Other Models: Jakobson, Gerbner, Maletzke

Story

Three words of slogan on a linguist’s desk

In the United States a presidential candidate’s campaign slogan had three words: I like Ike. (Ike alluded to Dwight Eisenhower.) It looks like an ad agency’s job, but in 1958, at a conference on style held in the United States, the linguist Roman Jakobson analysed this slogan like a poem. By his account the three words are single syllables, all three carry the same diphthong (/ay/), the second diphthong is framed by the sounds /l/ and /k/, and /ayk/ returns like an echo in the preceding word. The result, in Jakobson’s telling, is a sound-image of a feeling that wraps its object; this poetic side reinforces the slogan’s impact and efficiency.

In the previous lesson (The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver Models) we drew communication with boxes and arrows: source, channel, receiver, noise. In that scheme this slogan would be a one-line “message”; the sound pattern inside it would stay invisible. Jakobson asks what job the message does.

In this lesson you will meet three models that look at communication from three different places: the language-centred Jakobson, the perception-centred Gerbner and the social-field-centred Maletzke. All three set aside the question “how is a message carried from A to B?” and bring forward another.

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Three models, three separate doors

These three models did not come out of the same laboratory; they came in through doors that did not know each other.

• Jakobson (1958–1960): A linguist gives the closing talk of a conference on style held in the United States. The talk was published in 1960 as “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics” in the collected volume Style in Language. The subject is the language of poetry, not communication; the communication scheme comes out of that discussion.
• Gerbner (1956): “Toward a general model of communication” appeared in volume 4 of the journal AV Communication Review, pages 171–199. That same year Gerbner began work at a communications research institute in Illinois.
• Maletzke (1963): The book Psychologie der Massenkommunikation, published by the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, where Maletzke had worked from 1952 to 1964. As a psychologist he was interested in what goes on inside a person listening to the radio.

Linguistics, educational and communication research, psychology: three separate sources. What they share (this reading is ours) is that each brings on stage something that the box-and-arrow scheme does not show: in one the function of the message, in one perception, in one the social environment.

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Three names, a few key dates

• Roman Jakobson (1896–1982): Moscow-born linguist, one of the pioneers of structural linguistics. His model was presented in 1958 and published in 1960.
• George Gerbner (1919–2005): Hungarian-born American communication researcher. His general model of communication came out in 1956. The same person would later found the cultivation line of the lesson Cultivation Theory; in 1969 he also wrote up the “Cultural Indicators” programme.
• Gerhard Maletzke (1922–2010): German communication scientist and psychologist. His book appeared in 1963 and was soon regarded as the standard work of the field.

A short timeline:

• 1923: Malinowski defines “phatic communion”
• 1934: Bühler’s Sprachtheorie
• 1948: Lasswell’s five questions
• 1956: Gerbner’s general model of communication
• 1958 / 1960: Jakobson’s paper delivered / published
• 1959: Riley and Riley’s social system approach
• 1963: Maletzke’s Psychologie der Massenkommunikation

You do not need to memorise the line; just do not mix up the pairs Jakobson 1960, Gerbner 1956, Maletzke 1963.

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Process models ask “how is it carried?”; these three ask other questions

The Lasswell and Shannon–Weaver schemes you met in the previous lesson looked at a message’s journey from one end to the other. Process models such as those of Schramm, Berlo, Westley and MacLean, and Newcomb enriched the detail of that journey; they are the subject of another lesson. The shared claim of these three models is that there are other things to look at before and around the journey.

• Jakobson, language-centred: A message does several jobs at once; which one do you count as dominant? Six factors, six functions. Jakobson’s functions of language
• Gerbner, perception-centred: Communication begins with someone perceiving an event; what is perceived is already incomplete. Gerbner’s general model of communication
• Maletzke, social-field-centred: Behind communicator and recipient stand a team, an organisation, an environment and an image of the other side. Maletzke’s field schema

A news bulletin raises three questions at once: what job is this bulletin doing (informing, reassuring, calling to action)? Which part of the event could the editor see? What environment stands behind the presenter and the viewer? Turkish sources do not always put these models in the same drawer; İplikçi (2015), for example, counts Gerbner among the “process school” models together with Shannon–Weaver, Lasswell, Newcomb and Westley–MacLean. Our grouping is a convenience, not the one right classification.

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Jakobson: six factors, six functions

When you say or write a sentence, six things are at work. Jakobson ties a function of language to each; the function shows which factor the message is oriented to. the six factors of verbal communication

• Context → referential function: what the message speaks about. “The plane has left.”
• Addresser → emotive function: the speaker’s attitude, feeling. “Oh no, the plane has left.”
• Addressee → conative function: moving the person in front of you to act. “No entry without a mask.”
• Contact (channel) → phatic (channel-checking) function: is the line open? “Hello, can you hear me?”
• Code → metalingual function: talking about language, like a dictionary entry.
• Message → poetic function: focusing on the message itself, on how it is said. “I like Ike.”

