Cartographic Communication in the Perspective of the Linguistic Pragmatics

When writing about pragmatics, theoreticians of cartography usually refer to the classic "Foundations of the theory of signs" by Morris (1938). Let me remind that Morris has divided semiotics into three basic branches: semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Originally semantics was defined as the study of the sign meanings (or of relationships between linguistic forms and entities in the world), syntactics as the study of relations between signs (linguistic forms) while pragmatics as the study of "relations of signs to their interpreters" (or relationship between linguistic forms and their users). Although pragmatics received its name quite a long time ago, it remained a largely unexplored area until relatively recently. For long years the focus of semiotic research was directed towards semantics. Considerable attention was also directed towards syntax, but for long time very little has happened in the field of pragmatics. The same situation of concentration of most of all the research efforts on semantics and syntax was characteristic not only for the study of natural languages but also other communication systems including cartographic communication. Research in the filed cartographic semiotics is to our day dominated by the semantic and syntactic traditions. Recent overviews of the field (e.g. MacEachren 1995) seem to prove the persistence of this legacy.