The simplest way to define communication is as transmission of information or the message. Every communication has following elements: 1) a sender, 2) a receiver, 3) a channel, 4) the message itself, 5) intention of the message. If a message was received that there are also: 6) receiver(s) of the message, 7) interpretation of the message, 8) perception of the message, 9) feedback or response to message. The most basic unit of any communication is a sign. Semiotics is a scientific discipline that studies signs. Language and nonverbal communication do not comprise the whole communication, as communication can use various other channels – graphic signs, images, objects, sounds, etc.

                                            Semiotics

American logician, philosopher, and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) coined the term „semiotic“, and is a pioneer of semiotics. Peirce views the whole universe as pansemeiosic, that is “perfused with signs.” He also viewed even the human mind and consciousness as sign activity.  He believed that “there can be no isolated sign” because a sign is only part of a semeiotic process. Peirce conception of the sign was triadic, in that every sign has three distinct correlates. In the triadic sign, the first correlate is the sign (representamen),  the second correlate is the object, and the third correlate is the interpretant. The semeiotic Sign (written with an uppercase) contains an irreducible triadic correlation in which a sign (written with a lowercase) stands for an object to an interpretant. The sign functions as the conveyer of meaning that mediates between the object and the interpretant; the interpretant mediates between the object and the sign to interpret the meaning; and the object mediates between the sign and the interpretant in order to ground the meaning. Removal of any one of the three correlates reduces the Sign from an actual Sign to a mere potential Sign. Peirce defines sign as something that  “stands for something in some respect of capacity”. He distinguishes between three types of signs: 1) icons – signs that resemble or stand in for something, 2) indexes – signs that have some causal connection for what they stand for, 3) symbols – signs that in no way resemble or have a causal connection for what they stand for. Thomas Sebeok, in Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (1994), in addition to three types of signs that Peirce introduced, added three more distinct types of signs: 1) symptoms – signs that are manifestation of instinctive and innate bodily response (to some internal or external stimuli) in humans and animals, 2) signals – signs that, by some convention, stand as a clear representation of something ( mathematical signs, semaphores, Morse code signals, etc., 3) names – linguistic signs that designate an extension class.

For Ferdinand Saussure, another pioneer of semiotics, language is a system of interrelated terms, what he called ‘langue’ (language), and is contrasted by ‘parole’ (speech), which relates to individual speech acts or speaking in general. A specific Langue is comprised of supra-individual and underlying code that is embedded in the minds of speakers of a certain language, and which enables common understanding between them. The analysis of this shared system of rules is the central object of linguistics. The language system has two types of relationships:  ‘syntagmatic’ (items are arranged in consecutive order) and ‘associative,’ (deep and not directly observable grammatical and semantic relations). Saussure also makes a crucial distinction between a “sign”, “signified”, and a “signifier”. Both a signified and a signifier together make a sign, while the relation between them is always arbitrary. The signifier is a sound or an image that represents something that is being signified (a concept, idea, object, etc.). The signifier is a physical manifestation of a mental concept, a signified. In Saussure’s linguistics, the whole language is ‘a system of  (arbitrary) signs’.

                         Chomsky’s Generative Grammar

In his books Syntactic Structures (1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Noam Chomsky introduced a new approach to linguistics which he named „generative grammar” or „transformational grammar”. Generative grammar goes further than strictly descriptive linguistics and inductive level of analysis to the ideal level of linguistic competence and ‘deep structure’, the level which allows the speaker to be creative in his or her use of language. Chomsky’s approach to linguistics was completely opposite to the behaviorist approach to linguistics. Behaviorists like B. F. Skinner saw knowledge of the language as consisting of associations between specific words or sound sequences. This type of grammar is called associative grammar and is based on the empiricist idea that humans learn language through sensory experience. Chomsky, on the other hand, claimed that there is massive evidence that people are constantly producing completely new sentences, that they have never heard before. For Chomsky, language is not acquired inductively via stimulus-response conditioning, as behaviorists thought, instead language is learned through an innate cognitive capacity, that all humans have.

Chomsky also introduced the distinction between ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ in language use. Competence is the ability to create correct sentences, while performance is actual sentences that have been produced by the language user. In that sense, generative grammar represents a set of transformational rules that somebody with the  ‘competence’ of the ideal language user can apply to generate grammatically correct sentences. A person with competence can potentially produce an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences. This approach is named, generative because competence allows users to produce or generate any meaningful sentence, even some that are completely new. For Chomsky, because transformational rules of grammar shape our mind, and are the product of innate cognitive psychology, linguistics should be considered a branch of psychology. Chomsky is considered one of the founders of the field of cognitive science.

Every language possesses these elements: 1) deep structure, 2) surface structure, 3) semantic interpretation of the deep structure, and 4) phonetic interpretation of the surface structure. Chomsky stated that all human languages possess many common principles, rules, and features, and those shared patterns represent the "deep structure" of language. That is why linguistics is simultaneously a study of a particular language and a study of universal human language patterns. These common language principles allow almost any child to learn any language, to which it is exposed, with ease. This innate cognitive ability present in children is what Chomsky called a “language acquisition device.”. The "surface structures" of language are specific rules of some particular language.

                                     Speech Act Theory

Probably John L. Austin introduced the concept of speech acts in the article “Performative utterances” (1956) and the book How to Do Things with Words (1962). Type of speech act that involves a person performing something Austin called an illocutionary act. Intentional or nonintentional consequences of an illocutionary act he calls an perlocutionary act. John R. Searle, in his Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), introduced a typology of illocutionary acts: 1) assertives (statements), 2) commissives (committing oneself to an action), 3) directives (giving orders), 4) expressives (expressing emotions or thoughts), and 5) declarations (announcing transformative changes.

