One of the six factors that make up any speech event or communication process.
The addressee is the being to whom the message is addressed or transmitted;
The addresser is the agent or mechanism that sends or transmits the message.
If I shout to warn you of a danger, you are the addressee and I am the addresser.
Apart from the addressee and addresser, the other factors in every communication process are context, message, contact, and code. Each of these factors corresponds to one function.
As far as communication is directed to the addressee, its function is conative; insofar as it is addressed to the addressee, the communicative function is expressive.
If I say “Beauty, wait for me in the square tonight“, the addressee is the focus of this communication and therefore its function is conative.
If I say “My heart is broken because it did not come“, I, in the role of the addresser, am in focus, therefore the function of the message is expressive.
There are many synonyms for the addressee/addresser pair.
For example:
Sender / recipient;
communicator / receiver;
transmitter / receiver;
source / goal;
encoding / decoding;
speaker / listener;
writer (author) / reader
Charles Peirce sometimes uses the terms expressive and interpreter to denote sender and receiver.
When the participants in the message are marked as author and reader, this reduces the active and indivisible role that senders and recipients play in constructing meaning.
The meaning of the text is not a complete product for consumption – it is a finely complex process that is played out again and again for readers. In the very act of reading, readers recreate the meaning of a text created by someone else. Hence the need to distinguish between the author and the writer of the text.
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