Instead of memorising the functions from a list you can tell them apart with one question: whom or what has the speaker turned to with this message? To the world (context), to herself (addresser), to you (addressee), to the line (contact), to language itself (code), or to the structure of the sentence itself (message)?

The key sentence is Jakobson’s: no message has a single function; the difference between messages lies in the ordering of the functions. Jakobson’s functions of language

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Gerbner: one event, two perceptions, one statement

The letters in Gerbner’s model look a bit like code at first glance, but they are all characters in one story.

• E (event): the event, what happens in outside reality.
• M: the perceiver; it can be a person or a machine. (McQuail and Windahl’s example: a thermostat in a heating system.)
• E1: the event as perceived by M. Not the whole of E, but the version visible from M’s point of view.
• SE: the statement M produces about the event. S stands for form and E for content; the statement is content that has taken on a particular form.
• M2 and SE1: the second perceiver who receives the statement and perceives it in his or her own frame, and that perception.

There are two separate dimensions. In the perceptual dimension, three things determine how the event appears to M: selection, context and availability of the event. In the means and controls dimension, what matters is by what means and under how much control the statement M produces is spread. perception in communication (Gerbner)

The strength of the model is that its parts can be used like building blocks: you can draw a simple chat and a many-linked news chain with the same letters.

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Maletzke: four elements and the invisible strings between them

Maletzke’s schema has four familiar boxes: communicator (Kommunikator), statement (Aussage), medium (Medium) and recipient (Rezipient). The real action is in the strings stretched between them.

• Self-image: how does the communicator see herself: as an interpreter of events, a champion of a cause, or merely a mirror?
• Image of the recipient: how does the communicator imagine the audience across from her? The recipient in turn meets the communicator and the medium with an image.
• **Constraint of the medium (Zwang des Mediums):** each medium shapes the message with its own possibilities and limits: broadcast time, text length, the demand for sound or picture.
• Social environment: the communicator is in a team and an organisation; the recipient in a family and a circle of friends.
• Para-feedback: the recipient’s reaction reaches the communicator only indirectly: reader letters, phone calls, ratings, surveys.

Maletzke’s definition of mass communication is built on the same logic: messages are given publicly, by technical means, indirectly and one-sidedly to a dispersed audience. mass communication He does not make effect a separate box; effect stays inside the recipient’s process of selecting and experiencing.

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The silent assumptions of the three models

Every model treats some things as “given” inside the scheme it draws. Without seeing them it is hard either to criticise or to defend the model.

Jakobson assumes the following. All six factors are present in every verbal act. Addresser and addressee share a code at least partly; if the code is not shared at all, the message does not work. The functions live together and the difference lies in their ordering.

Gerbner assumes the following. Perception is selective and incomplete. Communication systems are open, that is, influenced from outside. The same building blocks suffice to draw both simple and complex communication situations.

Maletzke assumes the following. Mass communication is public, technically mediated, indirect and one-way; the recipient is a dispersed audience. The mass media work like a relay between the messages of social actors. The psychological and social characteristics of communicator and recipient are inseparable parts of the process; feedback, however, is weak.

There is also a shared assumption, and this is our observation: all three map a relationship; none proposes a cause–effect claim of the kind “if this happens, that follows”. So they should be looked at as maps, not as theories. We will unpack this in the critique section.

Lab

Lab: split a media message into six functions

Pick a message: a news headline, a notification, a slogan. Apply the following five steps.

1. Write it down. Copy the message word for word. It should be a documented, that is, really existing text; do not summarise it in your own sentences.
2. Identify the factors. Who is the addresser, who the addressee, what is the context, which code and channel?
3. Look for fingerprints. What do clues such as exclamations, vocatives, commands, greetings, definitions, repetitions and sound play point to?
4. Rank. Order the functions by importance; find the dominant one.
5. Test. If you remove the top function, what does the message leave behind?

Worked example: “I like Ike”. In Jakobson’s own analysis the poetic function, through its sound structure, reinforces the slogan’s effect. Our reading: there is also an emotive function (“I like” declares an attitude), a conative one (it is an election slogan, asking for votes) and a very weak referential one (a reference to a candidate). Remove the poetic function and “I like Ike” leaves “I like Ike”: the slogan is still understood but no longer sticks in the mind.

A second example. Nesterova Coşkun notes that Rumi’s Masnavi opens with “Listen to this reed, what it tells”, that the text makes contact with the reader and addresses him from the very first line, so that the phatic and conative functions are intertwined.

