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6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
7. The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that
you remembered a moment ago.

SITUATIONAL CONSTRAINTS
(by Crystal and Davy )
A. Relatively permanent features of language:
 individuality – by using idiosyncratic linguistic/paralinguistic traits (handwriting, voice
quality, turns of phrase, pet words, recurring syntactic patterns, etc.) in unselfconscious
utterances a particular user of language is identified as an individual and a unique human
being;
 dialect – features indicating the user´s geographical location or origin (geographical dialect)
or social ranking (social/class dialect);
 time – features providing diachronic information on a language item (i.e., from which period
of the historical development of language it dates);
B. Relatively temporary features of language:
 field including features providing information on the type of the (occupational and
professional) activity the participants are engaged in communication;
 status (theory of functional styles degrees of formality) including features reflecting relative
standing of a participant on the social scale, e.g., level of formality and informality, power
and solidarity, politeness;
 modality which is similar to the traditional notion of ´genre´, as a conventional format of a
message produced for a specific purpose;
 singularity involving, in contrast with the constraint of individuality, a deliberate use of some
linguistics features for the purpose of achieving a specific (e.g., humorous, poetic) effect;
C. Discourse, which includes variation given by :
a) medium, (i.e., the difference between speech and writing):
 ´simple´ when used as a means to an end in itself, e.g., speaking to be heard (a joke)
and writing to be read (newspaper article);
 ´complex´ when used as a means to some further end, e.g., speaking to be written
(taking notes during lectures) or writing to be spoken (a political speech read from a
script);
b) participation, i.e., the difference between monologue and dialogue;
 ´simple´- in the case when monologue is produced by one participant and dialogue by
two participants;
 ´complex´ - when an utterance of one participant contains dialogical features (e.g.,
recounting a story which involves conversational exchanges) or when a dialogical
encounter involves participants´ individual monologues (e.g., conversation consisting of
extended turns in which participants reflect on their experience at length).

GOFFMAN’S THEORY OF COMMUNICATION CONSTRAINTS
In his study of human communication, Goffman (1976) claimed that there is a set of
universal constraints on all communication. Since the constraints are universal, they should
appear in all types of communication and in all languages. Each language would differ in
exactly how the constraints are met, and the ways in which the constraints are met should vary
according to the communication channel.
Goffman divides these communication constraints (CCs) into two types: