My Intra Essay from the Meaning and Mind Book

A Reflection on the Mind at Work by Leonard J. Shedletsky

(This essay originally appeared in Shedletsky, L. (1989). Meaning and Mind: An Intrapersonal
Approach to Human Communication. ERIC and The Speech Communication Association.)

Communication is not governed by fixed social rules; it is a two-step process in which
the speaker first takes in stimuli from the outside environment, evaluating and selecting
from among them in the light of his own cultural background, personal history,
and what he knows about his interlocutors. He then decides on the norms that apply
to the situation at hand. These norms determine the speaker's selection from among
the communicative options available for encoding his intent.

(Gumperz and Hymes, 1986)

This book on intrapersonal communication is about the part our minds play in
communication-our perceptions, memories, experiences, feelings, interpretations, inferences,
evaluations, attitudes, opinions, ideas, strategies, images, and states of consciousness.
This book is designed to help students examine their thought processes, since thought and
communication are inseparable. As students learn more about the subconscious and
self-reflective mind, its representations, operations, and products, they will acquire a
greater understanding of, and greater control over, their communication behavior.
The central goal of intrapersonal communication theory is to increase awareness,
understanding, and choice.

In teaching about intrapersonal communication, I have found that students
are very willing to explore their own minds in furthering their understanding of
communication. This willingness on their part to undertake self-observation is what
makes the exercises in this book so effective. You will find, as I have found, that by
facilitating the students'self-awareness of intrapersonal communication, you succeed in
deepening their understanding of communication, and, at the same time, you help them
improve their communication skills. In my experience, college students at any age are eager
both to explore their intrapersonal communication
and to communicate about themselves with others. They are also eager to speculate
about intrapersonal processes. When the classroom atmosphere is noncoercive and
open to exploration, students quickly find that they have interesting and curious experiences
to offer, and that they are not alone in the human experience. The students become
their own laboratory experiments as they begin to look inward at intrapersonal communication.

A Sampler of Definitions

The term intrapersonal communication is not used frequently in communication literature.
A search of Communication Abstracts over the decade of the 1980s shows a scarcity of
references to intrapersonal communication. Recently published textbooks on communication,
however, show a growing awareness of the cognitive perspective, whether or not they
explicitly use the term "intrapersonal." (See, among others, Littlejohn, 1983; Barker, 1987;
Fisher, 1987; Reardon, 1987.) A few textbooks on intrapersonal communication have
appeared in the past few years.

Some theorists say that intrapersonal communication is about communication with
one's self, that is, the talking that goes on inside one's head. (Barker & Edwards, 1980;
Weaver & Cotrell, 1985) According to this view, intrapersonal communication takes
place when the sender and the receiver are the same person. Vinson (1985) presents a
closely related definition. According to Vinson, intrapersonal communication "...is the
sending and receiving of messages within the human organism. The structure or processing
subsystems which comprise ITC [intrapersonal communication] are neurophysiological in nature."
(p. 2) Bode defines intrapersonal communication as "...inner speech that occurs during moments
of selective deep caring which is self or other directed." (1985, p. 1) (For more on inner speech,
see Korba, 1987.) For Biddle, intrapersonal communication is the way "I bring about a union
of the disparate parts or potentially separated parts of my being." (1985, p. 2) LaFleur discusses intrapersonal
communication in terms of "the ways in which persons interpret (decode) the multiple
potential meanings of both internally and externally originating sentences and sentence
fragments." (1985, p. 1) Barker and Kibler, discussing a conceptual overview of communication,
define intrapersonal communication this way:
Intrapersonal Communication is the basic level from which all other forms of human
communication are derived. It is that communication which occurs within the
individual. It involves the evaluating of and reacting to internal stimuli. These
evaluative and reactive processes help human beings to cope with and understand
ideas, events, objects, and experiences.
Thinking is one form of intrapersonal communication.(1971, p. 4)

Ruesch and Bateson discuss intrapersonal communication as a level of
communication characterized by both proprioception (reception from within)
and exteroception (reception from external stimuli); both propriotransmission
(internal transmission of messages) and exterotransmission (external transmission
of messages); and the central functions of coordination, interpretation, and storage
of information (1968, pp. 276-279). Roloff and Berger liken intrapersonal
communication to social cognition: both are characterized as intemal processing;
both involve representational systems; both are focused on self, others, and behaviors;
and both are assumed to have some impact on behavior. (1982, pp. 24-26)

