Coordinated Management Of Meaning Theory

According to Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory, people has a tendency to learn conducts that are suitable and correct for unambiguous contexts (Pearce, 1976). Precisely, early conceptualizations focused on the explanatory process through which individuals drew from six levels of understanding to create particular meanings (Pearce & Cronen, 1980; Philipsen, 1995). These six levels are:

1. Communicative expressions (the words used to communicate),

2. Speech acts (how we perform the content),

3. Pragmatics (a system of formal and/or informal rules that guide two or more individuals’ communication),

4. Communication routines (that consist of a describable sequence of speech acts),

5. Self - Perception (individual’s self-perception

2000).

The scholars of CMM study how individuals coordinate and synchronise their meanings and actions over time, often in larger contexts that contain conflicting messages that compete for greater salience (Bruss et al., 2005). According to the theory, this negotiation is best understood through the recognition of two different types of rules:

1. Constitutive and regulative rules: (Pearce & Cronen, 1980). Constitutive rules are guidelines that reveal meaning, they help answer the fundamental question of “What does this mean?”

2. Regulative rules: Regulative rules are in contrast, are rules of action, they indicate what actions should be taken in any given communicative context. In short, people interpret messages and know what actions constitute appropriate responses because they can follow rules that guide what they do and say (regulative rules) in the context of how they interpret what transpires (constitutive rules) (Heath & Bryant,

Roger Brown has drawn a distinction between weak linguistic relativity, where language limits thought, and strong linguistic relativity, where language determines thought. The idea that linguistic structure influences the cognition of language users has bearings on the fields of anthropological linguistics, psychology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, cognitive science, linguistic anthropology, sociology of language and philosophy of language, and it has been the subject of extensive studies in all of these fields. The idea of linguistic influences on thought has also captivated the minds of authors and creative artists inspiring numerous ideas in literature, in the creation of artificial languages and even forms of therapy such as neuro-linguistic