ABSTRACT
There are many ways in which humans communicate: personal interaction, telephoning, letters, newspaper articles, books, broadcasting, advertisement campaigns, non-verbal gestures, showing off the new car and extravagant clothes. Practically everything people do, even when they are on their own, could be construed as actual or potential communication. The trouble with such a wide definition is that it encompasses all human behaviour. In this chapter I shall be concerned with verbal communication in which words are used in face-to-face situations. There is an account of non-verbal communication and the role of language in defining social status in another volume in this series (Gahagan, 1984).
