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Metacommunication
The act of commenting on, analyzing, or reflecting on another communicative act. The metacommunication may contradict the other communication, reaffirm it, or cause its meanings to be more complicated and ambiguous. Metacommunications can take place before, during, or after the communication, and their position in time can have an effect on the reception of the communication. For example, warning someone that a story about to be told may be scary can set up the listener differently than when not issuing this warning. The exact effects of a metacommunicative act cannot be any more precisely predicted than the act of communication itself, which is always prone to multiple interpretations, unexpected effects, and misunderstandings. Metacommunications may try to predispose a listener or reader to a particular interpretation ...