             Ethnography of Communication of Dell Hymes

American linguist and anthropologist Del Hymes tried to make a departure from the transformative-generative grammar of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's perfect speaker thus possesses linguistic competence – the ability to use a language perfectly. Del Hymes believed that this conception of linguistic competence does not pay enough attention to the variations that exist between different speakers, as well as to the use of language in communication. Hymes was more influenced by the linguistic conception of Roman Jakobson, as well as the anthropological approaches to the study of language by Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth.

Hymes presented the foundations of his theory in the introduction to the book Ethnography of Communication (1964), which he edited together with Gumperz. Both authors, were also co-editors of the book Directions in Sociolinguistics. Hymes believes that it is necessary to build a unique theory of language that would not only take into account the knowledge about language obtained by linguistics, psychology, sociology and ethnology, but would also deal with the study of completely new types of facts, that is, the direct study of language in the context of the situation. Ethnography of communication should give the answer about the place that language occupies in a certain culture and society. Hymes believes that common linguistic codes enable communication within a group, but that these linguistic codes do not limit communication within that group, because different communication goals can be achieved with the same linguistic means, just as different communicative goals can be achieved with different linguistic means. For Hymes's theory of ethnography of communication, the double study of speech is also important, because speech contains the means of speech, but, at the same time, there is also the communicative (speech) economy of the group. Hymes believes that it is important to introduce a difference between the etic and emic approach to the study of communication, the emic approach studies the meaning that communicative behavior has for the communication participants themselves, while the etic approach represents an objective analysis of communicative behavior by an external observer. The etic approach should provide the opportunity to determine recurring patterns, enable prediction of behavior, establish criteria and ways of testing hypotheses, and examine the economy of communication.

In order for an event to have a communicative status in the ethnographic sense, it must contain the transmission of a message. The message must contain a code that is known to the participants, it has a certain form and must be transmitted through some channel, in some environment or context and should cause some reaction (comment). A message can be any phenomenon or behavior, including sunset or thunder, as completely natural phenomena, can have the status of a message, if they are recognized as such by the participants in the communication. So in the Vishram Chinook culture, from North America, there are three communicative matrices within the same community, each with its own codes. One communicative matrix includes adults, another includes small children, dogs, coyotes and guardian spirits, while the third includes persons who have the ability to communicate with guardian spirits. In this culture, it is believed that children have the ability to communicate with coyotes and spirits, and that they lose this ability when they grow up. Ethnography of communication should study all forms of communication that exist in a certain culture, and examine all those events that have the status of a communicative event in that culture. The ethnographer must fully understand a culture and do much more than mere observation, in order to fully understand communicative events, and to prevent his own understanding from being confused with that of the participants in the culture itself. For an event to be characterized as a communicative event, at least one participant must be a real person. Sociolinguistics must also study social changes, in order to establish a systematic theory and explain the processes of cultivation, linguistic creolization, pidginization, standardization, construction of artificial languages ​​and education in the vernacular.

According to Hymes, the basic concepts of ethnography of communication are: ways of speaking, fluent speaker, speech situation, speech event, speech act, components of speech events and acts, rules (relations) of speaking and functions of speech. The way of speaking is the most general and starting concept. A fluent speaker is a person who has both linguistic knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge in a certain language. Hymes believes that this kind of conception, which was used in Chomsky's grammar, neglects the problem of individual and group differences that exist in a certain culture. These problems should be the focus of ethnography of communication. Speech community is often equated with the term language. However, this leveling is inappropriate because it limits social communities internally and externally. When viewed from the outside, linguistic and communicative boundaries between social communities cannot be defined only on the basis of linguistic peculiarities. Political and other social circumstances often influence whether linguistic differences between speakers will be defined as differences between two (or more) languages ​​or as differences between dialects. In earlier theories, there was an assumed natural unity of a speech community, however Hymes rejects this view and believes that no social community can be considered a simple product of mechanical replication of uniformity. It is necessary to empirically study the frequency of linguistic interactions that take place in a speech community. There are spoken forms of a language that are not understandable to all speakers of that language. The terminology of a profession is understood by those who belong to that profession, while it is mostly incomprehensible to other speakers of the same language. However, it should be remembered that these mutually unintelligible speech forms do not constitute different languages. The mixing of speech community and language is manifested above all through three features attributed to language: origin, intelligibility and use. Hymes further introduces the terms: language field, speech field and speech network. The linguistic field refers to the number of languages ​​in the range of our personal knowledge. The set of all social communities in which one's knowledge of the way of speaking enables communication constitutes the speech field. The speech network is made up of connections between persons who share common knowledge of speech forms and ways of speaking. A speech situation is any situation in which speech communication takes place. There are many different speech situations that can be arranged, structured, formal, traditional and others. Each situation has its own environment and context. Hymes uses the terms speech act and speech event to emphasize the active aspect of speech communication; speech is not only a verbal expression of linguistic rules, it represents a meaningful activity that has meaning for the person speaking in a cultural context, as well as an event that affects other people and their society and culture. Individual speech acts and speech events are part of a system of communicative acts and events that are characteristic of a certain group of people. The speech act is the smallest unit in the study of the ethnography of communication. It is the smallest part of communication that has some meaning in itself. For example, it can be a joke, an order, a statement, an assertion, etc. When discourse is viewed from the viewpoint of speech acts, it can be studied both paradigmatically and syntagmatically. Discourse, as a set of speech acts, is conditioned by the point of view of the speaker and represents a series of choices, from the set of all possible choices. Each speech act has a multitude of features and components, the probable number of which is never less than three. A communicative (speech) event represents the basis of understanding the communicative behavior of a social community. In order to understand a communicative event, it is necessary to understand its basic components. Ethnography of communication does not look at language as an abstract form, or as a simple correlate of society, but looks at communicative processes and patterns that shape and are shaped by communicative events. The very form of a communicative event must be viewed in the context of the communicative function that event performs in a certain situation. For the ethnography of communication, it is necessary to study: (1) the components of communicative events; (2) relationships between those components; (3) capacity and status of those components; (4) the action of the composed whole.

