2. How do we communicate?

Communication can be seen as a process by which two or more people establish a relation and exchange some kind of information (the content or “message”) through some media (words, pictures, gestures, etc.).

We usually distinguish two roles in communication: the source and the receiver, namely who conveys the message and who gets it, respectively. It is however important to emphasis that in many communicative exchanges like everyday conversations, people continuously shift from one role to another; so that it would be more correct to speak of “participants”. Furthermore, the very idea of “receiver” suggests that people simply take the messages addressed to them in a passive way. On the contrary, people interpret the message on the basis of their experience, their knowledge and their feelings. Just think of how many times people over-react, or misunderstand what other people say to them!

We communicate in ways other than speech. Our posture, gestures, facial expression and tone of voice are other ways we get messages across. Whereas the content of our messages (“what” we want to communicate) is mainly transmitted through verbal language, non-verbal communication is the channel through which we convey, mainly unconsciously, “how” we feel with regards to the content of the message, to other participants and to the very communicative situation.

Given that communication involves different dimensions (the “what” and the “how”) and different media, the communicative competence is composed by different aspects:

• Linguistic competence, or the ability to produce and interpret messages verbal (which includes in turn syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology);

• Paralinguistic competence, or the ability to produce and interpret the elements that modulate communication such as the prosody, the speed of speech, the pronunciation, breaks etc.;

• Kinetic competence or the ability to modulate communication through gestures (signs, facial expressions, hand movements, etc.);

• Proxemic competence, or the ability to manage one’s position and distance with regard to the other participants of the interaction;

• Pragmatic competence, or the ability to use verbal and non-verbal dimensions of the communication in a manner functional to the situation and one’s own purposes;

• Socio-cultural competence or the ability to correctly interpret the social situations, roles, relationships of the participants.