Communication SYSTEM

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Communication (disambiguation).

Communication is commonly defined as "the imparting or interchange of thoughts, opinions, or

information by speech, writing, or signs...",[1], 1: an act or instance of transmitting and 3 a: "a process
by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or
behavior ... also: exchange of information".[2] Communication can be perceived as a two-way process in
which there is an exchange and progression of thoughts, feelings or ideas towards a mutually
accepted[clarification needed] goal or direction.

Communication as an academic discipline relates to all the ways we communicate, so it embraces a large
body of study and knowledge.Contents [hide]

1 Overview

2 Types of communication

2.1 Dialogue or verbal communication

2.2 Nonverbal communication

2.3 Visual communication

2.4 Other types of communication

3 Communication modelling

4 Non-human living organisms communciation

4.1 Plants and fungi

5 Communication as academic discipline

6 References

7 Further reading

8 External links

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Overview

Communication is a process whereby information is encoded and imparted by a sender to a receiver via
a channel/medium. The receiver then decodes the message and gives the sender a feedback.
Communication requires that all parties have an area of communicative commonality. There are
auditory means, such as speaking, singing and sometimes tone of voice, and nonverbal, physical means,
such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, by using writing.

Communication is thus a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared
understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal
processing, listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing, and evaluating. if you use these
processes it is developmental and transfers to all areas of life: home, school, community, work, and
beyond. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur.[3]

Communication is the articulation of sending a message through different media,[4] whether it be verbal
or nonverbal, so long as a being transmits a thought provoking idea, gesture, action, etc. Communication
is a learned skill. Most babies are born with the physical ability to make sounds, but must learn to speak
and communicate effectively. Speaking, listening, and our ability to understand verbal and nonverbal
meanings are skills we develop in various ways. We learn basic communication skills by observing other
people and modeling our behaviors based on what we see. We also are taught some communication
skills directly through education, and by practicing those skills and having them evaluated.

There are also many common barriers to successful communication, two of which are message overload
(when a person receives too many messages at the same time), and message complexity.[5]

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Types of communication

There are three major parts in human face to face communication which are body language, voice
tonality, and words. According to the research:[6]

55% of impact is determined by body language--postures, gestures, and eye contact,

38% by the tone of voice, and

7% by the content or the words used in the communication process.

Although the exact percentage of influence may differ from variables such as the listener and the
speaker, communication as a whole strives for the same goal and thus, in some cases, can be universal.
System of signals, such as voice sounds, intonations or pitch, gestures or written symbols which
communicate thoughts or feelings. If a language is about communicating with signals, voice, sounds,
gestures, or written symbols, can animal communications be considered as a language? Animals do not
have a written form of a language, but use a language to communicate with each another. In that sense,
an animal communication can be considered as a separate language.

Human spoken and written languages can be described as a system of symbols (sometimes known as
lexemes) and the grammars (rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The word "language" is also
used to refer to common properties of languages. Language learning is normal in human childhood.
Most human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for symbols which enable communication with
others around them. There are thousands of human languages, and these seem to share certain
properties, even though many shared properties have exceptions.

There is no defined line between a language and a dialect, but the linguist Max Weinreich is credited as
saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". Constructed languages such as Esperanto,
programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms are not necessarily restricted to the
properties shared by human languages.

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Dialogue or verbal communication

A dialogue is a reciprocal conversation between two or more entities. The etymological origins of the
word (in Greek διά(diá,through) + λόγος(logos, word,speech) concepts like flowing-through meaning) do
not necessarily convey the way in which people have come to use the word, with some confusion
between the prefix διά-(diá-,through) and the prefix δι- (di-, two) leading to the assumption that a
dialogue is necessarily between only two parties.

[edit]

Nonverbal communication
Nonverbal communication is the process of communicating through sending and receiving wordless
messages. Such messages can be communicated through gesture, body language or posture; facial
expression and eye contact, object communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, or
symbols and infographics, as well as through an aggregate of the above, such as behavioral
communication. Nonverbal communication plays a key role in every person's day to day life, from
employment to romantic engagements.

Speech may also contain nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion
and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress. Likewise, written
texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the use of
emoticons.A portmanteau of the English words emotion (or emote) and icon, an emoticon is a symbol or
combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form.

Other communication channels such as telegraphy fit into this category, whereby signals travel from
person to person by an alternative means. These signals can in themselves be representative of words,
objects or merely be state projections. Trials have shown that humans can communicate directly in this
way[7] without body language, voice tonality or words.

