Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines : Volume 1: Culture, sensory interaction, speech, conversation [1 ed.] 9789027297129, 9789027221810

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Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines, Vol I Culture, sensory interaction, speech, conversation

Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines Volume I: Culture, sensory interaction, speech, conversation

Fernando Poyatos University of New Brunswick

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam
/
Philadelphia

8

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Poyatos, Fernando Nonverbal communication across disciplines / Fernando Poyatos. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contens: v. 1. Culture, sensory interaction, speech, conversation -- v. 2. Paralanguage, kinesics, silence, personal and environmental interaction -- v. 3. Narrative literature, theater, cinema, translation. 1. Nonverbal communication. 2. Communication and culture. 3. Oral communication. I. Title. P99.5.P694 2002 302.2’22--dc21

2001052813

isbn 90 272 2184 7 (set) -- isbn 90 272 2181 2 (v.1) -- isbn 90 272 2182 0 (v.2) -- isbn 90 272 2183 9 (v.3) (Eur.) / isbn 1-55619-756-X (set) -- isbn 1-55619-753-5 (v.1) -- isbn 1-55619-754-3 (v.2) -- isbn 1-55619-755-1 (v.3) (US)

© 2002 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Volume I

To Thomas A. Sebeok, who personally and through his always inspiring work encouraged my thirst for interdisciplinarity



Table of contents

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Culture, communication, and cultural fluency 1.1 On defining culture1 1.2 Culture as a communication continuum: Active and passive, interactive and noninteractive forms3 1.3 Inherited habits and learned habits through time and space5 1.4 Sensible and intelligible systems in a culture8 1.5 The systematic analysis of a culture: The interdisciplinary model of culturemes10 1.6 Relationships among sensible and intelligible, somatic, extrasomatic and environmental systems15 1.7 The barriers of intercultural communication: The case of Tom17 1.8 Linguistic fluency and verbal and nonverbal cultural fluency: Behavioral alternatives and fluency quotient19 1.9 Verbal and nonverbal cultural fluency from within: Acculturation, epistolary communication, literary translation21 1.10 On the concept of verbal and nonverbal usage22 1.11 The semiotic-communicative processes of language and nonverbal systems in intercultural interaction24 1.12 Conclusion27 1.13 Topics for interdisciplinary research28

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Chapter 2 Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems 31 2.1 Intersomatic communication in its cultural and environmental context
31 2.2 The channels of intersomatic emission and perception in interaction: Direct and synesthesial perception of dynamic and static signs
32 2.3 Light as an external agent for our interactive perception
47 2.4 The importance of synesthesia and language among the other somatic systems in human and animals
48 2.5 External somatic communication
49 2.6 The communicative possibilities of body movements
49 2.7 The concept of interactive articulations: Single and multiple
52 2.8 Coding and interrelationships of verbal and nonverbal behaviors in interaction
53 2.9 The basic interrelationships among nonverbal systems and language
55 2.10 Toward a revision of the concept of redundancy
59 2.11 Conclusion
60 2.12 Topics for interdisciplinary research
61 Chapter 3 The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse: the speaking face 3.1 The audiovisual production of speech: Permanent, changing, dynamic and artificial signs in the speaking face
63 3.2 Breathing and communication: Lungs and bronchi
74 3.3 The esophagus
76 3.4 The larynx
76 3.5 The pharynx
78 3.6 The alveolar-palatal areas
79 3.7 The dental areas
81 3.8 The labial areas and the cheeks
82 3.9 The tongue
89 3.10 The mandible and the chin
93 3.11 The nasal cavities
95 3.12 The vowel sounds as degrees in tongue and lip position: Sound and gesture
99 3.13 Conclusion
100 3.14 Topics for interdisciplinary research
100

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Chapter 4 Language-paralanguage-kinesics 103 4.1 The basic triple structure of discourse: Language-paralanguage-kinesics
103 4.2 The semiotic-expressive limitations of spoken words and the verbal-nonverbal expression of the ineffable
104 4.3 The written word and the feasible ‘orality’ of writing
108 4.4 Lexicality and grammaticality of paralanguage and kinesics and the other sensible systems
110 4.5 New information, communicative economy, verbal deficiency, anticipation, and formal and semantic congruence
111 4.6 The precarious reality of read discourse
113 4.7 A brief introduction to verbal language, paralanguage and kinesics
114 4.8 On intonation as communication
117 4.9 Segmentable and nonsegmentable elements in the triple structure
118 4.10 The ten realizations and mutual combinations of language, paralanguage and kinesics
119 4.11 Ontogenetic and social development, spatial and temporal transmission, and balance and pathology in the triple structure
121 4.12 The total conditioning background of the triple structure and of communication in general
123 4.13 Conclusion
130 4.14 Topics for interdisciplinary research
130 Chapter 5 Two applications of the basic triple structure model i. 5.1 5.2 5.3

the transcription of interactive discourse The need for a realistic transcription of speech
133 On the relevance of the registered signs and the risks of their omission Two background models for the exhaustive organization of a transcription: Interaction and conversation
135 5.4 The transcription of a conversational corpus
139 ii. nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching 5.5 The unrealistic classroom acquisition of a foreign language and the academic target of verbal-nonverbal fluency
143 5.6 The acquisition of linguistic and cultural repertoires: Native learner versus foreign learner
145 5.7 The presentation of paralinguistic material
148 5.8 Illustration and drilling for paralinguistic instruction
154 5.9 Distribution of the kinesic material
155 5.10 The order of presentation of gestures, manners and postures
156

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5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15

Illustration and description of the kinesic material
157 Classroom drills, tests, and course projects
159 Beyond language acquisition: A course on ‘Intercultural Awareness’
160 Conclusion
162 Topics for interdisciplinary research
163

Chapter 6 Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers 6.1 The need to classify and label behaviors
165 6.2 Emblems: Gestures for words
167 6.3 Speech markers: The movements of our speaking
171 6.4 Space markers: Pointing at what is present or absent
177 6.5 Time markers: Past, present, future
178 6.6 Deictics: Pointing at people, things and concepts
179 6.7 Pictographs: Drawing with gestures
183 6.8 Echoics: Imitating what sounds
184 6.9 Kinetographs: Imitating what moves
185 6.10 Kinephonographs: Imitating movement and sound
186 6.11 Ideographs: Giving visual form to thoughts
187 6.12 Event tracers: How things happened
188 6.13 Identifiers: Giving visual form to concepts
188 6.14 Externalizers: Our reactions made visual
189 6.15 Self-adaptors: Contacting ourselves
198 6.16 Alter-adaptors: Contacting others
204 6.17 Body-adaptors: The intimates of our body
211 6.18 Object-adaptors: Contacting objects
219 6.19 Conclusion
224 6.20 Topics for interdisciplinary research
224 Chapter 7 The structure of conversation 7.1 The study of conversation: The configuration of the encounter and its interpersonal relationships
227 7.2 Speaker’s and auditor’s initial behaviors
233 7.3 Basic speaker-auditor turn-change behaviors
234 7.4 Secondary turn-change bevahiors
237 7.5 Listener-to-speaker behaviors I: Feedback
240 7.6 Listener-to-Speaker behaviors II: Listener’s secondary activities
243 7.7 Speaker’s secondary behaviors
246 7.8 Interlistener behaviors
248

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7.9 Coinciding activities: Simultaneous behaviors and crossed conversations
249 7.10 Acoustic and visual pauses or breaks
253 7.11 Conversational fluency, ontogenetic development, reduced interaction, chronemics, and naturalness
266 7.12 Conclusion
268 7.13 Topics for interdisciplinary research
269 Chapter 8 Nonverbal communication in interpretation 8.1 The total communicative approach to simultaneous and consecutive interpretation
271 8.2 The verbal and nonverbal components in the interpretation situation: Basic systems
272 8.3 The fate of nonverbal systems in interpretation
275 8.4 The fate of the basic structure language-paralanguage-kinesics in interpretation
278 8.5 Interpretation in the total context of personal and environmental interaction
279 8.6 The relationships between verbal and nonverbal in interpretation
281 8.7 Chronemics of interpretation
284 8.8 Silence and stillness in the interpretation situation
284 8.9 The exchange of nonverbal visual behaviors in interpretation
285 8.10 The structure of conversation in interpretation
288 8.11 Reduced interaction situations and the interpreter’s responsibility
292 8.12 Conclusion
294 8.13 Topics for interdisciplinary research
295

271

Appendix

297

Notes

305

List of illustrations

319

Scientific references

321

Literary references

347

Index of literary authors and works cited

355

Name index

359

Subject index

365

Tables of Contents, Volumes II and III

370



Preface

This is the first of the three volumes which, while enlarging upon different aspects and adding new topics and perspectives, cover the majority of the topics in nonverbal communication and interaction through which I believe I have contributed to nonverbal communication studies in the last thirty-some years. They have appeared as books and articles mainly within semiotics, linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and literature. In those publications, in the many symposiums I endeavored to organize over the years and in my lectures, I tried, and still do so, to foster the interdisciplinary approach so needed today in many domains. At the same time, speaking on these topics in over twenty countries, and the international variety of students I always had in my Canadian courses, have provided me with much cross-cultural material and opportunities to witness the growing interest in nonverbal communication within the academc world, while being a great incentive to explore ever new perspectives in this field. Fernando Poyatos Fredericton, 1998 Algeciras, 2001



Acknowledgements

To my University of New Brunswick for its continued support of thirty-three years. To my nonverbal communication students in my anthropology, sociology and psychology courses of twenty years, for their interest and response, with my best personal memories. To those who by applying my work in their research encourage me to pursue my own, and to those I may never meet personally but whose comments or consultation I always find stimulating. To the many colleagues around the world, for their hospitality and friendship. To John and Claire Benjamins and their staff — especially Yola de Lussenet, editor of my first book with the company, and above all Bertie Kaal, editor of the last three and this trilogy — for our excellent twelve-year relationship.



Introduction

1.

The itinerary of a personal investigation of language and communication Today’s younger or not-so-young scholars in nonverbal communication tend to ignore, or ungratefully neglect, those who set the foundations for this multi- and interdisciplinary field. Since I have been interested in communication from within, between and across at least half-a-dozen different fields of knowledge for over thirty years, I should summarize with gratitude my own journey of discovery as a gage by which others may trace their own and acknowledge their indebtedness to those who worked in the past four decades. Incited by an initial philological background, I began to naturally develop interrelated interests in other disciplines, which very soon carried me beyond the traditional perspectives within linguistics, phonetics and language and communication in general. At the same time, precisely through the language and the literature which I myself taught in those years to foreign North American students, I began to ponder the audible-visual triple reality of speech: what we say–how we say it–how we move it. Nothing new in anyone’s experience, yet never systematically studied, although research in communication and personal interaction had been gathering momentum since the late 1950s. To help me in that integral orientation which I already sensed as indispensable, I was personally living a gradual process of acculturation and a daily experience of whatever my adopted culture (the United States and then Canada) communicated through both its speakers and everything that surrounded them in a way I could not dissociate, as I continually encountered them in my interaction with the people and the environment. That is why, abandoning a verbal phraseology project — precisely because those expressions appeared to me very much as ‘verbal-nonverbal phrases’ — I began to profit from the pioneering work on ‘paralanguage’ by Trager (1958) and Pittenger and Smith (1957), as well as by the first on ‘kinesics’ by Birdwhistell (1952). Additionally inspired by much that had not been done, I immediately missed in the book The First Five Minutes (Pittenger, Hockett and Danehy 1960) a double phonetic and paralinguistic transcription of a schizophrenic girl’s speech, ‘how she must have moved what she said.’ I was familiar with the work of Darwin (1872) on emotional human reactions (of no small influence on the then developing field of human

xvi Introduction

ethology) and Lorenz’ on animal behavior (Lorenz 1966); the late prominent anthropologist Gordon Hewes prompted me quite eagerly (on a 1974 lecture visit to his University of Colorado) to further my line of research and introduced me to the work of Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1971, 1972, 1973) and to his own hypotheses on the gestural origin of language (Hewes 1955, 1957, 1973a, 1973b, 1974), to which I added the work of Glen McBride (1973). I also knew some early cultural gesture inventories like those by Efron (1941), Amades (1957), Saitz and Cervenka (1962) and Barakat (1973, 1975). The always inspiring and foremost interdisciplinary semiotician Thomas Sebeok (to whom I am much indebted on many accounts) asked me to do a review article (Poyatos 1975a) on David Efron’s — who also encouraged me much after hearing me discuss my work in Milan — and Saitz and Cervenka’s, adding a weaker but still pioneering one by Green (1968). I also incorporated into my initial holistic schemes the also developing field of proxemics (Hall 1963, 1966, 1968, 1974; Sommer 1962, 1969, 1974). At the same time, on the occasion of the Chicago 1973 International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, in which I was intensively engaged, I started a fruitful and encouraging personal relationship with some already influential researchers, mainly the anthropologist-urban architect Amos Rapoport, the psychologists Adam Kendon and Starkey Duncan, the late psychiatrist Albert Scheflen and the linguists Mary Ritchie Key and Walburga von Raffler-Engel. All these encounters were confirming to me the necessity for my approach to communication and interaction, beginning with what I had developed as ‘the basic triple structure of human communication’ (language-paralanguage-kinesics, that is, speech), a perspective which I simultaneously incorporated (as something that just lay untapped) into my study of culture (e.g. Poyatos 1971, 1972a, 1976a, 1976d, 1976e, 1980b, 1983a), the novel (Poyatos 1972b, 1976a: Chapter 7, 1976b, 1976c, 1977, 1983a: Chapters 9 and 11) and later the theater (1982a, 1983a: Chapter 10, 1983b). I realized, however, that that tripartite core of communication did not function in isolation, but in close co-structuration with all types of somatic, objectual and even environmental signs, from which I soon found it impossible to isolate verbal language, the ‘speech act’ of which many were talking following the work of Searle (1969), as if it were a reality relatively easy to isolate and interpret. In addition, my contacts with many different cultures of the world would constantly confirm to me to what extent those persons communicated with me basically through faces that I not only heard but saw, in basically audiovisual systems of linguistic-cultural signs. In other words, they sounded and moved in English, French, Spanish, or in any language I might not understand; and those speaking faces I perceived morphologically and even syntactically joined to two hands and to a body, together representing always a given culture.

Introduction

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2.

Nonverbal communication: Definition and interdisciplinarity

2.1.

To argue at this point in time whether the term ‘nonverbal communication,’ used for so long in multiple languages, is more or less felicitous would be quite unproductive (see Poyatos 1988a: 2–4). Some top scholars have voiced their discontent with it. To mention two of those I respect most personally and scientifically, Sebeok (1975: 10) argued that “the formula ‘communication minus language = nonverbal communication’ is clumsily negative, simplistic, and obscurantist,” and later (Sebeok 1977: 1065– 1067) that “the concept of nonverbal communication is one of the most ill-defined in all of semiotics,” referring, for instance, to the verbal value of many gestures, and to the nonvocal but nevertheless verbal quality of American Sign Language, concluding by suggesting (tongue-in-cheek) that “nonverbal surpasses the sphere of bodily communication to subsume the entire range of culture exclusive of language”, but overlapping ethology. Kendon, besides his later comments on it (e.g. Kendon 1994: 311, 321), reviewed the emergence of the term in the excellent introduction to his 1981 compilation (Kendon 1981a) of Semiotica’s “seminal articles” (whose volume title bears the term [as do the papers, including my own two]), its limits and consequences since being part of the title of the book by Ruesch and Kees (1956) — based on cybernetics and the mathematical theory of information (which regarded all intended or unintended behaviors as informative) — and then explains why behavior does not have to be intentional in order to communicate, intentionality not always being possible to determine. The reader would find that the concept of nonverbal communication as explained in that introduction appears considerably enlarged in the three present volumes, for there Kendon referred to the term “as currently employed”: “in reference to communication between persons who are directly present to one another” (3), “effected through behavior whose communicative significance cannot be achieved in any other way” (3), adding that “messages that are at the center of interest (whether in fact conveyed by words or not), are typically those messages that are not given explicit formulation” (4). Nevertheless, the work in ‘nonverbal communication,’ unsure of the term as some may be, has certainly taken great strides in the last four decades. Personally, for my own interdisciplinary approach to communication, I have previously define nonverbal communication as: the emissions of signs by all the nonlexical, artifactual and environmental sensible sign systems contained in the realm of a culture, whether individually or in mutual costructuration, and whether or not those emissions constitute behavior or generate personal interaction (Poyatos 1983a: 69)

This definition is based on the fact that not only we people as socializing beings, but our natural, modified or built environment, are unceasingly emitting nonverbal signs; hence the interdisciplinarity of nonverbal communication studies responds to their very nature and covers, besides those just mentioned, fields like architecture, landscap-

xviii Introduction

ing, general medicine and psychotherapy, nursing, business, tourism, painting, photography, interior decoration and furniture design, clothes and fashion, cosmetics and perfumes, sports, law, etc. No wonder in my earliest readings of the communication literature I was struck by this statement in the preface of a volume edited by Lee Thayer (1967): Whenever one studies human communication from the perspectives of his own discipline, he soon finds himself at an impasse; the corpus he wants to comprehend stretches perversely, indeterminately across many fields of study in the life and behavioral sciences and the applied arts. The head or the tail, or some other vital part of what he wants to understand, lies somewhere else — sometimes beyond his own communicative reach. Or it lies along the often great cultural boundaries which divide one way of seeing the world from another.

Nevertheless, from a stricter point of view, it is true that nonverbal communication can be understood solely as the tripartite activity of speech, at most developed in turn in the two basic dimensions of space and time, which, due to our conceptualization and structuration of both, determine attitudes studied as proxemics and ‘chronemics’ (Poyatos 1972a: 84, 1976a: 152–155), respectively. Without failing to acknowledge the dissatisfaction that the term ‘nonverbal’ may cause, neither do I regard it as “unforgivably ugly” (Kendon 1994: 311), and I believe that we must not interrupt our work while we search for a better one, and that, in light of the present work, we can hardly deny the existence of a “coherent field of ‘nonverbal behavior,” as stated by Kendon (1994: 321). 2.2.

From their onset, nonverbal communication studies have been characterized by their multi- and interdisciplinarity. First, the ‘Conference on Paralinguistics and Kinesics’ organized by Sebeok at Indiana University in 1963 (Sebeok et al. 1964) and then the even more multidisciplinary gatherings of the Royal Society of England during the 1960s (instigated by Sir Julian Huxley and presided by W. H. Thorpe) to define the nature of nonverbal communication, which resulted in a second and still more interdisciplinary volume (Hinde 1972) containing innovative and very valuable studies by specialists like the linguists Crystal and Lyons, the art historian Gombrich, the anthropologist Leach, the ethologist Eibl-Eibesfeldt, the psychologists Argyle and Blurton Jones, the zoologists Thorpe and van Hooff, the theater specialist Miller, etc. Sponsored by Germany’s Wenner-Gren Foundation, Sebeok organized a semioticallyoriented conference on “Interactive ethology” (Amsterdam, 1970) and a second one on “Language and Medicine” (New York, 1970). On her part, Mary Ritchie Key — who for years generously distributed a typed newsletter, “Nonverbal Components of Communication: Paralanguage, Kinesics, Proxemics,” keeping scholars in five continents abreast of publications and ongoing research and serving as their personal liaison — was instrumental in fostering interest in paralanguage and kinesics (e.g.

Introduction

Key 1975a, 1975b, 1977, 1982), and also assembled an influential group of scholars in an interdisciplinary volume (Key 1982); Martha Davis was also instrumental with her own work in clinical psychology (Davis 1970, 1975), for some years with her highly informative The Kinesis Report, out of New York’s Institute of Nonverbal Communication Research, and with a bibliographical volume (Davis and Skupien 1982). After lecturing twice in the early 1970s at Saratoga Spring’s Skidmore College, The New York State English Council commissioned me to do my first book on nonverbal communication (Poyatos 1976a), while the psychologists Harper, Wiens and Mattarazzo (1978) produced an extremely well documented state-of-the-art book for psychology, followed by Shirley Weitz’s compilation of reputed specialists in that field (Weitz 1979), and an equally prestigious interdisciplinary group gathered by Walburga von Raffler-Engel (1980a), until today a prolific interdisciplinary figure in nonverbal communication studies (e.g. von Raffler-Engel 1983, 1988a, 1994, 2000). Later, besides numerous symposia, there were already courses for researchers, such as the Advanced Institute of Nonverbal Research, sponsored by NATO in 1969 and 1979, the latter led by Paul Ekman and Klaus Scherer (Scherer and Ekman 1982, on research methodology [particularly the excellent paper on face-to-face interaction by Kendon [1982]), and two conferences with leading scholars organized by psychologist Aaron Wolfgang, of The Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, in 1978 and 1983 (Wolfgang 1979a, 1984a). At the same time, my own contribution in the field has taken me (to mention only a few eloquent examples of interdisciplinary interest) to institutions like Copenhagen’s International School of Commerce in Copenhagen, the Schools of Interpreters and Translators at the Universities of Heidelberg and Meinz (Germersheim), the Department of Tourism and Hotel of Bogazici University in Istanbul (where I designed a course in that area, and through which I lectured for tourism and hotel managers in Istanbul and Antalya), Sebeok’s Research Center for Language and Semiotics Studies at Indiana University, etc.; a multidisciplinarity I have tried to reflect in several volumes (Poyatos 1988a, 1988b, 1992a, 1997a), in which, besides my own contributions, I gathered the work of colleagues in psychology (Argyle 1992; Cupchik 1988; Knapp and Streek 1992; A. Kendon 1988; Ricci Bitti 1992; Schneller 1988, 1992; Lowenthal 1992; Hadar 1992; Morsbach 1988a, 1988b; McDonnell 1992; van de Koppel 1988), anthropology (Hall 1988; Wescott 1992), ethnology (Hawad-Claudot 1992; Koechlin 1992), ethology (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1988), architecture (A. Rapoport 1988), English (El-Shiyab 1997), linguistics (Hasada 1997; Diadori 1997; Hatim 1993; von Raffler-Engel 1988b; Tobin 1997; Yau 1992, 1997), literature (Golden 1997; Holoka 1992; Lateiner 1992; Newbold 1992), translation (Malmkjer 1997; Nord 1997; Snell-Hornby 1997; Vermeer 1992), film and television dubbing (Varela 1997; Zabalbeascoa 1997), interpretation (Viaggio 1997; Weale 1997), fine arts (Schmitt 1992; Golder 1992), photography (Weiser 1988), sociology of clothes (Vicary 1988), and intercultural training (Ramsey 1988). I myself have followed that interdisciplinary

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Introduction

orientation from the beginning in the areas such as: anthropology and ethnology (e.g. Poyatos 1976d, 1983a: Chapter 11, 1988b, 1996a), psychology (e.g. Poyatos 1986a), cross-cultural psychology (e.g. Poyatos 1988c), psycholinguistics (Poyatos 1986b), interaction (e.g. Poyatos 1985d, 1995a), communication (e.g. Poyatos 1980b, 1982c), intercultural communication (Poyatos 1984a, 1985a, 1994a, 2000), linguistics (e.g. Poyatos 1993a, 1994b), narrative literature (e.g. Poyatos 1972a, 1976a: Chapter 7, 1977, 1983a: Chapters 9, 1985c, 1992b, 1994c, 1999), theater (e.g. Poyatos 1982a, 1983a: Chapter 10, 1983b, 1994c), translation (e.g. Poyatos 1993b, 1995b, 1995c, 1997b, 1998), interpretation (Poyatos 1987, 1997c), punctuation (e.g. Poyatos 1981a, 1994c: Chapter 5), and Hispanic studies (Poyatos 1978), besides semiotics, the latter mainly (among the references cited) in its main international organ, Semiotica, directed by Thomas Sebeok, and in Umberto Eco’s Versus: cuaderni di studi semiotici, Semiotic Inquiry, Kodikas/Code, Signa, etc. (e.g. Poyatos 1981b, 1981c, 1981d). Since the early 80s, I began to provide literary examples as illustrations for any of the topics discussed and tried to promote mainly narrative literature as an important data source. Returning to the late 1960s, and apart from a number of pseudoscientific publications on ‘body language,’ there began to appear a vast and important literature, particularly in psychology journals, but notably in Semiotica, the prestigious multidisciplinary forum directed by Thomas Sebeok, always the catalytic element as Director of Indiana University’s Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies and even more through his always inspiring personal work on semiotics and related fields. As well, nonverbal communication studies have been present at national and international conferences of different disciplines. For my part, after organizing especial sessions within the Modern Language Association of America (1977), Northeast Modern Language Association (1973), and several of the annual Canadian Learned Societies conferences, I endeavored to regularly organize symposiums (in different areas) for the international congresses of Phonetic Sciences (Miami, 1977), Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (New Delhi, 1978; Québec, 1983; Zagreb, 1988), Psychology (1980, Leipzig), Applied Psychology (Edinburgh, 1982; Jerusalem, 1986; Madrid, 1994), Cross-Cultural Psychology (Istanbul, 1986), Sociology (Madrid, 1985), Linguists (Tokyo, 1982), Applied Linguistics (Thessalonika, 1990; Amsterdam, 1993) and Semiotics (1979). At the same time, lecturing on my work in over twenty cultures (including North America, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India and Japan) allowed me, in the first place, to witness both the great interest generated by this field among colleagues and students, the need for much more research in different disciplines, and its many still untapped possibilities; and in the second place, to observe and acquire a first-hand experience of all sorts of personal and environmental nonverbal aspects in those cultures, apart from those I visited as an ordinary traveller; without excluding the extreme multiculturalism I have enjoyed even in my own classes at the University of New Brunswick for thirty-three years, a fascinating source of direct observation and

Introduction

information, and, though indirectly, through my interactions as a volunteer worker for seven years in Fredericton’s equally multicultural hospital.

