Extending the domain of interpersonal rhetoric in linguistic pragmatics through interactional properties of communication participants

1.1 On the linguistic foundations of semiotic theory

The term pragmatics denotes the study of language use, asking how the context of communication and the intentions of language users affect the meaning of utterances. The term was coined by Charles W. Morris (1901–1979) in his Foundations of the theory of signs (1938: 6–9)^[1] as the third subdiscipline of semiotics after semantics and syntactics. Accordingly, semantics is seen as focusing on the relations between words and the objects they denote, and syntactics on the relations among the constituents of language, such as the sounds of speech, or words among other linguistic units at different levels, or grammatical rules detectable in the structure of sentences. When specifying the subject matter of linguistic pragmatics and interpersonal rhetoric, one has to accept the statement that there is a relation between language and its speakers, the consequences of which become apparent in their use of it in different situational contexts.

In a similar vein as Morris (1938: 29–42), who departed from dimensions and levels of semiosis, Jerzy Pelc, in his article “Semiotics and logic: pragmatization of the common ground” (2012),^[2] considered pragmatics the study of the practical use of signs mediating human activities. One must, therefore, agree with Pelc (2012: 6), according to whom the concept of semiotics as a discipline that studies cognition and communication is “pragmatically tinged,” especially as a sign is always “intended for someone.” Pelc meant thereby the signs that are signals “aimed at someone, sometimes its sender, triggering experiences in this someone – and thus performing pragmatic functions of a twofold nature: the expressive and the emotive” (2012: 6).

1.2 Linguistic pragmatics as a study of performative acts in communication

The proponents of linguistic pragmatics, who are interested in verbal discourse from the viewpoint of intentional expression of meaning and action taken in actual situations, especially John L. Austin, Herbert Paul Grice, and John Rogers Searle, pointed out the need to investigate verbal utterances as conveying not only complex meanings but also the aims and intentions of communication participants. They devoted their attention to studying everyday language use, believing that language speakers make vocabulary choices depending on situations, society, culture, and traditions that determine and limit the meanings of words they are saying at a particular moment.

In particular, pragmatics detects the meaning of verbal utterances in social and cultural contexts. Its main conceptual tools are notions such as speech acts, conversational implicature, presupposition, etc., implying that the function of verbal utterances is to accomplish appropriate actions. To start with, it was Austin who, in How to do things with words (1962), spoke in favor of investigating threefold actions that the individual speaker performs simultaneously through a speech act.

Austin argued that through an utterance, the speaker performs a locutionary act (when they are saying something meaningful, namely, producing words evocative of specific meanings which, consisting of the sounds of a language, are related to each other through the rules of grammar). According to social conventions, the individual, in Austin’s view, “does” something “with words”; actually, the individual performs an illocutionary act when expressing an apology, account, admonishment, advice, accusation, directive, promise, request, etc. If their utterance influences the feelings and behavior of the addressee, it has an illocutionary force; that is, it causes intended effects (goals). In such a case, the particular utterance or expression produced by the speaker, as a perlocutionary act, has consequences for the listener.

Subsequently, Searle, the author of Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language (1969), spoke in favor of studying speaking as an activity through which individuals perform illocutionary acts by analyzing these acts in terms of their structure and function. Thus, he submitted a postulate to describe language as “a rule-governed form of behavior” (Searle 1969: 17).

Speech acts, such as requesting, asserting, asking questions, thanking, advising, warning, greeting, and congratulating, are performed according to rules, which Searle (1969: 57–71, especially 66–67) defines and formulates, assuming in so doing that they are deducible from the conditions accompanying respective communicative events. Most importantly, for Searle, illocutionary act rules are constitutive rules, depending, nevertheless, on social conventions, allowing the researcher to (1) state what the speech act is about (propositional content rules), (2) enumerate the indispensable prerequisites for the speech act (preparatory condition rules), (3) assess whether the individual performs the speech act sincerely or not (sincerity condition rules), and (4) identify the type of the particular illocutionary act (essential condition rules).

Pondering the relationship between language and society (as expressed in the question “How many ways of using language are there?”), Searle (1976: 1) elaborated a typology of illocutionary acts. He distinguished between direct speech acts (the function of which unambiguously results from their structure) and indirect speech acts (in which the sentence type in some way matches up with the illocutionary force it expresses). In his belief, there is considerable variation among illocutionary acts because of the differences (1) in the point (or purpose) of the act, (2) in the direction of fit between words and the world, (3) in the psychological states they express, (4) in the force with which the illocutionary point is presented, (5) in the status/position of the speaker and hearer (related, nevertheless, to the illocutionary force of the utterance), (6) in the way the utterance bears upon the interests of the speaker and hearer, (7) in relations to the rest of the discourse, (8) in propositional content determined by illocutionary force-indicating devices, (9) between those acts that must always be speech acts and those that can be, but need not be, performed as speech acts, (10) between those acts that require extralinguistic institutions for their performance and those that do not, (11) between those acts where the corresponding illocutionary verb has a performative use and those where it does not, and (12) in the style of performance of the illocutionary act. But what representatives of pragmatics should deal with are, according to Searle (1976: 10–14), the following speech acts, expressing, nevertheless, different intentions of language speakers as viewed in sociocultural terms: (1) representatives (asserting, reporting, stating, concluding, deducing, describing, for example), (2) directives (requesting, asking, ordering, commanding, begging, pleading, praying, defying, and challenging), (3) commissives (promising, threatening, offering, pledging), (4) expressives (thanking, congratulating, apologizing, condoling, deploring, welcoming), and (5) declarations (appointing, nominating, marrying, christening, excommunicating, declaring war, resigning).

In turn, Grice (1975), having introduced the concept of the cooperative principle in his theory of conversational implicature, supposed that the individual, when hearing an indirect speech act in a conversation, (should) react(s) to it adequately. It is because their responses to the utterances of other communication participants are guided by certain expectations, which Grice defined as conversational maxims that, as he claimed, should be mutually shared by the communicators. This way, individuals who communicate can, at least partially, avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations, which often stem from the ignorance of social conventions and communication rules. Of course, one must note on the margin of Grice’s argumentation that any conversation can only run following the cooperative principle and the four maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner when the individuals have appropriate experience in social communication, and additionally are willing to show their goodwill.