[edit]

Visual communication

Visual communication as the name suggests is communication through visual aid. It is the conveyance of
ideas and information in forms that can be read or looked upon. Primarily associated with two
dimensional images, it includes: signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, colour and
electronic resources. It solely relies on vision. It is form of communication with visual effect. It explores
the idea that a visual message with text has a greater power to inform, educate or persuade a person. It
is communication by presenting information through Visual form.

The evaluation of a good visual design is based on measuring comprehension by the audience, not on
aesthetic or artistic preference. There are no universally agreed-upon principles of beauty and ugliness.
There exists a variety of ways to present information visually, like gestures, body languages, video and
TV. Here, focus is on the presentation of text, pictures, diagrams, photos, et cetera, integrated on a
computer display. The term visual presentation is used to refer to the actual presentation of
information. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability.
Graphic designers use methods of visual communication in their professional practice.

[edit]

Other types of communication

Other more specific types of communication are for example:

Facilitated communication

Graphic communication

Nonviolent Communication

Science communication

Strategic Communication

Superluminal communication

Technical communication

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Communication modelling

Communication major dimensions scheme

Communication code scheme

Communication is usually described along a few major dimensions: Content (what type of things are
communicated), source, emisor, sender or encoder (by whom), form (in which form), channel (through
which medium), destination, receiver, target or decoder (to whom), and the purpose or pragmatic
aspect. Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experiences, give
advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, in one of the various
manners of communication. The form depends on the abilities of the group communicating. Together,
communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be
oneself, another person or being, another entity (such as a corporation or group of beings).

Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of

semiotic rules:

Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols),

pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users) and

semantic (study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent).

Therefore, communication is social interaction where at least two interacting agents share a common
set of signs and a common set of semiotic rules. This commonly held rules in some sense ignores
autocommunication, including intrapersonal communication via diaries or self-talk, both secondary
phenomena that followed the primary acquisition of communicative competences within social
interactions.

In a simple model, information or content (e.g. a message in natural language) is sent in some form (as
spoken language) from an emisor/ sender/ encoder to a destination/ receiver/ decoder. In a slightly
more complex form a sender and a receiver are linked reciprocally. A particular instance of
communication is called a speech act. The sender's personal filters and the receiver's personal filters
may vary depending upon different regional traditions, cultures, or gender; which may alter the
intended meaning of message contents. In the presence of "communication noise" on the transmission
channel (air, in this case), reception and decoding of content may be faulty, and thus the speech act may
not achieve the desired effect. One problem with this encode-transmit-receive-decode model is that the
processes of encoding and decoding imply that the sender and receiver each possess something that
functions as a code book, and that these two code books are, at the very least, similar if not identical.
Although something like code books is implied by the model, they are nowhere represented in the
model, which creates many conceptual difficulties.

Theories of coregulation describe communication as a creative and dynamic continuous process, rather
than a discrete exchange of information. Canadian media scholar Harold Innis had the theory that
people use different types of media to communicate and which one they choose to use will offer
different possibilities for the shape and durability of society (Wark, McKenzie 1997). His famous example
of this is using ancient Egypt and looking at the ways they built themselves out of media with very
different properties stone and papyrus. Papyrus is what he called 'Space Binding'. it made possible the
trasnsmission of written orders across space, empires and enables the waging of distant military
campaigns and colonial administration. The other is stone and 'Time Binding', through the construction
of temples and the pyramids can sustain their authority generation to generation, through this media
they can change and shape communication in their society (Wark, McKenzie 1997).

References

^ "communication definition". Ask.com service. Retrieved on 2009-03-08.

^ "communication - Definition from the Mirriam-Webster online dictionary". Mirriam-Webster.

Retrieved on 2009-03-08.

^ "communication". written at Washington. office of superintendent of Public instruction. Retrieved on

March 14, 2008.

^ Douglas Harper, Historian. "media". online Etymology dictionary. Retrieved on March 14 2008.

^ Montana, Patrick J. & Charnov, Bruce H. 2008. Management. 4th ed. New York. Barron's Educational
Series, Inc. Pg 333.

^ Mehrabian and Ferris (1967). "Inference of Attitude from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels".
In: The Journal of Counselling Psychology Vol.31, 1967, pp.248-52.

