Meanings Are in People

Lecture 2

Verbal Messages

UNIT CONTENTS

v Principles of Verbal Messages

v Disconfirmation and Confirmation

v Using Verbal Messages Effectively

You can use language to communicate your thoughts and feelings and to create meaningful and lasting relationships. But you can just as easily use language to distort and prevent meaningful dialogue and destroy relationships. In this unit you'll learn

■how language works

■how you can use it to communicate effectively and at the same time avoid

the pitfalls that create misunderstanding

As you communicate, you use two major signal systems – the verbal and the nonverbal. This unit focuses on the verbal system (the next will examine the nonverbal system) and discusses the principles of verbal messages, the concepts of confirmation and disconfirmation, and the ways you can use verbal messages most effectively.

PRINCIPLES OF VERBAL MESSAGES

As you grew up, you learned the language spoken by the people around you. You learned its phonological, or sound, system; its semantic system, or system of word meanings; and its syntactic system, which enabled you to put words into meaningful sentence patterns. Our concern in this unit is not with the grammatical structure of language (that's the linguist's job) but with the verbal messages you speak and hear. These verbal messages, of course, rely on the rules of grammar; you can't just make up sounds or words or string words together at random and expect to be understood. But, as we'll see, following the rules of grammar is not enough to achieve effective communication. For this we need to understand five key principles of verbal messages; we'11 now explore these principles one by one.

Meanings Are in People

If you wanted to know the meaning of the word love, you'd probably turn to a dictionary. There you'd find a definition such as Webster's: "the attraction, desire, or affection felt for a person who arouses delight or admiration or elicits tenderness, sympathetic interest, or benevolence." But where would you turn if you wanted to know what Pedro means when he says, "I'm in love"? Of course, you'd ask Pedro to discover his meaning. It's in this sense that meanings are not in words but in people. Consequently, to uncover meaning, you need to look into people and not merely into words.

Also recognize that as you change, you also change the meanings you created out of past messages. Thus, although the message sent may not have changed, the meanings you created from it yesterday and the meanings you create today may be quite different. Yesterday, when a special someone said, "I love you," you created certain meanings. But today, when you learn that the same "I love you" was said to three other people, or when you fall in love with someone else, you drastically change the meanings you perceive from those three words.

As already noted in Lecture 14, this principle is especially important in intercultural communication, as meanings for the same words are often drastically different between members of different cultures. This became especially obvious after the tragedy of the World Trade Center attack: Terms like justice, suicide, and terrorism were given totally different meanings by many in Afghanistan and in the United States.

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