«What is central to everything above, then, is the move away from the idea of speech communication as being a process of information transmission, of the speaker as a source of information, of speech being a common code into which one puts one‟s thoughts, and of listeners as simply being decoders who have to task of arriving at the speaker‟s thought. This „model‟ of the communication process eradicates the role of two major aspects of the communication situation: (1) The spontaneous, living, expressive-responsiveness of our bodies, thus leaving listeners as passive listeners – in this situation, “the active role of the other in the process of speech communication is… reduced to a minimum” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 70). (2) The other, is the role of what I have called the „determining surroundings‟ of our utterance, the (often invisible) surroundings which, in our being spontaneously responsive to them in the voicing of our utterances, on the one hand, give shape not only the intonational contours of our utterances, but also to their whole style, to our word choices, to the metaphors we use and so on. But which, on the other, orients us toward the „place‟ of our utterances in our world, toward where they should be located or toward what aspect they are relevant, and toward where next we might we might go, i.e., their point – what they are trying to „construct‟ in speaking as they are. In other words, it is crucial to bring our words back from their „free-floating‟ use – whether it be in committee or seminar rooms, in psychotherapy, in strategic planning in businesses, on the internet, or in just general conversations in sitting rooms – to their use within a shared set of “determining surroundings.” That is, it is crucial if we are to understand how the “specific variability” in a speaker‟s expressions are expressive both of his or her unique „inner world‟, and of the unique „point‟ he or she wants to express, to make, in relation to their world.» In: Moments of Common Reference in Dialogic Communication: A Basis for Unconfused Collaboration in Unique Contexts. In: International Journal of Collaborative Practices 1 2009.