pragmatic linguistics ...

Somewhere between semiotics/sociology and Richard Dawkins like meme/replication theories there lies an area of progmatic linguistics which contains elements of both the evolutionary stance and phenomenology.

This is not an area of focus of my studies, but i do like the possibilities of the field.

Here is an article/interview by one of the big names of the field ... Dan Sperber ...
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sperber05/sperber05_index.html

Here is a good quote from the article ...

"When we speak we want our audience to understand something that's in our mind. And we have no way to fully encode it, and trying at least to encode as much as possible would be absurdly cumbersome. Linguistic utterances, however rich and complex they may be, cannot fully encode our thoughts. But they can give strong richly structured piece of evidence of what our thoughts are.

From the point of view of the audience, a speaker is providing rich pieces of evidence, which we interpret in a context of shared background knowledge, drawing on the common cultural, on the local situation, on the ongoing conversation, and so on. You construct a complex representation helped by all these different factors. You to end up with something which will have been strongly guided, sometimes guided in an exquisitely detailed manner, by the communication, by the words used by the speaker, but which end up being a thought of your own, relevant to you, a recognition, to begin with, of what the speaker meant, from which you extract what is relevant to you."

And another good general observation ... that when we talk about communication we are talking about a vast array of subject up and down the animal kingdom, and many different spheres of human life. We must narrow the subject a lot if we care to make headway into any of its sub-branches.