The components of speech in classical linguistic analysis were presented through a tripartite division into the speaker, the listener and the topic being discussed. Such schemes or models did not provide a good basis for ethnographic research on speech, because sometimes there are three participants in communication (the addressee, the addressee and the audience) and sometimes only one.  Hymes proposes the introduction of a universal concept, the concept of participants in communication. Ethnographic work should enable the introduction of real types of relationships between participants, which would allow speaking (communication) to be explored in different types of its manifestation.

The best-known form of  Hymes' analysis of the components of speech (communication) is represented by the mnemonic SPEAKING, which groups the components of speech into eight categories. SPEAKING is an acronym for: (1) setting - time and place, physical aspects of the situation in which one speaks; (2) participants  - including the personal characteristics and social positions of the participants and their mutual relationships; (3) ends – goals of both the entire communication and the participants; (4) acts – how the speech acts are organized within the speech event and the topic that was talked about; (5) Key – style or tone in which something was said or written; (6) instrumentalities – the linguistic code that conveys communication and the channel of communication; (7) norms – standard socio-cultural rules of interaction and interpretation; (8) genres – type of communicative event.

Hymes takes the concept of competence from Noam Chomsky's linguistics, but he uses the concept more broadly in the sense of communicative competence and not just linguistic competence. Communicative competence represents the ability to communicate successfully in a certain culture. A child who grows up in a certain culture (or an adult who becomes a member of a new culture) adopts a system of using language in relation to persons, places, purposes, other means of communication. It adopts all these components of communicative events together with the attitudes and beliefs that surround them. It also adopts developed patterns of language use in conversation, greetings, standard routines. That adoption is based on the child's sociolinguistic competence, his ability to participate in his own society, not only as a speaking member, but also as a communicating member.

Coupled with the concept of communicative competence, as the other side of the coin, appears the concept of performance, actually manifested communicative behavior. Instead of studying the ideal speaker-listener relationship, or studying "fluent speakers", ethnography of communication deals with differences in abilities (competence) between speakers, and such exist even in small homogeneous societies. Each type or case of an individual way of speaking is significant for researching the special and universal functions of speaking of a social community whose members create their own history and possess a symbolic culture.

Hymes also studies the functions of communication and believes that they have priority over the structure of communication. Language itself is organized as a plurality of functions, and different functions operate in different domains. There are several types of functions: “expressive, directive, contact (phatic), metalinguistic, contextual, poetic (stylistic), referential, and metacommunicative” (Hymes, 1964).

  Communication in the Perspective of Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic Interactionism is an sociological approach that has its roots in the teachings of Charles Cooley and George Herbert Mead. Cooley states that  "communication" and "understanding" mediates between the self and society. He believes that the self does not have complete autonomy, as the utilitarians believed, nor is it completely determined by social values ​​and norms. In the book Social Organization (1909), Cooley introduces the term "primary group", which refers to a group in which there are close relationships and direct communication. Examples of primary groups are: family, neighborhoods, smaller communities, etc. These groups are most important for shaping a person's social nature and values. Communication and organization are the key to transferring the values ​​of primary groups to the level of the wider social order. The interaction and mutual influences of individuals are what form public opinion and social order. In democracies, communication takes the form of deliberation, which shapes identities, social ties, and organizational and institutional structures. Cooley sees social classes as a normal part of democracy. When communication between them, on the issue of the economy and cultural capital, takes place in the form of deliberative debate, then democracy is stable, and it becomes endangered when classes close in themselves and refuse to participate in a public debate.

Mead considered language to be the most important social institution. Language enabled the development of „human sociality“ and was the basis for the emergence of all other institutions. Verbal communication enabled the acceleration of social evolution in a period in which cooperation was becoming increasingly important for the survival and progress of society. Language enables people to develop „reflexive selves“, to talk to themselves, to put themselves in the position of other people and thus interpret their actions, as well as to take over the views of other people. Symbolic communication, which takes place through language or non-verbal communication, enables the construction of a social world (attitudes, roles, and institutions), but it also plays a key role in shaping the individual mind. In this sense, the two key elements of the self are its reflexive nature and its ability to develop symbolic forms of communication. Language and other forms of symbolic communication enable communication that is mediated by "significant actions", self-conscious acts by which we distinguish human from inhuman behavior.

