communicationthat

Communicationthat is a term used in some discussions of discourse and pragmatics to refer to a class of communicative acts that foreground explicit propositional content via that-clauses. The term is not widely standardized and appears in different forms across the literature, sometimes described as a practical pattern in everyday speech and sometimes as a theoretical lens for analyzing how propositions are introduced and anchored in discourse.

In one usage, communicationthat describes how speakers employ that-clauses to assert, report, or request with clear propositional content, thereby guiding interpretation and memory. In another usage, it refers to the broader function of any utterance whose core content is a proposition introduced by a complementizer that, and how such structure influences attention and response.

Linguists examine how the presence or absence of that affects processing, ambiguity, and focus. The choice to use a that-clause interacts with information structure, such as given/new information, emphasis, and discourse coherence. Cross-linguistic variation further complicates analysis, as not all languages mark propositional content the same way.

Researchers study communicationthat through corpus analysis, experiments on processing, and discourse analysis, often comparing sentences with and without that to assess effects on comprehension and decision making.

Some critics note that the term is not widely recognized and may obscure established distinctions between complement clauses and illocutionary force. When it is used, it should be defined clearly in context.

See also: that-clause, complementizer, information structure.