In a critique of the concept "intrapersonal communication," Cunningham (1985)
provides an extensive and organized list of functions and properties attributed to
intrapersonal communication. (Also, see Cunningham, 1989.) Moreover, he challenges
the theoretical soundness of many of those ideas that have gone into defining intrapersonal
communication. Underlying Cunningham's arguments is the claim that communication
typically entails the features of community, message (meaningful/informative), and
transfer or sharing of the message. It is chiefly the first feature, community, that
accounts for the bulk of his concern. Can we speak of communication when we limit
our definition to the individual, the single person, one organism only? In short, Cunningham
says no, because either (1) we are back to the shaky metaphysical status of attributing
psychological faculties to the person in the "talking to oneself" perspective, or (2) we
stray from the idea of communication as being about community, society-more than one
person. Cunningham wrote:
In a field that undertakes to instruct us about the central fundament of community
and society, laC [intrapersonal communication] pulls us in the opposite direction by
postulating a very private and opaque process that is said to be or to comprise
[parts of] the individual psyche. (1985, pp. 25-26)
Cunningham raises a second concern and in so doing lays the groundwork for
important and difficult theoretical decisions, namely, the question of the atomic versus
the discursive nature of cognition and intrapersonal communication. That is to ask, do
all mental structures and operations comprise intrapersonal communication, orjust some?
Or, to put the question in other words, where up the cognitive ladder, from mental
elements to high-level mental constructions, does intrapersonal communication begin
to occur?

The question of exactly when communication has occurred is a problem for all
levels of communication, and has been widely debated. I attempt no answer to that
question here, but that should not deter us from exploring intrapersonal communication:
academic studies are replete with central concepts that evade unitary definition. Our fuzziness
on what life is, does not keep us from studying biology. Our confusion over what language is,
does not deter us from linguistics.

Intrapersonal Communication Is More Than just Talking to Yourself

Contrary to some of the definitions mentioned above, I argue that intrapersonal communication is more than communication only with one's self, as that phrase is
ordinarily understood. (See Roberts, 1983; Halfond, 1985; Roberts, Edwards,
& Barker, 1987.) Intrapersonal communication is a level of communication not
defined by the number of people involved, the communicative functions served,
or the channels of communication used. Intrapersonal communication consists
of mental processes that operate every time we communicate. The exercises in
this book allow one to explore intrapersonal communication involving all the mental
processes that provide the mind with its experiences; one's view of one's self and the
world; one's feelings, thoughts, strategies, reasons, motivations, knowledge, and states
of consciousness. (See Goss, 1982.)

Intrapersonal communication is about the individual's processing of stimuli,
both verbal and nonverbal. Sometimes those stimuli are generated within the perceiver,
and sometimes they are received from outside the perceiver. Sometimes what is
generated remains within the individual (e.g., talking with one's self, "seeing" images,
or having physiological sensations), and sometimes what is generated is expressed
(e.g., speech and gesture).

The study of intrapersonal communication is also, therefore, the study of decoding
and encoding-the study of meaningmaking. Whether or not what is decoded originates
inside or outside the body of the intrapersonal communicator, and whether or not what
is encoded is actually expressed, leaked, or given off, intrapersonal communication has
occurred. (See Goffman, 1959.) Stated broadly, intrapersonal communication is
about the relationship between the individual and the stimuli that the individual encounters.

Without engaging in a lengthy theoretical debate, I would like to address a handful
of nagging questions that are being discussed regarding intrapersonal communication.

Foremost among these questions are two: (1) the "disciplinary" question-Does not
cognitive psychology already study intrapersonal communication? How does intrapersonal
communication differ from related disciplines, especially cognitive psychology, linguistics,
and philosophy.(2) the question about "community"-How many people are needed to
communicate? Are not at least two people needed to communicate?

The disciplinary question can be approached on a number of grounds: political
and territorial, historical, methodological, and theoretical. In a discipline characterized
by its interdiscipli#nary nature at every level, and by its admittedly weak definition
of itself as a separate entity, the "how does it differ?" question is always a hard one.
If one is really asking, "Who has the right to ownership of the discipline?" then the
question may translate, "Who was here first?" But chronology does not resolve the
question of which discipline should be working on a problem. Many disciplines share
roots; new disciplines often have emerged from earlier ones, notably, psychology
from philosophy, linguistics from anthropology, and speech communication from speech.
The critical issue is theory, not ownership.

