new vocab

Reading these articles I'm see words I've often seen but never made the effort to define, so here goes.

Semiotic

"The distinctive characteristic of human learning is that it is a process of making meaning—a semiotic process; and the prototypical form of human semiotic is language . . . . Whatever the culture they are born into, in learning to speak children are learning a semiotic that has been evolving for at least a thousand generations. … Language is not a domain of knowing; language is the essential condition of knowing, the process by which experience becomes knowledge." (Halliday, 1999: 93–94)

heuristic - (from the free dictionary)

1. Of or relating to a usually speculative formulation serving as a guide in the investigation or solution of a problem: "The historian discovers the past by the judicious use of such a heuristic device as the 'ideal type'" (Karl J. Weintraub).

2. Of or constituting an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations made by the student.

3. Computer Science Relating to or using a problem-solving technique in which the most appropriate solution of several found by alternative methods is selected at successive stages of a program for use in the next step of the program.

phatic - (from Wikipedia)

In linguistics, a phatic expression is one whose only function is to perform a social task, as opposed to conveying information.^[1] The term was coined by anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski in the early 1900s.

For example, "you're welcome" is not intended to convey the message that the hearer is welcome; it is a phatic response to being thanked, which in turn is a phatic whose function is to be polite in response to a gift.

Similarly, in the English language, the question "how are you?" is usually an automatic component of a social encounter. Although there are times when "how are you?" is asked in a sincere, concerned manner and does in fact anticipate a detailed response regarding the respondent's present state, this needs to be pragmatically inferred from context and intonation.

As an example of the former: a simple, basic exchange, shared by many that see each other every day at work, but must fulfill that social obligation each morning, or at first contact:

Speaker one: "What's up?"

Speaker two: "Hey, man, how's it going?"

And each just walks on.

Neither expects an answer to his/her question. Much like a shared nod, it's an indication that each has recognized the other's existence and has therefore performed sufficiently that particular social duty.

The utterance of a phatic expression is a kind of speech act.

In speech communication the term means "small talk" (conversation for its own sake) and has also been called "grooming talking".^[2]

In Roman Jakobson's work, 'Phatic' communication is that which concerns the channel of communication, for instance when one says "I can't hear you, you're breaking up" in the middle of a cell phone conversation. This usage appears in the context of online communities and more specifically on micro-blogging (see for instance ^[3][4]).

deictic - (from Wikipedia)

In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words which have a fixed semantic meaning, but have a denotational meaning that constantly changes depending on time and/or place, are deictic. A word or phrase whose meaning requires this contextual information — for example, English pronouns — is said to be deictic.

Person (pronouns), place (here, this) and time (now)