Step by step

Gerbner’s chain, step by step

Let us walk through Gerbner’s own example with a raindrop.

1. An event happens (E). Moisture in the air condenses; something is really going on outside.
2. M perceives (E1). The perceiver sees the event within his or her own selectivity, context and access: “rain”. The resulting E1 is not the event itself but a slice of it.
3. M produces the statement (SE). He says “it’s raining”. A form (S) and a content (E) are chosen here; there is also a means and a level of control: is he talking face to face, writing a message, publishing a newspaper?
4. The statement circulates. In the means and controls dimension the statement moves within the possibilities and limits of the channels chosen.
5. M2 perceives (SE1). The listener perceives the statement, in his or her own frame, as “it’s raining”; his or her own selectivity and context are at work.

At each arrow there may be a loss or a transformation: from E to E1, from E1 to SE, from SE to SE1. You can extend the chain: if M2 passes the statement on to someone else, a new perception–production–perception link opens (this extension is our inference).

Think of a news story: the event (E), the part the reporter could see (E1), the story he wrote (SE), what the reader understood (SE1). Four places, four separate points of loss.

Lab

Lab: place a documented broadcast in Maletzke’s field

Let us pick a documented broadcast: the Mercury Theatre on the Air programme that CBS radio aired on the evening of Sunday, 30 October 1938. It was a dramatised Martian invasion, told with news-bulletin interludes.

Now fill in the field:

• Communicator: the team that made the radio play and the organisation that aired it, CBS. (For Maletzke the communicator is not one person but a team and an organisation.)
• Statement: a fictional event, told in the form of news bulletins.
• Medium: radio; sound only and a programme flow. The constraint of the medium determines the form here: everything through the ear, in a single stream.
• Recipient: a dispersed audience. That evening a listener-measurement service (Hooper) surveyed 5,000 households; only 2 per cent said they were listening to “a radio play” or to the Orson Welles programme. The rest were listening to something else; one of the rival programmes was Edgar Bergen’s comedy show.
• Para-feedback: next-day newspaper front pages; the questionnaire that CBS’s Frank Stanton wrote that night and the fieldwork that began the next morning.

This placement is an interpretive frame: it does not answer “was there a panic?”. But it organises the questions “who spoke to whom, through which medium and with what image, and where did the feedback come from?”

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The evidence for models: having been put to use

A theory makes a claim of the kind “if this happens, that follows” and is tested; these three models mostly offer a framework. So their evidence is of another kind: examples of the model actually being used and proving useful. You saw this distinction in detail in the lesson What Is a Theory? Paradigms and Classifications.

• Jakobson: Kulkarni (2014) investigated the phatic function in instant messaging: she collected 60 chats from 20 participants and used conversation analysis to look at how contact is established, maintained and ended. Dalak (2021) analysed a French play with Jakobson’s model. Nesterova Coşkun (2023) explained each function with Turkish examples.
• Gerbner: According to McQuail and Windahl the model was also used to explain the procedures of content analysis (Gerbner 1964); it is also seen as suited to analysing situations such as testimony in court (how accurately did the witness perceive the event, how well does the statement match the perception?).
• Maletzke: The model became the skeleton of the book itself; McQuail and Windahl write that it can be treated as a “checklist” and that it reminds a communicator of the need for a clear definition of the intended audience. According to Ioni and Pstae, Burkart (1997) adapted the model to online communication.

Each example shows that a model is a tool for producing questions; none of them proves that the model is “true”.

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Criticisms: each model has a different blind spot

The criticism of these three models does not fit into one sentence; each gets stuck in a different place.

Jakobson. In a lecture text published on Semioticon (author not stated), two separate points stand out. First, Jakobson says surprisingly little that is explicit about the conative function, and his examples of the phatic function (birds, babies) are left unfinished. Second, Baudrillard’s critique of the phatic function: for him “contact for contact’s sake” becomes an empty form in information networks. Nesterova Coşkun also reminds us that the model was not developed only for communication research; expecting a “communication theory” from it is therefore a little unfair.

Gerbner. İplikçi (2015) writes that the model looks as if it is oriented to meaning but remains an extension of the Shannon–Weaver model: it does not ask how meaning arises, takes the form of the message and the codes as given, and does not go beyond the process of transmission. The defence is McQuail and Windahl’s stress on the model’s flexibility and on its showing that perception is subjective and selective.

Maletzke. McQuail and Windahl write that Maletzke’s image of the person is a complex one (communicator and recipient behaviour is a function of many factors) and that this complexity is an important reason why mass communication research has been fairly unsuccessful in explaining and predicting outcomes; they add that the schema is relatively dated but remains useful as a checklist. Ioni and Pstae also report a methodological criticism: the criteria used in building the model are not consistent and unified.