         Communication in the Perspective of Phenomenology

Alfred Schütz, in his book Phenomenology of the Social World (1967, in German 1932), uses the concept of the Life-world (Lebenswelt), a theoretical concept that Schütz took from Husserl, as the foundation of his sociological approach called phenomenology. The life world represents the socio-cultural world, as it is experienced and perpetuated by the people who are in it. Individual consciousness and understanding form the basis of the actor's action within the life world (social world), and the life world itself is built through „intersubjectivity“. Intersubjectivity represents the relationship between the consciousness of a person and other persons in the present. Intersubjectivity, which consists of everyday interpersonal interaction and communication, creates a "life world". The life-world is made possible by the fact that people experience and interpret the world around them through a "natural attitude", that is, by using accumulated social and cultural patterns of meaning. Communication is a process in which two or more subjective streams of consciousness meet and harmonize, within social interaction (Wirkungsbeziehung). Every action of a person is a sign that should be interpreted by other people, so the ultimate meaning of someone's action is shown in the reactions of other people to that action. If there is a development of established patterns for the interpretation of some type of action, then these patterns represent the basis for mutual understanding between the actors. The creation and adoption of such cultural patterns for the interpretation of action takes place in long-term and lasting interpersonal face-to-face relationships, and once adopted, knowledge of these cultural patterns becomes applicable, even in situations where the actor performs an action in a completely unknown environment, with unknown co-actors.

         Anthropological Structuralism and Communication

Lévi-Strauss' first book The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) introduced his theoretical approach, which was based on the structural linguistics of Saussure. Lévi-Strauss' approach is also called structuralism, and it sees social structures similar to how Saussure sees linguistic structure and different from how structural-functionalism, of Malinovsky and Radcliff-Brown, uses structure as a theoretical concept. ‘Structure’ for  Lévi-Strauss is not equivalent to the empirical relations between elements in observable reality. According to Lévi-Strauss anthropology studies the unconscious structures that underlie all cultural phenomena, and organizes those phenomena into types that express connections and relationships understandable only to scientists.

These structures are constructions of the analyst himself, reducing cultural phenomena to an unconscious common basis. The structures are built by combinations from the repertoire of ideas, and society can be explained as a set of codes whose forms are dictated by the structure of the human mind. The basis of all cultural phenomena is the unconscious teleology of the spirit, that’s why anthropology deals with the inventory of mental categories. Culture is a set of symbolic systems and as symbols are the basis of communication, the whole science of society, culture, and men is a communication theory. The world becomes meaningful only if it is structured, because symbols do not have an immanent meaning, but their meaning comes from their position inside the wider structure.

The human mind builds the entire world by dichotomization - from binary oppositions that man is consciously not aware of. The complex interactions of people and society are unconscious projections of the mind's binary logic. There is the necessity of rejecting the subject, society is a cybernetic communication machine. Culture and nature as basic binary oppositions, and the task of anthropology is to discover the neurophysiological foundations of how the unconscious brain works. Besides binary oppositions, there is also always a third element that forms a ternary structure, and this third element is always empty, ready to assume any meaning.

Communication in society works through the exchange of symbols. There are three types of fundamental exchange: the exchange of women by rules of kinship, the exchange of goods and services according to the rules of the economy; and the exchange of symbols according to linguistic rules. Symbolic structures of exchange in areas of kinship, language, and economy are key for understanding social life, and not human biology. The kinship system and marriage are cultural phenomena based on the prohibition of incest, and the interdiction of sexual behavior is not a natural phenomenon.

                        Marshall McLuhan on Communication

Theorist of media and communications Marshall McLuhan, in his work The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), studies how the printing press and printed books and press rearranged the culture, consciousness, and sensibilities after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg. This book introduced two new concepts – “global village” and “Gutenberg galaxy”. Global village refers to time and space distances losing their significance due to the development and spread of printing technology. This new technology allowed for mass communication that shaped contemporary culture and created a village-like mindset all over the world.  Gutenberg galaxy is a globally accumulated body of intellectual and artistic works, which is contained in all printed materials over the centuries.  

McLuhan, influenced by the work of Canadian political economist and communication theorist Harold Innis wrote the book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964) which focuses on a new way of understanding media. McLuhan sees a medium as any extension of humans that allows them to communicate. That includes technologies usually consider as media –television, radio, and newspapers – but also cars, electricity, and language itself. While conventional studies of media focused on its content, McLuhan instead sees the real meaning or message of media to be its ability to amplify and accelerate existing processes, which introduces a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into the human association, affairs, and action", in that way changing society, culture, and individual psychology.

This intricate process is subsumed in McLuhan’s famous idiom "the medium is the message." An example of this process is a printing technology that enabled the dissemination and formation of national symbols and national languages. In the same book, McLuhan introduces the distinction between two types of media: “cool media” which involves active users connected to the media on a deeper level, and  “hot media” that don’t connect users with media on a deep level and makes users passively consume the content. Electric media changed the perception of time and space and permitted the development of cool media. Electric media truly brought the age of the global village and rendered national forms of identification irrelevant.

     Communication in the Perspective of Ethnometodology

Harold Garfinkel developed his micro sociological approach of Ethnometodology. Ethnomethodology in its study starts from several key assumptions. The first is that common sense knowledge is created, above all, through linguistic communication. Another assumption is that in everyday speech one should distinguish between contextually neutral expressions and those whose meaning changes in accordance with the specific context and situation. The third is that the explanation of practical action is always reflexive. The fourth assumption is that purposeful behavior, within a context, should be studied as a practical achievement.

According to Garfinkel, the social order is not a simple product of socialization, because the actors are active and reflective about the norms, and create values ​​and meanings in creative ways. The choice of goals, made by the actors, is based on the empirical everyday knowledge available to them. Garfinkel believes that the sociological theory of action must include the actor's own view of an activity. Individuals are constantly striving to establish new rules, when they are in a situation, and ethnomethodology should reveal these implicit rules and the planned nature of everyday life. The actors, while acting, pay attention to the other actors and plan the next moves. If the situation does not go according to their plan, then they strive to repair the damage and restore normalcy. Society consists of reflective social activities that contain a variety of meanings.