In any case, Grice was most convinced that individuals as interactants should always make their “conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice 1975: 45). Specifically, they are obliged, in Grice’s conviction, to follow, and they usually do follow, the maxims of (1) quantity (while making their contributions “as informative as is required,” but not making their contributions “more informative than is required”), (2) quality (while making their “contribution one that is true,” that is, neither saying what they consider false nor saying that for which they “lack adequate evidence,” (3) relation (while saying only what is relevant), and (4) manner (being perspicuous, especially while avoiding obscurity of expression and ambiguity, as well as being brief, especially while avoiding unnecessary prolixity, as well as being orderly) (cf. Grice 1975: 45–47). Conversational maxims are sometimes violated or flouted. As such, they can be acknowledged as useful for discerning various nonliteral meanings communicated through indirect speech acts; thus, they help clarify how languages function as means of communication, depending on the intentions of their speakers.

Grice’s concept of the conversational implicature indicates his original approach to meaning in communication. It refers to utterances expressing the intentions of the speakers who produce them, breaking away from the rules of conversation. Grice’s (1975: 57–58) merit was noticing that conversational implicatures are, as a matter of fact, cancellable, nondetachable, calculable, nonconventional, and indeterminate. Respectively, it follows, from the principle of cooperation, that the conversational implicature can be canceled by the speaker himself or herself or by the context/situation.

Moreover, the same information cannot be communicated without a particular implicature. Implicatures are derivable from inferences based on conversational maxims. Implicatures are not part of the meaning of an utterance. Of course, implicatures have alternative interpretations. One could say that implicatures derive from complex reasoning, including relevant aspects of contexts and situations, based on the knowledge and beliefs of the speakers about themselves and others.

What should be emphasized, alluding to Grice, is that the general principles of communication, such as the cooperative principle and conversational maxims, govern inferential processes of humans that are, according to him, at best culturally determined. However, in this respect, not all researchers agree. For example, in response to Grice’s ideas, Sperber and Wilson (1995 [1986]) proposed considering the communicative principle of relevance, believing that communicating individuals make pragmatic interpretations due to their natural ability. This ability is, in their view, not culture-specific but rather universal, especially as, as they believe, communication is a prerequisite of cognition. It is a natural thing for humans, as interlocutors are inclined to expect any communication input, including verbal, to be relevant and noteworthy in a given context.

Furthermore, one has to point out that, according to Sperber and Wilson (1995 [1986]: 50–64), information is picked up in communication on two layers, in their words, the layers of ostension and inference. Hence, following Sperber and Wilson, there are also two reasons for communicating (verbally) and, at the same time, for viewing (verbal) communication as intentional. That is to say, humans communicate, firstly “to convey a wider range of information” (especially through a direct expression of one’s informative intention), and, secondly, “to modify and extend the mutual cognitive environment” they share with one another” (cf. 1995 [1986]: 64).

Ultimately, one should conclude, in keeping with Sperber and Wilson (1995 [1986]: 116–117), that human inferential abilities, the result of the natural evolution of the species, are a property that all people share in common. Their conclusion may even imply that “of the assumptions which come most spontaneously to a human mind, those that are true are more likely to be relevant than those that are false, so that when relevance is achieved it provides generally valid retroactive strengthening” (cf. 1995 [1986]: 117).

In any case, for the purposes of pragmatics, it is worthwhile to assume that communicating individuals, being creative language speakers, share even the nonliteral sense of speech acts while making inferences based on respective principles. At the same time, it is clear that individuals who also know how to structure their messages to express their intentions and purposes are also able to guess the intentions of others. In addition, the supposition is reasonable that the speakers of a given language usually know how to achieve their goals and objectives, how to behave appropriately, and how to become effective in variable settings of communication. And finally, as communicators, they are to be considered as being capable of perceiving sequences of interactions as integral wholes and engaging in them and even creating them jointly when taking into account the requirements of their culture and the particular situation.

1.3 Interpersonal rhetoric in the study of everyday conversations

Interpersonal rhetoric, proposed by Geoffrey Leech, a sociolinguistically oriented representative of English linguistics who studied the sociocultural conditions of human communication in situational embeddings, falls under the scope of linguistic pragmatics. Mainly influenced by Austin, Searle, and Grice, Leech, for whom pragmatics was a domain of rhetoric, clearly supported the study of language in interpersonal communication. In his Principles of pragmatics (1990 [1983]), Leech argued that there is a need to investigate how the principles of language use operate in different cultures and in different communicative situations, especially regarding linguistic diversity in the world.

Contrasting interpersonal rhetoric with textual rhetoric, which, according to him, deals with utterances from the viewpoint of their formal organization, Leech (1990 [1983]: 15) stressed the importance of the concept of speech situation, distinguishing its elements, especially such elements as addresser and addressee, context, goals, illocutionary act, and utterance. He argued that the task of (interpersonal) rhetoric should be to explain the meaning(s) of verbal utterances in given speech situations.

The topics of interpersonal rhetoric, focusing on various linguistic expressions of politeness, including the manifestations of the willingness to maintain one’s own face and the face of the interlocutor in communication, indicate that it is a domain of study that mostly brings to light the cultural and social aspect of language use. One should note that politeness, which implies being well-mannered, courteous, and respectful, is, following Brown (2015: 326), ubiquitous in language use because it requires that people, behaving less straightforwardly, avoid speaking directly, for example, when they take into account the feelings of their interlocutors, their social status, and social relations, in general. Thus, one has to agree with Brown that politeness is “probably the most pervasive source of indirectness,” as there are reasons behind it “for not saying exactly what one means” which make people “frame their communicative intentions in formulating their utterances” in specific ways (cf. 2015: 326).

Accordingly, such authors as Leech (1990 [1983], 2014) and Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987 approached politeness in language use in terms of sets of communicative strategies the speakers apply to establish and maintain friendly relations with one another. In the view of Leech (1990 [1983]), who maintained that universal rules for the expression of politeness did not exist, researchers working in the domain of interpersonal rhetoric should analyze direct and indirect as well as conventional and nonconventional ways of expressing politeness across languages and cultures. In short, reformulating Grice’s cooperative principle and conversational maxims, Leech (1990 [1983]: 81) proposed that communication partners should follow the politeness principle, that is, they should minimize the expression of impolite beliefs while at the same time maximizing the expression of polite beliefs. Moreover, they should observe at least ten maxims that advise them to behave politely.

