ABSTRACT
A common and perhaps fairly reasonable assumption in a great deal of work on language and communication is that the purpose of language is to communicate ideas between people, and that the general effect of such activity is to arrive at a form of mutual comprehension. This view of language is also based more generally on a model of cooperative behaviour that exists outside relations of power, inequality and antipathy. This chapter explores underpin notions of language and understanding as very particular ways of thinking about language and communication that derived from the humanist focus on talking heads. It then explores in more depth through an analysis of metrolingual data how contexts of apparent misunderstanding may shed more light on processes or communication than do assumptions about understanding. For Saussure, by contrast, this was in fact how language really operated, a general characteristic of the linguistic system that operates independently of the will of the speakers.