In the empirical study of everyday speech, Garfinkel studied how people use the context of the situation they are in to understand what is not explicitly said in a speech, so they can get a full understanding of the message. Studying the queues that form in public places, he found that even such an unstructured situation requires an active and reflective approach. The most famous example of Garfinkel's application of the ethnomethodological approach in empirical research is a case study he conducted in 1967 and represented in the book Studies in Ethnomethodology. He studied an intersex woman named Agnes, who had genitals of both sexes but looked completely feminine on the outside. In her daily life, Agnes managed to "pass" as a woman, although she was constantly at risk of someone discovering that she was an intersex person. Garfinkel concluded that sexual and gender identity is, in essence, a constant endeavor that represents "accomplishment", achieved through practical activities.

                              Conversational Analysis

Conversational Analysis was developed by Harvey Sacks. At first Sacks collaborated with Garfinkel on the development of ethnometodology and they jointly published an article "On Formal Structures of Practical Action" (1970). In this article, they argue that the division into "indexical" expressions (the meaning of the statement comes from the context in which it is given) and "objective" statements (meaning is free of context) is wrong, because, even supposedly objective expressions always depend on situations in which they are used. It is necessary to introduce "ethnomethodological indifference", meaning that in the process of the analysis of speech, we should not assess the status of objective expressions, in the context of their adequacy, value, and consequentiality. They believe that the "orderliness" - the practical means that are used in order for those expressions to attain their sense - of all human expressions should be explored.

Over the next few years, Sacks and his collaborators Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson developed an approach to speech analysis that differed in several significant respects from the ethnomethodological approach. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson called this approach "conversation analysis," and the first paper to lay the groundwork for this new approach was "Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation” (1974). Sacks died a year after the article was published, but Schegloff continued to develop conversational analysis, and, years later, he published and edited Sacks' lectures in the book Language Lectures on Conversation (1992).

Conversation analysis rejects the idea of ​​using pre-composed categories to codify social meaning in conversation, but focuses on the structure of conversation, to arrive at meaning. This approach rejects the existence of a universal intersubjective meaning of words and symbols. The goal of conversational analysis is to develop a methodology for analyzing conversations through a sequential approach. Everyday conversations should be analyzed through “membership categories”, as means by which verbal interaction is made meaningful. The method developed by these authors consists of compiling detailed transcripts of recorded conversations, which are then analyzed in detail by recording each aspect of the conversation: intonation, pauses, taking orders in the conversation, moments when two or more interlocutors speak at the same time and other details. Using this method of analysis researchers obtain sequential organization of talk in interaction.

The goal is to determine how the participants in the conversation relate to the speech of other interlocutors, and how that relationship changes at every moment of the conversation. Every part of the conversation is essential, from the way the conversations start and end, the turns of speakers, to the interaction problems that need to be overcome in the conversation. Nonverbal communication (body language) is also analyzed. In the end, there are rules, patterns, and structures that form a dynamic (because the situation is constantly changing during the conversation) "sequential ordering" of the conversation. The mechanisms that speakers use to organize a conversation are independent of the cognitive disposition and motivation of any speaker, but also of the broader social context of the conversation or physical limitations. In addition to the organization of the conversation itself, this approach seeks to determine how intersubjective understanding occurs in the conversation.

The most critical sequences in a conversation are called "adjacency pairs", and are composed of two speaking activities, in which the first activity, performed by the first speaker, directly invites the second actor to respond with complementary speaking activity. Examples of adjacency pairs are: question-answer, greeting-greeting, request-grant/refusal, and invitation-acceptance/declination, etc. adjacency pairs very often serve as a basis for further expansion of conversations. The turn of speakers in the conversation, and the rules that regulate that change, are also very important fields of analysis. Usually, each speaker is entitled to one “constructional unit” of conversation (the smallest unit of speech that can be considered as a whole – one turn). When one such speech unit is completed, other speakers can start their own, or if no one steps in, the first speaker can continue with the next speech unit. The mechanism that controls the turns (who speaks) is called "recipient design". The ability of speakers to recognize and respect the rules of turns is the basis of intersubjective understanding. …Sacks

         The Dramaturgical Approach to Communication

In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Erving Goffman presents his theoretical framework, often called the dramaturgical approach. He believes that face-to-face interpersonal relationships should be the focus of research and that any such relationship can be viewed as a theatrical role. This dramaturgical approach studies interpersonal relationships through six basic concepts: 1) performance, 2) the team, 3) the region, 4) discrepant roles, 5) communication out of character, and 6) impression management. He views all people as performers who, consciously or unconsciously, perform rehearsed speeches and roles, to maximize the potential to deceive other people. On the other hand, people as observers also see all aspects of other people's performances, in order to expose potential deception. Our performances will be more credible if we are "sincere", rather than „cynical“ that is if we really believe in the role we play. Goffman believes that every person is, in fact, a mask, so theatricality is necessary for us to maintain that mask.

The performances are supported by "fronts" of which the most important are „settings“, "expressive equipment" (clothes, manner of speech), and "manner“ (personal style of performance“. This kind of front is part of the performing „routine“. Performances are often deliberately filled with a dose of "mystification". People often act as part of a "team", and such teams are often coordinated, and members have additional information about the performances of people who are not available to other observers. Goffman distinguishes between a performance that takes place consciously and publicly, and background performances in which the secrets that the team wants to hide can be revealed. "Impression Management" refers to everything that performers do to better play a role, deceive and hide secrets.