3.

The use and teaching of nonverbal communication We can make use of any nonverbal system in a conscious positive or negative way. Therefore, if our systematic and progressive study of these communicative phenomena sharpens our sensitiveness toward all that is nonverbal in people and things, it is up to us to decide how we wish to utilize our emitting and receiving nonverbal skills. We know, for instance, that we can manipulate those communicative signs and through them other persons; in fact, it is being done, and people in certain sectors are even instructed to do so. But they also allow us to perceive attitudes and feelings we might not perceive otherwise, and communicate to others what on occasions would simply be ineffable. Thus, as either receivers or senders, we can, in whatever capacity, give of ourselves more efficaciously and, at the very least, observe others and enjoy more our interactions with them, both as inexhaustible as innocent pastimes. The three different courses on Nonverbal Communication which for twenty years I taught in the Departments of Anthropology, Psychology and Sociology of the University of New Brunswick (of which my last outlines appear as Appendix I) may well have been, I am afraid, the only truly (or most) interdisciplinary ones (mainly in terms of fields otherwise not brought together), judging by the contents of otherwise valuable textbooks on communication, which continue to appear (e.g. Argyle 1975; Malandro and Barker 1983; Wieman and Harrison 1983; Richmond and McCroskey 1987; Burgoon et al. 1989; Weaver 1990; Feldman and Rimé 1991; Knapp and Hall 1992; DeFleur et al. 1993; Hickson and Stacks 1993; O’Hair et al. 1995; Leathers 1997; Adler et al. 1998) and specifically on nonverbal communication (mainly Weitz 1979). Other pioneers in specific areas of nonverbal communication will be mentioned and credited throughout the three volumes. My own three courses aimed at sensitizing students of different ages, cultures and walks of life to the presence of the nonverbal in people and in the environment, and to its many applications in numerous areas. At the same time they dealt, together with many other topics, with all those nonverbal attitudes and activities that help us establish an optimal relationship with people and even with the environment in countless situations. Which in turn generated an astonishing variety of topics for course projects, among them: communication with brain-injured children or a limbless child; the blind in interaction; the students’ family album, where they discovered both the presence and absence of feelings and traced so many personal and environmental changes through several generations; their interactions as teachers, cashiers, night-club bouncers, waitresses, miners, nurses, police officers, custom officers, hockey players, dental assistants, salespersons, sport coaches, counter-snipers;

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interpersonal touching or greetings across cultures; their life and problems as residence roommates or in a co-ed residences; the negative and manipulative aspects of ads and commercials; magazine advertising cross-culturally, including Asian cultures; their intercultural problems as foreign students in Canada or as teachers in our multicultural elementary classrooms; the negative aspects of so many children’s books; nonverbal communication in films, the theater or dance; the richness of Canada’s native Maliseet or Micmac cultures, Alaska’s Kotzobue Eskimos, or any of the cultures represented in my classes; how someone fared as a punk in public places, as a visitor to other cultures, or as a hitchhiker through Europe; behaviors in the buses they rode to the campus daily; the more sensitive levels of nurse-patient relationship in the hospital floors or in its emergency room; people’s living-rooms and the evolution of status symbols and interior decoration trends; clothes and cosmetics, their social functions and people attitudes toward them; life in and out of the military uniform; games, sports, athletics, martial arts; behavior in drinking establishments, in flirting, courtship, etc.; the conflicts of the different esthetic values and tastes of the newly-married in their new shared environment; the do’s and don’t’s of the job interview; residential landscaping as class identifiers; the gestures that our invited informants from different cultures would show in class; the cultures of foreign students in the courses; and so many more (see Poyatos 1992c).

4.

Cross-cultural perspective and literary documentation Through these three volumes, the reader will frequently find a cross-cultural approach, reflected in examples and comments mostly from my own experience, and in the literary quotations, as they both sensitize us more deeply and realistically toward other peoples and cultures. Neglect of so much needed cross-cultural perspectives has been quite prevalent for many years, and continues to be in certain cultures through an inveterate ethnocentrism, as well as in the resulting ignorance of, and cultural disinterest in, other ethnic groups; as has traditionally happened in my native country, Spain (reflected also in the general neglect of the most needed foreign languages and the absence of intercultural communication textbooks like the ones mentioned above). As for the literary illustrations throughout the three volumes, whatever points are discussed I have tried to illustrate vividly with literary quotations, for the writers’ incisive observations and identification of their reality-based characters constitute an invaluable and reliable document on both people’s behaviors and their interrelated environmental elements in any of the disciplines and areas represented or alluded to. In fact, it would be totally shortsighted if we were to neglect, as something foreign to disciplines other than literature, the wealth of diachronic and synchronic documentation contained above all in the narrative and dramaturgic production of the different cultures. Most importantly, the reader is asked to carefully read and ponder these

Introduction

quotations, not simply as illustrations of what is being discussed at that particular point, for very frequently a single quotation, if carefully pondered, will be seen as an encapsulated theoretical treatise in its own right, or as suggesting further perspectives not specifically dealt with right there. Readers will find particularly the narrative texts of each culture and period of the greatest relevance for the study of all aspects of communication, to the point that, in many respects, one could legitimately regard this entire trilogy as a study of “communication in and through literature.”

5.

Editorial features of the three volumes This volume and the next two offer the following aids for a consistent organization of the material. The Figures throughout the three volumes afford a visual illustration and a representation and quick reference for the discussion of the various topics. The Literary Quotations, 3876, are distributed as follows: in Volume I: 941, from 110 authors and 200 works; in Volume II: 1854 from 154 authors and 271 works; in Volume III: 1081 from 176 authors and 207 works. They come exclusively from my own personal readings and no one else’s. For obvious reasons (apart from biblical quotes, excluding any that would not have a common translation in the different versions), I rarely use the literatures of languages I cannot read. Those in French or Spanish are not translated in order to keep their original communicative value, quite often untranslatable. Not to resort to the national literatures as a source of documentation in this kind of studies would simply reflect great shortsightedness and the unfortunate waste of an inexhaustible wealth of cultural and even subcultural nonverbal data. Three more observations regarding these quotations are in order: that, in groups of several quotes, authors tend to be in chronological order (further confirmed in the Literary References by giving also original publication dates), precisely to better show the historical aspect of their usage; that, since readers may have access to different editions, chapters (unless nonexistent) are indicated rather than pages; and that ellipsis points are placed between square brackets (crotchets) […], simply because … could be part of the original writer’s own text and my suspension points would conceal the original ones. As for the inclusion of certain authors, the fact that I utilize them as documentation for nonverbal communication does not at all imply my agreement with their ideas, for which reason I could say, with Saint Augustine: “I do not condemn the words, which are like chosen and precious vessels, but the wine of error that intoxicated teachers gave us in them” (Augustine, C, I, 16). The Topics for Interdisciplinary Research constitute a closing section for each chapter with twenty-five suggestions, susceptible of being dealt with at different levels, from course and research projects to doctoral dissertations, suggesting in turn a

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xxiv Introduction

number of other possible applications. As for the Scientific References, it is not the aim of this work, a personal contribution to the field, to strive for an ‘exhaustive’ list, given today’s easily available bibliographical data. Thus, what I offer here should reflect only a desire not to present “a long catalog of authors to lend authority to the book,” as we read in Don Quixote’s Prologue, but to show the many facets of what we call nonverbal communication, its multi- and interdisciplinarity, and also my grateful acknowledgement of those who inspired me to keep breaking new paths in this inexhaustible field. The Literary References, set apart, show more easily those writers and works that have provided illustrations for nonverbal topics, and the location of material from each of their specific works, while an additional Index of Authors and Works Quoted or Cited allows the reader to identify and locate each one. Finally, after the Name Index, the Subject Index identifies all the many topics and subtopics and specific aspects either treated at length or mereley suggested.

6.

On Volume I This volume, the first in a progressive and cumulative study of culture, language, interaction and communication in general, treats of areas which should be read by those who might be more interested in the other two, that is: Volume II, concentrating on paralanguage and kinesics, and derived topics like extrasomatic sounds, personal and environmental silence and stillness, and the deeper levels of interaction; and volume III, a more specific application of the two previous volumes to an interdisciplinary approach to the field of literature, particularly the novel and the theater (the latter both textual and staged) — also as related to each other and occasionally to cinema — and literary translation. Chapter 1 defines the communicative nature of a culture in both space and time — for whose exhaustive and systematic analysis it offers a taxonomy of its sensible and intelligible systems as well as a model for the study of ‘culturemes’ — and identifies the semiotic and interactive problems inherent in intercultural and subcultural communication, based on our degree of verbal-nonverbal cultural fluency. Chapter 2 presents, in their inherent cultural context, the sensory perception of the various somatic and environmental sign systems — that is, the communicative possibilities of both the human body and whatever artifactual and other environmental elements surround it — language and specifically speech (being at its very core), the importance of light in our sensory perceptions and of our perception through synesthesia, as well as the interrelationships of language and nonverbal systems. Once all those sign-bearing systems have been identified, Chapter 3 focuses on the audiovisual production of speech as an activity channelled mainly through the ‘speaking face’ and its static and dynamic natural and artificial features, and analyzes the acoustic and visual functions

Introduction

of the phonatory organs. This could be the only part of the whole work where the less specialized readers might find the otherwise essential phonetic discussions somewhat arid (yet relevant for the understanding of personal communication), although only as an abridgement of a previous monograph (Poyatos 1993a). Chapter 4 deals mostly with the triple reality of discourse: verbal language–paralanguage (its acoustic modifiers and independent quasiwords)–kinesics (gestures, manners and postures), discusses their lexical and grammatical values and identifies their segmentable and nonsegmentable elements and the possible realizations or combinations of the three co-systems; their basic developmental aspects — as well as their transmission through space and time and the various conditioning elements of a person’s interactive speech — are identified for a better grasp of the nature of personal communication. Chapter 5 consists of two useful and much needed applications of what has been discussed so far. One is a model for a comprehensive, transcription of interactive speech, today a growing concern among students of spoken language, yet generally not approached in a fully realistic way that would acknowledge the potential relevance of any nonverbal contextual elements and events. The other, a theoretical and methodological discussion of a feasible implementation of nonverbal communication in the rather unrealistic traditional foreign-language teaching methods, both in the classroom and in textbooks and other teaching materials. Chapter 6 presents a rather exhaustive model for the identification, observation and study of ‘nonverbal categories’ with which to carry out a detailed analysis of normal or pathological behaviors in any interactive or noninteractive manifestations, profusely illustrated, as other chapters, with insightful literary descriptions and with many cross-cultural observations, thus suggesting a number of research and social and clinical and professional applications. Chapter 7, drawing from the needed background of the previous chapters and, partly prompted by today’s lack (aside from many partial treatments) of an exhaustive model for the study of the structure of conversational encounters, identifies all the events and behaviors (well beyond the existing literature) characteristic of their mechanisms, thus suggesting a number of applications in different fields. Finally, Chapter 8 is based on simultaneous or consecutive interpretation as, ideally, the relaying from a speakeractor to a listener-viewer (or audience) of verbal and nonverbal messages indistinctively or simultaneously through verbal and nonverbal ones. It attempts to promote interdisciplinary study in this area by pondering various issues and problems inherent in any formal or informal live translation, a realm where speech appears once more as a tripartite activity, without neglecting: the accompanying somatic and extrasomatic co-activities that could occur along with speech; the physical co-presence of the persons involved; the equally real presence of at least two cultures (if not many more, as at an international conference) at a given time; and the physical environment itself. It remains only to say that my greatest satisfaction would be to continue to be of use not only to those I seem to have encouraged to study nonverbal communication in their own areas (as I see in articles, books and theses), but to others who may wish to

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xxvi Introduction

explore this fascinating field further and work in its many areas in depths impossible for a single person to reach. Finally, I wish to assure my readers that a detailed perusal of the table of contents of these three volumes will disclose the explicit or implicit presence of their own fields of interest.



Chapter 1

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

I smiled at him, and looked pleasantly, and beckoned to him to come still nearer; at length he came close to me; and then he kneeled down again, kissed the ground, and laid his head upon the ground, and taking me by the foot, set my foot upon his head; this, it seems was in token of swearing to be my slave for ever (Defoe, RC, 178)

1.1

On defining culture Anthropology, whose subject matter is people, has been always seeking new avenues and perspectives, and we have witnessed the appearance of visual anthropology, psychological anthropology, literary anthropology, etc. We can easily observe that certain failures in different fields, from clinical psychology and psychiatry, through literary studies, to the study of theater and even the multifaceted, multidisciplinary domain of communication studies, are due precisely to the fact that they often neglect the overwhelming bearing of culture on the very topics they deal with. We need to understand culture in its full meaning. As readers of these very volumes we are living parts of different cultures, a reality that will permeate our task as such readers and therefore demands a realistic definition not exclusive of any one area of knowledge, but valid for all of them. My own interest in this ambiguous state of affairs as to the concept of culture was spurred perhaps by a basic but delightful little book by anthropologist Douglas Oliver (1964), who admitted the confusion “that there should be such vagueness and such difference of opinion over what [culture] means.” Without any need to resort to recent definitions, the anthropologist-linguist Sapir (1924: 402–405) acknowledged the ethnologists’ and culture-historians’ which embodied “any socially inherited element in the lif of man, material and spiritual…coterminus with man himself”; another, concerning a ‘cultured person,’ referring to “a rather conventional ideal of individual refinement, built upon a certain modicum of assimilated knowledge and experience but made up chiefly of a set of typical reactions that have the sanction of a class and of a tradition of long standing”; and a third one embracing “those general attitudes, views of life, and specific manifestations of civilization that give a particular people its

2

Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines

distinctive place in the world.” Another anhropologist, Edward Hall (1959: 31) conceded that “though the concept of culture was first defined in print in 1871 by E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture), after all these years it still lacks a rigorous specificity which characterizes many less revolutionary and useful ideas.” The speech communicationalist Richard Porter (1972: 3) referred to culture as “the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, meanings, beliefs, values, attitudes, religions, concepts of self, the universe, and self-universe relationships, hierarchies of status, role expectations, spatial relations and time concepts acquired by a large group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving,” while his colleague K. S. Sitaram (1972: 19) wrote of “the sum total of learned behaviors of a group of people living in a geographic area.” For his part, social psychologist Michael Argyle (1967: 77) referred to “the culture of a group of people …their whole way of life — their shared patterns of behavior, their common ideas and beliefs, their technology, and their art, science, literature, and history.” And, to quote one more, the anthropologist-psychiatrist Robert LeVine (1973: 4) uses the term to mean “an organized body of rules concerning the ways in which individuals in a population should communicate with one another and toward objects in their environments.” Thus, it seems that each definition tends to conform to the aims of a particular discipline, although all students of culture include shared learned habits, ways of life, behavior patterns, and material products. A living example of this uncertainty was for me a 1973 ICAES pre-congress conference, at whose first session Rapoport asked the invited participants (several anthropologists and sociologists, three architects, a demographer, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, an animal behaviorist, an ethnologist, and an interdisciplinarily and rather undefined myself) were asked to offer with pen and paper a definition of culture. I was surprised when the definition I had included in my paper for that occasion (Poyatos 1976d) was the one chosen by Rapoport with the approval of such an heterogenous and learned body, obviously because of the interdisciplinary orientation with which I already conceived of my work in communication.1 Trying, therefore, to be simply realistic, and resisting the limitations of any single discipline, I will still define culture (enclosing in square brackets words in my original version [1976a: 3, 1976d: 265, 1976e: 313, 1983: 3]) as: a series of habits shared by members of a group living in a geographic area, learned but biologically conditioned, such as the means of communication (language being the basis of them all), social relations at different levels, the various activities of daily life, the products of that group and how they are utilized, the peculiar manifestations of both individual and national personalities [in their cultural context, its patterns and prohibitions], and their ideas concerning their own existence and their fellow people [men].

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

1.2

Culture as a communication continuum: Active and passive, interactive and noninteractive forms Culture, then, is made up of a complex mesh of behaviors and of the active or static results of those behaviors (cf. Fig. 1.2 below). It has been stated many times, but perhaps without enough emphasis and without truly explaining why, that culture is communication. A culture develops as an aggregate of people living according to certain common patterns of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, but they cannot fail to communicate about themselves and about those patterns. From irrigation systems through the design of dwellings to the elaboration of a monetary scheme, any cultural manifestation is inconceivable without the personal communicative exchanges that express ideas and attitudes regarding what is done and thought. Since these volume and the two following treat of communication in a progressive fashion, it will be in order to define certain concepts and aspects of a culture intimately related to language and communication. First, it is important to distinguish between live, active culture and passive culture. The latter consists, for instance, of all kinds of artifacts and roadways, temples, land distribution, etc., of a disappeared people, reduced to a permanent static state in which nobody uses those cultural elements as happens in a live, dynamic culture, that is, making them ‘live,’ associating them to the minds that devised them and assigned to them specific values and functions, utilizing them in personal exchanges of ideas and material goods. It is only dead cultural stuff, suggesting a cultural dimension, but lacking what would turn it into a dynamic continuum: people in constant interaction with members of their species, with the lower species and with their environment. Interaction, the exchange of messages through signs of symbolic value (words, tone of voice, gestures, placards, furniture design and layout), requires a sender and a receiver, and their interactive behaviors are shaped, or dictated, by the above-mentioned habits (learned, but biologically conditioned, that is, inherited and then filtered through a given culture), whose meanings can be emitted and perceived in different ways in the interactive processes.

1.2.1

Fig. 1.1, ‘Culture and communication,’ summarizes as two basic blocks the various forms of communication within a culture: on the one hand, the exchanges generated by human beings in social interaction, their activities rather than the products of those activities, that is, the behaviors engendered by the various somatic systems that will be studied later; on the other, the results of those activities, in other words, the extrasomatic and environmental elements, which reveals the culture-generating force of the former. Interaction — besides our interaction with the environment as emitter of signs to which we react — is mainly a two-way transaction between at least two socializing

3

4

Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines

Full direct face-to-face Interaction

Direct

Vocal-verbal Vocal-nonverbal Nonvocal-nonverbal

Total bodily external communication

Reduced Epistolary communication Delayed Physical and chemical messages

Direct

Personal or Impersonal

Noninteraction

Audiovisually preserved

vocal-verbal vocal-nonverbal

Acoustically preserved

nonvocal-nonverbal

or Graphically preserved

written literature painting, graphic arts

Delayed Objectual communication Environmental communication Animal species

Figure 1.1.Culture and communication

organisms (human–human, human–animal, animal–animal) which sets in motion what we should understand by culture. I have often argued whether we can legitimately speak of Robinson Crusoe’s culture (despite the artifacts, personal habits and life style he develops in his desert island). I rather think that, from a semiotic-culturalcommunicative point of view, a true input–output of signs develops, and a culture is born, as one initiates, and the other responds to, a first interaction: [Robinson] hallowing aloud to him [Friday] that fled […] I beckoned with my hand to him […] I hollowed again to him, and made signs to come forward, which he easily understood, and came a little way, then stopped again, and then a little further […] I smiled at him (Defoe, RC, 206)

While those first footprints discovered by Crusoe long before that day were forms of delayed interaction–as would be the perfume fragrance intentionally or unintentionally left in a room, initials engraved on trees, or a letter — it is the direct personal interaction of the twosome that activates through a face-to-face encounter an uninterrupted succession of exchanges (the cultural continuum discussed below) of material and intellectual goods. That face-to-face interaction, the most basic, important and complex form of human communication, will already put in motion the various transmitting somatic channels studied in the next chapter, which operate consciously or unconsciously for the intended or unintended conveyance of messages. Thus, besides the two possible situations resulting from an encounter, that is, full direct

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

interaction and reduced interaction (due to physical, mental, environmental or circumstantial impediments), the communication activity can be: vocal-verbal (language), vocal-nonverbal (paralanguage) and nonvocal-nonverbal (kinesics, proxemics and the other corporal systems). As for non-interaction — understanding this concept as a clear exchange process, without yet considering, for instance, the semiotic interaction between a painter and the beholder of his work — it is a direct or delayed transmission of codified information originated or encoded by physical or intellectual activities that can be: personal or impersonal, whether meant to reach a given individual or individuals or whoever may have access to it, as with material recorded audiovisually (film, videotape) or audibly (tapes, records) and graphically recorded material, such as written literature, painting and graphic arts, which still evoke interactive somatic activities. Objectual communication2 is shown in Fig. 1.2 as an extensive class of universal or culture-specific material products, which, consciously or unconsciously, can play very important functions in face-to-face interaction, while the built environment (e.g. the now vanishing traditional stone bench attached to the façade beside the main door in Spanish small town homes; sitting on the porch steps in the traditional North American home) and the modified environment (e.g. the narrow paths between fields which elicit personal interactions) are also relevant forms of interaction that can even generate cultural behaviors, as discussed in Section 1.5 below (Poyatos 1983a: 358–359; Rapoport 1976, 1991). But this classification would not be complete without acknowledging animals, since we establish exchanges with different species, and our positive or negative attitudes toward them define quite eloquently both cultures and individuals. We see therefore that, if culture is communication and a product of interaction, it is also a dynamic continuum of activities, and that interaction among members of a culture is an uninterrupted activity along many different channels, thanks to which the sensible and intelligible systems of that culture (Fig. 1.2) remain active and are transmitted from one day to the next, even though they are modified across time and space.

1.3

Inherited habits and learned habits through time and space

1.3.1

When we acknowledge the need to follow a progressive and systematic itinerary in order to study anything concerning communicative phenomena, we soon discern those habits that constitute a culture and realize the difference between genetic (inherited) and learned (cultural) habits (Poyatos 1983a: 8–13). Genetic habits are originated by specific genes that determine specific external personal traits: a characteristic pitch in laughter due to the shaping of the phonatory organs, a posture or gait determined by anatomical configuration, etc. These habits can be: purely idiosyncratic, nonexistent before they are displayed by an individual (but with potential capacity to be borrowed by others and become familiar and eventually

5

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Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines

cultural), although they can also be equivocally adopted by foreigners as if they possessed cultural status; familiar, that is, inherited without apparent changes through a pervasive genotype (cf. Caspari 1958) that ‘runs in the family’ (a nervous tic, a gesture, voice timbre, a low blushing threshold), which we can all recognize in friends and as the style of public figures or families of actors (the Kennedys, Kirk and Michael Douglas, Judy Garland and daughter Liza Minelli). Anne […] her face had a pretty regularity that was almost doll-like […] there were moments when she seemed nothing more than a doll; when the oval face, with its long-lashed, pale blue eyes, expressed nothing […] that bowler-like countenance was one of the Wimbush heirlooms; it ran in the family, appearing in its female members as a blank doll-face. But [she also had] other inheritance — quick laughter, light ironic amusement, and the changing expressions of many moods (Huxley, CY, III).