Without an adequate theoretical response to the question of where intrapersonal
communication belongs, we are in no position to place it in its proper discipline. On
what basis can we judge whether it really belongs in cognitive psychology or in linguistics
or in communication? In the end, an area of study finds its home where the theory and
methodology of a discipline require it. Unlike cognitive psychology, intrapersonal
communication is not concemed with thoughtper se, or with mental dynamics per se.
Unlike linguistics (and its related areas, e.g., discourse analysis, pragmatics), intrapersonal
communication is not interested in cognitive content for its part in accounting for linguistic
intuitions per se. Instead, intrapersonal communication is interested in cognition-knowledge,
cognitive structure, feelings, etc.-for its part in the act of communicating.
In a special issue of the Journal of Communication, titled "Ferment in the Field,"
a number of prominent scholars wrote about the definitional and disciplinary issues of
the field of communication. (See the Journal of Communication, Summer 1983, Volume 33,
No. 3.) Reference to intrapersonal variables occur throughout that volume, although the authors
are likely to be discussing social and policy aspects of communication research.
Miller, for instance, wrote:
This respect for the individual's role in his or her own behavior is largely
responsible for the emergence of rule-following rather than law-governed
conceptions of communications. To a lesser extent, it buttresses the argument
that an actor's perceptions of or meanings for a given situation constitute the primary
data for communication researchers-a position advocated, among others, by the constructivists.
Volitional action, rather than causally shaped motion, is seen by these scholars as the
generative mechanism for symbolic exchange. (1983, p. 32)

Research on communication effects leads us back to the individual and to
the conceptual underpinnings of our ways of thinking about ourselves. This takes
us to the question of the individual versus society: Can we talk about communication
within the individual? Behind this question lies the assumed dichotomy of the individual
and society. We are often led to think that we can speak of one or the other. But the
definition of intrapersonal communication proposed in this book does not allow us to
isolate the individual from society.
In our intrapersonal focus on the individual, let us not confuse the distinction between
internal versus extemal stimuli with the theoretical difference between the individual and
society. Study of intrapersonal communication is, in fact, the investigation of the interface
between the individual and the social-cultural environment. Billig, Condor, Fdwards,
Gane, Middleton, and Radley make the point well:
We see thinking as inherently social. In fact, thinking is frequently a form of dialogue within
the individual. (See Billig, 1987.) Yet the content of the dialogue has historical and ideological
roots, for the concepts involved, and their meanings, are constructed through the history of social
dialogue and debate. In this sense the social pattern of ideology is mapped onto individual
consciousness. Similarly, because of its dilemmatic nature, ideology cannot preclude thought
and debate. Thus, the paradox of "the thinking society," describes the reality that our dilemmas
of ideology are social dilemmas and that our ideology cannot but produce dilemmas to think
about. (1988, pp. 6-7)

When we speak of the individual engaged in intrapersonal communication, this should not
be interpreted as severing the individual from the community. We are simply focusing on that
part of the process of communication that takes place intrapersonally-the individual's encoding
and decoding of messages.

Clearly, the definition of intrapersonal communication is controversial; but this should come
as no surprise. After all, the elements that enter into intrapersonal communication--the self,
communication, mind, meaning, information, and consciousnes-are all complex and controversial.
I offer you my definitions of communication, meaning, and mind. In the end, you will decide which
definitions of intrapersonal communication fit with your models of communication.

Intrapersonal Communication Is at the Center of All Communication/FONT>

In describing the field of communication, Fisher (1987) pictures "a nested hierarchy of
communication systems." (p. 3) As one can see in Fisher's diagram, intrapersonal communication

Intrapersonal System Interpersonal System Group system Organizational system Societal System Nested Hierarchy of Communication Systems is at the center of concentric circles, with interpersonal, group, organizational, and
societal systems surrounding it. This imagery is helpful. It helps to remind us that,
while we may speak of separate levels of communication-and we may build courses
around these levels, we are dealing with interrelated components of an individual
self situated in its society. Each system in the diagram affects and is affected by the
other systems.

What is "communication"? Students in my introductory course on communication
regularly offer these key ideas on day one: sending, conveying, transmitting, exchanging
messages between two or more people. These typical and popular ways of conceptualizing the communication process are summarized in what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) label as
the conduit metaphor. According to the conduit metaphor, words are thought of as containers
of meaning. When we communicate, we send messages from one place to another like water
sloshing through a conduit. The word is the conduit carrying the meaning to its destination.