Goffman calls all these aspects of complex interpersonal communication an "interactional order." For Goffman, the interaction order serves as a conceptual scheme for understanding everyday interpersonal communication, and he further developed this concept in his book Behavior in Public Places (1963a). In this book, he studies communication in various public places, such as restaurants, elevators, stadiums, and formal events. He distinguishes between three types of personal interaction: "gathering", "situation" and "social occasion". Each of these types of communication can be "focused" - when people consciously participate in a specific type of mutual communication, and "unfocused" - when such a specific relationship does not exist. Gatherings are the type of communication meetings that are the least focused, situations are meetings with higher focus, while social gatherings are organized so that they are limited in time and space and include the highest degree of ritualization, preparation, and focused communication.

In his book Strategic Interaction (1969), Goffman further developed a dramaturgical approach, focusing on the aspect of communication as an instrumental, goal-oriented, activity. He distinguishes between „strategic interaction“, which is aimed at achieving a specific goal, and normative behavior, which does not strive to achieve some external goal but is a goal in itself.

In his book Frame Analysis (1974), Goffman partially changed his former perspective and introduced the concept of "organized frames", thus introducing a distinction between the theatrical situation and everyday activities that do not require a role. Role-playing takes place only when there is specific permission from the audience to show the drama. Such permission provides a framework that determines performance characteristics. People use these organized frameworks, which they have imposed on themselves, to keep the group together. Frames serve to organize our experience by determining exactly which form of communication takes place. "Primary frameworks" are those that relate to the real reality of communication. Primary frameworks can be " keyed " when the meaning of the primary frame is misinterpreted. "Fabrications" are frameworks designed to deceive other interlocutors. To prevent misinterpretation of the frames, and for the audience to accept them as real, people implant the frames in the current reality.

In his book Forms of Talk (1981), Goffman explores different forms of speech and pays special attention to the "footing of talk". This term refers to the projection of the selves that the interlocutors have during the conversation. He views society as loosely integrated through everyday conversation, which is based on the ritual affirmation of a shared reality. Conversation plays a key symbolic role here, helping to define, strengthen, and maintain the structure of social groups and patterns of interaction. Everyday communication is maintained through symbolic and routine elements of decency. Institutional and interactive order are loosely connected through a common ground in symbolic and ritual forms that connect the individual with ingrained sacred and moral values. The social structure does not define cultural practices or rituals but helps individuals to choose from an already available repertoire.

                French Structuralism on Communication

Roland Barthes studied signs, symbols, and ideologies, acting as a bridge between Saussure's classical structuralism and the postmodern and poststructuralist upheavals represented by Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard. He added to Saussure's analysis of the relationship between the signified and the signifier. This new conception sees signs of the first order of the sign system (both the signifier and the signified) serving as the signifier of the second order of the sign system operating at the level of myth. Second-order signs work by establishing an ideologically clear connection of first-order signs with an idea that seems completely natural and thus creates a myth.

Jacques Derrida developed his approach to communication knows as deconstruction. The subject of deconstruction is also the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure believed that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is stable and that the signified always has a strictly defined relationship with a concept. Derrida believes that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is always open and that the meaning contained in the signified is always arbitrary, so the signified cannot represent an objective reality. Structuralism presupposes the existence of a unity in language, a unity with organized elements that stand in stable relations, while deconstruction abandons such a rigid image. If signs do not have inherited stability, then meaning alone cannot have such stability. Meaning is a function of the differences between terms. A game of infinite differences within the text produces the possibility of multiple meanings.

Deconstruction breaks down absolute truths, reveals key binary oppositions in the text, and then reveals the dependence and hierarchical relationship of those oppositions, while the next step shows that these relationships are relative, revealing the absurdity of absolute truth/knowledge itself. It is necessary to find instabilities, ambiguities in meaning, contradictions, and excluded elements from the structure of the text. His analysis of language and literature represents a radical view of writing. Derrida believes that each text contains the seeds of its own destruction. He believes that writing does not reproduce a single reality, but produces multiple realities. Deconstruction takes place at the level of the text, but also in the very interpretations of the text. After the end of the deconstruction, what remains, in the end, is the text itself. This opens up a space for constant reflection and creative thinking, which allows us to "play" with the text. Derrida advocates an open text in which reality is in a constant state of linguistic fluidity.

Sign and Symbol in Theoretical Perspective of Jean Baudrillard

In his early works The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), Jean Baudrillard criticizes Marxism from a structuralist and semiological perspective. He denies the crucial role that the “base” has in Marxism and the reduction of the superstructure to a mere reflection of material infrastructure. Modern society is increasingly structured with signs and symbols. All objects can be analyzed in the context of binary oppositions that reveal the rules and internal relationships that structure objects. Marxism overlooked that goods are a sign that gives individuals a cultural identity. The sign constitutes a special material reality that is used for prestige, status, and thus for social differentiation. In premodern (symbolic) societies, social relations are organized around symbolic exchanges at festivals, rites, and rituals that strengthen the social order. Here the sign had a purely reference function.

Industrial societies have a fixed and stable hierarchy of the sign that clearly distinguishes the real from the unreal, so the sign and reality are truly equivalent, and goods reflect social statuses. Culture is organized around a social world in which words, sounds, and images have a direct relationship with object and reality: code produces coherent meanings and provokes precisely defined answers. With the emergence of postmodern culture, the sign and its code become autonomous, producing their own inner meanings without reference to objective reality. The reference value is destroyed and replaced with total relativity, combinations, and simulation, so that the signs are exchanged with other signs, rather than with the real things. The sign becomes liberated from the archaic obligation to mean something and finally becomes free, indifferent, and indefinite, in a structural and combinatorial game that overcomes the rule of a certain equivalence. In the new "semiurgical" society, the code functions as an organizational principle that creates new forms of communication and social order.

