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Our aim in the present paper is to analyze diplomatic communication from the viewpoint of a very comprehensive representation of the communication process. This representation will be obtained by a suitable combination of representations of this process due to Claude Shannon (the father of Information Theory), Roman Jakobson (with his well-known six-components-scheme of the communication process) and Colin Cherry (the famous specialist in Communication Engineering). We will obtain ten components of the communication process: the addresser, the addressee, the sender (or the transmitter), the receiver, the message, the referent (or the context), the channel, the code, the noise and the observer, with ten corresponding communicational functions: the expressive, the conative, the coding, the decoding, the poetic, the referential, the phatic, the metalinguistic, the noise function and the observer function. Each of these ten communicational functions deserves a special investigation. In the present paper, we accomplish this task only for some of them, a further paper being envisaged in order to continue this research. Although it is difficult to make a general hierarchy of these functions, our claim is that the most important communicational function, when dealing with diplomatic communication, is the phatic function. Thus, in some respect, diplomatic communication is similar to communication with children, where the phatic function has priority with respect to all other communicational functions.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-9188-6_2

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