Lakoff and Johnson, however, reject this idea of language and communication, because it
implies that meanings are the objective properties of words rather than the subjective products
of interpretation. The conduit metaphor holds no room for the role that context plays in
interpretation. It suggests that the literal meanings of words are what we communicate to
one another. Moreover, the conduit metaphor suggests that communication of ideas is
something that happens to the receiver. What comes out at the end of the conduit is
what the receiver gets-according to the conduit metaphor, the receiver is passive before
the incoming stimuli in reception of the message.

Lakoff and Johnson say that the conduit metaphor reflects the common-sense way
of thinking both about language and communication and about the nature of meaning.
When we talk about communicating through language, we tend to emphasize the function
of conveying literal meaning (or what has been variously called factual, propositional,
representative, ideational, and descriptive meaning). But, of course, we also communicate
other kinds of information when we talk, and we do this without expressing that information
literally. For instance, we communicate how we regard the person we are talking to, our group
identity (social class, native region, etc.), whether or not we want to be having this conversation,
what our role and/or communication relationship is in relation to the person with whom we are
interacting, and much, much more. (See the "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wool?"exercise)

You could think of this type of meaning as interpersonal meaning. It has been variously
called social expressive, relational, and emotive information. The ways in which we communicate
literal meaning and interpersonal meaning are different from one another, though they are both forms
of communication. Is it possible to define "communication" so as to include both literal and interpersonal
meanings? Is it also possible then to define "intrapersonal communication" as focusing on this inclusive
understanding of meaning?

Everyone knows that communication is an active process. What does this mean? Where do
the dynamics of communication reside? How do they work? Both old information (in memory)
and new information (received) are subject to the dynamics of mental processing. Stimuli take
on meaning in context. The "recognition of information" requires knowledge on the part of the receiver,
even if that knowledge is only knowledge of the literal meaning of words. Communication is
thus interactive-both the receiver (the knower) and the thing known (object, word, action,
and sender) are taken into account. Clearly, this interactive model of communication includes
more than does the conduit metaphor.

What does "the recognition of information" mean? "Recognition" is the use of stored knowledge
in the memory by which we perceive (make sense of) stimuli. In other words, recognition requires a
"going to" the mental "storehouse" and there retrieving knowledge for use in decoding sensations from
the outside. When you recognize a word on this page, you make use of your stored knowledge of written
English. When I use the term "information," I mean anything that has meaning for the receiver.
This information is not necessarily interesting, significant, or new. Only when we categorize things
and events do they become meaningful. (See the first "Silence" exercise, p. 13.) Some examples of
information are: common names of objects like "car" and "bicycle"; categories of events like greetings,
invitations, suggestions, news, descriptions (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969); and indications that something
is, was, or will be. Communication occurs when we-verbally or nonverbally, consciously or
nonconsciously--categorize. In other words, communication occurs when we have an idea,
when we assign meaning. This view of communication is a cognitive perspective-it focuses
on the mental activity of transforming sensations into meaning. This leads us to a working
definition of intrapersonal communication.

A Receiver-Based Definition of Intrapersonal Communication

Intrapersonal communication concems the processes of assigning meaning (e.g.,
the mental structures and the retrieval processes of memory) and the products of
assigned meaning (e.g., schemata, labels, and memorie r more generally, representations).

This view of communication places emphasis on the interpreter (the receiver). No
interactant is required-you may 'Just" get an idea on your own, no interlocutor needed.
Nothing is implied about the intentions of a sender or the source of stimuli, the type of stimuli
(verbal or nonverbal), the relationship between the stimuli and the idea or feeling, or the level
of consciousness of either the sender or receiver. Accordingly, when you look out on a clear
blue sky and feel uplifted, you have experienced communication. When you think, as you walk
along, "I've got to get the laundry done,"you have experienced communication. When you have
a conversation with another person, exchanging both literal and interpersonal meanings, read a book,
or watch television, you have experienced communication. What all of these experiences have in common
is that the receiving mind has processed stimuli, interpreted the stimuli, and mediated a response. For none
of the above is an observable response required. That is, the receiver may respond to the meaning he/she
attributes to the event, and that response may not be observable.