To deal with linguistic strategies of polite or impolite behavior, one should be aware, in Leech’s (1990 [1983]: 104–139) opinion, of its kinds and degrees determined by different situations in social/everyday life. Furthermore, one has to recognize with which illocutionary aims the interlocutors do perform speech acts when they are expressing politeness or impoliteness.

Speech acts, such as (1) ordering, asking, demanding, begging, etc., that clash with the social goal, may have, according to Leech (1990 [1983]: 104–105 and 2014: 89–90), competitive goals, (2) offering, inviting, greeting thanking, congratulating, etc., coinciding with the social goal, may have convivial goals, (3) asserting, reporting, announcing, instructing, etc., being indifferent to the social goal, may have collaborative goals, or (4) threatening, accusing, cursing, reprimanding, etc., conflicting with the social goal, may have conflictive goals. Among these speech acts, inquisitive researchers can find examples of positive or negative politeness (viz., pos-politeness and neg-politeness), expressing predominantly competitive and convivial illocutions, which constitutes the subject matter of interpersonal rhetoric, in Leech’s belief.

As components of the politeness principle, Leech listed in his book The pragmatics of politeness (2014) a tabular enumeration of maxims that advise courteous and respectful behavior. Associating them with the respective speech acts, Leech (2014: 91) claimed that: (1) the use of the maxim of generosity, recommending the speakers to give a high value to the wants of the others, takes place in commissives; (2) the use of the maxim of tact, recommending them to give a low value to self’s wants, takes place in directives; (3) the maxim of approbation, recommending them to give a high value to the qualities of others, takes place in compliments; (4) the use of the maxim of modesty, recommending them to give a low value to their qualities, takes place in the speech acts of self-devaluation; (5) the use of the maxim of obligation of the speakers to others, recommending them to give a high value to their obligation to others, takes place in the acts apologizing and thanking; (6) the use of the maxim of obligation of others to the speaker, recommending to give a low value to the obligation of others to the speaker, takes place in their responses to thanks and apologies; (7) the use of the maxim of agreement, recommending the speakers to give a high value to the opinions of others, takes place in the acts agreeing and disagreeing; (8) the use of the maxim of opinion reticence, recommending the speakers to give a low value to their own opinions, takes place in the acts of giving opinions; (9) the use the maxim of sympathy, recommending the speaker to give a high value to the feelings of others, takes place in congratulating and commiserating, and (10) the use of the maxim of feeling reticence, recommending the speakers to give a low value to their own feelings, takes place in the acts of suppressing feelings. The investigative model of linguistic politeness developed by Leech found practical application in the chapter “Politeness and impoliteness in the use of English” of his book published in 2014. Namely, Leech (2014: 115–243) discussed apologies and requests, two types of speech events, from the point of view of historical aspects of English to show social conditions of polite and impolite speech acts.

In interpersonal rhetoric as a pragmatic theory of politeness, one uses the concept of face to refer to the spontaneous, natural attempts of the communicating individual to save their feelings and the feelings of their interlocutors through acts of identification with their emotional experiences. As such, Erving Goffman (1922–1982), an American sociologist, in his essay “On face-work. An analysis of ritual elements in social interaction,” published in his book Interaction ritual (1967), defined “face” as “an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes – albeit an image that others may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion by making a good showing for himself” (1967: 5). For Goffman, the face is a positive public image that the individual, especially when performing their social roles, seeks to establish in interactions with others.

1.4 The principles of politeness among the universals of language use

Issues of politeness in human interactions were investigated by researchers working in the domain of interpersonal rhetoric, especially by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson. In their article “Universals in language usage” (1978) and their book Politeness (1987), they appreciated the concept of face as helpful in analyzing face-threatening and face-enhancing speech acts. For Brown and Levinson (1987: 61–65), each human individual desires not only to behave unimpeded by others but also to be accepted by others. Moreover, all human beings can balance ways of expression to save their face and the face of their interlocutors, which is, in fact, indispensable when they communicate to achieve their goals. Brown and Levinson (1987: 61) describe these properties of competent adults as representatives of society on the premise that their face, which is “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself,” has two aspects. These are (1) the negative face, viz., “the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction of action and freedom from imposition (negative face)” and (2) “the positive self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants.” In Brown and Levinson’s (1987: 61) view, human beings also have “rational capacities, in particular consistent modes of reasoning from ends to the means that will achieve those ends.” According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 61), one must expect, however, that “while the content of face will differ in different cultures (what the exact limits are to personal territories, and what the publicly relevant content of personality consists in), we are assuming that the mutual knowledge of members’ public self-image or face, and the social necessity to orient oneself to in interaction, are universal” (cf. 1987: 61–62). Unlike in earlier theories of language politeness, for Brown and Levinson being polite does not exclusively mean respecting the rights of another person or other people. Precisely, politeness should also protect the speakers themselves, which, in pragmatic terms, is protecting their positive face.

The choice of conversational strategies helpful in communicating politely with one another is determined by three pragmatic factors listed by Brown and Levinson (1987: 74), namely (1) the social distance between speaker and hearer, (2) the relative power of the speaker and hearer, and (3) the absolute ranking of impositions in the particular culture. Each speech act can potentially threaten the face of the speaker (for example, a request in the case of refusal). Although the model of politeness in everyday conversation proposed by Brown and Levinson seems universal, the rules and strategies of politeness it allows an analysis of are always culture-specific. In different cultures, keeping distance, (emphatic) expression of group membership, commitment, and warmth (cordiality) are considered more or less polite.

Brown and Levinson (1987: 65–71) propose a typology of face-threatening acts and strategies as a starting point for any linguistic analysis of politeness. They differentiate between actions by the individual that threaten (1) the negative face of their interlocutors, such as orders, requests, suggestions, advice, remindings, threats, warnings, dares, offers and promises (in some circumstances), compliments, expressions of envy or admiration (in some circumstances), expressions of strong (negative) emotions toward hearer, etc., on the one hand, and, on the other, actions by others that threaten (2) the positive face of their interlocutors, such as expressions of disapproval, criticism, contempt, ridicule, complaints, reprimands, accusations, insults, contradictions or disagreement, challenges, expressions of violent (out-of-control) emotions, irrelevance, mention of taboo topics, including those that are inappropriate in the context, bringing of bad news about the hearer, raising of dangerously emotional or divisive topics, blatant noncooperation in an activity, use of address terms and other status-marked identifications in initial encounters, etc. Moreover, there are actions by the individual which threaten (3) their negative face, such as expressing thanks, acceptance, excuses, acceptance of offers, responses to hearer’s faux pas, unwilling promises and offers, etc., and those that threaten (4) their positive face, such as apologies, acceptance of a compliment, breakdown of physical control over body, bodily leakage, stumbling or falling down, self-humiliation, shuffling or cowering, acting stupidly, self-contradiction, confessions, admissions of guilt or responsibility, emotion leakage, non-control of laughter or tears, etc. (regarding positive and negative politeness, see Brown and Levinson 1987: 70.)

