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The Psychology of Verbal Communication
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ABSTRACT
Communication occurs when signals carry information-bearing messages
between a source (or sender) and a destination (or receiver). Although all
species communicate, human communication is notable for its precision
and flexibility, a consequence of the uniquely human ability to use
language. Language endows human communication system with the
properties of semanticity, generativity, and displacement, allowing people
to formulate an unlimited number of meaningful novel messages that are
not tied to the immediate present. At a fundamental level verbal
messages convey meanings the speaker has encoded into the words of an
utterance, but a listener who has understood the utterance has gone
beyond the literal meaning of the words and grasped the particular sense
in which the speaker intended them to be understood. In order to do so,
communicators must make their coparticipants' perspectives part of the
process of formulating and interpreting messages. Thus any
communicative exchange is implicitly a joint or collective activity in
which meaning emerges from the participants' collaborative efforts.