I define communication as broadly as possible to include all instances of symbolic thought.
(See Cronkhite, 1986.) But even if one limits communication (as some researchers do) to its
prototypical case, i.e., intended messages between two people having a face-to-face conversation,
my main point applies: the information processing of intrapersonal communication is centrally
involved in the communication event. Limited by the narrower definition of communication,
one may overlook that part of the communication process is deciding whether or not messages
have been produced and sent, and whether or not they were intended. Recognition of an
incoming message is part of the information being processed--communication is what we, as
receivers, figure out. (Worth & Gross, 1974;Messaris & Gross, 1977) It is precisely this "what we
figure out" that this book is all about.

Assigning Meaning

Consider for a moment what would happen if we could not recognize messages, determine their
literal and their interpersonal meanings. One-on-one, prototypical communication could not take place.
Clearly, the ability to assign meaning is prerequisite to the prototypical case. This takes us back to the idea that
communication does not happen to us passively-we actively do it. We interpret and categorize
what we encounter (see the "Group Discussion" exercise, p. 19). We assign meaning to words,
deeds, events, and objects (see the "Concept Formation" exercise, p. 6 1). To learn more about
communication, then, we need to understand how we assign meaning. That is the main purpose of
this book: to explore how our minds work when we interpret.

Philosophers have pondered the nature of meaning for at least as long as the history of Western
philosophy. More recently, linguists have worked intensively to describe the meaning in a word,
and how words combine to form sentence meaning. (For a review of linguistic semantics, see Raskin,
1983.) Publication of linguistic research on meaning and language use-the ways in which actual utterances
signal meaning to people in social context-is relatively recent. (Levinson, 1983)

"Context" may be thought of as all the many ways in which utterances (and nonverbal behaviors
as well) gain meaning from a surrounding frame of reference e.g., physical objects, discourse,
long-term and short-term memory, mutual knowledge, public (cultural) and private (interpersonal)
knowledge, and so on. Clearly, the construction of context is itself an intrapersonal act. Many
researchers use the term in "semantics" to refer to meaning derived from hypothetically constructed
(i.e., context-free) sentences, and the term "pragmatics" to refer to meaning derived from utterances
in context. Semantics (that part of linguistics concerned with literal meaning) and pragmatics (roughly,
the meanings of utterances in context) are linguistic topics alive with controversy, and that includes their
interrelationship. Semantics and pragmatics, nevertheless, are sources of many insights that
increase our understanding of how we communicate.

One of the most important insights for communication theory is the idea of types of meaning.
We gain far more information from what people say than merely the literal meanings of the words
or sentences they utter. Consider the sentence:

Do you know the Barley Mow?

The Barley Mow is a pub in Brighton, England. With that information filled in, you can give
some literal meaning to the sentence. Perhaps you simply interpret it as: Are you familiar with
a certain pub called Barley Mow? And if this is the reading you give the sentence, then you
also interpret it as a question-it is punctuated with a question mark. Literally, it is a question
requiring a yes/no answer. But you can see that in context it is much more than a yes/no question.
All kinds of other questions arise: Who would ask you such a question? What do they have
in mind? Where are they going with this line of questioning? Do they have any expectations
about your answer? Are they referring to the night of the brawl? Do they know that you
left before the fight broke out and long before the police arrived? How you interpret the
question depends greatly on the context in which you receive it.

Consider this context: You are an American male visiting in Brighton, England.
You and your eight-month-old baby step into a restaurant, and get into a conversation with
a British man, who also has a baby. You mention that you enjoy the pubs and that you go
to one called The Golden Cannon, with which, as it turns out, your interlocutor is familiar.
At this point in the conversational context, he utters the sentence: "Do you know the Barley Mow?"

Now, how do you interpret the sentence? The question, as you may have surmised,
is leading to something more--'Do you know the Barley Mow? You ought to try it. It's
near The Golden Cannon. Come around on Sunday at noon and I'll be there playing darts.
Join me! "You are relieved that the line of questioning was not leading to a subpoena, but
to a pleasant evening at the pub. It is quite usual to ask a question as a prelude to offering an
invitation or making a request. (Labov & Fanshel, 1977; Stubbs, 1983)

The main point that I want to make is twofold:

(1) Context is crucial to the interpretive process--context is itself part of the information
that we use in interpreting utterances and events. Communication occurs in context.

(2) We glean far more from an utterance in context than merely its literal meaning.
This second point reinforces our grasp of the layers or levels or types of meaning, an
idea crucial to communication theory.

