Every communication has the purpose of establishing a relationship. Relationships are basically of three orders: the equal (between friends) and hierarchical relationship on both sides: adult-child and child-adult. There are also relationships, for instance, between man and woman thatmove through all three orders of relationships in different phases and different moments.

Human relationships are established if both accept the identification of the degree of relationship proposed by the other. In our case, for instance, I’m the father and you’re the child- I’m teaching and you’re learning. We accept this. The moment one of the students reacts and the teacher perceives that he is refused as a teacher, there is tension between the two until, for instance, the teacher realises that in that particular subject matter it is the student who knows more. So, I accept the other as the teacher (for instance, when you put doubts on the hardware list). The elasticity or the capacity of persons to accept changes in the levels of the relationship at different points is extremely important for the relationship.

Even if we consider language to be different from communication, we must always consider the hierarchical relationship as an essential purpose of the fact of communicating. We communicate in order to establish the level of the relationship and only after we’ve established it. This again is a problem of punctualisation.