They can also appear in different families of very different cultural and geographical backgrounds when that habit-forming genotype appears in them without as yet becoming cultural if it does not spread through imitative adoption or learning; and finally, universally innate habits, due to biological mechanisms and species-specific genetic components that characterize linguistic, paralinguistic or kinesic anthropomorphic systems (Cf. Lenneberg 1964, and the studies of innate motor patterns and releasing mechanisms, in Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1979a, 1988). 1.3.2 Learned habits, then, the fabric of culture, require a biological base, since a way of laughing or walking or the pressure of a handshake is rooted (even if they are imitated or learned) in the person’s propensity to those behaviors. That is why it is convenient to be able to identify a person’s purely genetic or idiosyncratic habits, particularly in another culture, to avoid interpreting them as cultural and suffer the consequences of a typical communication error; without forgetting to what extent biologically conditioned behaviors can be in turn molded by learning. Even reflexes like coughing or sneezing (studied in Volume II as paralanguage) are performed differently by each person right after their onset, as they are controlled by certain ‘display rules’ differing across cultures and social ranks (cf. Ekman 1977). In the simplest form alluded before, Crusoe and Friday share habits they have previously learned from others, habits they have been developing based on earlier experiences (learned), and others they learn from each other; to which each of the two would probably incorporate not only biologically conditioned ways of carrying out those habits, but their own personal genetic habits, independent of possible mutual borrowings (learning). This distinction between genetic and learned habits is at the very root of the universalists-culturalists (or relativists) controversy in human ethology, represented, on the one hand, by Darwin (1872) and Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1979a, 1979b, 1980, 1988) and, on the other, by LaBarre (1947), Leach (1972) and Birdwhistell (1970); while Ekman (1972, 1977, 1979) took a more conciliatory posture with his neurocultural theory of emotion.

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

It is interesting, thinking of personal communication, to read Thorpe’s (1974: 214–215) reference to Dubos’ (1970) discussion of this nature-nurture controversy to the effect that “genes do not actually determine the characteristics by which we know a person; they merely govern the responses to experience from which the personality is built,” and that “almost everything we do, almost every response we make, results in the acquisition of memories that alter our subsequent responses to the same stimulus.” 1.3.3

From a spatial point of view one has to be aware of a sort of ‘behavioral geography,’ since a habit can be shared by just two people, perhaps a married couple, who can pass it on to their nuclear family, later to the whole extended family, perhaps simultaneously to persons in other families, to the entire clan and even to other individuals or families and to work groups, and finally to an entire community; or, beyond that, to a subculture and a whole culture, from which follows a process of intercultural borrowings. It is easy to notice the mutual influence and borrowings, not only in a married couple (sometimes, after meeting one of the spouses at a gathering, we identify the other by his or her paralanguage, kinesics or both), but among colleagues, schoolmates, superior and subordinate (easier than the other way around), which depends on the capacity of one of them to influence others and on their susceptibility to interpersonal borrowing. On the cultural level, when we have spent some time in a foreign culture we begin to identify cultural habits, such as: in North America, holding the door for someone coming behind us, ridiculously too soon according to members of most other cultures, as we may feel obliged to quicken our pace; in India we have to get used to a colleague holding our hand for a while into a conversation after shaking hands; while Spaniards or Italians are almost shocked to see the average Anglo-Saxon North American boy or young man shaking hands with his own father instead of kissing or hugging him; on their part, the North American guests discover the Spanish ‘sobremesa,’ the aroundthe-table lingering conversation after a meal.

1.3.4 That wider or narrower geography of behaviors, a true ‘behavioral ethnography,’ which one could identify in atlases similar to linguistic ones, is also subject to a temporal dimension, essential for the study of cultural and communicative systems, not only for serious cultural field work but for a deeper knowledge of normal or pathological personality, or the accurate evaluation of the social behaviors and thought patterns contained in a literary work. Whether acquired during a prolonged or brief period of time, learned habits have a beginning and a life span, or a virtually permanent one, but always subject to a development and susceptible of disappearing. Any middle-aged person, and even younger, has been able to witness the appearance of certain verbal and nonverbal habits: in Spain, only since the early 1990s, the average speaker adopted the more Latin American ‘Hasta luego’ (traditionally meaning only literally ‘See you later’) as an ubiquitous goodbye; the lexical degeneration of the English word ‘gay’ (its

7

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Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines

true meaning unjustly banned from conversation and literature) having certain feminine gestures associated with hairdo (e.g. delicately pushing aside a strand of hair with ring and middle fingers of one hand, and since the 1980s in Spain also raking one’s hair with all fingers from the forehead) and with garments like jeans or miniskirt. We find successive elaborations of verbal expressions like folk similes (e.g. ‘As easy as falling off a log,’ — as falling off a greasy log,’ ‘ — as falling off a log backwards,’ ‘ — as rolling off a log’). On the other hand, habits can be born, develop and even disappear, due to certain changes in life style, which in turn may respond to the evolution of, for instance, estethic values concerning furniture, in turn determining a close relationship furniture-kinesics (e.g. the appearance of curved, upholstered chairs and couches replacing since the eighteenth century the stiffness of previous periods and giving way to more relaxed social postures, quite in keeping with Versaillesque type of relaxed morals and sensual habits), moral values (e.g. as related to man-woman dating habits, today’s decline of mourning black in many cultures), or ritual gestures, as when El Cid meets his king after his exile and los inojos e las manos en tierra los fincó,/ las yerbas del campo a dientes las tomó,/ llorando de los ojos tanto avie el gozo mayor (Poema del Cid, v. 3031)

In summation, a culture is a continuous coexistence of habits and a succession of habits of many kinds and origins, some displayed through bodily behaviors, others revealed by the environment as conditioned by people’s physical and intellectual activities, and all communicating in interactive and noninteractive situations and molded by the life styles of social groups that differ in greater or lesser degree from other cultures of the world.

1.4

Sensible and intelligible systems in a culture Having identified the two broadest classes of interactive and noninteractive activities within a culture, we realize that we can perceive them in two mutually complementary ways: through the senses, as with gestures and kitchen utensils, or through the mind, as with the code of honor and etiquette norms communicated among the Tuaregs through the use of their veil (Hawad-Claudot 1992). This differentiation is essential for the correct understanding of so many cultural manifestations we encounter which sometimes, as researchers, we need to perceive and study seriously and systematically. For space economy, what would take many pages and much fascinating elaboration can be represented, at least as a quick visual reference, as in Fig. 1.2, ‘Sensible and intelligible systems in a culture.’3

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

9

CULTURAL SYSTEMS SENSIBLE Sound

Human somatic systems

INTELLIGIBLE Verbal language Paralanguage Other sounds

Movement

Religion God(s), mythology Ideas, beliefs Festivals Celebrations Ritualized behaviors and attitudes Socio-religious activities Impact on language, interaction, etc.

Gestures Kinesics Manners Postures Proxemics-Orientation

Chemical Dermal Thermal

Bodyadaptors

Food Drink

Pseudonutrition products

Drinks, tobacco Masticatories Narcotics

Clothes, hairdo, footwear Jewelry, adornment objects Painting, cosmetics, perfume Eating, drinking, smoking utensils Writing instruments, writing

Objectual systems S i g n s

Nutrition products

Objetadaptors

Eating & drinking utensils Household artifacts Occupational instruments Anatomical furniture

Decoration, visual arts Objectual Non-adaptor objects TV, tapes, books, magazines Vehicles

Environmental Built systems

Animals

Society Structures Relationships & roles Moral values Esthetic values Ritual & etiquette Interaction patterns Epistolary communication Family & marriage Child rearing Attitude toward elders Household chores Education systems Cooking, cuisine, drinks Culture-bound diseases Leisure-time activities Humor Sports Status symbols Mourning displays Publicity Press Television Chronemic patterns Interregional attitudes, etc.

C u l t u r e m e s

Politics Ideology Social attitudes Attitudes toward leaders Campaigning Humor and politics

Architecture Other structures Color, light, temperature Music Town and settlement layout

Modified

Landscaping Agricultural forms

Natural

Terrain, flora, color, climate

Fauna

Domestic Tamed Wild

Folklore and the arts Popular beliefs & superstition Festivals & celebrations Music & dance Oral literature & sayings Literature Children’s literature Theater Adults’ & children’s games Painting & plastic arts People-animal relationships Calls Treatment

Interaction

-

Noninteraction

Figure 1.2.Sensible and intelligible systems in a culture

In this panoramic view of what is in reality a culture we find four basic system blocks: somatic, objectual, environmental and animal. But as the terms ‘sensible’ and ‘intelligible’ are actually relative terms and cannot constitute a real dichotomy, when we speak of the first we refer to the sensory channels along which we perceive those systems through bodily signs (postures, use of tools, etc.) or environmental signs (architectural spaces, landscaping styles, etc.). But we can also identify certain sensory channels when referring to the intelligible ones, since the perception of the latter is not only ‘intellectual’ but through the senses, for instance, ‘we think’ of certain moral-religious values of the Amish people as we see them on their buggies in their black attire, or those of North American United Pentecostals when observing the women’s longer skirts (never trousers) and long hair worn in a bulky bun, but down to the waist by the young ones.

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Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines

What this scheme tries to show as well is the mesh of intersystemic interrelationships between and among the various sensible systems and between and among the sensible systems, and at the same time between both categories, represented by the horizontal and vertical lines, as discussed in Section 1.6.

1.5

The systematic analysis of a culture: The interdisciplinary model of culturemes

1.5.1

If we endeavor to advance in the realm of nonverbal communication in a progressive way, it is at times indispensable not to try to approach a very specific area, such as kinesics at the table within the rural class (not even general table kinesics in a given culture) without having first explored and identified larger areas and without a clear and mentally organized knowledge of the culture we attempt to study. This was, in my early period as a student of nonverbal communication, what prompted me to elaborate a model that would allow me to carry out, in a manner totally flexible and suitable to the needs of each researcher, a systematic and progressive analysis of a culture, based on the unit I called cultureme (Poyatos 1976a: 15–21, 1976d, 1976e, 1983a: Chap. 2), defined as: any portion of cultural activity or nonactivity perceived through sensible and intelligible signs with symbolic value and susceptible of being broken down into smaller units or amalgamated into larger ones.4 To at least offer a workable discussion of this model, Fig. 1.3, ‘Analysis of a Culture through its culturemes,’ outlines this progressive analysis from the broader culturemes to the simplest ones.

PHASE 1

PHASE 2

PHASE 3

PHASE 4

DERIVED PHASES

Basic Primary Secondary Culturemes Culturemes Culturemes

Tertiary Culturemes

Settings: dwelling Environschool mental church office bar restaurant Behavioral park square theater cinema

Visual Acoustic Tactile Kinesthetic Olfactory

Urban Culture: Exterior Interior

Rural Culture:

Environmental

Exterior Interior

(according to culture)

Derived Derived Derived Culturemes Culturemes1 Culturemes 2, etc Dress Kinesics Proxemics Chronemics etc.

Kinesics at table Proxemics and touch within the family Chronemics of social visitings

Cultural systems Subcultural systems

P R O G R E S S I V E

A N A L Y S I S

Behavioral SYNCHRONIC

-

Figure 1.3.
Analysis of a culture through its culturemes

DIACHRONIC

Kinesics at the table according to social class Eye contact and conversation at the table acording to social class ETC.

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

Phase one: Basic culturemes In this phase we find the largest culturemes of the two basic ecological realms in advanced cultures: Urban and Rural and, within each one, what characterizes Exteriors (mainly the street) and Interiors (dwellings and public buildings), which constitute the four Basic culturemes (Urban-Interior, Urban-Exterior, etc.), still in a very broad and somewhat vague fashion, just as we initially perceive a culture upon arrival. But through these four basic culturemes (or ‘basic zones,’ or ‘megaculturemes’) a culture identifies itself already in our first contact with it, even though in a still impressionistic fashion, and mostly sensorially. As representative of Urban Culturemes, one could mention, for instance: in North America (United States and Canada): the larger size of many automobiles, the summery sound and smell of lawn mowing, the smell of city bus exhausts, the basic separation of the ‘downtown’ business and residential areas in the small town or village, the sirens of their police cars, the smell of hamburger and French fries of many eating establishments, the unique drugstore smell, the ‘Licensed’ signs in many second-rate restaurants (indicating a cultural attitude toward drinking); in India, among many other images, we are immediately striked by the almost stifling crowds of people and cars in the cities, the jammed double-deckers and other public conveyances, scooter taxis driven by bearded and turbaned Sikhs (the ones drawn by human ‘wallahs’ now gradually disappearing in the main cities), all competing with bullock carts and the ever-present sacred beige-colored cows; the men’s ‘dhoti’ (like a large diaper to Western eyes), worn with a Western jacket or vest, and the women’s colorful saris; the cooking-time unmistakable combined odors of cow dung and kerosene used as fuel; stalls along the sidewalks with tropical fruits (mango, papaya, the milk from coconuts piled high), many kinds of fried food, fountain-pens, etc.; huge film placards on theater façades, signs by the counter of some establishment indicating their ‘Dry Days’ (no alcohol served), taylors’ ‘Suitings’ signs; in Calcutta, the families living in shacks along the streets or in a tiny ‘territory’ right on the sidewalk, with a small coal burner and a few brass or clay pots; the ubiquitous fluttering and screaming crows that rummage, as do people and dogs, in garbage heaps; tea-stalls with disposable tiny and delicate clay cups one finds along street curbs; in Japan we see right away people bowing in greetings and goodbyes, their frequent ‘¡Hai!’ (agreement) and ‘E-e-e-eh’ (feedback) through a conversation, the high percentage of sleeping subway passengers, the high pitch of the recorded woman’s voice calling the stops in buses, the face-cloths used by the less young to wipe off sweat in the summer, the ‘¡Bye-bye!’ of uniformed school-girls, the attractive uniformed women greeters who bow at customers at the foot of escalators in department stores, the daintily arranged dishes displayed in restaurant windows, the profusion of bicycles parked by subway stations; in Turkey, large American automobiles from the 1950s as taxis, children selling water with a large glass container on their back and a glass in a hand, the sellers of

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feed for the pigeons, the man who sits on the sidewalk silently offering to weigh us on a bathroom-scale, the young errand boys skilfully keeping balance while running from cafés to offices with tiny coffee cups on a round brass tray suspended by three thin rods in a cone; in Spain, the foreigner notices the limitless speed of urban traffic and in general the lack of courtesy among drivers and toward pedestrians and the absence of the usual Anglo-Saxon apology after even accidental slight physical contact; the combination of businesses and homes in the same high-rising buildings, the gigantic hand-painted film placards on theaters, rather cryptic signs on some balconies identifying ‘Oposiciones’ (meaning that they prepare candidates for the competitive examinations required for attaining many kinds of jobs) and ‘Gestoría’ (burocratic agents still badly needed in a culture with much red tape); alcoholic beverages in any grocery-store window; the abundance of cafeterias and sidewalk cafés and the familiar appearance of most bars; small children peeing while waiting with some parents at a crosswalk, men scratching their crotch, and warmly touching other men from the waist up at greetings and leave-takings and while standing in animated conversation. It is in this phase, through this sensory participation, that we experience a true interaction with the general environment. For, as the acutely sensitive anthropologisturban architect Amos Rapoport (1977: 182) wrote, “people are involved in the environment — they are participants rather than observers. People are immersed in the environment and act in it and on it.” This participation, in addition, has an influence on well-being as well as on our negative feelings and attitudes; and, in any case, we must recognize that we live in continuous interaction with our private or public environment in villages and cities, inside and outside their buildings.5 Phase two: Primary culturemes In this phase we establish, within each of the basic culturemes seen above, other elements that allow us to subdivide them into Environmental and whatever is seen as Behavioral (people in their daily activities), constituting eight Primary culturemes, for instance: ‘Urban Interior Behavioral culture in Turkey,’ in which we would include that little boy carrying the mid-morning coffee into the bank (where, to our frustration as foreigners, any activity comes to a halt at that time, an aspect of Turkish chronemics). This stage might be experienced as part of an enculturation process, whether we experience it through mere observation or systematic learning. Should we want to introduce a further classification of our material, we could resort to: –

already discernable cultural topics within these eight still broad culturemes, referring either to settings (the street, the park, the bus stop, the sidewalk café) or to already identifiable social forms (general proxemic behavior, general chronemic

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

–

patterns, clothes, voice and noise levels in public places), an intermediate level with a deeper understanding of a culture, beyond which we might not have to proceed; a sensible-intelligible distinction (within which we may not at first identify any particular hierarchical order of perception modes) within each primary cultureme: smells, sounds, kinesthetic experience of the old European city layout; the conceptualization and structuration of time (chronemics), parents-children relationship as seen at this stage.

It is in this phase, however, that we begin to notice and ponder certain cultural patterns, such as customer-waiter or customer-salesperson relationship, as seen in the stores we visit. Phase three: Secondary culturemes This phase affords a much more detailed analysis, each primary cultureme being now subdivided into as many settings we find or need in a given culture, such as the home, the school, the church, the bar, among interiors; and the square, the park, the stadium, the gym, the beach, etc., among exteriors, now identified as secondary culturemes. They can be approached, if it is feasible, according to the various sensible or intelligible systems, although for now those aspects show themselves more impressionistically than analytically, not as isolated provinces. A study, for instance, of the home (within ‘Urban Interior Environment’) would identify room layout, the proxemic arrangement of formal and informal space, etc., while the typical North American bar would be differentiated mostly by its main function: drinking; in other words, only at a more advanced stage could we discriminate, for instance, between foveal, macular and peripheral vision within the cultureme ‘Visual culture in the home,’ o between the customers of the bar and its environment; neither could we study ‘Postural behavior in the laborer’s living-room,’ without first identifying in general the behavior of that social group at home as a setting (secondary cultureme) and, before that, the laborer’s behavior both in both exterior and interior environments (primary culturemes). Phase four: Tertiary culturemes It is at this stage that, limiting the scope of our study but gaining in depth, we can classify and analyze each of the sensorial or intelligible compartments as independent tertiary culturemes, for instance: ‘Urban-interior-behavioral-audible: the home,’ or ‘Visual behavior in an Irish pub.’ And, having identified the various settings where behaviors take place, and the behaviors themselves, we can define two important elements: –

cultural systems, after having observed, for instance, ‘Urban-human-communicative-human visual culture in the home,’ ‘ — the barbershop,’ ‘ — the North American funeral parlor,’ ‘ — the North American Indian wake,’ to later concentrate on topics like furniture or proxemics in interiors in a whole culture;

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–

subcultures, since, upon identifying various systems, we can differentiate certain subcultures both geographically and socially; after studying, for instance, ‘Visualurban-environmental-interior in Spanish culture’ as one single cultureme, we would be able to go specifically into ‘Spanish Andalusian subculture.’

Derived phases: Derived culturemes Derived phases are the ones that allow us to subdivide a tertiary cultureme, such as ‘Urban-Interior-Environmental-Visual: The Home,’ into smaller culturemes and focus on each manifestation of that communicative modality, that is, ‘Visual,’ and break down into ‘Clothes,’ ‘Kinesics,’ ‘Proxemics,’ etc. (previously included as parts of broader culturemes), each one being now an individual derived cultureme. But a ‘derived cultureme 1’ can deal in areas as specific as ‘Kinesics at the table.’ identifying all the postures and manners of a social group (e.g., rural) or culture (e.g. Japan). A ‘derived cultureme 2 would be able to analyze ‘Kinesic behavior of upper-class hosts and guests,’ or ‘Upper-class hosts and rural-class guests,’ identifying cultural and social aspects like the handling of cutlery, the use or lack of napkins, the Spanish middle-class common salad bowl or individual bowls, etc. A ‘derived cultureme 3’ could deal with ‘Eye contact of high-class guests at the table,’ and a still more advanced cultureme could identify the unconscious social anxiety behaviors of lower-class guests, or define the habit among young Japanese women (which I have observed and confirmed in Japan) of going to public washrooms in groups of two or more. For a better organization within, for instance, human behavior, all DC1 units can deal with clothes, all DC2 with kinesics, all DC3 with proxemics, etc. Without forgetting that when doing, for example, ‘eye contact,’ we can elaborate a whole ample class like ‘Eye contact in exteriors and interiors in urban and rural environments.’ Intersystemic relationships show themselves more clearly now, for instance: ‘relationship between eye contact and proxemic behavior at the table according to social rank’ in a given culture. Finally, one must always consider the influence of the variables that constitute the ‘total biophysicopsychological and socioeconomic conditioning background,’ outlined in Chapter 4.10. 1.5.2

Something important must be pointed out at this junction: that, although only examples from nonverbal sensible systems have been given for culturemes, we also find true linguistic culturemes. For instance, during my first days in Japan I began to discern (communicating in English) the typical tendency to avoid the negation ‘No.’ I would ask: “You never went to Canada?,” and my interlocutor would reply: “Yes, I never went to Canada,” initially quite ambiguous for an inexperienced foreign speaker. It is simply one of the many forms of ‘omoiyari,’ the moral rule of maintaining empathy and promote social harmony, never hurting our interlocutor’s feelings, or avoiding his retaliation if, for instance, it is a superior. Another one was the smile when one does not understand, as I was warned before lecturing in that culture.

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

1.5.3

There is also a theoretical end methodological complement to the cultureme model which is not discussed here, but in Chapter 8 of Volume III, when applied to ‘literary anthropology.’ It is based on a sign typology which allows to carry out a progressive and exhaustive analysis of behavioral and nonbehavioral cultural manifestations — distinguishing systems, subsystems, categories, subcategories, forms, and types — and can help much in a minute study of communicative systems or even material components of a culture.

1.6

Relationships among sensible and intelligible, somatic, extrasomatic and environmental systems Returning to the table in Fig. 1.1., the lines joining vertically and horizontally the different sensible systems of a culture are limited only by my own difficulty in showing them more exhaustively. A few examples will suffice to at least suggest the intricate grid of interrelationships, since many of them are discussed and illustrated or at least evoked thought the three volumes. Verbal language
–kinesics: – – –

the gestures accompanying and punctuating words in each speaker and culture; clothes: fitting, or incongruent with, a very cultured verbal style; personalized objectual environment: equally agreeing or disagreeing with the person’s vocabulary.

Within the intelligible systems, revealing socioeconomic rank, occupation, medical state, religious affiliation, etc. Paralanguage
–kinesics: – – – – – – –

sexual differences as well as sexual deviations, ontogenetic development; proxemics: voice and distance of confidentiality; drinking: voice and kinesics of the inebriated; chemical reactions: brokenness of a sobbing voice; clothes: voice affectation that may well correspond to dress affectation; environmental light and temperature: voice in an intimate interaction and conditioned also by the characteristics of the setting; domestic animals: the way we talk to them.

In the intelligible systems paralanguage appears related to religious affiliation and style of preaching, to festive situations, social status, sports yells, etc. Kinesics
–food and drink:

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– – – – – – – –

table manners: distance from table, posture, eye contact pseudonutritional products: talking while chewing gum, tobacco, betel or kola; clothes: fashion’s historical conditioning of manners and postures; writing: deeper meanings of a person’s longhand, even a text done with a typewriter (pressure, errors); furniture, conditioning postures historically and according to situational context; domestic implements: the stickless broom of India, conditioning the sweeper’s squatting; work implements: postures and movements of a potter at the potter’s wheel, handling a scythe, leading a plow; domestic architecture: the gathering on the traditional North American home porch steps.

Within the intelligible systems: kinesics as cross-culturally differentiated in traditional games, religious and folklore celebrations, wakes and funerals, etc Proxemics – – –

furniture layout and also furniture–posture (kinesics); paralanguage–kinesics: the relationship between the three in a theater house; urban design: interpersonal relationship on a modern large avenue, against that in the narrow streets of an old European or Asian village.

