The process of transmitting and receiving messages.
According to Roman Jakobson and other authors, the analysis of this process covers six factors:
1. Addresser
2. Addressee
3. Contact (Channel)
4. Context
5. Code
6. Message
Corresponding to these factors are six functions: emotive, conative, phatic, referential, metalinguistic (metacommunicative), and aesthetic (poetic).
This process (communication) is accepted as a central object of semiotics. Roman Jakobson, for example, believes that “the essential object of semiotics is communication or any message, while the field of study of linguistics is reduced to the communication of verbal messages“.
In addition, Margaret Mead defines semiotics as the study of “patterns of communication in all their manifestations“.