It is worth noting that Brown and Levinson (1987: 101–227) discuss the strategies of both positive and negative politeness used not only in English but also in such languages as Tzeltal, a Mayan language spoken in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and Tamil, a Dravidian language spoken in India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore. Approaching human interaction, the research of Brown and Levinson, according to their intention, accounts “for the pan-cultural interpretability of politeness phenomena, broadly defined” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 283).

Concluding that politeness has two main aspects, namely, (polite) friendliness and (polite) formality, Brown and Levinson state that “interactional systematics” is mostly based “on universal principles” (1987: 283). However, as they state, “the application of the principles differs systematically across cultures, and within cultures across subcultures, categories and groups” (Brown and Levinson 1987: 283). What is more, in Brown and Levinson’s view, “categories of egos distribute these universally based strategies across different categories of alters” during communicative interactions, where the politeness principles constitute “the building blocks, out of which diverse and distinct social relations are constructed” (1987: 283).

By way of summarizing the achievements of studies of politeness, one should note, referring to Brown (2015: 326–327), that aspects of kindness and courtesy can be analyzed either in terms of social rules, or adherence to an expanded set of conversational and/or politeness maxims (as formulated by Grice and Leech), or as a strategic concern for “face.” In the first case, researchers pay attention to language use, mostly involving conventional expressions of relatively unchangeable social categories. In the second case, they are interested in “codified social rules for minimizing friction between interactors” in the belief that “deviations from expected levels or forms of politeness carry a message.” In the third case, researchers assume that politeness is “an aspect of interpersonal ritual, central to public order,” while “any interactional act with a social-relational dimension is inherently face-threatening and needs to be modified by appropriate forms of politeness.” However, as Brown argues, it is only the last approach, which conceives of politeness as the strategic maintenance of face, that allows the analysis of similarities in polite expressions across languages and cultures and which, in her opinion, places it in the context of reflections on the nature of human cooperation and its evolutionary origins (Brown 2015: 326–327).

2.1 On the levels of subjective meanings and interpretations in speech acts

Social pragmatics and interpersonal rhetoric lack effective methods for extracting subjective meanings from verbal utterances. Yet, W. Barnett Pearce and Vernon E. Cronen should be brought here to the reader’s attention as far as they have partly filled the need for terminological tools for interpreting meanings at various levels in their work entitled Communication, action, and meaning: making social worlds (1980), falling, nevertheless, within the paradigm of sociological research.

Regarding Austin’s and Searle’s theories of speech acts, which formulate the rules governing human social behavior, Pearce and Cronen (1980) state that communicative processes operate according to behavioral patterns imposed by societies on their members. Therefore, one usually expects that communicators should follow certain norms and adjust to certain standards. Pearce and Cronen (1980: 20–21), who propose a theory of meaning management in communication, make the following assumptions. Firstly, since there are always interdependences between social reality and communication, the socially imposed criteria of normality in human behavior are rather rigorous. Secondly, since humans communicate and societies function on the principle of recursiveness, communicating individuals as subjective agents have to deal with “the trickiness of recursivity,” and at the same time, they have to assume “responsibility for their own meanings” (Pearce and Cronen 1980: 20). Thirdly, as culture-dependent participants in communication, individuals function as systems of “rules for meaning and action.” Fourthly, since the reality in which individuals communicate is what they actually “believe and believe that other people believe,” they undoubtedly act to some degree as subjective beings, that is, independently of society (Pearce and Cronen 1980: 21). Fifthly, as communicating individuals jointly create and cope with this (social) reality, two or more such “intrapersonal rule systems produce an interpersonal rule system that exerts logical force controlling and constraining various lines of sequential action” (Pearce and Cronen 1980: 21). Individuals are interchangeably entangled in various systems at the interpersonal level, each of which is governed by “its own logic of meaning and order”; therefore, they have to possess communication competence, allowing them “to control the extent of one’s enmeshment in those systems.” Sixthly, since communication consists “of conjoint behavior by two or more persons functioning within interpersonal rule systems,” it is challenging for interlocutors, especially as conjoint behavior “cannot be fully known or controlled by any of the individuals involved.” Finally, since social realities are usually disordered, “specific forms of the disorder have important implications for personal and interpersonal developments” (Pearce and Cronen 1980: 21). Pearce and Cronen (1980: 99) note that human individuals are complex psychological-social beings who have “the power to act in ways ranging from something very like a pure agent to something very like a pure automaton.”

Conclusions from respective analyses of several conversations, especially of indirect speech acts, authorize Pearce and Cronen to put forward a postulate to search for the subjectively communicated meaning(s) at multiple levels. According to them, when asked about something, people make seemingly unrelated responses that they expect the asker to hear at a particular moment rather than provide the requested exact information. It follows that the interpretation of indirect responses is possible only in contexts where messages mean something other than what the words they consist of usually denote.

What Pearce and Cronen (1980: 129–130) argue is that, in interactional situations, human individuals have to manage meaning on at least six different levels, such as the levels of (1) content, (2) speech acts, (3) contracts, (4) episodes, (5) life scripts, and (6) archetypes. In truth, this implies that if one analyzes verbal utterances in interpersonal communication, it is not enough to deal with meanings from the viewpoints of semantics and (interpersonal) pragmatics. In fact, one must remember that the same word may mean different things in the extralinguistic reality to different people. As Pearce and Cronen believe, communicators cope with meanings at various levels, which correspond to the levels in the processes of abstracting that, as such, facilitate human thinking at all.

At this point, one has to stress that the view regarding the levels of meaning formation advocated by Pearce and Cronen seems to be right in the light of general semantics, the theory of language as a representation of reality developed by Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) especially in his book Science and sanity (1933). Thus, for example, Hayakawa (1952: 167–170), one of the promoters of Korzybski’s teachings – the aim of which was to improve the habits of human thinking and, accordingly, communicating with the environment – pointedly claimed that the same word could have different meanings at different levels of abstraction. In particular, it may (1) stand for an object of direct experience (viz., direct perception) or (2) stand for all objects having common characteristics (more precisely, for characteristics which people may abstract from objects belonging to a class of objects), (3) refer to an object as part of a broader category or (4) refer to the value(s) the object has to a person/different persons, and the like. Hence, to deal with the meanings of words in conversational communication, one must be aware that individuals potentially operate the same words but are moving on different levels of abstraction. Presuming that human individuals differ in the number of levels at which they communicate meanings, Pearce and Cronen (1980: 129–136) formulate criteria that could be applied by researchers aiming to go beyond the semantic and pragmatic senses of verbal utterances.

Thus, according to Pearce and Cronen,^[3] at the first level of content, communicating individuals engage in the referential processes by which they categorize, organize, and grasp the world as they perceive it. Already at this first level, individuals respond not so much to their environment but rather to the mental representations they have of it, which are always subjective and unique. As Pearce and Cronen stress, the effects of perception, a complex creative (also interpretative) process, are partly dependent on the properties of the perceiving organisms.

In turn, operating at the second level of speech acts, individuals tend to ascribe intentions to the words they and their interlocutors utter in concrete situations. To be exact, they make interpretations of verbal utterances believing that they express advice, compliments, simple information, insults, promises, threats, and so forth. However, in Pearce and Cronen’s opinion, numerous studies clearly show that when asked to label speech acts according to the intentions expressed by the speaker and understood by the addressee, other people usually interpret them in terms of communicative goals and aims but always based on their own goals and aims (that is, in a subjective way). Undoubtedly, the interpretation of meaning must go beyond the pure analysis of speech acts.

The management of meaning in communication may also occur at the third level of contracts, because interlocutors tend to define their relationships with others in terms of a number of attributes. In the reasoning of Pearce and Cronen, when communicating with one another, people act as if they were making contracts and, accordingly, see their relationships with other people in terms of agreements to which they assign certain attributes (features) (just as if these relationships were things). All interpersonal relations are, in this view, contracts of two kinds: either officially recognized by jurisprudence and society and, as such, legally binding (for example, a marriage) or formally written and notarized and implicit based on customary law (for example, common law marriage). Agreements and commitments between friends and adversaries or participants in social situations, including transient agreements about long-lasting and temporary values and enduring and occasional attitudes toward self, others, events, situations, etc., are, in this approach, considered contracts individuals make.

According to Pearce and Cronen, the management of meaning in communication takes place because of and for the sake of the interpersonal contracts in question. One has thus to agree that subjective meanings people ascribe to words at the level of contracts may depend on (1) how they identify differences between themselves and others, which they usually view as social boundaries (describable, nevertheless, in terms of inclusiveness, exclusiveness, distance, proximity, permeability, rigidity, enmeshment, etc.), (2) repertoires they use as participants of events legitimate within respective contracts, (3) social comparisons people make when they evaluate social relations and alternative contracts, and (4) how they identify themselves as belonging to and being responsible for a particular group or groups (enmeshments within the various systems).

At the fourth level, the level of episodes, communication participants, when engaging in routine communicative events, which are for them certain wholes, change their perspective concerning the uttered words. Episodes, types of discourse governed by specific rules of speech and nonverbal behavior, are, in Pearce and Cronen’s opinion, often distinguished by clearly recognizable opening or closing sequences. As distinct kinds of communication, episodes, running according to a pattern, have a particular meaning. The meaning of a speech act as part of an episode is contextualized hierarchically and temporally. The meaning of a speech act, which is, in fact, part of an episode, is contextualized hierarchically and temporally. As such, it depends on and simultaneously determines the meaning of the preceding and subsequent acts. As Pearce and Cronen further claim, it is fairly easy to sensitize the individual to episodic meanings. That is because interpersonal communicators easily distinguish, for example, between having coffee with one person and having dinner with another person, or are aware of having different obligations when they are asked what they were doing in the evening during a chat with friends and an interrogation in the courtroom.

Focusing on episodic meaning, Pearce and Cronen admit that this concept found application in anthropology, sociology, (social) psychology, sociolinguistics, and other domains of study. They refer, for example, to Canadian-born psychiatrist Eric Berne, for whom the meaning of the communicative strategy – which he described in 1964, calling it, however, a game, as the individual plays it in a communicative transaction – is a function of its position in a sequence of events through which the individuals attempt to reach the intended goal.

In this context, Pearce and Cronen are aware that episodes (or discourse stages, sequences of which conversations consist) are important units distinguished for the purposes of analyses of communicative events in comparative sociolinguistic studies. As Gumperz (1972: 17–18), a pioneer in the ethnography of communication, claimed, even expectations regarding sequencing may affect the interpretation of the social significance of communicative acts or messages. Incidentally, it must be mentioned that episodes are considered semantic units in the analysis of conversation and discourse analysis, which, as van Dijk (1981: 178) demonstrates, have psychological relevance in the cognitive processing of discourse as well. At any rate, Pearce and Cronen suppose that if an observer/researcher knows what episodes are typical of the various individuals in a group and to what extent they are related to those episodes, they can not only describe, but also predict their behavior.

At the fifth level, individuals generate meanings depending on the situations and events they anticipate should take place in their life, and thus on their private life scripts. The term “life script,” defined by Berne (1964), suggests that trains of interactive situations in which individuals participate, being consistent with their sense of the self, plans for the future, aspirations, desires, etc., are decisive for individual interpretations of meanings. Hence, individuals who interact with other individuals, participating in sequences of scenes with diverse content and structure, which are individual repertoires of episodes, are guided by their subjective meanings, which may substantially differ from one another. Pearce and Cronen believe that, depending on their life scripts, people evaluate some episodes in which they take part positively (that is, as good for them) and others negatively (that is, as bad for them).

Finally, Pearce and Cronen recognize human individuals as operating at the sixth and highest level of meaning management, while calling it the level of archetypes in allusion to Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychologist. This is, namely, the level of the collective unconscious that forms part of the human psyche as opposed to the personal unconscious, arising as such due to the subjective experiences of the individual. For Jung (see, for example, : 42–43), archetypes are constituents of the collective unconscious, to the intense impact of which man is subjected mainly at certain stages of human life or in certain situations.

Alluding to the Jungian concept, Pearce and Cronen notice that it is unclear what form the archetypes can take. However, they do not doubt that the way humans punctuate and communicate the sensory inputs from their experiences is most probably independent – at least to some extent – of culture, situation, and personality. Without describing or defining what archetypes are, Pearce and Cronen (1980: 138) claim that, firstly, “meanings are imposed on the stream of experience rather than being derived from it,” secondly, “meanings require comparable framing if they are to be understood well enough for coordinative communication to occur,” and, thirdly, “coordinative communication is observed to occur even – with difficulty – across centuries and cultures.”

Pearce and Cronen maintain that, independently of their cultures, humans who “share a common physiology and live in a world with common physical properties” give similar meanings to recurrent experiences, such as “birth, maturation, death, joy and agony, hope and despair” (1980: 138). Since the neurological and perceptual structure of all humans is in principle the same, one has to be aware, following the belief of Pearce and Cronen, when dealing with meanings of the symbols, which are of archetypal significance at the levels both of consciousness and unconsciousness.

In the context of speech acts theory and practice, it is worth realizing that, by acting purposefully through words at various levels, the participants of communicative events display communicative competence of different kinds. Moreover, they may be at different levels of competence in different situational settings. As to the types of communicative competence, Pearce and Cronen (1980: 210–212) characterize minimally, satisfactorily, and optimally competent persons. They admit that it is difficult to clearly say which competence each person features when they communicate in dyads and (small) groups, always constituting, in fact, specific, unique systems.

Thus, analyzing speech acts as authentic communication events, one has to consider that it is the minimally competent communicating individuals who know the rules indispensable for routine performance and generally accept them without ever forming new rules. Minimally competent persons may sometimes misunderstand the other(s); they do not fully control their behavior, which, as such, sometimes depends on unpredictable circumstances and incidents in communication. Otherwise, satisfactorily competent individuals adjust their behavior to the social norms and expectations. They seek and internalize the rules of communication to be able to fit them to a particular situation and even to make new rules. Optimally competent individuals, in turn, can view communicative events as if from the outside and realize that there are alternatives to the rules they (and other people) apply.

Therefore, optimally competent and creative agents in communicative events anticipate the consequences that may result from the use of some rules. They predict what others will say and do, perceive ambiguities and contradictions between the rules, and often experiment with new strategies without causing misunderstanding or disorientation. For example, optimally competent individuals sometimes deliberately choose between understanding or misunderstanding to solve problems or complete tasks. Indeed, the different kinds and degrees of communicative competence make the interpretation of the intentions of communication participants and, accordingly, their subjective meanings difficult or impossible for researchers.

As seems, practitioners of pragmatic-oriented disciplines usually do not distinguish between communicative behaviors resulting from a lack of competence and the ability to experiment without creating confusion. This means, to conclude from the argument of Pearce and Cronen, that competence can be assessed only according to the assumable rules existing within the group at the transpersonal level. For the discussed authors, the concept of communicative competence, applied in the study of verbal performances, especially in the way that speech acts as units of analysis, is misleading. It still allows, at least partially, the researchers of pragmatics to realize the changeable nature of the human selves who are able to communicate their intricate meanings at different levels.

2.2 Axioms of interpersonal communication as tenets of subjective motivation for meaningful behavior

With the development of social pragmatics and interpersonal rhetoric, extensive studies on human communication have taken place as a separate research direction. These studies have contributed to clarifying the dependencies between human nature and human behavior in communicational contexts. Worth mentioning here, for example, is a representative of the philosophical approach to information and communication interested in humans and their mental conditions, Gregory Bateson, who expressed in his own words every confidence that “perception determines values” so that, “as we see things, so we act” (1987 [1951]: 177). As a dictum referring to the essence of research in the domain of interpersonal communication, one might take the statement of Gibb (1975 [1961]: 123), namely, that “[o]ne way to understand communication is to view it as a people process rather than as a language process.” Gibb’s observation implies that it is essential to be aware of the properties of human individuals, who are fundamental to the way they communicate their meanings to each other and, as such, responsible for the interpersonal relationships they form.

Parallel to when the philosophers of language formulated the principles and maxims of linguistic pragmatics and interpersonal rhetoric, theoreticians and practitioners of communication studies searched for the principles governing human verbal and nonverbal behavior. Taking advantage of knowledge from various subdisciplines of psychology and other disciplines dealing with behavior and the cognitive processes of human individuals embedded in society and culture, they acknowledged communication to be a dynamic process, especially of an interactive nature, determined primarily by the relationship between the communicators.

Thus, especially the axioms of interpersonal communication set forth by Paul Watzlawick, Janet Beavin Bavelas, and Don J. Jackson from the so-called School of Palo Alto (located in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA), independently of the pragmatists in the philosophy of language, deserve to be mentioned here. Watzlawick et al. (1967: 48–71), who used real examples of human communicative behaviors, proved the validity of five communication principles. These are the impossibility of not communicating, the contentment and relationship levels of communication (that is, the metacommunication function of its relationship aspect above its content aspect), the punctuation of the sequences of events, digital and analogic communication, and symmetricity and complementarity interaction.

To put it more exactly, Watzlawick and his collaborators’ (1967: 48–71) tenets of communication say that (1) it is impossible not to communicate (so that individuals, aware of each other, are practically constantly responding to each other, and even the lack of response itself always communicates something); (2) communication has two aspects, namely, the content and the relationship (its purpose is only reciprocally informing but also confirmation, rejection, or disconfirmation of self-definitions of its participants); (3) the punctuation (organization) of sequences of behaviors into meaningful groups of messages by communication participants independently of one another significantly determines the nature of the relationship between them; (4) human communication encompasses both digital messages (dealing with discrete elements, as in the case of verbal communication) and analogic messages (forming continuous systems, as in the case of nonverbal communication); and (5) communication interactions are either symmetrical or complementary; therefore, within the same interaction, behaviors based upon both the equality (parity) and differences between the partners frequently alternate.

What is essential in Watzlawick and his collaborators’ approach to communication is the concept of the (interpersonal) relationship as definitely crucial to understanding messages mutually sent in interpersonal encounters by their participants. However, one should note that the researchers from the School of Palo Alto were interested in the subjective motivations for the specific communicative behaviors of the interlocutors rather than the meanings communicated by them.

Referring to the achievements of psychologically oriented communication studies, one becomes aware that the investigative domain of interpersonal rhetoric would comprise not only the norms of interaction operating in given societies, in particular, and, in general, the knowledge about the nature of human communication. As investigative objects, the various types and aspects of the relationship between communicators – as characterized, for example, by Michael Burgoon and Michael Ruffner in their manual Human communication (1978) – might also be of importance. These include, for example, interpersonal attraction, intimacy, partnership, cooperation, competition (emulation), combat, and the like.

3.1 On universal properties of human individuals as interacting selves

Moving on to the human self as a communicator, it is indispensable to focus on some aspects and constituents of interpersonal communication, such as consciousness and subconsciousness, attention and perception, memory and imagination, and volition. To specify the interactional properties of the human self as a constellation of cognitive–emotional–motivational processes, one must view the communicating individual as being aware of distinguishing between the self and non-self. Since self-awareness cannot develop other than in a society and culture, it is a universal property of human individuals as selves. At the same time, one must keep in mind that human self-understanding and self-reflection always include a time dimension. Owing to John Locke (1632–1704), a British Enlightenment thinker who, among other things, examined the operation of the human mind, including consciousness and memory, researchers began to see humans as (1) existing “in a continued duration more than one instant,” (2) continuing for the future, and (3) extending themselves “beyond present existence to what is past” (Locke 1952 [1690]: 227). In Locke’s account, the human self is considered the repeated identification of oneself.

In psychology, the self, depicted, following James (1890), as consisting of the material, social, and spiritual selves, is, in the case of each individual, a general structure of self-awareness filled with specific contents. Its self-awareness is derived from personal experience and filtered through the structure of the language(s) the individual speaks, especially their native language. Regarding the correlation between the self and culture, it suffices to stress that, based on studies in psychology and anthropology, Markus and Kitayama (1991: 226–245) have distinguished two types of construals of the self, independent and interdependent, which are decisive for all its behavior. In keeping with Markus and Kitayama, one must say that individuals (with independent self-construals) in individualistic cultures tend to understand their selves as independent, bounded, separate, and individual entities. In contrast, individuals in collectivist cultures (with interdependent self-construals) perceive themselves as interconnected and interdependent entities. In both cases, the phenomenological distinction between the self and not-self implies the ability to assume alternative points of view or perspectives. At any rate, considering singularity and individuality essential features of the human self as a thinker, feeler, speaker, and agent, aware of its aspects as an observable object, one can presume that its interactional properties are determined by the powers of its (embodied) mind as a perceiving, experiencing, thinking, reasoning, conceiving, and imagining subject. In particular, these properties can be regarded as resulting from the self-awareness of this subject, related – to use the terms introduced to physiology by Sir Charles Sherrington in (1920 [1906]: 114) – to their interoceptive and exteroceptive sensitivities and also self-reflection.

It means that human subjectivity operates on a higher psychological level of consciousness thanks to (1) interoception (the individual’s sense of the physiological functioning of their body, viz., a sense of physiological sensations) and (2) exteroception (their sensitivity to stimuli from the outside of their body), determining the patterns of experience and, as such, shaping patterns of behavior, including the patterns of the expression and emotional reactions to symptoms. As a uniquely human ability, human subjectivity is connected with introspection (the awareness of one’s own mental, sensory, bodily, cognitive, and emotional states, as thoughts and feelings, not less important than the awareness of the external world) and as such with the mechanisms of self-perception, self-observation, and self-correction (described, inter alia, by Bateson 1987 [1951]: 199–203).

Furthermore, the self-reflection of human individuals is interrelated with their capacity to interchangeably focus on themselves and the environment (that is, to be self-aware and aware of others and external events) and, accordingly, to make comparisons that involve evaluations. Thanks to this capacity, each individual can reflect on how they appear to others, that is, their “looking glass self,” as the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley termed it in his work Human nature and the social order (1902).

Similarly, an essential feature of the human self is its ability to have insights into its inner thoughts and feelings, and hence to be aware of its outward public image. In general, it causes the duality of its (the self’s) existence as the private self-consciousness, or private self (encompassing aspects of the self which are known to self), that contrasts with the public self-consciousness, or public self (encompassing aspects of the self which are known to others). Thus, human individuals possess the abilities of self-monitoring and self-control, self-esteem or self-evaluation, self-presentation, self-oriented behavior/action, etc., which significantly determine their social interactions. All the abilities in question are responsible for conceptualizing reality and oneself and thus for the development of the self-concept of the individual – as described in terms of the internal structure of their selves, for example, by cognitive linguist and philosopher Lakoff (1997), as related to human cognitive abilities. Being concerned with themselves allows humans as conceptual selves to participate in group life as dynamic personalities (summarized, inter alia, by Kenrick et al. 2002 [1999]: 72–149; Metts 2009). The self-monitoring abilities, for which human subjectivity is responsible, regulate the behavior of individuals, for example, those depending on their reactions to others or aspects of communicative situations. Therefore, considering introspection as a metacognitive ability of all human beings, one must distinguish between high self-monitoring individuals (who pay more attention to others whom they easily accommodate than to themselves) and low self-monitoring persons (who pay more attention to themselves, adjusting their behavior to internal factors, such as personal orientation, especially personal attitudes, values, and beliefs).

What has to be added, the most different protection mechanisms in which individuals view themselves and others in a way that enhances their positive attributes are aspects of evaluative social comparisons, as indicated by Festinger (1954). The source of dynamism of these individuals is also their ability to strategically present to others in communication their self-images. Deliberate self-presentation concerns not only physical appearance but also all the impressions individuals can make on their interlocutors to influence what they think of them, acting, as Goffman argued (in his book The presentation of self in everyday life, 1959), as if according to the theatrical roles provided for them in the script. As one might interpret Goffman’s views, the individual may expect to gain power, influence opinions, etc. while engaging in impression management, affirming or verifying their self-image, whether consciously or unconsciously, truthfully or misleadingly.