Within the intelligible systems: distance and physical contact according to moral values and personal relations in each culture. Food and drink provide one of the most complex grid of relationships in both the sensible and the intelligible realms. One already complex aspect is, for instance, the many culture-specific eating and drinking etiquette rules reflected in manners and postures associated with the handling of different utensils, or the verbal and nonverbal behaviors corresponding to food-related reactions like belching. But, as illustrated (to enhance cross-cultural understanding) by a new fascinating documentarey video by Dan Archer (2000) on food aspects like taboos and religious prohibitions, rules and practices, intercultural (often ethnocentric) likes and dislikes, etc. Objectual environment
: –

socioeducational level, suggested by reading material, decorative and artistic objects, memorabilia, kind of musical records, people’s speech, etc.

Within the intelligible systems: taste, wealth revealed by certain possessions. Architectural structures and spaces
–proxemics: –

in public interaction, according to settings (parks, squares, shopping centers, porticoed streets, cafeterias).

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

Within the intelligible systems: the frequency, infrequency or absence of certain social ranks in specific places. We could keep establishing, following Fig. 1.1, countless others intersystemic relationships, which would assist us in assessing much better the scope of specific systems in their relations with others seemingly unrelated to them. This, of course, covers all the elements included in communication, starting with the basic triple structure of speech language-paralanguage-kinesic. Their detailed analysis allows us to understand how those interrelationships play important functions as components of social interactions, whether on a conscious level or out of awareness, as discussed in Volume II, Chapter 8.

1.7

The barriers of intercultural communication: The case of Tom

1.7.1

A second look at the table in Fig. 1.1. makes us realize the immense complexity of that web of behavioral and nonbehavioral peculiarities (among which is language) projected into time and space and in constant movement, and the end product of each of those peculiarities in each culture. If we think that in today’s world cultural differences are becoming narrower and narrower, we must admit that not only do we come in contact with members of other cultures in their own milieu, but in our own, and not only when they visit us but by correspondence and other means of communication. But this complexity becomes more apparent still when we are exposed to all manner of communicative problems with persons of age, sex or occupation different to our own or from different culture or subculture. I have always been concerned with this multiple problem of miscommunication and lack of communication — not only when physically in many different cultures, but even living a multicultural nation like Canada and specifically within my own University of New Brunswick, with students from about seventy-five different cultures yearly. I have previously tried to analyze situations and problems that are typical from a semiotic-communicative point of view (see Poyatos, 1983a: 13–26, 1984a, 1985a). Aware of an already large body of literature in this area,6 I will attempt to summarize it here. The mutual confrontation of two schemes representing two different cultures, like the one in Fig. 1.1., would immediately disclose as many potential cultural barriers as sign systems we see represented, subject all of them to the two fundamental activities, emission and reception on the part of the members of those cultures come in contact. In other words, which signs and messages are emitted by both people and their environment in each of the cultures and how they are interpreted in that exchange. Since we find all the stumbling blocks and barriers listed in communication studies, and many more, rather than trying to elaborate one more list, the following personal experience will seems to be in order.

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1.7.2 The first cultural clash I can remember involved my first roommate, Tom Todd, when I was studying in Madrid. After graduating from his high school in Youngstown, Ohio, with a fairly good knowledge of Spanish, he went to Spain for some language and culture courses, neither of them offering what he really needed. Arriving from Paris (where he had worked for a while for the writer Jean Pierre Girodoux), I met him at the railway station, where, as soon as he identified me from the train window, he winked at me and made the American finger-ring ‘Okay’ gesture, at that time seen only in American movies and tourists. We greeted each other at the platform in Spanish while shaking hands, the latter common to both cultures; but I qualified that by grabbing his right arm with my left hand and then clapping him on the back, since a simple handshake did not seem to me too friendly. When I motioned to pick up his suitcase out of courtesy, what he said trying to translate his expression ‘Oh, it’s alright!’ came out “¡Oh, está bien!” (‘Oh, well done!’ or ‘Oh, that’s good!’). When I introduced him to my landlady she remained for a moment with her hand in the air, for an average American male was not thinking of shaking a woman’s hand. “Bueno, ¿y qué tal el viaje?,” asked she, to which he (thinking of a drawled ‘Well — ,’ because it had not been that good, translatable with an equally drawled ‘Hombre —’ or ‘Pues — ,’ with rather flat intonation) simply answered with a flat “Bueno,” to which she smilingly said she was glad. Telling us about his trip, his hands clasped over his head and balancing his chair on its hind legs, he once yawned audibly and said: “¡Perdón!” (instead of just repressing the yawn in Spain). Walking in the street, he was amused to see men complimenting attractive women (not too frequent today) if they were not with a man, and he was amazed that any kind of grocery-store window would show all kinds of alcoholic beverages. When he invited me to have a beer at a bar, he did not even think of leaving a tip on the counter (a virtually disappeared custom now). What really surprised him was to see our Arts Faculty cafeteria (actually called ‘el bar’), where students could drink anything between classes or at any time. When I introduced him to some girls (with whom naturally he did not shake hands) and he went with one of them to pick up a cup of coffee at the counter, he never thought of paying for her coffee, something still common today. I noticed he was rather bewildered to learn that, as a rule, Spanish students did not (and still do not) work to pay for their schooling, nor had to ask for student loans, since they are in no hurry to leave home and the daily company of close relatives, who love to have them at home as long as possible (unless they must study in another location) and pay for their expenses. When we took the subway and Tom (from a different proxemic system) turned around aggressively because another male student was pressing him on the side, I quickly explained that such contact between Spanish males was not offensive in a rush-hour situation. At home again, my landlady was quite pleased when Tom held her chair for her at lunch, but then I knew she was amused at several things: when he would crisscross knife and fork (instead of keeping his fork in his left hand and using his right only to cut) and, if there was nothing to cut, kept his left

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

hand on his lap; when he would bite from a whole slice of bread instead of taking a small portion for each mouthful of food; when she pushed the food with his thumbtip rather than a crust of bread, and then licked his soiled finger instead of wiping it in his napkin, which he did not use at all, not even to wipe his lips before drinking. In sum, Tom in other instances more polite in and outside the home than the average Spaniard (and not necessarily representative of the many Americans who show ‘European manners,’ but of the average middle-class person), had arrived in Spain after attaining a certain degree of ‘linguistic fluency,’ without realizing that he was carrying his own culture with him and was constantly displaying it, because what he truly needed was ‘cultural fluency.’

1.8

Linguistic fluency and verbal and nonverbal cultural fluency: Behavioral alternatives and fluency quotient Ever since I started teaching in North America I was concerned with the intercultural problems my own students were exposed to, not only when they would visit other cultures but from within their own. It was becoming more and more apparent to me that when they learned a foreign language they were receiving only a verbal skill, but never the one they truly needed and should be provided with as an indispensable complement, at least within the possibilities of a classroom, that is, the kind of cultural fluency I myself was acquiring as verbal-nonverbal fluency.7 I also realized that what I was beginning to study as cultural fluency, covering verbal language and any other communicative system, involved: (a) emitting fluency, having to choose at all times among a series of behavioral alternatives as I confronted my cointeractor, even within my own culture, for there were, to begin with, different social levels and situations where I could act correctly or incorrectly according to a kind of interpersonal sensitiveness I was beginning to conceive of as a true fluency quotient; (b) receiving fluency, intimately linked to the former and far beyond what we perceive sensorially, embracing all the intelligible manifestations of that foreign culture, or our own, from moral and religious ideas (and their many ramifications reflected in life styles) to the cultural and social significance of certain verbal expressions, for instance: among Englishspeaking people, ‘Don’t leave home without it!,’ for some years applied to anything, borrowed from a slogan for the American Express credit card, a play on words quite meaningless for those unfamiliar with its source, let alone if found in a literary text to be translated. This possible choice — unknown to the naive foreign interactant — among verbal and nonverbal signs and behaviors appears in the course of an interaction at what constitutes ‘behavioral junctions,’ at which point we are free, according to our judgement, to choose from among multiple behavioral choices. This possibility

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suggested to me a structural theory of behavior, based on what earlier has been defined as culturemes. I also realized that my concept of interaction within the framework of a culture responded to the theory formulated by Pike (1954; abridged, 1964). What attracted me in his theory was that he did not try to define an unchangeable minimal unit equivalent to the phoneme (as many have tried to do in an attempt to apply structural linguistics), but referred to those “spots” as behavioral junctions. Our fluency quotient (FQ) obviously depends mainly on age (as suggest the development of language and nonverbal systems,8 as well as the degree of socialization, both parts of an ontogenetic development curve), psychological configuration (a greater capacity for learning, observation, imitation, association, etc.) and socioeconomiceducational status and the corresponding degree of socialization. Naturally, our FQ diminishes outside our own culture. Those of us with a higher FQ will interact much more efficiently because we will try not only to copy the behaviors and attitudes of the new culture, but to understand and accept those of our native cointeractants; we will also know that those of a lower social status will expect us to do so, precisely because they themselves lack the fluency to adapt to our ways. In other words, in India we will adopt the ‘namaste’ greeting (palms vertically together and perpendicular to the chest while slightly bowing); in Denmark we will learn to accept and return the mutual gaze held while saying ‘Skol!’ and slightly raising our drink toward the other person, drinking without breaking eye contact and then while raising it again before putting it down; but in Hungary we would not clink glasses simply because Hungarians stopped doing it when they lost their nineteenth-century war against Austria and had to imagine their enemies doing just that in their celebrations. As for the behavioral choices, present as much in our own culture as in a foreign one, I have often illustrated this point by referring to the very Spanish situation that may arise when someone who is about to eat, for instance, during a train or bus trip (or found eating somewhere), says: ‘¿Ustedes gustan?’ (‘Would you like some?’). It may be that that person has used that polite formula because he habitually does so as a member of the middle-middle-class or lower; or perhaps he has done it precisely because he has identified the others as belonging to than social rank, although he would have not said anything among equals. To that question any well mannered person, regardless of his own status, would reply with a minimal ‘Gracias’ or ‘Muchas gracias,’ to at least adapt to the norms of the others; and, if not proud enough to step down from his social rank, even complete the popular polite formula by adding ‘Que aproveche’ (like the generalized, classless French ‘Bon ap’tit!’). He could, of course, be silly enough to show his refinement by dettachingly responding only with a ‘Gracias’ even intentionally qualified by a smile so slight that can only betray his condescendence. A frank, positive ‘Gracias, que aproveche,’ however, will show the best kind of interactor. Another very Spanish example is the rather ridiculous kissing-or-notkissing-her-hand situation. In Spain kissing the hand of a married woman (when introduced or being formal) is common, although not the rule, among the more

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

refined people, or wanting to appear so in order to keep up with the former. Now it may happen that two ‘refined’ couples meet a ‘non-refined’ couple, and their encounter may create a tense situation in which three different things can happen: that the refined husband kisses the hand of the two refined wives and then that of the nonrefined too, causing certain embarrassment mixed with satisfaction in the nonrefined couple; that he does not kiss the nonrefined wife’s hand, thus offending her and her husband; or that, aware of the situation, he opts for not kissing the hand of any of them. As for the nonrefined husband, he can choose between one of the two behaviors as greetings develop, unless he is the one initiating them, since the one who starts may determine the sequential causative chain along which the participants will encounter a series of what Kendon (1980) called ‘slots,’ at which point they will choose from among various interchangeable behaviors.

1.9

Verbal and nonverbal cultural fluency from within: Acculturation, epistolary communication, literary translation On the other hand, that cultural fluency with respect to a foreign culture can be just as necessary for us even if we never leave our own; not only because when our foreign cointeractants are visiting we are exposed to all the coding and decoding situations discussed later in this chapter, but because they may have become part of our culture, even if still going through an acculturation period, as with immigrants and political refugees today. Thus, we can find ourselves in the typical situations that must de identified (Poyatos 1983a: 22–23, 444–445, 1984a). As an acculturation agent for those who are being incorporated into our culture. Having worked for years as a pastoral care volunteer in a rather large Canadian hospital, I have always seen that place as a real school of training in cross-cultural difference.9 The growing presence there of Chinese, Indians and Latin Americans — together with already deeply rooted cultures with first- and second-generation immigrants (e.g. Lebanese, Italians) — oblige us, as I always discussed with the nurses in my courses, to sensitize ourselves to certain nonverbal cultural aspects of the patients, such as the concept of personal intimacy and our potential invasion of it, of nudity, of the different rules for the display or concealment of emotions, etc. In the case of a Japanese person, for instance, it may be necessary, but not always possible, to detect emotion through nonverbal signs other than those expected in our own culture, for he or she has been taught to never manifest it on the face or voice (kinesic and paralinguistic repression). A good example from Japanese daily interaction, so full of subtleties that escape the Easterner unaware of that hidden presence of cultural features, is the social moral rule known as ‘giri’: one may dislike a fellow worker, but will always hide his feelings and when, for instance, they exchange New Year’s cards, will not fail to give him one too. My student Mari Nakajima acknowl-

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edged this attitude as obliged and concealed social hypocrisy, “because we have to survive in harmony.” Along with this rule there is the one called ‘omoiyari,’ observed with those with whom we have an affectionate relationship as relatives or good friends, whom one must never disappoint by refusing something one does not like.10 Another form of ‘communication from within’ is epistolary communication, which I myself observe in my letters to colleagues and other correspondents from many countries, whose interactive styles I have adopted without an effort, based mostly on my first-hand experience of their cultures. Even when I have to type the same kind of letter (e.g. to invite to contribute to a volume or symposium), the one addressed to the American will be rather colloquial and informal, I may sign my first name and even address him by his (not so with a woman, unless she did it first); with the French it will take me a little longer, as they ‘monsieur’ each other as liberally as they shake hands; with the Hungarian I will certainly express myself with their habitually respectful but warm tone; for my colleague from India the tone will also be warm, always very courteous, and without failing to address him as ‘Professor’; the Japanese, as a westerner myself who interacted with them in their own territory, I will address quite openly, but certainly in a ‘verbal bowing’ style; with Muslim Arab colleagues and friends from Syria, Irak or Jordan, I enhance the warm tone and never forget to express my good wishes for their closest relatives. The third modality of intercultural communication without leaving one’s own culture is that of literary translation, to which translators will find, explicitly or implicitly, numerous references throughout the three volumes. It also takes place when reading the original text, still a form of semiotic interaction between the reader and all types of cultural signs generated by the text itself. Translators need the kind of cultural fluency they so often lack, making all sorts of errors because they cannot ‘hear’ (paralanguage) or ‘see’ (kinesics) the characters, who live as audible-visual beings, nor can they perceive (a case of ‘zero decoding,’ as defined in Section 1.11) many environmental and contextual signs of a cultural nature which can be defined even through a verbal expression (e.g. Spanish ‘Me dieron un plato que no se lo saltaba un torero,’ comparing the heaped portion of food one is given to the high bullring barrier a bullfighter has to jump over sometimes).

1.10

On the concept of verbal and nonverbal usage There is no doubt, after considering the various levels of communication, about the mobility speakers have across the different cultural and social sectors and the problems inherent in any intercultural contact. We usually speak of ‘usage’ in a rather restricted way, but it should be applied to nonverbal usage as well, something that I have been pondering ever since I began to study nonverbal communication (Poyatos 1983a: 202–203, 1993: Chapter 3.13). One should not only use terms like ‘standard,’ ‘collo-

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

quial,’ slang,’ hyperurbanism’ or ‘vulgar,’ but keep in mind, first, that adjoining social groups overlap each other, because an ever-changing and self-renovating part of their members are socioeconomically and culturally astride both groups; and second, that there are today in the most developed cultures a constant tendency to nonverbal borrowings as much as verbal ones. particularly on the part of the socieducationally lower groups with respect to those higher up. Therefore, rather than recurring to a vertical classification of linguistic, paralinguistic and kinesic usage, I would suggest a horizontal scheme in which to differentiate the following categories. A.Standard, that is, the verbal repertoires, paralinguistic expressive constructs and accompanying phenomena, kinesic activity and, in fact, any social sensibly apprehensible attitudes common to the refined and the least educated, the educated and the pseudoeducated, as the national or ‘cultural’ standard used by everybody. B.At the same time, each socioeconomic and occupational group possesses a portion of its standard repertoire not shared by the others, but of which those others are perfectly aware, and for whom that portion is felt and judged as extrastandard. Each one of us, from our own level or group, can easily identify that extrastandard and, according to his capacity, adopt it under special circumstances as a functional variety for the sake of adaptability to a particular group and/or situation. One interesting fact about this capacity for adaptation to another group is that it seems to decrease in direct proportion to the socioeconomic and educational status of the individual, while the tendency to criticize extrastandard behaviors increases in direct proportion to it. Clearly enough, the average uneducated person does not have the capacity to use the same words, paralinguistic features and gestures, manners and postures used by the educated one. This is so because uneducated people lack the proper sensitiveness for judging the different ways in which other people speak and move (something acquired only through daily contact with the educated groups) and a conscious or unconscious appreciation of the values related to the dominant norms and tastes in other groups. But a person with a much larger cultural capacity, often in close contact with people in other strata, is prepared to appreciate and judge those differences and, if necessary, to adopt them. The least educated will typically not find as many faults with the behavior of the educated as the latter will find with them, even if they mock the ‘fine manners’ of the higher-up for fun, not for the sake of criticism. C.But below the standard and the extrastandard, and regardless of social rank, there is definitely an infrastandard, unacceptable for most people under normal circumstances, as happens with blasphemy, habitual yelling, obscene gestures, unacceptable physical contact, excessive unpunctuality, etc. D.Naturally, an overdisplay of lexical and paralinguistic sophistication and overcorrect pronunciation, of gestural expressions, excessively refined manners and affected postures, or a situationally improper excessive politeness are also felt as outside the

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Nonverbal Communication across Disciplines

standard forms, whether we traditionally consider them good or bad, and they represent a typical ultracorrectness (or hyperurbanism) that deserves especial research. E.What we could subsume as technical or group usage is an independent category which on occasion can be shared by individuals of different socioeconomic levels, such as religious and sports ritualized behaviors, the verbal and nonverbal codes of some occupations, certain sex-differentiated repertoires, etc.

1.11

The semiotic-communicative processes of language and nonverbal systems in intercultural interaction Having outlined the various aspects of what constitutes a culture, the barriers for intercultural or subcultural communication and what we really should understand for fluency, it is interesting to identify the specific problems to which we are exposed; at times, what is worse, on a unconscious level. Trying to briefly offer a model I utilized before (Poyatos 1985a), I will refer almost only to gestures and to coding and decoding between sender and receiver of verbal and nonverbal signs of any type, as suggested in Fig. 1.4., ‘Semiotic-Communicative Processes of Verbal and Nonverbal Systems in Intercultural Interaction.” 1.As speakers we use our own kinesic constructs, correctly decoded by our interlocutors from another culture because of their location and syntactical functions in our speech, their co-structuration with surrounding verbal and nonverbal behaviors (i.e.preceding, simultaneous, succeeding) or the situational context. The same thing happens to us as their listeners and, in both instances, those kinesic constructs can be, with relation to the other culture: antomorphs-antonyms, different form and meaning: for an English person, the Spanish finger-purse gesture of bunching and opening the fingers of one hand twice to signify ‘crowded,’ ‘packed’; antomorphs-synonyms, different form but meaning identical to one of our gestures: the Colombian who indicates a person’s height with the edge of a horizontal hand perpendicular to the ground, the Mexican who shows an animals’ height with a vertical close fist; or homomorphs-antonyms, identical appearance but different meaning, similar to false verbal cognates: in Venezuela you extend your palm parallel to the ground to indicate an animal’s height, never a person’s. 2.As speakers we use, intentionally or unintentionally, our own kinesic expressions, which the other person perceives but does not decode, because it does not make sense ‘syntactically,’ nor suggest any association with his own kinesic repertoire (unless we use the gesture to accompany its verbal equivalent), and at most he sees it as an unconscious act. This is one of the zero decoding situations, and the same thing happens to us as listeners. In both instances kinesic expressions are antomorphsantonyms: once at a Canadian store I saw a Latin American pull his lower eyelid down

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

25

SEMIOTIC-INTERACTIVE PROCESSES OF VERBAL AND NONVERBAL SYSTEMS IN INTERCULTURAL INTERACTION CODING CULTURE A Foreign Interactant one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms homomorphs-antonyms one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms common signs(cognates homomorphs-synonyms

Systems: Somatic Objectual Environmental EMISSION: CODING

DECODING CULTURE B Native Interactant correct decoding (by context)

Kinetic: Kinesics, objectual kinesics Acoustic: Language, paralanguage, objectual sounds

zero decoding (signs perceived) zero decoding (signs not perceived)

Proxemic: Intersomatic, body-to-object, object-to-object Chemical: Body odors, body-adaptors

false decoding (deceitful context)

Dermal: Blushing, pallor

correct decoding

Thermal: Somatic, com. signs (false cog.) environmental homomorphs-antonyms com. signs (false cog.) homomorphs-antonyms zero decoding CULTURE B Native Interactant one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms homomorphs-antonyms

RECEPTION: DECODING Visible: Kinesics, chemical, dermal, body-adaptors, objectual, environmental Audible: Language, paralanguage, audible kinesics, objectual, environmental

one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms

Kinesthetic: Kinesics, contactual kinesics, proxemics, objectual, environmental

one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms

Dermal: Chemical substances, dermal, thermal, contactual kinesics

one’s own signs antomorphs-antonyms antomorphs-synonyms

Olfactory: Body odors, chemical, body-adaptors, objectual, environmental

common signs (cognates) homomorphs-synonyms Thermal: Somatic, environmental com. signs (false cog.) homomorphs-antonyms Gustatory: Chemical, bodily, body-adaptors com. signs (false cog.) homomorphs-antonyms

false decoding correct decoding (by context) absent decodability CULTURE A Foreign Interactant

correct decoding (by context) zero decoding (signs perceived) zero decoding (signs unperceived) false decoding (deceitful context) correct decoding false decoding correct decoding (by context)

Figure 1.4.Semiotic-communicative processes in intercultural interaction

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with his forefinger while looking at the dumbfounded saleslady, meaning he was “/Just looking/”11 (which in Spanish means also ‘I saw it,’ ‘You don’t fool me,’ ‘Look!’; in Niger, the children’s gesture (or adults addressing children) for praising a meal and signify ‘Delicious!’: patting the top of one’s head; students in Trinidad (Wolfgang 1979: 166) put the back of index and middle fingers horizontally against the forehead when they want to be excused from the class; antomorphs-synonyms: the Japanese finger-ring gesture for ‘money.’12 Zero decoding is a semiotic gap that occurs more often than we can imagine, not only in daily interaction, where many messages (intentionally or unintentionally sent) are lost, but in all static manifestations of the arts and whatever surrounds us.13 3.As speakers, intentionally or not, we use our own kinesics, often so quick and ‘meaninglessly’ that it can pass unnoticed if our cointeractant cannot attach to it any communicative value, an instance of true zero decoding, while as listeners we are exposed to the same absence of decoding; they are antomorphs-antonyms: the Greek affirmation or feedback cue (a slight head jerk + slightly closed eyelids + a nasal sound); the speaker from Hong Kong, China or Japan who indicates the pronoun ‘I,’ ‘Me’ by touching his nose-tip with the forefinger; the Chinese from China or Hong Kong who taps on the table with forefinger and middle finger to thank us when we pour tea o wine for them; or antomorphs-synonyms: Saudi Arabia’s masculine reference to an attractive woman by sliding a forefinger down one’s cheek. 4.As speakers we use, voluntarily or not, some of our kinesic expressions, which others will perceive but which, due to certain false syntactical clues, will not interpret correctly. This is an instance of false decoding, to which we are also exposed as listeners, and the behaviors are antomorphs-antonyms: if a man of the Caucasus greets a foreign man by touching his hips with both hands, the latter will hardly understand it as a vestige of when they would check for arms; or homomorphs-antonyms: the typical Indian double head-rock as affirmation or conversational feedback behavior, which we may easily interpret as negation; the Tibetan greeting by sticking out their tongue, which we may misunderstand as mockery; the palm of one hand as a lid over a vertical fist, a Malaysian sexual insult, but meaning ‘crowded’ in Niger; or what, without realizing it, I did to another driver at a Greek intersection when he motioned for me to go first: showing him the splayed fingers of one hand, the worst insult in his culture. This decoding through a deceiving context occurs also among members of different cultures who speak the same language (e.g. Spaniards and Latin Americans, British speakers and Anglo-Indians). 5.As speakers we use gestures common to both cultures in form and meaning (similar to linguistic cognates), decoded as correctly as we do it as listeners, therefore homomorphs-synonyms: in quite a few cultures, /crazy/ by touching or approaching the temple with one finger, /money/ by rubbing thumb and forefinger. However, as with cognate words and phrases, we may find many differences added to the basic charac-

Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

teristic of the gesture: the Spaniard’s forefinger touches the temple with a screwdriver motion (i.e. /He’s missing a screw!/), the Japanese forefinger makes a circle in front of the temple and then all the fingers splay. 6.As speakers we use what appear as common kinesic constructs, but actually homomorphs-antonyms, truly like false verbal cognates and, therefore, subject to misinterpretation, which is even worse than not using any gesture at all. As listeners we are typically exposed to this in direct proportion to our verbal-nonverbal fluency, as happens with certain cross-cultural differences in ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ (e.g. /No/ in Greece and Turkey, with a head-jerk whose second downward phase can be interpreted as affirmation; the Hispanic scooping movement of the hand toward oneself for /Come here/, sometimes seen as the opposite by, for instance, English speakers, because of its upward phase; the almost universal hitchhiking sign: a hand with the thumb up following the car’s direction, a sexual invitation in Ghana. 7.As speakers we use gestures common to both cultures that are similar to the homomorphs-antonyms (false cognates) mentioned earlier, but interpreted correctly because our listener (or ourselves as listeners) perceives certain signs of a syntactical nature as well as their co-structuration with the other behaviors and their context: the Japanese ‘negative affirmation’ mentioned earlier, or an unknown form of greeting in an otherwise unambiguous context). Besides these seven situations, we as foreign speakers operate always, in greater or lesser degree, with our typical deficiency in our verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic repertoires. This is the only instance of zero encoding, since on other occasions we utilize correct discourse components in any of those three modalities or replace them with our own (often quite unconsciously in paralanguage and kinesics). But in zero decoding we simply produce gaps within the triple structure language-paralanguagekinesics when we do not know or do not remember the correct word, gesture or paralinguistic utterance. This for our listener can result in zero decoding. Kinesic deficiency in intercultural interaction is tantamount to lack of ‘emblems’ (see Chapter 6.2), which means that, in general, we can fill that communication gap if we know the appropriate emblematic gesture. It should be emphasized once more that these processes and problems typical of intercultural communication, here outlined only with kinesic examples, affect all somatic type of communicative signs.