Myth check

Myth: “The model was refuted, so throw it away”

What people assume. A model is tested like a theory; a single counter-example refutes it. E.g.: “Feedback on the internet is instant; Maletzke’s ‘one-way’ schema has been refuted.”

What the evidence says. McQuail and Windahl define a model as a consciously simplified graphic description of a piece of reality. A model’s job is to show the main elements and the relations between them; it has three uses: it organises, it helps explanation (a heuristic function) and sometimes it gives a basis for prediction. They add that in communication research old models have generally been discarded or modified quickly.

So if the “one-way” assumption of Maletzke’s schema does not hold in the new environment, the thing to do is to change that assumption and adapt the schema; according to Ioni and Pstae, Burkart adapted the model for online communication in just this way. A model is a map: when the road changes the map is updated, but the map still helps you find your way. Choosing which model suits which question is also a skill. Recall the distinction in the lesson What Is a Theory? Paradigms and Classifications: a model mostly shows “how it works”, not “why”.

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Today: one question from each model

Instead of memorising these three models and shelving them, you can keep them in your pocket as three questions.

Jakobson: “What job is this message doing?” In messaging the phatic function is a world of its own: Kulkarni’s study shows that participants put serious effort, through short reactions, into establishing and keeping contact. Nesterova Coşkun links emoji to the emotive function and reports that as of March 2019 Unicode had recorded 3,019 emoji and that, according to one study, nearly half of the text messages on Instagram contain emoji. These numbers are what the article reports; they are not our own measurement.

Gerbner: “Which part of the event is this news showing?” At the societal level, if you take E as potential news, M as the media, SE as media content and M2 as the audience, these questions follow: how well do the stories the media tell match reality, and how well does the audience understand the content?

Maletzke: “Who, in what environment, with what image?” The model works like a checklist: it reminds you especially of the clear definition of the target audience and of the communicator’s image with the audience.

Our interpretation (not a sourced finding): on platforms, likes and comments have sped up feedback; Maletzke’s assumption of “weak, indirect feedback” must be re-examined in these environments, but the question “what environment stands behind whom?” is still valid.

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This is how exams ask it

Common question patterns

• “The referential, emotive, conative, poetic, phatic (channel-checking) and metalingual functions belong to which researcher?” → Roman Jakobson (1960; presented 1958).
• “Which function is focus on how the message is said?” → poetic. “Testing the channel?” → phatic (kanal teyidi).
• “Which model begins communication with the perception of an event?” → Gerbner (1956).
• “Which model shows communicator, message, medium, recipient and the images and pressures between them?” → Maletzke (1963).
• Matching: language-centred → Jakobson; perception-centred → Gerbner; social-field-centred → Maletzke.

Tempting wrong answers

• Confusing Jakobson’s six functions with Lasswell’s three (surveillance, correlation, transmission). The same word “function”, different lists. the three social functions of communication
• Mentioning Gerbner only for cultivation, or placing the cultivation studies in 1956.
• Thinking effect is a separate box in Maletzke. Maletzke takes the first four elements of Lasswell.
• Merging Riley and Riley’s 1959 social system approach with Maletzke’s 1963 schema. Riley and Riley model
• Years: Gerbner 1956, Jakobson 1960 (paper 1958), Maletzke 1963.

Alternative names in Turkish

• Jakobson: Jakobson modeli, iletişim şeması, dilin işlevleri; for the phatic function kanal teyidi, ilişki işlevi; for the metalingual metadil, üstdil.
• Gerbner: Gerbner Modeli (1956), genel iletişim modeli.
• Maletzke: Maletzke modeli, kitle iletişiminin alan şeması. Some sources count Gerbner among the “process models”.

Summary

Summary card

• Shared concern: Three additional views to the process models’ question of “the message’s journey”: language, perception, social field.
• Jakobson (1960): Six factors (addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, code) and six functions (emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic/channel-checking, metalingual). No message has a single function; the difference is in the hierarchy. The first three functions come from Bühler.
• Gerbner (1956): An event (E) is perceived (E1), a statement is produced (SE), a second perceiver perceives it (SE1). A perceptual dimension and a means-and-controls dimension.
• Maletzke (1963): Communicator, message, medium, recipient; self-image, image of the recipient, medium constraint, social environment, weak feedback. Effect is not a separate box.
• Riley and Riley (1959): Sender and receiver sit inside primary and secondary groups and the social structure.
• Model ≠ theory: A model is a simplified map; it organises, works heuristically and carries hidden assumptions.
• Today: The phatic function in messaging, Gerbner in the fit between news and reality, Maletzke as a checklist.
• Exam: the years 1956 / 1960 / 1963; Jakobson’s functions and Lasswell’s functions are different lists; alternative Turkish names.