- Positioned rhetoric as the study of misunderstanding and its remedies
- Believed that improving communication was key to addressing the world's problems
- Created Basic English with C. K. Ogden
- This is a sort of reduced English with 850 words and a simplified rule structure
- Compatible with Standard English
- Was intended for use as a world language (and thereby the basis for a world culture)
- Rejected traditional rhetoric
- Objected to collections of unhelpful rules
- Objected to focus on persuasion (Richards believed persuasion is just one of the aims of rhetoric)
- Posited a new rhetoric
- Traditional assumptions must be challenged
- Words (the smallest units of meaning) must be the basis rather than whole acts of communication (speeches, documents, etc.)
- Rhetoric should hold a central place in the order of knowledge and education because it is involved in all other disciplines
- Meaning comes from words being repeatedly associated with a context
- Word meaning is not inherent (he calls this false believe Proper Meaning Superstition)
- Feedforward is important in establishing meaning, but can also cause different people to have different word meanings
- Semantic triangle is a diagram of how meaning is made
- Symbol (the word that activates the referent)
- Reference (thoughts and associations with referent context)
- Referent (Objects corresponding to symbols)
- Model of communication goes: Source Experience > Source Mind > Environment > Destination Mind > Destination Experience
- Comparison-fields are the different experiences (and thus different references) of people involved in an act of communication
- The closer the comparison-fields the more successful the communication
- Feedforward is the pattern created from past experiences that creates an expectation about future experiences
- It is the hypothesis that awaits further confirmation or destruction from evidence (feedback)
- Functions of discourse
- Speaker:
- Sense
- Feeling
- Tone
- Intention
- Listener
- Indicating
- Characterizing
- Realizing
- Valuing
- Influencing
- Controlling
- Purposing
- Language can be emotive or referential, and in practice is often both
- Eliminating misunderstanding
- Metaphor
- Definition
- Literary context
- Metasemantic markers (specialized quotation marks)
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