1.12

Conclusion This chapter should be read as an introduction to the realistic approach to language and its associated nonverbal behaviors, since neither of them occur in a semiotic vacuum but precisely within the rich fabric of a culture. The nature of this fabric, at once static and dynamic, sensibly and intellectually apprehended, has been outlined in

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all its complexity and acknowledging its biological as well as spatial and temporal dimensions. However, to assist the student of culture and communication, a progressive and orderly working model based on a flexible unit has been put forward which would prove extremely useful in field work and other projects. Before one focuses on language or on communicative modalities like gesture or voice, it is necessary to acknowledge their intimate relationship with all other cultural systems; otherwise any study of the language of the street or the speech of a given linguistic area would prove quite unrealistic and deprived of its constituting internal components (languageparalanguage-kinesics) and whatever surrounds it, whether dynamic or static, behavioral or nonbehavioral, for, as will be seen, all together constitute the elements of daily human interaction. The foremost conclusion one easily draws from these approach to culture and communication is obvious: we must seek the sort of verbalnonverbal fluency that is needed for that interaction, within our culture or between cultures, and be conscious of the numerous and diverse stumbling blocks that so often can impede the different exchanges, particularly in intercultural encounters.

1.13

Topics for interdisciplinary research Depending on the scope and depth of the study to be pursued, the topics suggested in this chapter and the following, always based on the material covered, can be developed on different levels — according to the data gathered and the research techniques employed and the depth of the study — as course projects, theses or monographs.14 1.The interaction of the members of a given culture with their built environment: spaces, structures and behaviors. 2.Verbal and nonverbal intercultural borrowings in daily life and on television. 3.Appearance, development and disappearance of verbal and nonverbal behaviors. 4.Intelligible systems in a culture through its sensible systems. 5.Relationship between linguistic usage and other somatic systems in a culture. 6.Relationship between linguistic, paralinguistic and kinesic usage and the objectual and environmental systems of a culture. 7.Outline of the cultureme model as applied to a given culture from the foreigner’s viewpoint. 8.Secondary culturemes: semiotic-communicative analysis of different settings and their associated behaviors. 9.Interrelationships among sensible and intelligible cultural systems. 10.Ontogenetic development of verbal and nonverbal behaviors according to socioeconomic and socioeducational rank.



Culture, communication, and cultural fluency

11.Inventory of verbal-nonverbal usage of a social/occupational group. 12.Comparative study of culturemes in the English-speaking cultures.15 13.Comparative study of culturemes in the Spanish-speaking cultures. 14.Comparative study of culturemes in other culture groups with a common language. 15.An inventory of intercultural problems from within a given culture. 16.Intercultural kinesic problems. 17.________(e.g. Canadians, French, Spaniards, Chinese) abroad: nonverbal problems. 18.An inventory of intercultural nonverbal problems among first-generation immigrants. 19.Intercultural nonverbal problems among children. 20.Comparative intercultural nonverbal problems of refugees in different countries. 21.Problems of personal communication in a country’s tourism sector. 22.Verbal-nonverbal interactive fluency and behavioral alternatives among native and foreign speakers of a given country: typical risks and situations. 23.Culturemes of a given country. 24.Nonverbal false cognates cross-culturally. 25.Cultural information through feature films.

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Chapter 2

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands, the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean, the coarse, the fine; such differences of temperature, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, the flabby; such diversities of grasp, the tight, the loose, the short-lived, and the lingering! (Dickens, MC, XXII)

2.1

Intersomatic communication in its cultural and environmental context The emission and perception of the signs classified in the previous chapter presupposes the existence of a net of interbodily channels that must be acknowledged by anyone trying to study communication. For only then can we realize to what extent our interaction with others — and how we conceptualize it — depends on exchanges of signs and messages on a somatic level and, beyond the bodies themselves, between us and whatever surround us, that is, on their coding and decoding between at least two individuals and their environment. This analysis of interbodily communication in a mostly cultural context — which naturally includes language — requires a previous fundamental consideration: the mutual confrontation of two human bodies as two socializing organisms. These two are equipped with unique cognitive and intellectual abilities which combine the mutual sensory and intelligible perception and that of their society and surrounding world, linking to each other, to their congeners and to the environment, in both space and time. This last statement is far from being gratuitous, as will be seen. Suffice it to say at this point that two human bodies can become related through physical distance and through temporal distance (e.g. the duration of interpersonal silences, the endurance of human or environmental olfactory memories into the future) Every time I must outline for colleagues or students the various aspects of nonverbal communication I need to begin — in order not to abandon this progressive itinerary one must always follow — by identifying the intersomatic channels along which are transmitted and perceived any type of personal signs. But always, of course, reckoning with the fact that a full face-to-face interaction (in a specific physical setting) requires at least two ‘triple structures,’ and that the more secondary channels

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can function intermittently, or also by themselves, but in exceptional and generally brief encounters; naturally, those two language-paralanguage-kinesics compounds operate practically like two autonomous emitters of signs that determine intercultural and historical differences in their two essential dimensions of space and time. Besides, it would be totally unrealistic to set out to study conversational discourse without those two blocks, sender and receiver, for if we were to dissociate them we would be leaving out all those verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic realizations that are conditioned precisely, on the deepest level of interpersonal and environmental communication, by the co-structuration of the participants’ activities. This fundamental principle is shown in Fig. 2.1., ‘Somatic systems of interpersonal and environmental communication,’16 which does not require an explanation at this point, as the various sensory channels are identified and discussed later.17 The triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics represents the optimal structuration of signs perceived sensorially and intellectually; but, as Sebeok (1977: 1061) writes, between the two polarities, the molecular code and the verbal code (completed in the diagram as the basic triple structure) “there exist a whole array of other mechanisms, ranging from those located in the interior of organisms […] to those linking them to the external ‘physical world.’” One could concentrate exclusively on a ‘semiotics of conversation.’ In the same article Sebeok refers to the “awesome entanglements of verbal responses with other kinds of acts […] dealt with in Goffman’s […] (1975) on minimal dialogic units, and amply justify the research strategy […] by workers like Duncan (1975 [1975a]) and Poyatos (1976 [1976a]: see his fig. 4, on p. 66), and others […].” The mechanisms of personal interaction based on intersomatic exchanges — without neglecting our exchanges with other species and with the environment — is not only the living foundation of all social achievements in the history of civilizations, but the basis of any behavioral analysis in many fields of study.

2.2

The channels of intersomatic emission and perception in interaction: Direct and synesthesial perception of dynamic and static signs What takes place as soon as an interaction is initiated by one of those two socializing bodies suggested in the diagram, surpasses in complexity the mere linguistic exchange, even when verbal language seems to be the only behavior sustaining that encounter, for it is never dissociated from a more complex totality of explicit or hidden concurrent activities, neither biopshychologically on the part of the speaker, nor from the point of view of the listener’s conscious or unconscious perception. In addition, one must think that, despite the unquestionable preponderance of sound and movement, they are not the most important channels in the majority of instances, since that primary system can be, at a given time, not a word but, for instance, a chemical reaction (e.g. one tear, emotional sweat), which will contain the most relevant part of

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

Somatic Communication Systems

SENDER

RECEIVER Complete Interaction

CODING

DECODING Chronemic Relationship

Chronemics

Chronemics

Paralanguage Lexicalmorphologicalsyntactical complex

Paralanguage

Common Culture

Kinesics

Lexicalmorphologicalsyntactical complex Kinesics

Chemical

Chemical Different Cultures

Dermal

Dermal

Thermal

Thermal

Proxemics

Proxemics

Proxemic Relationship location, Duration, Intensity, Co-structuration with preceding, simultaneous, succeeding activities

Figure 2.1.Somatic systems of interpersonal and environmental communication

the message, or even be the message itself. This makes us realize that the study of ‘language’ does not even consist in seeking out what happens on the vocal-auditory channel; and, on the other hand, that there are a whole series of other channels along which travels an intricate net of somatic activities which actually affect those very words we so respect. This discloses a new and fascinating semiotic-communicative perspective, shown in Fig. 2.2., ‘Intersomatic and environmental sensory perception.’ It shows how the receiver’s perceptual systems involve the activities of vision, audition, olfaction, gustation and cutaneous and kinesthetic sensations, while the emitter’s include the active stimuli of a kinetic, acoustic, chemical or thermal nature (human, animal and

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environmental), plus (in humans and animals) dermal and (in both) the characteristics of shape, size, consistency and strength, weight, and color. While earlier I limited myself, in the study of sensory perception, to the strictly somatic personal exchanges, that is, elaborating only within the realm of what is suggested in Fig. 2.1., my own study of the many aspects of social communication and communication with our environment (identified in Volume II, Chapter 8) obliges me to not dissociate at any time the personal exchanges and those which alternatively or simultaneously take place between our organism and whatever surrounds it. But what in this second scheme is suggested by the extremely complex exchanges that constitute our daily existence — beginning by the basic linguistic-paralinguistickinesic nucleus as the center of our interaction, both directly with others and with the objectual and environmental world — is the twofold and extremely intricate grid of lines linking the emitting static characteristics and activities and the receiving activities between the two end-points, coding and decoding. The 21 solid lines represent the processes that take place when a stimulus generated by one of the two bodies activates the receptors of the other, or by any environmental element toward a body, in a direct way, for instance: sound waves transduced into neural impulses within the auditory system results in hearing; a chemical stimulus impinges upon the olfactory nerve and produces a smell sensation; temperature changes in one body are perceived through the other’s dermal senses; the irregularities of a road are felt kinesthetically transmitted through one’s shoes or the mediating bicycle seat, automobile seat or horse’s saddle and body. Actually, of all the direct ways of perceiving people and our physically immediate environment, the most subtle and effective one is often the sense of kinesthesia (or kinesthesis), variously illustrated in this section: the perception of the position of our own body and its members in space and with respect to the substratum and whatever we come in contact with, through muscles, tendons, nerves and joints. This mode of direct perception is one of the most important and almost constant in everyday life, yet it has been traditionally neglected in communication studies, perhaps because it is not thought of and consciously acknowledged. Kinesthetically, we feel people’s bodies in all sorts of social situations and behaviors: in the subtle tremor of a shiver, in a handshake, in a romantic or emotional encounter, while dancing: She sighed heavily, and leaned toward me a little, so as to rest her shoulder against mine. I felt her trembling (Collins, WW, 191) Her shiver ran down his arm (Wharton, EF, II) he [Sam Dosworth] waltzed […] proud of his shining burden. He held her lightly enough, and after the chaste custom of the era [1903], his hands were gloved. But his finger-tips felt a current from her body [Fran’s] (Lewis, B, I)

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

Figure 2.2.Intersomatic and environmental sensory perception

As well, we receive kinesthetically all kinds of sensations of the environment, from an airport’s moving travellator under our feet to the very ground we tread or drive on, to the act of tugging at a bell’s chain as we ring it: a carpet […] so thick and soft that it felt like piles of velvet under my feet (Collins, WW, 65)

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that rumbling, tumbling, jolting, shaking, scraping, creaking, villanous old gig (Dickens, MC, XII);

The following example from Norris encompasses most eloquently kinesthetic and other types of sensations which reveal, in this case, the particular sensory involvement in what can certainly be regarded as an epic of labor: [From the plough] Perched on his seat, the moist living reins slipping and tugging in his hands, Vanamee, in the midst of this steady confusion of constantly sensations, sight interrupted by sound, sound mingling with sight, on this swaying, vibrating seat, quivering with the prolonged thrill of the earth, lapsed to a sort of pleasing numbness […] the weaving maze of things in which he found himself involved […] Underneath him was the jarring, jolting, trembling machine; not a clod was turned, not an obstacle encountered, that he did not receive the swift impression of it through all his body, the very friction of the damp soil, sliding incessantly from the shiny surface of the shears, seemed to reproduce itself in his finger-tips and along the back of his head (Norris, O, IV)

The other 23 discontinued lines between energy sources and sensory receptors represent, on the other hand, the equally neglected physiopsychological phenomenon upon which depends much of our interaction with people and whatever surrounds, called synesthesia, also amply illustrated below: the physiological sensation on a part of the body other than the stimulated one; or put otherwise, the psychological process whereby one type of sensory stimulus produces a secondary subjective sensation from a different sense — from which derive poetic images like ‘a soft color.’ If we needed to actually touch in order to feel the coarseness of a peasant’s hand, the smoothness of a silk dress or the texture of a rough wall, our daily sensorial and intelligible experiences would be severely curtailed. In reality, we hear, touch, smell and taste ‘with the eyes,’ and we can imagine (mistakenly perhaps, but not with fewer interactive consequences) the consistency of another body by the sound of its footfalls or through kinesthetic perception of its movements and weight mediated, for instance, by a shared couch; the softness of voice and gesture of the stereotyped television model advertising a fabric of that characteristic lets us feel it with ear and eyes, not touch; or, conversely, the facial features, dress, manners and postures of the person we still cannot hear suggest to us that type of voice. Hence the great importance of synesthesial associations in publicity, whether it makes us ‘sense’ the model’s body, the texture of a car’s upholstery or the coldness of a refreshment. On the other hand, our personal objectual environment which we create in our homes or workplace provide different synestesial associations, even more in our guests, for we may not be aware of it anymore. While synesthesia operates, therefore, with great efficacy in daily interactions with people and the environment through persuasive advertising techniques — as part of their manipulation of people, even beyond what was consciously predicted by the designers of a magazine or television commercial — the more sensitive literary readers will acknowledge

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

its presence in a narrative text; not only more explicitly through the omniscient author’s descriptions and comments, but by the associations they establish themselves, thus amplifying the scope of the text beyond what was foreseen by the writer, as discussed more in depth in Volume III. This phenomenon of synesthesial association requires, of course, previous experiences and may well constitute the true complexity of sensory interaction or, in reality, communication with people and with the environment, as in: soft spurts alternating with loud spurts came in regular succession from within the shed, the obvious sounds of a person milking a cow (Hardy, FMC, III) Piaron los pájaros, chirriaron los grillos, rumor confuso de esquilas resonó a lo lejos (Baroja, CP, XV) a strange muffled pounding and splashing and ringing […] Venters recognized a hobble-bell of a horse, and the cracking of iron on submerged stones, and the hollow splash of hoofs in water (Grey, RPS, V) Maggie could hear soda-water squirting into a tumbler (Woolf, Y, 1907)

Otherwise, without that previous experience, we would not be able to establish this kind of association, as in: a sound he had never heard before — the plunging of hobbled horses on soft turf (Grey, RT, V);

or as we see in this girl who recognizes certain sounds, but not the impact of arrows: Cynthia [while her wagon train was being attacked by Indians] heard the fire of guns increase, the ping of bullets, and the quivering thud of something into the sides of the wagon (Grey, LWT, IV);

in contrast to this man’s repeated experience: Suddenly Neale heard the soft thud of lead striking flesh (Grey, UPT, XVI)

Thus, recognizing how heavily interaction in all its forms rely on synesthesia, in-depth studies seem to be overdue in areas such as the ontogenetic appearance of synesthesial sensations (along with other aspects of nonverbal communication), commercial techniques of persuasion, the work of art and its beholder, etc. This interplay of stimuli and sensory perception of messages travelling over the various channels can be outlined following the diagram, keeping in mind its possible correlations with language during our encounters with people and the environment.

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2.2.1 Movement A.Directly Visually
: Soundless movements: /Bye!/, a shoulder shrug, a passing cloud in space. Dermally
: Contactual movements through dermal receptors of touch, pressure and pain (e.g. a caress, the movement of our own skirt while walking, the sliding of a mechanical railing under our hand)18 Kinesthetically (associated to dermal perception), by contactual kinesics with someone (e.g. in a hug) or transmitted through a mediating agent, as with someone wringing his hands or sobbing silently with whom we share a couch, the hand of a commensal nervously toying with a bread crumb, thus letting us sense the parakinesic qualities of intensity, range, speed and duration: She was silent, but he felt a slight tremor in the shoulder against him (Wharton, EF, IX) Her rounded shoulder pressed against him until he could feel her slow, deep breathing (Grey, LT, XII)

B.Synesthesially Auditorily
: unseen but heard sounding movements (e.g. an applause and its intensity, the firmness of someone’s gait on hearing his footsteps, the water moving as we shake a container): the rustling of a woman’s dress on the carpet moved towards me (Collins, WW, 148) We heard the wheels of the dog-cart crashing on the gravel of the drive (Collins, WW, 272) el puchero de barro hervía con un glu glu suave (Baroja, B, III, VI) the clicking sound of horses in a rapid trot (Grey, RPS, II) the soft, steady footsteps of the sentry on guard (Grey, UPT, IV) He tipped the keg, and the slap and gurgle of water told of the quantity (Grey, TH, XIV) a slow-rising roar and rattle of sliding earth and rock. It diminished with the hollow cracking of stone against stone (Grey, UPT, IV);

even perceiving only the speech of someone making a movement, which could be the case in: “By George!” cried Withers, suddenly, and he pounded his knee with his fist. “I’d forgotten” (Grey, RT, IV)

Visually
: imagining, on seeing certain movements, others we do not see (e.g. on a cinematic close-up, the facial expression of someone attacking someone else, or someone violently spurring his horse, the shadow of something we cannot see):

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

That evening I lay awake a long time and watched the random play of city lights across my ceiling (Mailer, BS, X)

2.2.2 Sound A.Directly Auditorily
: audible language, paralanguage and kinesics and other sound-producing movements (e.g. of someone’s joints as he walks, tooth-gnashing, someone being slapped on the face) or internal sounds (e.g. intestinal rumbling), and those of objects and the environment in general (e.g. the rustle or swishing of a dress, the flowing of water in a brook): Hearing the clack of the gate she stood in suspense (Lawrence, SL, IX) “[…] I love you, I love you!”/ He turned to the window only to hear a soft, broken cry, and a flurry of skirts (Grey, LT, XV) She could still hear the snow flopping off the trees in the garden (Woolf, Y, 1880)

B.Sinesthesially. Visually
: unheard but seen audible kinesics (e.g. reading someone’s lips, seeing an applause or someone snapping the fingers, seeing a bell swinging). Dermally
: audible contact kinesics, whether or not we hear it (e.g. seeing someone hit another): He struck it [the dog] off with a smart blow; and the poor dog squeaked, and ran cowering back to me (A. Brontë, TWF, XXIV)

Kinesthetically
: by contactual perception (or mediated by something) of audible kinesics (e.g. a noncongenital deaf person who, looking or not, shares a seat with someone who slaps his own thigh or laughs spasmodically). 2.2.3 Chemical A.Directly Visually
: the visible qualities of human chemical substances (e.g. tears, thermal or emotional [e.g. palmar] sweat, perhaps related to speech) or of the environment (cf. Darwin 1872 [1970]:Chapter 6): [don Quixote, after drinking the balsam] le dio un sudor copiosísimo (DQ, I, XVII)

Olfactorily
: Depending on the area covered by olfactory molecules and on temperature (the higher it is, the better its reception) and air current, we perceive human odors (e.g. of sweat, tears, hair, pathological symptoms like frostbite or tissue

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deterioration, the smell of the schizophrenic patient perceived by some psychiatrists [Wiener 1966: 3157]), as well as environmental odors (e.g. of nature, food, garbage, a mouldy place, hospital odors), sometimes blended with the former, as in Agnes de Mille’s memories of her childhood’s ballet studio: My strongest impressions of the Kosloff (ballet) studio was, besides the sunlight on the floor and the white walls, the smell of sweat, the salty smell of clean sweat, the musty smell of old sweat and unwashed dresses, the smell of kitchen soup and sweat on the fresh dresses. Every dance studio smells of this – moist hair, hot glue in the shoes, hot socks and feet, and soap (de Mille, DP, VII) A hospitable smell of supper filled the air (Howells, RSL, VI) [a passing train] leaving in the air a taint of hot oil, acrid smoke, and reek of escaping steam (Norris, O, II, II) Inside [the theater] thick with the mingled odours of flowers, perfume, upholstery, and gas, enveloped her […] the unmistakable, entrancing aroma of the theater (Norris, P, I) a smell of girls’ perfumery and popcorn and molasses candy and powder from the shooting-gallery (Dos Passos, 42P, ‘Charley Anderson,’ 424)19

Dermally
: directly perceived by the touch and temperature receptors (sweat, tears, blood, etc.): all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands […] the dry, the moist […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII) his cheek touched hers, and it was cold and full of weeping (Wharton, EF, IX) Phillip felt the eyes of his fellow students rest on him […] he could not help blushing. He felt the sweat start up in the palm of his hands (Maugham, OHB, LXXXIV)

Gustatorily
: voluntarily or involuntarily perceived (tears, sweat, etc.). B.Sinesthesially. Visually
: from previous experience, olfactory and gustatory qualities upon seeing tears, sweat, sea water, etc. Auditorily
: hearing the sound of belching after a meal and imagining its odor, the smell and taste of tears upon hearing intense weeping, of food when hearing its being cooked, or the sea’s salty smell by the sound of its surf: A camp-fire soon crackled with hiss and sputter (Grey, LT, I)

Olfactorily
: imagining the taste of food or drink when smelling them: An odor of coffee and broiled meat mingled with the fragrance of wood smoke (Grey, RT, III)

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

2.2.4 Thermal activities A.
Directly Dermally: in our social interaction, given the great capacity of the skin to emit and receive thermal radiations, and according to interpersonal proxemics, our cutaneous receptors of heat and cold perceive body temperature (and of the above-mentioned chemical substances) and its rises and falls, and we detect certain emotional states by the blood supply in certain areas (the heat from anger or sexual excitement, the cold from fear), or simply other circumstances of personal characteristics: all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands […] such differences of temperature, the hot, the cold […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII) I heard her breath [Laura’s] quickening — I felt her hand growing cold (Collins, WW, 191)

