metacommunicativeadj.

1951 J. Ruesch & G. Bateson Communication vi. 152 He is..making implicit metacommunicative statements about his own position and stock of information.

1963 T. A. Sebeok in J. A. Fishman Readings Sociol. of Lang. (1968) 28 The metacommunicative messages used by rhesus monkeys, enabling them to distinguish between play and nonplay, have received particularly careful attention.

1975 Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 4 106 A frame is a metacommunicative device which signals the interpretive context within which a message is to be understood.

1992 Camera & Darkroom Feb. 66/3 But much of that debate would be metacommunicative, concerned as much with how we communicate as with what we communicate.