Cartographic Communication in the Perspective of the Linguistic Pragmatics Paper prepared for the 20th International Cartographic Conference, Beijing 2001

摘要

When writing about pragmatics, theoreticians of cartography usually refer to the classic "Foundations of the theory of signs" by Morris (1938). Let me remind that Morris has divided semiotics into three basic branches: semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Originally semantics was defined as the study of the sign meanings (or of relationships between linguistic forms and entities in the world), syntactics as the study of relations between signs (linguistic forms) while pragmatics as the study of "relations of signs to their interpreters" (or relationship between linguistic forms and their users). Although pragmatics received its name quite a long time ago, it remained a largely unexplored area until relatively recently. For long years the focus of semiotic research was directed towards semantics. Considerable attention was also directed towards syntax, but for long time very little has happened in the field of pragmatics. The same situation of concentration of most of all the research efforts on semantics and syntax was characteristic not only for the study of natural languages but also other communication systems including cartographic communication. Research in the filed cartographic semiotics is to our day dominated by the semantic and syntactic traditions. Recentoverviews of the field (e.g. MacEachren 1995) seem to prove the persistence of this legacy''. One could add that not only the study of the pragmatic issues was long neglected but even the definition of the field was unclear for years. In fact it remains contested until our days. However, there is much more overall consensus today on what pragmatics should be about than let say about 20 years ago. Thus, for example Verschueren (1999) defines pragmatics as "the study of language use" or in a more detailed way as "the study of linguistic phenomena from the point of view of their usage, properties and process". Another definition which I particularly value is one proposed by Yule (1996), who defines pragmatics as "the study of contextual meaning". I will allude to this definition in one of the following sections of this papers. Other alternative definitions of pragmatics proposed by Yule include: "the study of speaker meaning" and "study of how more gets communicated than is said". The main thesis of this paper is that the perspective of linguistic pragmatic can and should be adapted to the cartographic theory. As I will try to prove below, pragmatic theories and tools are not traditional view on map communication as one way process. Direct influence of GIS on the process of map making makes the interactive nature of cartographic communication obvious. Widespread recognition of this fact makes pragmatic approach particularly need in the field of cartographic theory.