Depending on circumstances and the existing, desired or rejected relationship with another person, even the most subtle perception of someone else’s body texture and temperature may trigger multiple sensations in the more sensitive individual, usually enhanced by concomitant synesthesial assumptions: the good-looking young women [in a sanitarium] who coughed slightly from time to time, but who smiled at him from their chairs, and let their warm soft hands touch his slightly [while handing them the magazines] as they paid him (Wolfe, LHA, X) He clasped her, conscious of her smooth warmth, and solemnly he circled in a heavy version of th one-step (Lewis, B, XXIII, IV)

Between this personal thermal interaction and the interaction with the objectual environment, for instance, are the one transmitted by a pen or a lighter someone gives to us directly from his pocket, the thermal perception of the bars we hold on to on a bus or subway, or the seat that has just been vacated by another person; in this latter case, it might be perceived and even desired (e.g. a woman’s lover or admirer) as an intimate contact with the other body, actually a simultaneous synesthesial evocation of other bodily characteristics, which we may find repellent when coming from certain other persons, particularly strangers and those we, justly or unjustly, find unpleasant.20 As for our interaction with the environment, we also perceive, negatively or positively, the temperature of objects to which heat seems to lend life, as when at sundown we sit on a stone still lukewarm from the sun: The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half an hour of its setting […] the warmth of the moulded stonework under his touch […] (Hardy, L, ‘Book the First,’ I)

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B.Sinesthesially Visually : imagining the thermal qualities of certain visible chemical substances (sweat, tears) and dermal reactions (reddening from physical exertion or heat, pallor from cold or emotional reaction): [When the butcher sees Helen with the hook she is trying to steal] Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood! (Huxley, EG, V)

Olfactorily
: assuming the thermal quality of odorous substances (sweat, tears, urine). Auditorily
: assuming the heat of a face when hearing intense weeping. 2.2.5 Shape A.Directly Visually
: by the tridimensional characteristics of any object and, in a person, by his proportions and body topography (which clothes may conceal): splashes of firelight on the curves of old full-bodied wardrobes and cabinets (Wharton, R, XIII)

Dermically-kinesthetically
: by palpation and perception of the tridimensionality of the object (stereognosis) as we hold, stroke or explore another body, or an object, with varying contactual continuity; that is, following its surface while touching it and (as though with a mechanical tracer) transferring those messages about curves, concavities and convexities, etc., to the brain, as when we try to identify a gift through its wrapping or when we enjoy the novelty of a recently acquired object (a camera, an automobile), or establishing only brief contacts: all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands, the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII)

B.Sinesthesially Visually
: Perceiving the object only partially and imagining its totality is one form of synesthesia, since it is not a direct perception (e.g. seeing in a woman just her lower legs, the neck of a man, part of any object); as it is also when what we perceive is the clothes that conceal the body or distorts it positively or negatively: she turned at her waist without moving her legs, so that her snug dress twisted even tighter and Homer could see her dainty, arched ribs and little, dimpled belly (West, DL, XI)

Auditorily, with a wide margin for error, when we perceive the characteristics of a voice or the sound produced by an object, or hear the sound of its contact with another object, we correctly or incorrectly imagine its morphological configuration,

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

according to our own mental patterns and esthetic concepts (e.g. the sensual phonetic features of a voice): Oyóse asimismo un espantoso ruido, al modo de aquel que se causa de las ruedas macizas que suelen traer los carros de bueyes, de cuyo chirrío áspero y continuado se dice que huyen los lobos y los osos (Cervantes, DQ, II, XXXIV) The horesemen were fast approaching […] so near that he could hear the creak of saddles, the clink of spurs (Grey, LSR, II) The rattle of waggon trappings, the roll of the crunching wheels (Grey, TH, V)

Olfactorily, we can imagine familiar objects and substances: thick mountaineer clothes that gave off the shanty smell of oil lamps and charred firewood and greasy fryngpans and raw whiskey (Dos Passos, 42P, ‘Mac,’ 113)

2.2.6 Size A.Directly Visually
: looking at someone or something as related to a point of reference. Kinesthetically
: By discriminating the spatial relationship between two points of the object by its direct perception (e.g. embracing someone, handling pens of different thickness) through muscles, nerves, tendons and joints: all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands, the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII)

B.Sinesthesially. Kineshetically
: in contact with any object or, in personal interaction, with the clothed parts of a body, or by its movements when it is mediated by another object (e.g. embracing it, sharing a couch or bed with another person). Auditorily, and with the same margin for error as for shape, imagining correctly or incorrectly the size of a person or animal when hearing a voice (powerful, thin, etc.), soft or heavy footsteps (if we mistake the intensity of gait for the effect of that person’s or animal’s weight), and when we judge the appearance of an object in the environment by the sound it produces on contact with other objects: Crack and roll of rock — slow sliding rattle — crack! (Grey, WW, XVIII)

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2.2.7 Texture A.
Directly Dermally: through the dermal receptors of touch and pressure we feel the texture and irregularities of a person’s skin surfaces (smoothness, pimples, scars) and the texture of our objectual world, as well as the texture caused by certain dermal reactions (skin papillary erection or ‘goose flesh’ [cf. Darwin 1872 (1970):101]): she [Hilma] slid her arms around his neck […]./ The sensation of her warm body in his embrace, the feeling of her smooth, round arm, through the thinness of her sleeve, pressing against his cheek, thrilled Annixter (Norris, O, II, II)

Visually: irregularities (freckles, warts, scars, blotches) and pathological reactions (jaundice, hepatitis): all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands […] the coarse, the fine […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII) His face [Sir Percival’s] turned so pale again that even his lips lost their color (Collins, WW, 191)

Kinesthetically: feeling large irregularities of the skin (warts, scars, swellings). B.
Sinesthesially Visually: direct visual perception of the human body allows us to imagine qualities like smoothness, roughness, etc., just as the objects of the environment offer us visual qualities that evoke the experience of their tactile perception and contribute to both our well-being and our negative feelings: the harmony of soft hangings and old dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security (Wharton, R, XXXV)

Auditorily, for instance, we can imagine (maybe erroneously) a smooth complexion on hearing a soft feminine voice. Olfactorily: By smelling the chemical reactions of certain somatic problems, such as frostbite, which smells like burnt rope. As with other forms of sensory perception, but still more vividly, dermal-kinesthetic features of texture and shape travel through time and are powerfully and effectively retained in our memory. In fact, always depending on the person’s sensibility, even the most flitting and seemingly irrelevant contact can exert a powerful effect on us: His arm [Cass’] was about her and it may have been by accident that his hand touched the unbelievable smoothness of her naked waist under the sweater. He snatched his hand away, but his finger-tips kept the memory of that living satin, the tender warmth of her soft side (Lewis, CT, XV)

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

2.2.8 Consistency and strength A.
Directly Dermally-kinesthetically: with relation to another body or any other object, exerting pressure and perceiving the degree of firmness or softness, or both, through our skin exteroceptors, their suppleness and yieldingness through our kinesthetic proprioceptors (e.g. holding part of a body firmly, embracing someone, dancing with our mate), and muscular strength when passively perceived (e.g. in a crushing handshake), which can make us feel as if we were perceiving the whole body: all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands […] such diversities of grasp, the tight, the loose […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII) The two combatants […] crashed together like bullocks. (Crane, BH, VI) He still held her hand […] A sense of his strength came with the warm pressure, and comforted her (Grey, LT, VI) Walking home [Soames] […] with the impression of Annette’s soft clever hand within his own (Galsworthy, IC, I, IV) His lips touched her cheek first of all, then found her mouth […] this almost excruciating pleasure that, from her lips, invaded her whole body and took possession of her mind (Huxley, EG, XXXIII) She went plodding heavily over the sand that was soft as velvet (Lawrence, SL, XIII)

B.
Sinesthesially Visually: we assume firmness of softness by looking at unclothed (or tightly clothed) parts of a body, seeing how another person holds it by an arm, as well as by the appearance of any other object. Auditorily: the sound of blow someone receives makes us imagine the consistency of that body: a soft patter of moccasined feet (Grey, HD, XI) There was heard the cushioned sound blows [in a fistfight] (Crane, BH, VI);

or imagining the consistency of the object when we hear the sound of something contacting it: I heard […] the crunch of the wheels on a smooth gravel drive (Collins, WW, 56–57) thud of boots on hard ground (Grey, RT, XV)

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2.2.9 Weight A.Directly Dermally-kinesthetically
: through the dermal receptors of pressure and, kinesthetically, through nerves, muscles, tendons and joints (e.g. holding parts of the body or another object, lifting someone or something): all shaking hands with Martin. Such variety of hands […] the fat, the lean […]! (Dickens, MC, XXII)

B.Sinesthesially Visually
: perceiving the size of the whole body or part of it: and calling out from the threshold […] left the room with his heavy important step (Wharton, AI, XII)

Kinesthetically
: through the mediated perception of bodily movements and the pressure on the mediating agent (e.g. sharing a couch, a bicycle, even a horse): Long after this explosion [of laughter] had died away, I heard, or rather felt, a mysterious shudder or tremor of the [tiny tarpaulin] cabin, and I knew that Frank and Jim were shaking with silent laughter (Grey, LP, XI)

Auditorily
: hearing the impact of another body against something: Crashing of brush, thudding of heavy hoofs [buffalo] (Grey, TH, IV)

2.2.10 Color A.Directly Visually
: looking at the chromatic characteristics of an object and, in personal interaction, at the ethnic, personal or temporary skin pigmentation (e.g. tanning), momentary reactions (blushing, blanching or paling), while certain kinesic behaviors perceived at a distance (gestures of embarrassment or of physical effort) suggest blushing, reddening, etc. (cf. Darwin 1872 [1970]: Chapter 13, on blushing): She [Elizabeth] reddened with shame and sadness (Hardy, MC, XX)

B.Sinesthesially Auditorily
: hearing, for instance, certain phonetic characteristics in the English of a black African speaker. Even this succinct outline of the various emission and reception channels in our interactions with people and the environment discloses two things: first, that personal interaction is infinitely more complex than we consciously recognize; and second, that

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

we also interact consciously or unconsciously with whatever surrounds us, as was already mentioned on page 31 and supported with words by Rapoport which should be read again (Rapoport, 1977: 182–183). To this we could add that, as he also said: Designers have been particularly prone to stress vision to the exclusion of other senses […] Psychology also [….] to the extent that frequently “perception” has meant visual perception […] One reason is that it is far more difficult to study the other senses (Rapoport, 1977: 184–185).

Therefore, although this introduction to sensory perception must follow the introduction to the cultural framework in which it takes place, and precede the one on speech and then the one on conversation, it should also be preliminary reading to the discussion of personal and environmental interaction offered in Volume II, Chapter 8.

2.3

Light as an external agent for our interactive perception Even though light does not consciously constitute a characteristic of people and things, it must be mentioned here as an important agent intimately associated to our systems of sensory perception, for it can affect — as indicated by the double lines in Fig. 2.2. — particularly colors, textures, size and movement.21 In its effects on a person’s image (e.g. lending skin a warm or cold tone, softening or enhancing complexion characteristics, hardening facial features by modifying how we perceive their shape, and affecting also the effect of the body movements) and on whatever surrounds us (e.g. the semidarkness of a room), light can certainly influence, and even trigger, different types of feelings and emotions associated with those referents, enhancing or softening their visual characteristics. Once more literature offers us numerous examples of what we otherwise experience in real life more frequently than we usually recognize; that is, the effects of the amount and direction of light in (our perception of) the colors, textures, shapes, sizes and movements of the people and things that surround us, masterfully evoked by so many painters of exteriors as well as interiors, whose “light effects” we praise: the sunlight was tempered by large blinds […] the light thus produced was deliciously soft, mysterious, and subdued […] helped to intensify the deep silence, and the air of profound seclusion (Collins, WW, 65) The girl heard yet louder tramps and clankings […] a whole column of calvalry […] At a distance behind these came a cloud of dust enveloping more and more troops, their armsand accoutrements reflecting the sun through the haze in faint flashes, stars, and streaks of light (Hardy, TM, I) Mrs Luna had taken up her bit of crochet […] Her white hands moved with little jerks as she took her stitches, and her rings flashed and twinkled in the light of the hearth (James, B, XXII)

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The blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room were drawn down […] in the sultry twilight the faces of her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement (Wharton, HM, II, IV) She laughed with pleasure, her head tilted back, the lamplight sparkling on her lips and teeth (Wharton, EF, V) about the tea-table. The lamps and the fire crossed their gleams on silver and porcelaine, on the bright haze of Eiffe’s hair and on the whiteness of Anna’s forehead, as she leaned back in her chair behind the tea-urn» (Wharton, R, XVI) The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of soft hangings and old dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security (Wharton, R, XXXV) She took one [cigarette] with an unsteady hand, and putting it to her lips, leaned forward to draw her light from his. In the indistinctness [of twilight] the little red gleam lit up the lower part of her face, and he saw her mouth tremble into a smile (Wharton, HM, I, VI) Her skirts […] Rustling back and forth across the sunny lawn (Huxley, EG, IX) I lay awake a long time and watched the random play of city lights across my ceiling (Mailer, BS, X)

As electrical lights replaced the effects of oil lamps and candlelight, besides the glow of fireplaces, and became such a powerful, enveloping environmental element, we note the conspicuous acknowledgement of it in the writers’ descriptions of the period: the eye was arrested by the luxury of stuffs, the brilliance and delicacy of fabrics […] dazzling and splendid under the blaze of the electrics (Norris, P, I)

The different feeling experienced in the same environment with or without light has a decided bearing on our personal as well as environmental interactions: the high, thin window of old stained glass, the oak panelling, the stags’ heads, the coats of arms upon the walls, all dim and sombre in the subdued light of the central lamp […] the following morning did something to efface from our minds the grim impression […] The dark panelling glowed like bronze in the golden rays, and it was hard to realize that this was indeed the chamber which had struck such a gloom into our souls (Conan Doyle, HB, VI, VII) the learned judge leaned forward. The electric light [1886], just turned on above his head, fell on his face, and mellowed it […]; the amplitude of his robes grew before the eye; his whole figure, facing the comparative dusk of the court, radiated like some majestic and sacred body (Galsworthy, MP, II, V)

As for the absence of light, its different communicative aspects are dealt with when analyzing silence and stillness in Volume II, Chapter 7.

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

2.4

The importance of synesthesia and language among the other somatic systems in human and animals The fact — incredibly neglected in the studies I have seen through the years — that there are as many channels of modalities of synesthesial perception as there are of direct perception, and the examples that have been given in the preceding discussion, are far from mere curiosities. We could, without any effort, identify many of the consequences and applications of this phenomenon, from different situations of everyday life (e.g. our ‘mute’ street interactions, interviews, the people on television, magazine and television publicity, the implicit associations inherent in the literary recreation of a novel or in a theater performance [studied in Volume II]). Synesthesial perception will be mentioned again throughout the three volumes — and particularly when speaking of ‘reduced interaction’ (with or among the deaf, the blind, the amputees, etc.) in Volume II — but one can already acknowledge how the strictly human (i.e. organismal) communicative potential between two cointeractors rely on different bodily functions of emission and reception without the intervention of external agents, except when we manipulate certain objects (e.g. a knife used for aggression). It is when we lack the refinement of certain animals that we necessitate to resort to some ‘extensions’ of our organism, as when we send chemical-olfactory messages by means of artificial products which, unconsciously or very consciously, we utilize to communicate (e.g. a perfume intentionally worn for a specific social function). Unlike our facility to communicate in space, our organismal emissions of messages fail to operate efficiently through time, for our few chemical messages (on a conscious level) disappear much sooner than they do in many animal species and therefore lack their socializing properties. But it is here that the mind not only replaces but surpasses the temporal communicative capacity of animals, since we can conceptualize and remember and, in addition, have invented writing, the ideal human means of breaking the time barrier. And it is precisely in the perceptual possibilities of that ‘synesthesial assumption’ that we discover the awesomeness of our everyday interbodily communication. Naturally, we can also consider one of the aspects of language that make it the unique anthroposemiotic and anthropomorphic vehicle of social communication well above the interactive capabilities of, for instance, chemical messages or gestures: that not only are words capable of speaking for themselves, but about the other intersomatic systems, either as those other activities take place or, what is more significant, long after they occurred. This makes language the moderator, judge and commentator of whatever somatic activities and characteristics we or our cointeractors may activate, enriching immensely the communicative possibilities of the encounter and of our appreciation of everything that surrounds us.

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2.5

External somatic communication Although our approach to communication should acknowledge somatic as well as extrasomatic and environmental elements, it is theoretically and methodological sound at this point to at least show at a glance the interactive sign systems we develop within the limits of our body and whatever elements of our most immediate environment we can manipulate by our movements. The purpose — after having identified all the sensory channels — is not to discuss any of the systems, which are dealt with at length throughout the three volumes, but simply to show what is already an extremely rich array of sign systems, which would be able to classify in two broad categories, those of a kinetic base, that is, generated by movement, and the activities generated dermally, thermally and chemically. Fig. 2.3, ‘External Somatic Communication.’22

2.6

The communicative possibilities of body movements As I tried to explore the communicative possibilities of the human body, it became increasingly imperative, as a departure point, to device an exhaustive taxonomy of the body’s external anatomy (besides identifying in detail the muscular speech physiology). I did that when I needed to identify and study all the audible body movements (Poyatos 1988d).23 At the same time I had to comprehend better the exact location of language activities within that whole arsenal of body movements, as shows Fig. 2.4, ‘Types of body movements’: all movements as potential constituents, albeit with different functions, of the linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic complex, while those, invisible and silent, that occurr internally in the larynge, pharynx and mouth cavities are the ones that can produce speech. Considering at the same time the above-mentioned anatomical classification of all points and areas of bodily articulations and this second classification of movements and their functions, we see that the human body is a magnificent apparatus equipped with a great variety of musculo-skeletical possibilities to execute visually perceived movements that perform locomotive, interactive, noninteractive and task-performing activities. Communicative functions are closely associated to sound-producing possibilities (language, paralanguage, audible kinesics), but can also operate exclusively along the visual channel (e.g. a beckoning gesture). Associated to sound, they can still be visually perceived as external articulations (e.g. finger-snapping) or be intimately related to sound-producing internal movements and even influence them (e.g. a voice change due to a momentary jaw retraction). Each category of movements, silent as well as producing sound, can therefore be part, although in different degrees, of the triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics. Thus, it can be asserted that during an interpersonal encounter the body is a continuum of possible communicative activities: on the one hand, its movements and

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

Verbal language Primary qualities: timbre, pitch, etc. vocalQualifiers: laryngeal control, etc. respiratory Differentiators: laughter, crying, etc. Alternants: labial, dental, narial clicks, vocalic, etc. vocal/narial Auditory Rumblings non-vocal nonrespiratory Gas Free: finger-snapping self-adaptors: chest-pounding Gestures Bound body-adaptors: tobacco-spitting alter-adaptors: tactual gesture Audibleobject-adaptors: desk-pounding visualFree: cracking joints while walking kinesics self-adaptors: applause, slapping Manners Bound body-adaptors: chewing, swallowing alter-adaptors: kissing, clapping objet-adaptors: door-knocking Free: gaze, pupil dilation, face, hands self-adaptors: chest-pointing ’I’ Gestures Bound body-adaptors: mouth with cigarette alter-adaptors: tactual pointing Visualobject-adaptors: gesturing with pipe dermalFree: gait, bowing, dancing kineVisual Manners self-adaptors: scratching sthetic kinesics Bound body-adaptors: eating, smoking alter-adaptors: handshake, caress object-adaptors: eating utensils Free: standing, squatting, ballet Postures self-adaptors: crossed legs/arms Bound body-adaptors: with clothes, eating alter-adaptors: hugging, fighting object-adaptors: with desk, couch Paralanguage

K I N E T I C

Proxemics

Dermal Thermal Chemical

Far: hunting, between buildings, open-field games Public: street, beach, park, actor-audience Social: protocol, subway, in queue, airport Personal: interview, beach, bus, theater, party Intimate: aggression, confidentiality, sexual Objectual: at desk, counter, wall

Visual: skin color, blushing, scar, tanning Dermal: complexion, wart, goose flesh Kinesthetic: scar, protuberances, inflammation Dermal: rises and falls in body temperature Visual: physiological/emotional sweat, tears, blood Olfactory: body odor, breath, sweat, tears Dermal: sweat, tears, temperature Gustatory: sweat, tears

Figure 2.3.External somatic communication

sounds, and on the other, the nonactivities between them. The latter are the positions and silences that delimit and define those activities as such, which develop since infancy as the interactor’s anatomical, physiological and cognitive abilities improve.24

2.7

The concept of interactive articulations: Single and multiple Proceeding this way I began to understand how by means of our movements (in gestures and postures with which we orient our limbs toward the body and touch in

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Silent Internal H articuu lations m a n M o v e m e n t s External articulations

Hidden articulations

conditioning speech

Phonetic articulations

producing language and paralanguage

Others

joints, esophagus stomach, intestines

Locomotion

Audible Interaction

Gestures

VisualSilent

conditioning language and paralanguage

Reduced interaction

contactual with oneself

Manners

with others Visual

Visualcontactual

Noninteraction

with objects Postures

Silent

Silent Audible

artifactual extensions

Taskperforming

Figure 2.4.Types of body movements

many ways) we ‘articulate’ with ourselves in what constitutes an ‘intrainteraction’; and with others, in what we commonly call ‘interaction.’ But we could still elaborate on this concept of articulation by applying it to the interbodily channels described above. If my interlocutor grabs my arm to emphasize his words, he has established a very specific interpersonal articulation which is part of his linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic discursive activity. But if he does not quite touch me, but merely stretches his arm toward me, or just leans forward, or looks at me, he has also formed a ‘kinetic’ articulation (in reality kinesic) aimed at my thoracic or abdominal region, or at my face; or at me in general, as in: the serpent-hatred of years […] Like a lurking reptile [Mrs. Catherick, when Hartright speaks to her] it leaped up at me as she eagerly bent forward towards the place in which I was sitting. Like a lurking reptile it dropped out of sight again as she instantly resumed her former position in the chair (Collins, WW, 509)

This visually contactual behavior, which I perceive visually, just like the kinesic one of his ‘speaking’ lips (and not necessarily less efficaciously than if I felt his hand on my arm), qualifies in addition his words (and his paralanguage) as much as he would paralinguistically. At the same time, our regards have met, probably as he touched me or pointed at me, and this constitutes another part of a communicative behavioral cluster through the visual channel.

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

‘[…] But listen,’ said she, smilingly putting up her finger to check my impatient reply (Brontë, TWF, XLV) She [Sue] looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her lips suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something. But she went on (Hardy, JO, III, VII) –No se apure usted — le decía la viuda, tocándole familiarmente la rodilla con su abanico (Galdós FJ, II, IV, VII) También él le clavo entonces una mirada desafiadora; y de cerca, muy de cerca (Espina, DM, II, III) –Ahí la tienes — dijo, señalando a Julia con la barbilla (Martín Gaite EV, 2, XII)

Actually, the gestures of speech act already as articulation, even though we cannot hear them, when it is added to those of the eyes: he repeats his question without any sound at all; forming with his lips only in words, ‘What do you know?’ (Dickens, BH, XXXII)

In the next example we see a triple articulation of three contacts, all within speech activities: verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic: al decirlo clavaba en su interlocutor una mirada luminosa y penetrante, vago destello del sinfín de ideas que tenía en aquel cerebrazo (Galdós, TH, II)25

But let us imagine that the topic of our conversation has elicited in me a chemical reaction like tears, which my cointeractor is perceiving visually. In a deeper analysis of the interaction, that chemical-visual relationship represents another type of contact which can accompany a kinetic contactual articulation, and even replace it, with the same meaning: –¿Hija de usted? [the sick girl]/ Respondieron unos ojos llenos de lágrimas y los labios mudos de la madre (Espina, EM, XIX)26

These interactive articulations can take place between more than two persons, as in: Una sonrisa de burla [toward Mr. Ledesma] estremecía los labios de Alfredo. Sentí su codo contra mi pierna, repetidamente, haciéndome señas (Delibes, SCA, I, VIII)

When identifying these articulations, however, we must not hastily limit that communicative contribution to certain ‘activities’ and neglect the sort of contacts we establish when, simultaneously to sound, we perceive visually the static characteristics of shape and size of the body (and synesthesially, weight and consistency), or natural or artificial odors, since they can certainly act as powerful components of the interaction on different levels.

