SOME THOUGHT ON INTELLIGIBILITY
I feel interested in exploring Speech and language by Hymes (1996) especially his language dimensions known as diversity, medium, structure and function. Each dimension has its own vantages to the researchers. Diversity of language has something to do with the origin as well as development process of that language while medium relates to utterance and written form of a language. Grammatical points play a key role in the sustainable development of a language system where language cannot be analyzed with context-free. Among them, language diversity catches much of my attention during this reading. The diversity of a language does not depend on the present or seeable things but relates to the origin or the past one. And I highly agree with Hyme(1996) that the core issue of language diversity is communication, especially intelligibility. Communication will be broken down if mutual understanding cannot be reached. In other words, without intelligibility, communication act is not successful at any places.
I highly agree with Mc Kay (2002) Intelligibility, according to is a “complex issue” which involving tripartite matters of “intelligibility (recognizing an expression), comprehensibility (knowing the meaning of the expression), and interpretability (knowing what the expression signifies in a particular socio-cultural context)”. For example, if a Vietnamese learner can realize that the term “sing” is an English word not a Vietnamese word, s/he is intelligible. Moreover, if s/he is good at vocabulary is enough to know the meaning of this term, it is s/he who is comprehensible. And above all, if s/he understands the utterance “You sing beautifully.” is a comment on her/is nice, gentle, sweet voice, it means s/he is able to interpret his foreign language.
In my concern, intelligibility is also the mutual understanding between and among participants in the communication process. For instance, a young guy who wants to show his heart to the girl friend is too shy to say “I love you”, he just gives her a rose and says “I like you”. His girl friend, however can of interlocutors, rather than focus on the features of an idealized native speaker variety”. Thus, intelligibility is interactional or mutual understanding between speaker and his/er audience or the participants should interact to reach to mutual understanding in their communication process.
In short, from my own thinking, intelligibility plays a key role in communication act in specific, in the diversity of a language in general.
I feel interested in exploring Speech and language by Hymes (1996) especially his language dimensions known as diversity, medium, structure and function. Each dimension has its own vantages to the researchers. Diversity of language has something to do with the origin as well as development process of that language while medium relates to utterance and written form of a language. Grammatical points play a key role in the sustainable development of a language system where language cannot be analyzed with context-free. Among them, language diversity catches much of my attention during this reading. The diversity of a language does not depend on the present or seeable things but relates to the origin or the past one. And I highly agree with Hyme(1996) that the core issue of language diversity is communication, especially intelligibility. Communication will be broken down if mutual understanding cannot be reached. In other words, without intelligibility, communication act is not successful at any places.
I highly agree with Mc Kay (2002) Intelligibility, according to is a “complex issue” which involving tripartite matters of “intelligibility (recognizing an expression), comprehensibility (knowing the meaning of the expression), and interpretability (knowing what the expression signifies in a particular socio-cultural context)”. For example, if a Vietnamese learner can realize that the term “sing” is an English word not a Vietnamese word, s/he is intelligible. Moreover, if s/he is good at vocabulary is enough to know the meaning of this term, it is s/he who is comprehensible. And above all, if s/he understands the utterance “You sing beautifully.” is a comment on her/is nice, gentle, sweet voice, it means s/he is able to interpret his foreign language.
In my concern, intelligibility is also the mutual understanding between and among participants in the communication process. For instance, a young guy who wants to show his heart to the girl friend is too shy to say “I love you”, he just gives her a rose and says “I like you”. His girl friend, however can of interlocutors, rather than focus on the features of an idealized native speaker variety”. Thus, intelligibility is interactional or mutual understanding between speaker and his/er audience or the participants should interact to reach to mutual understanding in their communication process.
In short, from my own thinking, intelligibility plays a key role in communication act in specific, in the diversity of a language in general.
WORK CITED
Hymes, D. (1996). Speech and language: on the origins and foundations of inequality among speakers. In Ethnography, Linguistics and Narrative Inequality: Toward an Understanding of Voice (pp. 25 – 62). London: Taylor and Francis.
Mc kay. (2002). Standards for English as an International Language. Teaching English as International Language. Oxford University Press
Smith, L., & Nelson, C. (1985). International intelligibility of English: Directions and resources. World Englishes, 4, 333–342.