^ Warwick, K, Gasson, M, Hutt, B, Goodhew, I, Kyberd, P, Schulzrinne, H and Wu, X: “Thought

Communication and Control: A First Step using Radiotelegraphy”, IEE Proceedings on Communications,
151(3), pp.185-189, 2004

^ Witzany, G. (2006). Plant Communication from Biosemiotic Perspective. Plant Signaling and Behavior
1(4): 169-178.

^ Witzany, G. (2007). Applied Biosemiotics: Fungal Communication. In: Witzany, G. (Ed). Biosemiotics in
Transdisciplinary Contexts. Helsinki, Umweb, pp. 295-301.

Language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Language (disambiguation).

This article is about the properties of language in general. For the use of language by humans, see
natural language.
Cuneiform is one of the first known forms of written language, but spoken language is believed to
predate writing by tens of thousands of years at least.

Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" — the forms of
communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of
human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic
creation, maintenance and use of systems of symbols, each referring to concepts different from
themselves.

The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages, such as English or Chinese. For example the
English word "language", derived ultimately from lingua, Latin for tongue, and "tongue" is still a word
which can be used in English to refer to spoken language. But there are also written languages, and
other systems of visual symbols, sign languages and so on.

Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these are
sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the
properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.

When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a particular
type of human thought which can be present even when communication is not the result, and this way
of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language itself.

In Western Philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with reason, which is also
a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word,
logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes
used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below.

Properties of language

A set of commonly accepted signs (indices, icons or symbols) is only one feature of language; all
languages must define (i) the structural relationships between these signs in a system of grammar, (ii)
the context wherein the signs are used (pragmatics) and (iii) dependent on their context the content
specifity, i.e. its meaning (semantics). Rules of grammar are one of the characteristics sometimes said to
distinguish language from other forms of communication. They allow a finite set of signs to be
manipulated to create a potentially infinite number of grammatical utterances.

Another property of language is that its symbols are arbitrary. Any concept or grammatical rule can be
mapped onto a symbol. In other words, most languages make use of sound, but the combinations of
sounds used do not have any necessary and inherent meaning – they are merely an agreed-upon
convention to represent a certain thing by users of that language. For instance, there is nothing about
the Spanish word nada itself that forces Spanish speakers to convey the idea of "nothing". Another set
of sounds (for example, the English word nothing) could equally be used to represent the same concept,
but all Spanish speakers have acquired or learned to correlate this meaning for this particular sound
pattern. For Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian or Bosnian speakers on the other hand, nada means something
else; it means "hope".

This arbitrariness even applies to words with an onomatopoetic dimension (i.e. words that to some
extent simulate the sound of the token referred to). For example, several animal names (e.g. cuckoo,
whip-poor-will, katydid) are derived from sounds the respective animal makes, but these forms did not
have to be chosen for these meanings. Non-onomatopoetic words can stand just as easily for the same
meaning. For instance, the katydid is called a "bush cricket" in British English, a term that bears no
relation to the sound the animal makes. In time, onomatopoetic words can also change in form, losing
their mimetic status. Onomatopoetic words may have an inherent relation to their referent, but this
meaning is not inherent, thus they do not violate arbitrariness.

Human languages

Main article: Natural language

Some of the areas of the brain involved in language processing: Broca's area(Blue), Wernicke's
area(Green), Supramarginal gyrus(Yellow), Angular gyrus(Orange) ,Primary Auditory Cortex(Pink)

Human languages are usually referred to as natural languages, and the science of studying them falls
under the purview of linguistics. A common progression for natural languages is that they are
considered to be first spoken, then written, and then an understanding and explanation of their
grammar is attempted.
Languages live, die, move from place to place, and change with time. Any language that ceases to
change or develop is categorized as a dead language. Conversely, any language that is in a continuous
state of change is known as a living language or modern language.

Making a principled distinction between one language and another is usually impossible.[11] For
instance, there are a few dialects of German similar to some dialects of Dutch. The transition between
languages within the same language family is sometimes gradual (see dialect continuum).

Some like to make parallels with biology, where it is not possible to make a well-defined distinction
between one species and the next. In either case, the ultimate difficulty may stem from the interactions
between languages and populations. (See Dialect or August Schleicher for a longer discussion.)

The concepts of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache are used to make finer distinctions
about the degrees of difference between languages or dialects.

REFERENCE

^ "Language". The New Encyclopædia Britannica: MACROPÆDIA. 22. Encyclopædia Britannica,Inc.. 2005.
pp. 548 2b.