Linguistic form in communication

Linguistic form serves a variety of functions, but one of its primary functions is to enable communication. 

Communication involves a communicator and a communicatee. Verbal communication is one of the kinds of communication (others occlude gestural, visual, etc) and involves languages.

The two primary media for verbal communication are speech and writing; for clarity here (and to avoid terms like ‘communicatee’).

A speaker produces an utterance and this communicates to the hearer. Communication is successful when the hearer attributed a set of thought to the speaker as her informative intention when the hearer recognizes what the speaker intends to tell him.

These thoughts can have any content whatsoever. Thus for example if the speaker tells the hearer a story, among the thoughts which she communicates are thoughts about the narrated work and its characters and what happens, but she also communicates thoughts about the structure and functions of the story itself – communicating that the story is about to reach its peak, or that there is a shift form one episode to another for example.

Communication can be vague. For example the speaker may say ‘my love is a red rose’. The hearer may use this as evidence that speaker intends to tell him that the loved person is beautiful, precious, will not live forever, and so on: the analogy with a flower means that various characteristics of the flower will be carried over to the loved person.

Successful communication involves the hearer reconstructing some of these thoughts and attributing them to the speaker: the communication is equally with different sets of thoughts.

There is no single tightly constrained set of the meanings intended, just some of meanings which can be inferred from the utterance.
Linguistic form in communication