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3. The various codes shared by various participants, linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesics,
musical, interpretative, interactional, and other :
4. The settings (including other communication) in which communication is permitted,
enjoined, encouraged, abridged;
5. The forms of messages, and their genres, ranging verbally from single-morpheme
sentences to the patterns and diacritics of sonnets, sermons, salesmen’s pitches, and
any other organized routines and styles;
6. The attitudes and contents that a message may convey and be about;
7. The events themselves, their kinds and characters as wholes.
In analyzing communicative events, primary consideration should be given to functions of
speech. There are many ways to achieve similar purposes, and any linguistic form may serve
different functions.
All cultures provide rules for appropriate communicative interaction, defining behaviors
that should occur, that may occur, and that should not occur in given contexts. These rules are
learned through both formal and informal processes of socialization that begin in childhood.
Children may be overtly instructed about how to act and what to say in particular places or to
particular people. But children learn most rules of appropriate communicative behavior from
their own observations of family, peers, and strangers in public places. Interactional norms are
specific to each society and convey cultural messages of shared values and expectations. We
use these guidelines to shape our own behavior and to evaluate actions of others.
An ethnographic approach to analyzing communication stresses the cultural specificity of
rules of communication and the totality of factors needing description. The most important
aspects are settings, participants, topics, and goals. Each of these components can be studied
separately, but it is necessary to remember that a speech event is an integrated occurrence
and all of its components are interdependent. Relative primacy of any one factor depends on
speakers' assessment of the entire situation and their judgement of likely outcomes. Certain
behaviors tend to occur in given contexts and lead to an overall sense of consistency or
coherence. Speech actions in contexts designated as formal often take place in specified
settings, among expected participants, and concern relatively fixed topics. Communicative
events taking place in informal interactions are not so highly structured, but they, too, are
constrained by cultural norms of roles, rights to speak, and ways of speaking. Rules governing
informal behavior are rarely objectified by participants and are not consciously stated or even
recognized. We usually assume that behavior in these contexts is "natural", although it is in fact
conditioned by our culture just as much as activities in formal settings. We generally become
most aware of informal communicative norms when they are violated, when someone speaks
inappropriately. All people make errors in communication, although they act in accordance with
their society's expectations. Speakers' errors often come from misjudging the relative
importance of given components within speech events.

COMMUNICATION SETTINGS
Settings of communicative events provide arenas for action, both in physical and social
sense. They help define events as particular kinds of occasions, invoking certain behaviors
and restricting others. Settings for communication can be classified along a continuum of
formality or informality. Although people in all societies make distinctions about relative
formality/ informality, the array of settings in each category differs across cultures.
Judith Irvine (1979: 776-779) singles out the following four universal aspects of formality: