ABSTRACT
In a broader sense the role of metacommunication tells a reader how the communicator sees or wishes to see his/her relationship to others. Bateson insists that all forms of communication contain positional information of this sort; and feedback, he insists, serves primarily a positional function. This chapter shows how significantly one's everday reality is defined and constrained by the information feedback he/she receives through a variety of metacommunicative codes. From his therapeutic studies, Paul Watzlawick has identified two interactional codes, which he calls symmetrical and complementary and which he believes are nearly universally present in our culture. Because a speech system is closely tied to people' social relationships and through them to social structures, it appears that different social structures may bring about different systems of speech, what Bernstein calls different linguistic codes. Bernstein distinguished two basic linguistic codes which he called elaborated and restricted.