In turn, a number of correlated opinions referring to the properties of interacting selves should be generally or particularly brought to light. In the first instance, the strength of the beliefs of individuals in their competencies enabling them to accomplish specific actions or achieve intended goals that stimulate their communicative behavior, called self-efficacy by cognitive psychologist Bandura (1977), falls among the noteworthy properties of communicators. In the second, the ways awareness of the perceptions of others enable social comparison and self-esteem in situations where the individual feels self-discrepancy experiences and emotional difficulties as a consequence of inconsistencies in self-knowledge, viz., incompatible beliefs about oneself, as examined by Higgins (1989), appear to be relevant for researchers of situationally embedded social interactions.

Finally, it is appropriate to comment, in line with such social psychologists as Kenrick et al. (2002 [1999]: 78–82), that human individuals at ease engage in experiences that enhance their sense of the self, anticipating being positively evaluated and respected by others. Therefore, they tend to explain their success in terms of their abilities and merits while attributing failure to chance and misfortune as external factors. By contrast, they prefer to hear favorable opinions from others, whether correct or not. Attributing traits to oneself and others, human individuals may display a self-serving bias, especially as building false self-images usually leads to problems in communication. As self-image is decisive for behavior, individuals with high self-esteem have an advantage in communication over those with low self-esteem. The evaluative social comparison, triggering self-regulative mechanisms in the behavior of the individual, has cognitive and emotional aspects which are interrelated. In allusion to Kenrick et al. (2002 [1999]), it also seems suitable to add that self-knowledge usually evokes emotions such as guilt and shame, social anxiety and embarrassment, and pride. Likewise, these kinds of emotions that arise from the inferences people make about others’ evaluations of them, especially regarding their social acceptability, have been termed by Leary (2007: 329–132) as self-conscious emotions.

3.2 Nonverbal behaviors of culturally determined human interactants

Nonverbal communication behaviors, although to a large extent culturally determined, do not constitute elements of speech acts. Nevertheless, one must be aware that nonverbal clues significantly influence the meaning and interpretation of speech acts.

In response to the conceptual-methodological limitations of interpersonal rhetoric, one should be aware of the achievements of studies that take cultural contexts into account when considering the individual variations of meanings. To answer the question of what aspects of communication should or may still be included in the research on interpersonal interactions, one should touch on the proposal by Edward T. Hall in The silent language, first published in 1959. Hall (1990 [1959]: 50) anticipated that the future study of communications should require identifying the building blocks of culture (called the isolates of culture). Notably, Hall gave the term infraculture to behavior that “preceded culture but later became elaborated by humans into culture” (1990 [1959]: 60) as acquired through socialization.

For Hall (1990 [1959]: 60–81), infraculture includes systems of messages communicated at the biological level, such as interaction, association, subsistence, bisexuality, territoriality, temporality, learning, play, defense, and exploitation. Hall argued that cultural systems have their roots “in a biological activity widely shared with other advanced living forms” (1990 [1959]: 61) so that the behavior of human selves preceding their cultural behavior is always biologically conditioned. Hence, cultures and, as one could even assume, human selves as their representatives must be investigated from the viewpoint of other codes of communication (apart from language) that form systems containing isolated components building up more complex units. As distinguished by Hall, infracultural activity systems (i.e., primary message systems) are not only interaction, which has “its basis in the underlying irritability of all living substance.” According to him, the most elaborate form of interaction is “speech, which is reinforced by tone of voice and gesture” as signs that subconsciously signal and modify the meaning of verbal messages.

Hence, making reference to Hall, one cannot ignore the facts that behaviors of human selves, verbal and nonverbal, describable in terms of their infracultural activities, include systems of messages serving group members (1) to be organized for everyday purposes (association), (2) to develop occupations guaranteeing means necessary for survival from individual food habits to the economy of a country (subsistence), (3) to establish the mating systems of sexual reproduction and differentiation of sex roles (bisexuality), (4) to take, possess, use and defend a territory (living space) (territoriality), (5) to identify and set and perceive temporal relationships between events (temporality), (6) to develop both adaptive mechanisms and educational systems (learning and play), (7) to specialize protective mechanisms and techniques in warfare, religion, medicine, law enforcement, etc. (defense), and (8) to adjust their bodies to meet specialized conditions of their environments (exploitation, viz., use of materials). In line with Hall’s reasoning that culture is “a complex series of activities interrelated in many ways,” it could be also argued that human selves as culturally determined beings gifted with personal potentials are multifaceted. Their activity, with verbal and nonverbal aspects, should be thus described in terms of the primary message systems.

When considering how human selves process natural language(s), one should assume that the mechanisms of primary message systems accompany their meaning formation in communication. But, in addition, one must emphasize, for the task of linguistic pragmatics, that, in truth, communicating individuals are unable to and do not pinpoint through their utterances the exact meanings they intend to share. However, they make their point clearly enough to guide the interlocutor to what they mean. Thus, communicators leave out information they assume hearers can figure out for themselves. This view, which may be deduced, inter alia, from Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding (1977), a common work by AI researcher Roger C. Schank and social psychologist Robert Abelson, may imply that meanings come not so much from individual utterances performed in some situations in cultural contexts as even from sequences of utterances. Schank and Abelson demonstrate that just the story-level experience and knowledge (understanding) are crucial for meaning formation in interpersonal communication, which is equal to goal-oriented human behaviors.

As for nonverbal modes of communicating, their importance for understanding what is conveyed verbally began to be emphasized after they became the focus of study in the 1970s. In his book on body language, which was a summary of behaviorist research on nonverbal communication, Fast (1970: 2–3) stressed the importance of cultural and environmental differences for understanding unspoken body language. Searching for behavioral patterns in nonverbal communication (within the framework of kinesics), Fast (1970: 3) maintained that “[t]he average man, unschooled in cultural nuances of body language, often misinterprets what he sees.”

Slightly later, communication scholars managed to formulate the principles of nonverbal behavior. In this particular context, the academic book The interpersonal communication book (1976) by Joseph A. DeVito appears to be very useful. For DeVito (1976: 305–310), firstly, nonverbal communication always occurs in a context, secondly, nonverbal behavior in an interactional situation always communicates, something to someone, thirdly nonverbal behavior is highly believable, and, finally, nonverbal behavior is frequently metacommunicational. The very last statement says that this kind of behavior is an adjunct to verbal communication, which relates to other nonverbal, previous, or simultaneous behaviors.