ABSTRACT
The basis of modern media effectiveness is a language within a language one that communicates to each of us at a level beneath our conscious awareness, one that reaches into the uncharted mechanism of the human unconscious. This is a language based upon the human ability to subliminally or subconsciously or unconsciously perceive information. This is a language that today has actually produced the profit base for North American mass communication media. The building blocks of verbal communication are words, combined to create texts, and understood within a context of understanding known as language. This chapter deals with Peter Farb's ideas about words and language, Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of intertextuality and the way texts are related to one another, and the codes that shape our conversations. It explains the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which suggests that language shapes our perceptions and Basil Bernstein's work on restricted and elaborated codes and their impact on people's lives.
