve his/her intended effect. According to speech act theory, utterances both state something and do something. All eight of the utterances (lemonade example) perform an action, each has the force of a request. The significance of an utterance is not its literal meaning, but what it contributes to the word of the interaction in which it occurs.