We have already encountered two types of meaning, literal meaning and meaning in
context. We recognize the meaning or function of an utterance both in the stream of talk
(to ask a question, to show agreement) as well as in the social encounter (to be friendly,
or distant, or polite, or in some other way to define the relationship). We use information
provided by a context to interpret utterances made in the context, and we
ourselves supply background information to the context of communication.

Mind as Information Processor

The concept of mind: I think it is important to acknowledge that mind is a "something"that none of us
has ever encountered directly with our senses. None of us has seen a mind, tripped over one, or
even heard one. The same holds true for "communication" and "meaning." Nevertheless, it is
entirely natural for us to speak of our minds as objects--something we can lose, make up,
change, or be "out of." You might say that language, through its ability to name concepts,
and to fix nonthings as things, misleads us to assume that the abstract concept "mind" stands
for something like a chair, a thing that we can sense directly.

As I use the word, "mind" is a convenient short-hand term for referring to our enormous
ability to process information.
Consistent with this, "mind," as I use the term, is what transforms stimuli into meaning.
The mind figures out both the literal meaning and the meaning in context. (Clark & Lucy, 1975;
Glucksberg, Gildea, & Bookin, 1982; Schweller, Brewer, & Dahl, 19 76) The mind is
thus "the instrument" that operates on stimuli to formulate contexts and recognize events in context.
Mind produces interpretations.

Fortunately, a great amount of research has been done in psychology and linguistics that
gives us some idea of how our mental apparatus transforms sounds and visual images into meaning.
This transformation of meaningless sensations into structures of meaning (information) is what we
call inforination processing.
A handful of main points about information processing can be stated: (1) The mind
operates at high speed. (2) The mind has a very limited workspace for processing immediate,
current stimuli. (3) The mind employs stored knowledge when transforming stimuli into meaning.
(4) The mind operates simultaneously or nearly simultaneously (we are not certain which) on
various layers of meaning-it recognizes sounds, images, tactile stimuli, words, phrases, sentences,
utterances, relations between utterances and larger chunks of discourse, literal meaning,
implied meaning(s), the speaker's intended meaning, the function of what was said (e.g., to
ask a question, to give advice, to make a statement), the hearer's attitude toward the message
and its speaker, the appropriateness or inappropriateness of what was said, its ambiguities,
vagueness, hints, degree of politeness, sincerity, and likelihood of being true-all "at once."

While it is tempting to think that we build up from smaller units (like sounds) to larger units
(like phrases), it is clear that context (i.e., a larger unit) also influences how we process smaller
units. Most likely, there is a dynamic interplay among the layers of knowledge. Normally, all
of this occurs without our conscious effort or awareness of the interpretive process. Posner distinguishes
between effortful and effortless search, which amounts to a way in which experimental cognitive psychology
can talk about states of consciousness. Posner explains:
Effortless retrieval occurs when the input contacts its address in memory without any conscious search.
Effortful retrieval occurs when the subject is forced to search the items retrieved into active memory,
or when he does not have sufficient content to locate the items in long-term memory unambiguously.
(1973, p. 43; see also, Shedletsky, 1989)

When we examine the interpretive process, we are to a great extent studying the subconscious mind.
determining meaning. Yet, we react to ourselves, to one another, and to the environment on the
basis of our minds'interpretations. The exercises in this book are designed to bring to the
student's attention the cognitive behaviors that ordinarily go unnoticed. By raising components of the
intrapersonal process to consciousness, we may understand them better and may even be able to
make conscious choices in their use.

Intrapersonal communication processes are ersential to the communication event. In order to
understand how we communicate, we need to understand how we derive meaning through our
intrapersonal communication processes. We need to consider our reactions to meanings, our
emotional triggers (see Steil, Barker, & Watson, 1983, pp. 94-102), our cognitive style, storage
systems, mental dynamics, and representations. We need to consider how we think as we
communicate. We need to consider meaning itself, and how the mind constructs meaning.
We need to acknowledge the various "types of meaning" that we draw from utterances, and
that types of meaning is a significant feature in linguistic communication. Literal meaning,
meaning derived from context, and the functional meaning of an utterance (e.g., to invite,
maintain contact, request) are among the types of meaning. Use of these exercises will
enable you and your students to increase your understanding of the many dimensions of
this complex process, and to take greater control over your own intrapersonal communication.

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