In his later works Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Fatal Strategies (1983), Baudrillard describes the social world as dominated by the media and the explosion of the image. In modernity, copies or models represented real objects or events, while in the postmodern era, that is, in the era of "simulacrum", copy or simulacrum produces reality, objects, and events. The performance of the representation is abandoned. Television and marketing are invading all the intimate processes of our social life, while reality collapses into hyperreality. "Dedifferentiation" means that there is no difference between news and entertainment, marketing and culture. Society consists of a large, phantasmagoric superstructure of signs and images with which the individual has neither an objective nor an alienated relationship.

Communication in Perspective of Luhmann’s Systems Theory

Sociologist Niklas Luhmann is best known for his theoretical approach, which he called autopoietic systems theory. He applies the concept of autopoiesis to the study of the economic, legal, political, scientific, and bureaucratic systems. Autopoietic systems are those that create their own basic elements. Autopoietic systems are self-organizing in two ways. On the one hand, they organize their own boundaries - the boundaries between the system and the environment. On the other hand, these systems organize their internal structure.

Autopoietic systems have the property of being self-referential, that is, they possess mechanisms that regulate the system. These mechanisms act according to the internal logic of a subsystem, to organize that subsystem – money is a mechanism in the economy, and laws are mechanisms in the sphere of jurisprudence and law. Autopoietic systems are closed systems because they do not have a direct connection with their environment. The environment affects such systems only when their action disrupts the system itself. Such occasional disturbances of the system, by the environment, enable the system itself to better adapt to its environment.

Luhmann introduces three different levels of analysis of autopoietic systems: general systems theory, the theory of social systems, and the level of concrete analysis of social systems. Society (social system) represents an autopoietic system because it produces all its basic elements, establishes its own boundaries, and is self-referential and closed in relation to the environment. The basic element of society, but also its product, is communication. One of the most important features of Luhmann's theory is that he does not see individuals as a part of either the entire social system or its subsystems. Individuals as biological organisms and as "psychic systems" are not part of the social system. Only those aspects of the individual's behavior that affect the functioning of the system, that is, communicate with the system, form part of the system. By psychic systems, Luhmann means the conscious part of the individual personality.

Psychic systems and society, as a system of communication, have one thing in common, and that is that they depend on "meaning". The meaning in Luhmann's terminology refers to the decisions that the system makes. The significance of an action performed by the system is contained in the difference that the action has concerning other, alternative actions that the system could have performed. Systems such as psychic and social systems, which depend on meaning, are closed systems because: 1) meanings always refer to other meanings, 2) only meanings can change meanings, and 3) meanings usually produce meanings. Meaning creates the boundary of each of these systems. In the psychic system, something that has no meaning is seen as something that is outside the system, as the "cause" of our activities, while what has meaning is seen as "motivation" for our actions.

In a social system, meaning is contained in the difference between communication within a system and noise coming from outside the system. Psychic and social systems have evolved in parallel with each other because each of these two types of systems represents a necessary environment for the other type of system. Conceptual representations are the basic elements of the psychic system of meaning. The basic elements of the social system of meaning are different forms of communication. The meanings that make up the social system are not the product of the individual's intentions. The meanings of the social system are not the product of specific words that a person utters but arise from the very choice to say exactly those words, and not some other, alternative words.

Every system must solve the problem of "double contingency". This problem relates to the fact that every communication must take into account the way it will be received, while, at the same time, it depends on the way the person receiving the communication evaluates the one who is communicating. This creates a vicious circle - both sides in communication depend on each other. The solution to this problem is for both parties that are communicating to know, as much as possible, about the other person and their intentions and expectations from the communication itself. The social structure creates standardized norms and roles by which people can, with a great deal of certainty, correctly interpret communication. Social structure (norms and roles) shape communication, which, in turn, shapes structure. The choices we make in each interaction are limited to the choices made in previous communications. In this way, security in the validity of communication is achieved.

Each social subsystem has its own rules of communication. Codes are a basic element of such communication and represent the product of the evolution of each individual subsystem. The different paths of evolution of each subsystem lead to the fact that each subsystem has separate codes, the most important of which are the binary pair of oppositions that determine the existence or absence of quality. Thus, science is characterized by a binary pair of opposition true/false; the pair in the economy is to have/not to have; in the arts it is beautiful/ugly; in the sphere of the law the pair is fair/unfair, etc. Codes serve to set the limits of allowed communication within a subsystem. Subsystems are not able to directly understand the language and codes of other subsystems but must translate them into their own language. Thus, for example, science affects the economy only if scientific knowledge can have some application in economics, that is if the code for true is translated into the code to have.

Luhmann's theory does not provide a fixed number of functionally differentiated societal subsystems. The functional differentiation of modern societies requires that problem solving has to descend from the level of the entire social system, down to the level of individual social subsystems. If a social system does not have a subsystem that is in charge of solving a specific problem, then the whole system is in danger. Luhmann believes that the environmental problems faced by modern societies are a consequence of the lack of a subsystem that would be in charge of solving those problems. Functionally differentiated systems are insufficiently resilient to environmental challenges because they can solve only those problems that can be represented in the form of codes of certain subsystems. On the other hand, once a change occurs in a subsystem, due to the functional connection of all subsystems, that change causes changes in other subsystems.

Codes do not directly affect the behavior of individuals, because they require the existence of programs that can translate these codes into behavioral instructions. The structure is defined as the limit on the possible number of combinations of elements within a system. The function of the structure is not to translate the requirements of the environment into the system, but to ensure the autonomy of self-reproduction of the system, which is conceived as an operationally closed process.

