69249454-chandler-semiotics

TEXTUAL INTERACTIONS 181
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FIGURE 6.3
addresser
Source: Jakobson 1960, 353
context
message
contact
code
Jakobson’s model of communication
addressee
code fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and
addressee (or in other words, to the encoder and decoder of
the message); and finally, a contact, a physical channel and
psychological connection between the addresser and the
addressee, enabling both of them to stay in communication.
(Jakobson 1960, 353)
Jakobson established the principle already noted that we cannot make
sense of signs without relating them to relevant codes. In response
to Bertrand Russell’s point that ‘no one can understand the word
“cheese” unless he has a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheese’,
Jakobson replied that (likewise) ‘the meaning of the word “cheese”
cannot be inferred from a nonlinguistic acquaintance with cheddar
or with camembert without the assistance of the verbal code’
(Jakobson 1958, 261). He noted that ‘the efficiency of a speech event
demands the use of a common code by its participants’ (Jakobson
1956, 72). However, his model of linguistic codes was not monolithic.
He argued that whereas Saussure had posited ‘the delusive
fiction’ of ‘the uniformity of the code’, ‘as a rule, everyone belongs
simultaneously to several speech communities of different radius and
capacity; any overall code is multiform and comprises a hierarchy
of diverse subcodes freely chosen by the speaker with regard to the
variable functions of the message, to its addressee, and to the relation
between the interlocutors’ (Jakobson 1971d, 719). It should
already be apparent that although Jakobson was greatly influenced
by Peirce, he did not owe his emphasis on encoding and decoding