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Who would have known that these are the words my machine wanted to speak?
(Douglas Coupland Microserfs 88)
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Goal, Background, and Motivation
More than 25 years ago, the world of computers was opened up to individuals.1 Since then, a shift has taken place: before the "personal" computer revolution, computers were huge and difficult-to-use machines which only large institutions could afford. The users of those machines were mostly programmers who dealt with complex mathematical problems, mainly for military, scientific, and, later, economic purposes. Today, computers have made their way into the homes of individuals and offices of small companies. Instead of programming their own software, off-the-shelf software products are bought for a variety of purposes, be it an adventure game or a psychological therapy program. At the same time, computers are no longer regarded as "bare" machines by their users; rather, they are regarded as if they have a personality.2 This has led some Human-Computer Interface researchers to the assumption that computer users apply their knowledge of human-human communication to communication with computers (Brennan 394; Suchman 11-15 and 180; Turkle Life on the Screen 35).3
If this assumption is true it should be expected that human-computer interaction shows features of human communication which can be examined in linguistic terms. The search for these features is the first goal of this paper, seeking an answer to the question in how far human-computer interaction can be compared to human communication.
Language and language use can be examined in several ways: apart from paralinguistic language, humans produce sounds, words, phrases, and messages. While it is possible to analyze the syntax and the semantics of computer input and output, the focus of this investigation is concerned with human-computer interaction in terms of pragmatic features.
Pragmatics is the "wastebasket" of linguistics as Yule calls it (Yule 6; see also Leech 1). According to him, linguists have, whenever they encountered features of language which could not be formalized and did not fit into other fields of linguistics, put these "anomalies" into the pragmatics basket. As a result, there are different definitions of what pragmatics is and what it is concerned with. Similar to semantics, pragmatics deals with meaning, but in contrast to semantics, pragmatics is not concerned with the meaning of words or phrases alone but with their meaning in use. Applied to human-computer interaction, what kind of "utterances" exist and how their meaning is derived by the interaction participants will be examined.
Since no empirical data will be gathered, theories from the field of pragmatics will be applied to current interfaces, in particular Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOS which are the two most popular operating systems and user interfaces.4 As a consequence, it will be possible to examine if these interfaces support users in the transfer of their knowledge of human communication to human-computer interaction.5 This is the second goal of this paper.
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Next: Overview of the Structure Up: Introduction Previous: Introduction
Tom Alby
2000-05-30
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