Cluster Equivalence, General Language, Language for Specific Purposes
387sections above, in actual discourse interactants tend to use verbal shorthands,
approximations, or convey (shared) meanings that go without saying. I
refer to this phenomenon as semantic approximation (Lewandowska-
Tomaszczyk 2012). The semantic approximation does not take place
exclusively between a Source Language and a corresponding Target
Language version. Due to the character of communication referred to
above, approximation is also a typical way of verbal interaction in the
same language code. Such communication is approximate partly due to the
indeterminate nature of most of linguistic meanings, but also due to
particular speakers’ preferences, necessities or needs, according to which
language users accommodate the meanings to one another in terms of a
multi-directional accommodation. Meaning approximation then is both an
outcome of (conscious or not) interactants’ strategies and the pressure of a
particular language systemic constraints.
Cluster of similar meanings
It is proposed in the present work that communication between a sender
(Speaker) and a receiver (Addressee), either in the case of the same
language or a translation, does not engage the use of identical single
meanings but is based rather on semantic clusters, or mental areas,
structured around similar content. Similarity (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
(2012: 1) is determined by a multi-peaked radial category space with a
number of tertia comparationis, or points of reference, which serve as
similarity conditioning parameters, considered, after Gärdenfors (2000), in
terms of topological spaces as a mapping of physical distance on a cline
between the Speaker’s and Addressee’s conceptual spaces, containing
objects, relations and events.
Degrees of meaning sharing in communication
Depending on the type, genre and style of discourse, communication can
assume one of the following types (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2016):
(i) loose communication, Gestalt in nature, in which interacting parties
communicate using less granular, more schematic senses
(ii) parallel aligned communication, in which interactants aim at more
exact meaning correspondences and investigate discourse
possibilities to fully align them
(iii) particularized also known as explanatory communication, which
reaches to a sub-categorial level of meanings and provides a more