                        Theory of Communicative Action

Jürgen Habermas' most famous work is the two-volume book The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, in German 1981). In this book, he develops, in detail, his theoretical system, which he began to create in earlier works. Habermas introduces a distinction between two basic aspects of any society - "lifeworld" and "system". The lifeworld is a theoretical concept introduced to sociological theory by Alfred Schütz. The lifeworld is an area where symbolic communication takes place, or, as Habermas calls it, "communicative action", between people. Culture, personalities, meanings, and symbols are the basis of communication, that is, communicative action. Within the lifeworld, actors (people) strive to achieve a common understanding. That common understanding is a product, but also the direction of communication and practical activities of people. The realm of the lifeworld is the focus of Alfred Schütz's phenomenology and George Herbert Mead's symbolic interactionism, and it is precisely these theoretical approaches that Habermas uses to study this realm.

On the other hand, the "system" represents a completely different analytical level. In Habermas's terminology, "system" means what functionalism and systems theory call the social system. The system understood in this way has its own structure, and each part of that structure has the function of achieving a harmonious integration of the entire system. The integration of the system is achieved through the instrumental rationality of the actors. If we applied the terminology of Max Weber to Habermas's theory, then the integration of lifeworld would be achieved through the „value rational action“ of actors, and the integration of the system through the „goal rational action“ of actors. The lifeworld consists of societies, cultures, and personalities.

Communicative action achieves the reproduction of the lifeworld by maintaining culture, integrating society, and forming individual personalities. Communicative action contains both cognitive and normative elements, because knowledge and understanding between speakers are achieved through it, and social norms are also established. The communicative action should provide answers to the four most important questions: 1) what is understandable; 2) what is true; 3) what is right (in the ethical and moral sense); 4) whether the speaker really believes in what he is saying.

These four questions are ‘validity claims’, that is, qualities that every communication should possess: ‘intelligibility’, ‘truth’, ‘moral rightness’, and ‘sincerity’. The rationalization of the lifeworld happens when the best answers to these questions are achieved in an open discussion, and the basis of consensus is the strength of the arguments in the discussion. This ideal goal of communicative rationality Habermas calls the “ideal speech situation”, in which only the “force of the better argument” exist. The opposite situation is “systematically distorted communication”. Habermas believed that in modern society, the lifeworld achieves that ideal speech situation, which leads to greater differentiation between different elements of the lifeworld, that is, between society, culture, and personality.

                      Other Approaches to Communication

Sociologist and linguist Basil Bernstein is known for his book Class, Codes and Control, 3 vols. (1971, 1973, 1976) where he showed the results of his pioneering study of the relationship between the social class from which a child originates and how that child learns and uses language, both in the family and at school. He found that there are significant differences between the ability of members of different classes to use symbolic communication. Different use of language influences the creation of different identities, experiences, and views of the world, and it is connected with socialization in the family and with two ways of organizing the household - "positional" and "personalizing". The positional type, and the associated language code, are characteristic of the working and old middle classes. The personalizing type is associated with the "new" middle class, which is engaged in the production of cultural content, while the old middle class is associated with material production and trade. The positional system depends on the direct means of social control - clearly defined social roles. The personalizing type allows individual reflection on identity and meaning.

Anthony Giddens, in his theory of structuration, views both the structures and actions of actors as two sides of the same coin, which are connected through social practices. For that reason, structuration theory starts from the basic assumption that social practices are the basis of all the most important social phenomena. Long-term reproduction of similar forms of practice leads to the creation of stable patterns of events and lasting collectives that retain their structural features in the long run. When there is a transformation of social practices, then there is the establishment of new patterns of events and enduring collectives. Except in periods of great social transformation, most social practices routinely take place. Routine behavior occurs within "circuits of reproduction", which can take place within interpersonal encounters or through distance communication, through space and time. Communication through spatial and temporal distance is the basis of Giddens' concept of "time-space distanciation" of social systems.

In her book The Managed Heart (1983), Arlie Hochschild observes how social structure, symbolic interaction, and ideology shape human emotions and their expression. She believes that there is an essential gender difference (strategy) between the expression of emotions in women and men. Public ideologies of emotions shape private emotional experience. Class position and ethnicity also influence the shaping and expression of emotions. Emotions have a signal communicative function because they define the position of an individual within a situation, as well as social expectations related to a situation.

Psychologist Albert Bandura, in his book Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory (1986), describes people as self-organizing, proactive, and self-reflective, as opposed to the dominant view of people as products of their environment or inner cognitive-affective forces. He stressed the importance of the human extraordinary ability to use symbols and imagery. Symbolic capabilities allow humans to comprehend their environment, plan their actions, solve complex problems, gain knowledge through reflection, organize their experiences to create structure, meaning, and continuity in their lives, and have complex communication, not only with those near them but even with those who are far away in time and space. 

Walter Benjamin viewed language as a living entity, capable of revealing deeper truths about the world. His essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (1916) posits that language is not merely a tool for communication but a medium through which the world is understood and interpreted. This philosophical stance permeates his literary criticism, where he emphasizes the importance of close reading and the aesthetic experience of literature. Benjamin, in the article “The Task of the Translator” (1923), explores the relationship between an original literary work and the afterlife that that work has when its translated into another language. For him translation is not merely transfer of the original information in another language, but the work of art that has to convey “the unfathomable, the mysterious, the ‘poetic,’ something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet”. Once translated, the original literary work must die, to give it a new afterlife in translation.

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