Communication Is Sending

conceptual-metaphor Containers → Communication

Categories: cognitive-science linguistics

What It Brings

The most specific layer of the conduit metaphor system: communication is the physical transfer of objects from sender to receiver. Speaking is putting meanings into word-containers and shipping them across. Listening is receiving the package and unpacking it. The metaphor makes communication feel like logistics — a matter of clear packaging, reliable delivery, and careful unpacking.

Key structural parallels:

Sender and receiver — communication has two roles mapped directly from postal delivery. The sender formulates (packages), the receiver interprets (unpacks). “I sent her a message.” “Did you get what I was saying?” The entire interaction is framed as a transaction between a source and a destination.
The message as object in transit — meanings travel. “The idea came across clearly.” “Something got lost in translation.” The metaphor treats meaning as a physical thing that occupies space, moves through a medium, and can be damaged, lost, or intercepted en route.
Channels and media — the path the message travels. “What channel are you using?” “The signal was weak.” Communication media are conduits that can be clear or noisy, wide or narrow, open or blocked.
Successful delivery — understanding is receipt. “Did the message land?” “I’m not sure that got through.” Communication succeeds when the package arrives intact. The metaphor provides a clean success criterion: did the receiver get what the sender sent?

Where It Breaks

Meaning is constructed, not delivered — the fundamental failure. The receiver doesn’t unpack a pre-formed meaning; they build their own interpretation from the cues the sender provides. Two people “receive” the same sentence and construct different meanings because they bring different contexts, assumptions, and knowledge. The sending metaphor makes this look like delivery error when it’s actually the normal mechanism of communication.
The metaphor erases the listener’s creative work — in the sending frame, the sender does the important labor (formulating, packaging) and the receiver merely opens the box. Real listening is active, interpretive, and creative. The best readers don’t extract meanings from texts; they construct meanings the author never intended. The metaphor systematically devalues reception.
Feedback is an afterthought — the sending model is fundamentally one-directional. You can bolt on “feedback” (return mail), but the basic architecture is sender-to-receiver. This makes dialogue hard to model. Conversation isn’t two people taking turns sending packages; it’s collaborative meaning-making in real time.
The metaphor makes silence look like absence — if communication is sending, then not-sending is not-communicating. But silence, pauses, and withholding are all communicative acts. “He said nothing, which said everything.” The sending frame can’t account for communication through absence.
It privileges explicit over implicit communication — the sending model works best for propositional content (“the meeting is at 3pm”) and worst for everything else: tone, implication, irony, body language, social signaling. The metaphor treats these as noise in the channel rather than as core communicative content.

Expressions

“Did the message get across?” — understanding as successful spatial transfer
“I couldn’t get through to her” — failed delivery, blocked channel
“He got a lot out of that lecture” — extraction of content from a verbal container
“Try to put your thoughts into words” — formulation as packaging
“Something was lost in translation” — meaning damaged in transit between languages
“She conveyed her feelings clearly” — emotional communication as transport (from Latin convehere, to carry together)
“The signal was weak” — communication quality as transmission strength
“I’m sending mixed signals” — contradictory messages as confused shipments
“Let me get this across to you” — the speaker as determined deliverer
“That really hit home” — a message that arrived at its destination with force

Origin Story

COMMUNICATION IS SENDING is the third component of Michael Reddy’s conduit metaphor system, identified in his 1979 paper “The Conduit Metaphor” in Andrew Ortony’s Metaphor and Thought. Reddy catalogued 141 expressions and found the sending/transfer component to be the most pervasive: English speakers cannot easily talk about communication without invoking spatial transfer.

Lakoff and Johnson adopted the conduit metaphor as a key example of structural metaphor in Metaphors We Live By (1980). Shannon and Weaver’s mathematical theory of communication (1949) independently formalized the same structure — sender, channel, receiver, signal, noise — giving the metaphor the authority of engineering. The Shannon-Weaver model was designed for telephone signals, not human meaning-making, but its elegance made it the default model of communication in fields from journalism to education. The metaphor and the engineering model reinforced each other.

References

Reddy, M. “The Conduit Metaphor” in Ortony, A. (ed.) Metaphor and Thought (1979)
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 3
Shannon, C. & Weaver, W. The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949) — the engineering model that formalized the same metaphorical structure
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986) — the inferential model that challenges the conduit framework