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2.8

Coding and interrelationships of verbal and nonverbal behaviors in interaction27 Once we have identified people’s verbal and nonverbal activities we must resort to the basic semiotic concepts, shown in Fig. 2.5., ‘Coding and interrelationships of interactive behaviors,’ to better understand how they function in interaction, recognizing: NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR nonverbal behavior-language (preceding/ simultaneous/ succeeding)

sign-meaning relationship

signified

adding information arbitrary SPEAKER----Æ ----supporting---Æ --------------Æ ----shared---Æ ---ÆLISTENER duplicating iconic emphasizing (imitative idiosyncratic weakening contradicting intrinsic masking disclaiming economizing replacing words verbal deficiency emotional interference

modifies behavior meaning

modifies behavior itself

as self-regulator

modifies behavior form

modifies behavior type

contextual element

as interpersonal regulator

NONVERBAL BEHAVIOR

Figure 2.5.Coding and interrelationships of interactive behaviours

a.That (as discussed in the next section), with relation to the message that we wish to express verbally, our nonverbal behaviors can confirm it (e.g. a gesture that supports it visually), duplicate it (e.g. a gesture that repeats it), emphasize it (e.g. a tear that intensifies it), weaken it (e.g. a voice type that weakens its credibility) and even contradict it (e.g. a voice type that betrays exactly the opposite), but also mask it with other nonverbal signs that sort of camouflage it (e.g. pretending indifference in order to conceal the anxiety something is causing us). b.That our cointeractors are much more conscious of our behaviors than ourselves because we can emit nonverbal signs without realizing it, from a slight paralinguistic lingual click of disgust to light blushing or a momentary silence, producing what Ekman and Friesen (1974) call information leak, which can be so useful in social or

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

clinical interaction; in other words, they can be coded and put in motion at a subconscious level, without the intellectual process required in verbal production, yet they are decoded by our auditor-viewer; what is more, they can play a major role and have a notable effect on even the decoding of the verbal message when their own message is truly more important: He sees her consciousness return, sees a tremor pass across her frame like a ripple over water, sees her lips shake, sees her compose them by a great effort (Dickens, BH, XXIX) His voice was not quite in such a perfect state of discipline as his face. When he said ‘Ah!’ he said it in the tone of a man who had heard something which he expected to hear (Collins, M, XIII)

c.That, given the semantic limitations inherent in words, verbally coded messages are often fully decoded only along with their complementary nonverbal elements (whether activities or nonactivities), particularly if we think that their coding is not necessarily conscious and that the emitted signs come to be decoded ‘colored’ in ways the speaker may have never predicted: “Is that you, Euchre?” asked a girl’s voice, low, hesitatingly. The tone of it, rather deep and with a note of fear, struck Duane (Grey, LSR, VI)

d.That the sign-meaning relation can be: arbitrary, if the sign does not resemble the signified at all (e.g. nononomatopoeic words, the Anglo-American finger-ring ‘Okay’ gesture, a perfume used as sexual attractant), as actually happens with the majority; iconic (imitative), if the sign does resemble what it signifies (e.g. showing an aggressive fist ); and intrinsic, the sign-meaning relation whereby the sign not only resembles but is the signified (i.e. not a threatening fist but the aggression itself, even if our hand just hits the other): “[…] ‘Mother,’ he said to me, ‘you make the place like a palace and it fits you like a glove.’” Mrs. Salad here moulded one of her black kid gloves to her small, knotted hand to illustrate the point (Wilson, ASA, I, III)

e.That the meaning, as to the degree of consensus among the interactors, can be: shared by a series of individuals, by an occupational group or by all the members of a culture; idiosyncratic, whether or not it is a recurrent one, when only some associate it to the significant (e.g. a gesture characteristic of only a given person). f.That, as to the interrelationships among the behaviors themselves and as related to sender and receiver, each activity can modify: our own behavior or our cointeractor’s, or be only a contextual element; the meaning of that behavior (that is, emphasizing it, contradicting it, etc.); its form (e.g. making a ‘Yes’ sound rather hesitant); or the behavior itself (e.g. not eliciting a ‘Yes’ but a shoulder shrug). g.And finally, that both the modifiers and the contextual elements can function in the encounter as self-regulators (e.g. the type of vocabulary we are using determines

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the frequency and characteristics of my gesticulation) or as interpersonal regulators (e.g. my audible inhalation and my leaning back on the chair leads someone else to start talking).

2.9

The basic interrelationships among nonverbal systems and language As for the interrelationships between nonverbal systems and verbal language, Fig. 2.5. identifies quite clearly the ways in which our nonverbal behaviors can affect what we have said, are saying or are going to say in words, and even other nonverbal behaviors. The former deserves our greatest attention when observing, studying and, in the first place, acting as speaker-actors or listeners-spectators in any type of interactive encounter, but still specifically meaningful in certain contexts and circumstances that are studied throughout the three volumes, such as: the intercultural interaction mentioned in the previous chapter, the relationship language-paralanguage-kinesics in the flow of conversational discourse (as much in the deeper levels of personal interaction as in the most obvious), the literary text and in its recreation by its reader. Keeping very much in mind that in a careful reading of each of the examples below the reader should also identify a nonverbal-to-nonverbal relationship, the basic relationships nonverbal signs-words are: a.Adding information, if the gesture or paralanguage that precedes, accompanies or follows the verbal message expresses something in addition to what those words say by themselves; for instance, I say ‘Well, you pay your share,’ with a shoulder shrug that adds /as you are supposed to/, and another manual that still adds /and never mind what the others do/; or if our paralanguage qualifies that same verbal statement with an emphatic, low-pitch and almost laryngealized (creaky) voice that means ‘Well, just do as you must’: –Pero ¿qué quieren ustedes que les diga yo? — preguntó Andrés con un acento en que se confundían la contrariedad, harto manifiesta, y el enojo muy mal disimulado (Pereda, S, XXIV) There was a strained silence; then she said, with a voice that had too much of a sob in it for him not to suspect the truth (Dreiser, JG, V)

b.Supporting what is said verbally simultaneously to the words: –Lo que Amalia me ha dicho — afirmó Jacinta con súbita ira, llena de dignidad, poniéndose en pie y afianzando con un gesto admirable su aseveración — es verdad. Yo digo que es verdad, y basta» (Galdós, FJ, III, I, II) They really will [my parents, irritated when they find out]. This is about the fourth school I’ve been to.” I shook my head. I shake my head quite a lot (Salinger, CR, II)

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

c.Duplicating what has been said verbally if, for instance, we say, ‘Well, I don’t want to know anything’ immediately followed by a conclusive gesture that simply duplicates the verbal message (provided, of course, we do not clearly qualify that gesture with parakinesic qualifiers that may communicate by themselves and, for instance, add emphasis): A fine old gentleman’ repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an angry knock (Dickens, MC, XI) Isidora le miró con ira, y respiró fuerte apretando contra el talle el lío de ropa (Galdós, D, II, XVIII) [the old man, refusing to assist his sister] a ésa no le doy ni esto./ Y metiéndose la uña del pulgar entre los dientes, tiraba con fuerza, produciendo un chasquido (Blasco Ibáñez, AT, V) Major Petkovitch called, ‘Hello. Hello. Hello,’ in an irritated voice and then slammed down the receiver (Greene, ST, IV, I)

d.Emphasizing what is said verbally, as when an English speaker utters a simple ‘Yes’ with rather neutral or ambiguous paralanguage, but together with an enthusiastic facial expression, which a Spanish listener must interpret as ‘You bet!’ ‘Of course!’: ‘You have done right!’ he said, in a tone of unqualified approbation, while his face brightened (A. Brontë, TWF, XLV) ‘An’t she lively?’ whispered Mr Jonas to the elder sister, with his favourite elbow emphasis (Dickens, MC, XI) ‘[…] there is nothing I should like so much as a beef-steak pudding!’ cried Tom, slapping his leg to give the greater force to this reply (Dickens, MC, XXXIX)

e.Weakening what is said verbally, as happens with a hesitating ‘Yes’ because of its drawling and other paralinguistic cobehaviors (‘Mmmm…yes’), which may be linguistically different between two cultures if any signs of enthusiasm or interest are missing: “[…] I would let you make the kind of pictures you want to make.” His voice trailed off as if he regretted the timing of the proposition (Mailer, DP, XVI)

f.Contradicting what is expressed verbally, as with the hesitating ‘Yes’ just mentioned, with gesture and paralanguage that are actually equivalent to ‘Why, yes, of course!’ or with an indignant voice that contradicts it; or, in the case of a Japanese speaker, the fact that, culturally, the smile accompanying his or her affirmative words may totally contradict the verbal message due to their complex rules with respect to smiling.28 She [Bathsheba] allowed a very small smile to creep for the first time over her serious face in saying this, and the white row of upper teeth, and keenly-cut lips […] suggested an idea of heartlessness, which was immediately contradicted by the pleasant eyes (Hardy, FMC, XX)

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g.Masking words and even their paralinguistic qualifiers, although quite often a given emotion, for instance, evident in those words, can be perceived in an information leak through, for instance, irregular breathing or a specific ‘facial action unit’ (Ekman 1976), besides the one that constitutes the smile proper: Hacía el traidor que sus lágrimas acreditasen sus palabras y los suspiros su intención (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXVIII) La dijo la hermosa huérfana [Sotileza], esforzándose por dar a su cara y a su voz toda la blandura que podía (Pereda, S, XX) ‘Quite,’ said Philip, nodding, and laughed with an affectation of amusement that was meant to cover the embarrassment he expressed he felt at Rampion’s references to physical disability [since he had a game leg himself] (Huxley, PCP, XXXIV)

Also masking another nonverbal behavior: He brought out the charge in a tone of forced composure, but his lips were white and he grasped the door-knob to hide the tremor of his hand (Wharton, R, XXIV)

At times, masking is parallel between two or more participants, using even the same tool of deceit, quite often laughing or smiling. Naturally, we can also use verbal masking, that is, words with which to deviate attention from what our nonverbal signs are expressing: –Tu abuela está en ruina como sus hijos — decía don Miguel, disimulando con palabras corteses la cólera de su acento (Espina, EM, XV)

h.Disclaiming nonverbally a possible interpretation of another nonverbal behavior. For instance, among Anglo-Canadians, a society in which (aside from circumstantial exceptions) affection among men is generally not expressed through physical contact (except invariably among committed Christians), I have repeatedly observed how the wife of a good friend (precisely because of that cultural bashfulness toward affective reactions) will consistently try (almost instinctively, never consciously disapproving) to provide a nonverbal disclaimer (which could also combine with a verbal one of some sort) for the embrace between her husband and me, thus meaning: ‘You are hugging because you love each other as good friends, even though you are both men,’ in other words, ‘It’s not what it seems.’29 ambos amigos [Carlitos and Regina], abrazados, sonríen para disimular su emoción. Él quiere preguntar alguna cosa, tímidamente balbuce:/ — ¿Daniel?… (Espina, AN,III)

i.Economizing, as we express something verbally, adding information that would require more words, as when a Spaniard says, referring to a third party, ‘Bueno — /por un oído le entra y por otro le sale/ (since there is a pointing gesture for ‘In one ear and out the other’).

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

‘You wish me to […]?/ Mr Pecksniff replied, by a shrug of his shoulders and an apparent turning-round of his eyes in their sockets before he opened them, that he was still reduced to the necessity of entertaining that desire (Dickens, MC, III)

j.Replacing words, because we do not wish to use them: Martin made not any verbal answer; but he as clearly implied, though only by a motion of his legs beneath the bed-clothes, that there was reason in this, and that he could not dispute it, as if had said as much in good set terms (Dickens, MC, III)

But sometimes, due perhaps to physical or emotional impediment, something is expressed nonverbally before it is verbally, as in: Gerty’s colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only answer. Then she made it more explicit by saying: “I am thinking of the fact that […]” (Wharton, HM, II, VIII);

or in this instance of subtle kinesthetic perception, so dependent on the receiver’s sensitiveness: He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling that had not yet risen to his lips. ‘Lily, can’t I help you?’” he exclaimed (Wharton, HM, II, XII)

k.Verbal deficiency, which sometimes may seem a voluntary substitution, or even pass for what has been called expressive economy, when in reality the speaker does not remember, or does not know the correct word or words, in which case we may resort to a pictograph (e.g. ‘Wow! you should see his study, with one of those lamps all [drawling ‘all’] /drawing a luxurious chandelier with the hands/’). Antonia undertook to explain. ‘This [what Mrs. Shimerda had given Mrs. Burden] very good, Mrs. Burden’ — she clasped her hands as if she could not express how good — [..] oh, so good! (Cather MA, I, X)

l.Emotional interference, another form of deficiency that takes place when we just ‘lack words’ in an emotional situation in which nonverbal elements come to the rescue as expressive replacements: Slingerland [promising to help the girl Allie] shoved out a horny hand and made a giant grip express what evidently just then he could not express in speech (Grey, UPT, VII)

On the other hand, we should not forget that these relationships can occur between different nonverbal behaviors, for instance, when one of them supports what the other communicates: Jonathan’s smile, which came quickly, accompanied by a warm light in the eyes, relieved Helen of an unaccountable repugnance she had begun to feel toward the borderman» (Grey, LT, III)

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His face [Mcleod’s] was impassive, his body draped carelessly upon the chair, but like a safety valve shrilling in agitation, his foot — so disconnected from him — tapped ever more rapidly, ever more nervously upon the floor (Mailer, BS, XI)

2.10

Toward a revision of the concept of redundancy In order not to misjudge the role that nonverbal elements, especially gestures, play in interactive speech, we must do away with the often fallacious concept of redundancy, whereby anything whose function in discourse we do not understand we just call ‘redundant.’ Actually, what appears to be redundant is most of the times ‘complementary,’ that is to say, it supports, emphasizes or contradicts the central message. For instance, the blushing of embarrassment is not necessarily redundant when it immediately precedes or follows words that carry the same message; on the contrary, it may act as a dermal expression of the ‘degree’ of emotion contained in those words, through its paralinguistic or kinesic equivalent; in other words, it offers complementary information. It could also betray deceitful words. Likewise, a beckoning gesture is complementary to ‘Come here’ when specifically denoting our attitude as we say it, since we can display it in different ways. A silence, after saying that we do not know what to say, adds complementary information precisely through its co-structuration with the kinesic behavior, perhaps body stillness. But neither should we regard redundancy as something negative and without a purpose, for even if it is so on the communicative level — as happens with some gesticulation, frequent pauses, etc., that probably add nothing — it will not be so on a social or cultural level when, at the very least, allows us to identify a culture (e.g. a Latin speaker, the speaker from India). This revised concept of redundancy links with the also much needed differentiation between primary systems (or messages) and secondary systems (or messages). Since each situation requires a different organization of verbal and nonverbal behaviors, if we try to establish a hierarchy of systems in an interaction, we soon discover that the verbal code is not always the principal one, despite the pretended superiority of ‘language’ over any other system; in fact, a rise in body temperature, blushing or a silence can contain that principal message when language, paralanguage, kinesics or proxemics simply support it as complementary information o duplicate it as a true redundancy. In which case what should determine the hierarchal arrangement of each sign system is its temporal location along the encounter, the intensity with which it occurs, and its duration.30 Waythorn flushed. “Oh — ” he stammered uncomfortably (Wharton, OT, III)

Language in the total communicative context of its interbodily and environmental systems

2.11

Conclusion As we have passed from the vast, complex and ‘organized’ panorama of a culture to the equally awesome array of exchanges between the bodies and between them and their environment, it becomes difficult to imagine how a linguist, anthropologist, psychologist, literature scholar or, for that matter, art student or architect, could but accept this realistic and progressive approach to language and any communicative activity. In reality, it is only a matter of abandoning a little the trodden ways, looking beyond the more common levels and seeing what is there. If we do, we immediately realize that it is indispensable to look at all the somatic elements that accompany the verbal exchange in order to have an in-depth understanding of what has so many times been called a speech act. What we have always called language, verbal language, is never the sole transmitting channel in a conversation. In it we find, crossing each other time and time again, countless sensible and intelligible signs — none of which can be hastily labelled redundant — which can even be affected by the very light that fills the setting in which the encounter takes place. And, at the same time, we are also receiving synesthesial messages that condition our external behaviors and our thoughts, all of which adds to that complexity. Thus, this organic, living concept of an interpersonal encounter (the deeper levels of an interaction, as will be seen when studying both the structure of conversation and of interaction in general, in Chapter 7 and in Volume II, Chapter 8) can be better conceived of when we relate it to that of interpersonal articulation, imagining our daily interactions as discrete parts of a continuum made up of such articulations. At the same time, this preliminary approach to language and interaction begins to disclose for us a fascinating series of research perspectives and possibilities that embrace from development studies (discussed again when presenting the triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics) to the deep analysis of the literary work, especially narrative literature and theater, the subject of Volume III.

2.12

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.Redundancy and complementarity between verbal language and behavioral and nonbehavioral nonverbal activities. 2.Co-structuration of verbal and nonverbal signs in advertising: direct and synesthesial perception in the press and television. 3.Verbal and nonverbal communicative elements in commercial establishments. 4.Synesthesial perception of people and the environment in everyday life and its interactive consequences: language and nonverbal systems. 5.Spatial and temporal transmission of personal and environmental sensible signs and its consequences.

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6.Semiotics of ‘interactive articulations’ and theoretical elaboration of the concept. 7.The interactive somatic exchanges and synesthesia in the theatrical performance: actors and spectators. 8.The Interactive somatic exchanges and synesthesia in the movies. 9.The Interactive somatic exchanges and synesthesia in photojournalism. 10.Developmental aspects of interpersonal and person-environment sensory exchanges in communication: emission and social perception. 11.Intersomatic sensory perception in the career interviews. 12.Intersomatic sensory perception in man-woman relationship. 13.Sensory perception in the theater. 14.Sensory perception in films. 15.Sensory perception of a given culture: diachronic study of its acoustic, olfactory and tactile-kinesthetic identifiers. 16.The interpersonal sensory exchanges in a given culture: settings, situational contexts and evaluation of natural and artificial bodily signs. 17.Social stratification of interpersonal sensory exchanges: natural and artificial signs. 18.Intersomatic exchanges in poetry. 19.Intersomatic exchanges in the novel. 20.Redundancy and complementarity in verbal and nonverbal elements of communication. 21.The relationship of nonverbal systems and language in the elementary, secondary and university classroom. 22.The relationship of nonverbal systems and language in the elementary, secondary and university classroom. 23.The concept of ‘interactive articulation’ applied to different situations. 24.Redundancy and complementarity in different situations. 25.Sensory perception in the rural and urban worlds.



Chapter 3

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse The speaking face The heart of a man changes his countenance, either for good or for evil (Sirach 13:24, NAB) The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word (Hardy, TD, II) flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle (Huxley, EG, I).

3.1

The audiovisual production of speech: Permanent, changing, dynamic and artificial signs in the speaking face

3.1.1

Despite everything that has been said hitherto, we recognize that the audiovisual signs in interaction are the carriers of the most important twofold system, languageparalanguage, for we can use them in the dark or speaking on the phone, dispensing with the accompanying kinesics without much difficulty (although it does not cease altogether). Therefore, we realize that an exhaustive and realistic approach to audible discourse would require that we identify as many external articulations as possible (including audible movements) and all the internal ones that produce or generate sound; without forgetting, of course, that many of those sound emissions, produced or conditioned internally, can be modified by visually perceived external movements, conditioned in turn by the anatomical characteristics (e.g. protruding lips, or tense unilateral protraction of the mandible), which lend the same verbal and paralinguistic expression certain acoustic and semantic peculiarities. Following is an abridged version of a longer treatment of voice production (Poyatos 1993a)31, that is, the sound-generating movements of what is strictly speech, produced by the internal phonatory organs and facial kinesics, conditioned by those articulations — in turn conditioned by it — and by the anatomy and the static and dynamic facial features, which proves even more convincingly the great richness of our verbal-paralinguistic repertoire,32 and that, as wrote Aldous Huxley,

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flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle (Huxley, EG, I)

When we approach speech in this manner, without neglecting its production, as is usually done, we begin by confronting the first reality: that we speak with and through the face, that is, through its physiognomy, different in each individual, consisting in a series of features which we can observe in a portrait, that is, size, shape and dimensions (and their position in some instances).33 Of these, some are static, but the majority become dynamic in various degrees when we speak, in such a way that the sounds of our speech blend with them (as indicated below) and even modify them, just as our repertoire of facial gestures conditions in turn phonic production, thus determining the individual audiovisual peculiarities of our discourse (always modified in turn by linguistic and cultural characteristics). This is, in other words, what Ayala’s character is trying to seek out in his possible distant relative when he sets out to find his roots among Morocco’s descendants of the Spanish Morisco Muslims: descubrí […], en lo vehemente de sus meneos, en la manera como accionaba, como acompañaba con las manos, con la cabeza, con los hombros, a las palabras que le salían de la boca […] un parecido atroz con mi tío Manolo […] algún vínculo debía existir entre mi familia y esos Torres de Fez […] yo había seguido, no el curso de sus palabras, sino sus ademanes, el manoteo, las inflexiones de su voz, el temblor de la ceja, y era ese lenguaje el que de veras me decía algo […] viéndole hablar, esperaba que su fisonomía em movimiento me revelase de improviso por algún rasgo el pretendido parentesco (Ayala, CC).

We see, therefore, the need to consider as a fundamental basis of speech something which is also usually ignored in discourse studies: the speaker’s facial features. Thus, prior to dealing with the various areas in the speaking face, it is necessary to identify in an orderly fashion the communicative elements determined by our facial anatomy and the ones we create by modifying those features; or adding to or suppressing from what is natural in that face, always the principal instrument of the visual manifestation of speech. However, it seems appropriate at this point to clarify that although this chapter deals with speech production, its comments on facial features are equally basic to the specific study of kinesics, as is done in Volume II. One should add too that the term ‘face’ should be understood in its broadest and more realistic sense as including the speaker’s hair that surrounds it, as well as the ears and neck, as we perceive them visually, and more effectively so in the face that speaks to us. Fig. 3.1., ‘Static and dynamic features of the speaking face,’ shows the four types of features we should identify: permanent, changing, dynamic and artificial.34 3.1.2 Permanent features. These features are: the head’s general bone structure, which determines the dimensions of the face; the skin’s color and texture, including such imperfections as birth marks

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

Figure 3.1.Static and dynamic features of the speaking face

and moles; the hair’s color and shape; the forehead, with its folds (more or less marked); the brows and, under them, the two eyes with their lacrimal corners more or less conspicuous, the eyelids with their eyelashes, the two infraorbital zones (with possible pouches and rings under the eyes); the nose with its profile, nares (in men often with hair sticking out), its wings, the nasolabial folds running down to the mouth corners (only initiated or very marked) and the philtrum (the little channel above the upper lip; the cheekbones and cheeks; the ears, which, especially in men, may show hair inside and on the lobes; the lips, of various characteristics; the teeth, equally varying in shape, size and color; the chin (sometimes parted or with a dimple); the underchin and the lower jaw; and the neck. Undoubtedly, it is the permanent features that give us the most important image

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of the person who speaks to us; and not only do they form the visual part of our speaking, but filter the two audible channels of words and paralanguage, thus lending the other features our positive or negative individualizing audiovisual image. The following literary portraits should be pondered in their every detail in order to appreciate, first, that filtering of words through their conveyor’s features, ‘the speaking face,’ and then what they may communicate, rightly or wrongly, about the person’s qualities: Era el bachiller, aunque se llamaba Sansón, no muy grande de cuerpo […] de color macilenta […] carirredondo, de nariz chata y de boca grande, señales todas de ser de condición maliciosa y amigo de donaires y de burlas (Cervantes, DQ, II, III) the very whites of her eyes [Phillis’] had a blue tinge in them, and her dark eyelashes brought out the depth of the blue eyes themselves (Gaskell, CP, II) the pleasure he took in the set of her head, the way her hair grew on her forehead and the nape, her steady gaze when he spoke (Wharton, R, XIII) her paleness was her most noticeable trait. But it was not a paleness of lack of colour. Laura Dearborn’s pallour was in itself a colour. It was a tint rather than a shade, like ivory; a warm white, blending into an exquisite, delicate brownness towards the throat (Norris, P, I) [Colonel Zane] his heavy eyebrows met in a straight line; his eyes were dark […]; his jaw was square and massive; his mouth resolute; in fact, his whole face was strikingly expressive of courage and geniality (Grey, BZ, I) He was neither loud-voiced nor angry-mannered, but there was a tightness about his lips which bespoke the man of force and determination (Dreiser, JG, VI) Her eyes were quite wide […] with an innocent, surprised look in them which was wholly unconscious with her (Dreiser, G, III, IV) She had broad nostrils, a straggling mouth which lay open in a contented leer, and two projecting front teeth (Joyce, D, ‘Two Gallants,’ 66) The serenity of her expression [Sally’s] was altered by a slight line between the eyebrows; it was the beginning of a frown (Maugham, OHB, CXXI) They were full lips, finely cut; voluptuous and at the same time grave, sad, almost tremulously sensitive. Lips as though naked in their brooding sensuality; without defence of their own and abandoned to their helplessness by the small, unaggressive chin beneath (Huxley, EG, I) the set of her lips was humorous and the expression of her round astonished eyes was mocking and mischievously inquisitive (Huxley, PCP, X)

The incisive fifteenth-century Spanish Arcipreste de Hita advices as to our choice of a wife:

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

Busca muger […] de cabeça pequeña;/ cabellos amarillos, no sean de alheña;/las çejas apartadas, luengas, altas, en peña;/angosta de cabellos: ésta es talla de dueña.// Ojos grandes, somneros, pintados, reluzientes,/ e de luengas pestañas, bien claras, paresçientes [hermosas];/ las orejas pequenas, delgadas; páral mientes/ si ha el cuello alto: atal quieren las gentes.// La nariz afilada, los dientes menudillos,/ eguales, e bien blancos, un poco apartadillos;/ las enzivas bermejas; los dientes agudillos; los labros de la boca bermejos, angostillos.// La su boca pequeña, así de buena guisa;/ la faz sea blanca, sin pelos, clara e lisa/ […] (Ruiz, LBA, 431a,b, 432–435a,b)

These are the elements that, consciously or unconsciously on the part of the listener, constitute the visual components of speech, joined, in a somewhat more informal fashion, by the kinesics of the hands and of the rest of the body; and which, erroneously or not (but always with their special effect in the interaction), compel us to judge personality as well as degree of intelligence, intellectual background and refinement, as insightfully observed the Spanish Renaissance Don Juan Manuel: E las más çiertas señales [in young men, showing us how they will be later as persons] son las de la cara, e señaladamente las de los ojos, e otrosí el donaire [grace, charm]; ca muy pocas vezes fallesçen [fail] éstas. E no tengades que el donaire se dize por seer omne fermoso en la cara nin feo, ca muchos omnes son pintados [beautiful] e fermosos, e non an donaire de omne, e otros paresçen feos, que an buen donario [donaire] para ser omnes apuestos (Don Juan Manuel, CL, Exemplo XXIV, “De lo que acontesçió a un rey que quería provar a tres sis fijos”)

But let us remember that facial features are located in a body of a specific size, and that this size in itself acts as true dominant agent which, in the description of a person, we tend to mention at the outset, whether he or she is burly, small, fat, slender, etc., for it is from that figure that his or her speech issues forth and addresses us: His slight corpulence [Roy Kear’s] only added to his dignity. It gave weight to his observations (Maugham, CA, II)

On the other hand, those with permanent features that may give a negative impression on people — particularly if their occupation involves much interaction, as with those in education, doctors, lawyers, etc. — should undoubtedly strive to, verbally and nonverbally (with paralanguage and kinesics), soften that permanent image: A facetious photographer had told him [Kitty’s father, a judge] to look pleasant […] as a rule the down-turned corners of his mouth and the dejection of his eyes gave him an air of mild depression (Maugham, PV, VI)

Finally, it is particularly the permanent features of a face alone (not necessarily all of them), independently of the rest of the body’s characteristics, that exert a positive or negative reaction in our perception of the person; the former, in what we familiarly refer to as a “chemistry,” can be the utmost factor in a love-at-first-sight response in a social encounter and maintain a lasting effect on the other person. Theodore Dreiser,

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probably from personal experiences (as his novels contain much autobiographical material), ponders the essence of what he calls the sum and substance of bliss [felt with each of his conquests] He [Eugene] wondered at times how it was that the formation of a particular face could work this spell. There was plain magic in the curl of a lock of hair, the whiteness or roundness of a forehead, the shapeliness of a nose or ear, the arched redness of full-blown petal lips. The cheek, the chin, the eye — in combination with these things — how did they work this witchery? The tragedies to which he laid himself open by yielding to these spells — he never stopped to think of them […] Tendencies are subtle things. They are involved in the chemistry of one’s being […] These attractions were deeper than human will (Dreiser, G, II, XV)

At times, though, for better or for worse, one could be like that character of Huxley’s, Anthony Beavis, who doesn’t see the things that to everyone else are obvious. He acted as if he could detect in her face [Helen Ledwidge’s] nothing but its external beauties of form and texture. Whereas flesh is never wholly opaque; the soul shows through the walls of its receptacle. Those clear grey eyes of hers, that mouth with its delicately lifted upper lip, were hard and almost ugly with a resentful sadness (Huxley, EG, I)

3.1.3

Changing features There are features that, although we tend to perceive as permanent in the interaction, actually kept appearing and evolving through time. As with permanent features, we perceive and evaluate through the changing ones (with historical and ethnic differences), first of all, beauty (e.g. western men, not all, may seem more attractive when they begin to show grey sideburns or grow a moustache or beard, and the paleness of the heroine is exulted in the romantic novel), but also, for instance, the intelligence or refinement in persons who would not suggest such characteristics before. On the other hand, they may appear in a pathological way due to illness (the typical pallor of the consumptive person described in so many novels until the mid-twentieth century not too many decades ago), or in a traumatic way, due to physical or psychological sufferings (the forehead folds permanently engraved by a habitual painful gesture), or to an accident (the scars that suggests certain situations and even personal characteristics like toughness or a belligerent personality). They may also appear gradually with the passing of years (although sometimes they can be of a circumstantial traumatic nature and last only for a while), as with skin color (pale, sallow, emaciated, etc.), as happens with folds (e.g. the nasolabial folds, the crow’s-feet at the outer corner of the eyes), warts, pouches (e.g. under the eyes), blotches, moles and other blemishes; the skin texture rarely stays smooth, becoming coarse, irregular, wrinkled, scaly, with bulges, bumpy, etc.; the hair becomes greyish and even turns grizzly, silvery or snow-

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

white, often diminishing in volume and even disappearing completely in the parietal and occipital areas, showing (rarely in women) a conspicuously bare and even shiny scalp, while it may grow where there was none before (e.g. under the chin in some elderly women, and even more in men as they grow older); fat deposits are also formed which (coupled to decreased limb flexibility) come to condition postures; and the teeth deteriorate, growing yellowish and becoming crooked and even disappearing or being removed. In some instances, occupation or certain habits (e.g. being much outdoors) can also in time lend peculiar characteristics to a face: [Sir Henry Baskerville] had the weather-beaten appearance of one who has spent most of his time in the open air, and yet there was something in his steady eye and the quiet assurance of his bearing which indicatd the gentleman (Conan Doyle, HB, IV) [Buffalo Jones had] keen eyes, half-closed from years of searching the wide plains, and deep furrows wrinkling his cheeks (Grey, LP, I)

The following descriptions illustrate the various changing features, which obviously have a decided bearing on the reader’s mental attitude toward the characters (as discussed in Volume III), as they would in real life: [don Quixote] desnudo, en camisa, flaco, amarillo y muerto de hambre, y suspirando por su señora Dulcinea (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXIX) Y aun alguna dama he visto/ Que tiene acabado el rostro,/ Con arrugas por lo mico,/ Con juanetes por lo mono./ Ralo, y lamido el cabello,/ Y sin pestañas los ojos,/ Los dientes menos y negros,/ La nariz mas larga un poco (Góngora, “Otro” [romance burlesco], P, 184) his plain, sensible face full of hard lines, the marks of toil and thought, — his hands, blackened beyond the power of soap and water by years of labour in the foundry (Gaskell, CP, II) I was utterly unprepared for such a change […] His eyes were dim; his hair had turned completely grey; his face was wizen; his figure had shrunk […] nothing left of his former self (Collins, M, ‘Second Narrative,’ VIII) It ‘s useless to dwell on what I suffered after that […] Look at my face, and let it tell for me the story of some miserable years (Collins, M, ‘Third Narrative,’ IX) No man had ever grown gray more beautifully […] His skin had the pearly tint which that of elderly men sometimes assumes, and the lines which time had traced upon it were too delicate for the name of wrinkles (Howells, RSL, VIII)

The influence of the changing features in our perception and evaluation of a person are enormous, as they can reflect the presence of certain determining habits and even constitute characteristics that have been positively or negatively perceived according to the historical period, as Hardy commented with respect to one of his characters:

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Though he would have been broadly characterised as a young man, his face bore contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was conceivably owing to a too dominant speculative activity in him, which, while it had preserved the emotional side of his constitution, and with it the significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead and temples till, at weary moments, they exhibited some traces of being over-exercised. A youthfulness about the mobile features, a mature forehead — though not exactly what the world has been familiar with in past ages — is now growing common; and with the advance of juvenile introspection it probably must grow commoner still (Hardy, L, Book the First, I)

3.1.4 Dynamic features On the other hand, let us consider how those permanent or changing features (also perceived as static for long periods of time), which we may deem attractive, can be enhanced or diminished in that quality when they become dynamic in the speech act, while the unattractive ones may acquire a special charm as they initiate their interactive movements: He [Ethan] kept his eyes at the way her face changed with each turn of their talk (Wharton, EF, V) His mouth, severe in repose, became mocking as he smiled […] Laughter altered his face so that for an instant he could appear young and merry (Mailer, BS, III)

On the other hand, the communicative effect of certain features as they become dynamic depend also on their own conspicuousness on the face, as happens with very bushy or very fine eyebrows: Mr. Brand frowned — as much as a man can frown who has very fair, soft eyebrows, and, beneath them, very gentle, tranquil eyes (James, E, X)

But a person’s static features, for instance, the lips, which we may perceive positively, may become negatively conspicous in conversation because of the shape given to them and/or the excessive rapidity with which they are moved in speech: She was sort of muckle-mouthed. I mean when she was talking and she got excited about something, her mouth sort of went in about fifty directions, her lips and all (Salinger, CR, XI)

In any case, the dynamic features are the ones that, often accompanied by manual gestures, become most characteristic of our personal interactive style and form our kinesic repertoire: muscular tone, less perceptible, but very meaningful (e.g. due to social anxiety, sexual arousal); the angle in the posture of the head, changing quite eloquently through our speech and according to sex (e.g. western feminine headtilting when speaking, even more in conscious or unconscious courtship, to a man); face movements, which during a public address or in ordinary conversation keep

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

readjusting our static signs to a whole gamut of formal changes semantically related to our verbal language and paralanguage, with a dynamism that fluctuates from very slow to a continuous mobility of the lips; the eye movements, which should be regarded as true gestures, as should pupil dilations and constrictions (due, for instance, to sexual arousal and to an extremely unpleasant sight, respectively); the meaningful lifting or puckering of the brows; the changing coloration of the face, reddening of blanching as reactions to verbal or nonverbal elements in the interaction, which can also trigger rises and falls in body temperature; the visible activity of sweating, particularly emotional sweat, of marked social perception; and, hardly perceptible except to oneself, the purely physiological or also emotional skin papillary erection called goose flesh. look, and tone, and gesture, and that ineffable but indefinite charm, which cast a halo over all he did and said, and which would have made it a delight to look in his face, and hear the music of his voice, if he had been talking positive nonsense (Brontë, A. TWF, XVII) When she [Sophy] smiled, the left corner of her mouth went up a little higher than the right; and her smile began in her eyes and ran down to her lips in two lines of light (Wharton, R, II) [Reginald Portway] His mobile, handsome features took on a look of understanding compassion, then changed to lively interest (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

We can also regard as dynamic features, rather than slow-changing, the sudden alterations undergone by some of the static ones, such as a momentary shine in the eyes, the abrupt change of the skin’s muscular tonus or color, as well as the quick appearance of blushing and paling: [Out of jealousy] Her cold blue eyes caught light, her dull white cheeks flushed into brighter colour, she looked years younger than her age in an instant (Collins, WW, 328). She [Marty] reddened so intensely as to pass the mild blush that suffices to heighten beauty (Hardy, W, II)

In fact, the whole body can be involved: The leaden hue that altered his yellow complexion in a moment, the sudden rigidity of all his features, the furtive scrutiny of his cold grey eyes, the motionless stillness of him from head to foot told their own tale. A mortal dread [at seeing someone] had mastered him body and soul (Collins, WW, 591)

Naturally, the effect of one type of features may combine with that of another type, as in the following examples, in which the persons’ habitual gestures blend with their identifying static features: Esto lo pronunciaba [Rosalía Pipaón] dando a su bonita y pequeña nariz una hinchazón enfática (Galdós, T, II)

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He [Mr. Leath] was blond and well dressed, with the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a thin nose, and habit of looking slightly disgusted (Wharton, R, I)

On the other hand, a habitually dynamic feature, such as a smile, a gesture which can be fixed and statically displayed for some time, truly constitutes a facial posture, in other words, a stilled dynamic feature: the evening was ruined for her. Elena would be grim, she would sit among the others with a smile stitched to her face (Mailer, DP, XIV).

3.1.5

Artificial features
: Finally, our features, whether permanent, changing or dynamic, are often modified by a series of elements foreign to our physiognomy, but which in reality we come to perceive also as features, although we well recognize as artificial. First, the changes caused in our features by plastic surgery, and to eliminate facial hair by shaving or plucking it; the various styles of haircuts and hairdos, which can condition unconscious, or very conscious, kinesic habits (e.g. a woman’s delicate pushing of the hair from her forehead), and can vary from a face-enveloping image that attracts particular attention to it (e.g. an overwhelmingly bulky hairdo) to a face-freeing one (e.g. tight at the temples and gathered in a bun); the presence or absence of dentures, which so easily incorporate a positive or negative characteristic to a speaker’s visual repertoire; hairpieces and wigs, which convey a new image of that speaking face; the different forms of body painting, from those achieved by lipstick or any kind of cosmetic masking to the distinctive vermilion mark of the Indian Brahmin woman and the more elaborate one of many underdeveloped cultures; the tattoos of different representational or symbolic styles; the deformation effected by scarification in certain black African cultures; the modification and even concealment of the eyes and their glances by means of prescription and sun eyeglasses of various styles, which can so efficiently change the total perception of a face and even mistakingly suggest nonexisting intellectual qualities; plus all sorts of purely decorative accessories, such as rings in ears, nose and even tongue and brows. Ojos grandes, somneros, pintados, reluzientes (Ruiz, LBA, 431a,b, 432–435a,b) (15th century) he [Driffield] wore his false teeth and they made his smile seem forced and stiff (Maugham, CA, IV) Her thin lips pursed, but this was beneath the other mouth of lipstick which was wide and curved in the sexual stereotype of a model on a magazine […] in active opposition to the small mobile lips beneath (Mailer, BS, II)35 There is character in spectacles — the pretentious tortoise-shell, the meek pince-nez of the school teacher, the twisted silver-framed glasses of the old villager, Babbit’s spectacles had huge, circular, frameless lenses of the very best glass; the ear-pieces were thin bars of gold. In them he was the modern business man (Lewis, B, I, IV)

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

Let us not forget that some of the features identified as permanent, changing or artificial can condition certain behaviors that may become characteristic of a person, as in: –It’s a pretty old air, said Mr. Dedalus, twirling the points of his moustache (Joyce, PAYM, II) Father Cowley brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand (Joyce, U, 243)

Having done this quick review of facial features, it should be added that there are certain body features which, from the point of view of communication, must be considered as associated to those of the face, since they appear in interaction as elements inherent in speech. This is what happens, for instance, with obesity, deformities like a hunched back or anomalies like the lacking of limbs or a limping gait, not less a face with cross-eye strabismus or marked by small-pox. 3.1.6 There are three more aspects worth pointing out regarding the visual characteristic of the speaking face, as they constitute the principal vehicle of speech. One is that in a face-to-face conversation there exists per force a hierarchy of those features with respect to their positive or negative perception by our interlocutor. This means that they become important components of interaction which, in greater or lesser degree, attract the attention of our partner, that is, the listener toward the speaker, and viceversa. We know that what we commonly refer to as ‘staring’ is actually a constant travelling of our regard over the other person’s face by virtue of the so-called saccadic movements.36 Naturally, those movements will undoubtedly concentrate on the parts of the face that attract us the most, positively or negatively: eyes whose glance seem to come not just from the organ of vision but from the speaker’s inmost depths; the smile that variously shapes the mouth that speaks to us during ‘smiling speech’; cheekbones that are peach-rosy, quite reddish, and perhaps pronounced, as in many Japanese, Chinese or Eskimo speakers; a deep dimple in the chin; a repulsive wart on the nose, yellowish or nicotine-stained teeth; a scar that may constantly evoke violent scenarios. All are features that can for different reasons constitute an element of distraction. She was very pretty […] With a dimpled, surprised-looking capital face, ripe little mouth that seemed made to be kissed […], all kind of good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another when she laughed, and the sunnier pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature’s head (Dickens, CC, III) [Paula] Her lips are the softest, reddest, most distracting things you ever saw. Her hair is as soft as silk, and of the rarest, tenderest brown (Hardy, L, II, V) But it was at her lips [June’s] - asking a question, giving an answer, with their shadowy smile - that men looked; they were sensitive lips, senuous and sweet, and through

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them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower (Galsworthy, MP, I, I) suddenly he [Soames] noticed that she [Annette] was so remarkably - so remarkably pretty that his eyes found a difficulty in leaving her face (Galsworthy, IC, I, IV)

The second aspect involves two factors, distance and light (apart from ambience temperature), as they can also modify the appearance of facial features, of which we can be perfectly conscious, and that is why these effects are skilfully utilized in the theater, the cinema and photography: She continued to stare at him, the flame of the unshaded lamp bringing out with microscopic cruelty the fretful lines of her face (Wharton, EF, II)

But a positive or negative luminous effect on facial features, or any other exposed area, can be also that of the person’s own clothes upon his or her complexion: Her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed by the rich red of her dress (Wharton, AI, XII)37

The third aspect is the combination of visual and audible features in interaction; independently, of course, of the very important moral or psychological factors, which will compel us, for instance, to ‘forgive’ any sensorially perceived defects in the light of personality and virtues of an individual. A face may show in its features a uniformity of mutually complementary characteristics that will dominate and make us perceive that common positive or negative quality: Everything was soft about her, her voice, her smile, her laugh; her eyes, which were small and pale, had the softness of flowers; her manner was as soft as the summer rain (Maugham, CA, XIV)

In fact, one or more features in themselves negative can blend with other permanent, changing or dynamic characteristics, or with the voice, whose attraction may even obliterate any adverse impression: Mary-Ann smiled. Notwithstanding her black decayed teeth, her smile was sweet and touching (Maugham, CA, VII)

And, as Maugham illustrates, the basically visual facial features can be perceived even by touch and kinesthetically: She kissed me […]. Her lips, those very full red lips of hers, rested on mine long enough for me to be conscious of their shape and their warmth and their softness (Maugham, CA, XV)

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

3.2

Breathing and communication: Lungs and bronchi The rest of this chapter is a discussion of speech production, considered in relation to the facial features discussed.38 The mere expansion-contraction respiratory process of the thoracic cavity becomes visible in laborious heavy or deep breathing; and not just audibly through either the mouth, the nose or both, with pharyngeal friction or dorsovelar friction (the tongue-back against the mouth-roof) — all with true paralinguistic voluntary or involuntary communicative value — but visibly as well through, for instance, the emotional thoracic expansion-contraction as we inflate and deflate the lungs. Thus, breathing is susceptible of functioning as a truly eloquent kinesic behavior as part of a complex kinesic cluster involving general facial expression with tense dilation of the nostril wings: El magistral respiraba con fuerza, como aparentando ahogarse en aquel ambiente de necedad (Alas R, XII)

On the other hand, depending on “posture, clothing, or individual habits” (Malmberg 1968: 30) — but also betraying, for instance, the typical behavioral configuration of the asthma sufferer — that form of “clavicular breathing’ (Perelló and Salvá Miquel 1980) with more inspiration than expiration movement is perceived as part of the individual’s visual repertoire; and, while one is not speaking, that air stream can be interfered with at various points on its way out or in, modifying sounds as paralanguage, both as voice ‘qualifiers’ (e.g. velopharyngeal control) and independent ‘alternants’ (e.g. addressing someone with just a prompting throat-clearing). In addition, the audible and visual realizations of breathing are qualified by two scales ranging from very slow to very rapid and from very smooth to very spasmodic (as in a deep emotional sigh), respectively. In sum, breathing, audibly and visibly, can convey different messages in both normal or pathological states in ways that must be included in the study of communication, as they coincide or alternate with, or replace verbal language and/or kinesics: As Mr. Pinch returned no other answer than such as was conveyed in his breathing very hard, and opening his eyes very wide, and nodding his head very much (Dickens, MC, V)

Naturally, while we almost always use pulmonic egressive air (expiration) to speak, brief ingressive speech is possible in words and paralinguistic alternants (e.g. ‘Oh! + /wide-open eyes, raised brows and prolonged mouth opening/,’ in fearful surprise). During both egressive and ingressive breathing, but more noticeably during inspiration, the asthmatic person (particularly during mild attacks that will allow him to carry out a conversation) will let out his typical whizzing due to mucus production in the bronchioles, while the also typical bronchial rattling characterizes the breathing and

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speech of bronchitis and similar problems; which, again, contribute to the visualacoustic interactive characteristics of certain persons: hablaba separando las palabras y poniendo entre los párrafos asmáticas pausas, de modo que el que le escuchaba no podía menos de sentirse contaminado de entorpecimientos en la emisión del aliento (Galdós, LDB, XXXVII) his weak wheezing voice out of hearing […] a plump woollengloved hand on his breast, from which muttered wheezing laughter (Joyce, PAYM, V, 210–11) ‘It’s this asthma,’ he gasped between great whizzing breaths. ‘Cuts ma wind when Ah trah to hurry […]’ (Dos Passos, 42P, ‘J. Ward Morehouse,’ 208)

But whizzing can be due also to excessive physical exertion: [in the desert] Doggedly he strove forward. A whistle accompanied his panting breaths (Grey, WW, VII)

3.3

The esophagus The esophagus (or gullet), the narrow food passage behind the larynx and the trachea and below the pharynx, with a sphincteric (ring-like) muscle, is kept closed except when swallowing. By expanding and contracting it as an air initiator, used mainly in belches and belch-like sounds, that opening can be used as a vibrator similar to the vocal bands, but with the characteristic belch timbre given to the sounds that can still be produced there. Some of their characteristics, although lacking many typical features of normal voice produced with lung air, are masked out in that esophageal type of voice, distinguished by vibratory trill quality, in which the separate pulsations of a typical trill are not clearly audible (hence its vibratory quality). On the other hand, during belched sounds the lungs may also let air through the vocal bands and add to them true vocal-band voice.39 What we hear in esophageal voice (for which the speaker must be trained after his larynx has been surgically removed due to cancer) is an alaryngeal speech produced by swallowing air and talking in controlled belches, that is, replacing the missing vocal bands with the pharyngoesophageal segment as a pseudoglottis, which sounds burbly.

3.4

The larynx La larynx has very complex linguistic and paralinguistic functions. In general, persons with a corpulent body tend to have larger folds (also ‘cords,’ ‘bands’), but exceptions typically deceive the unseeing listener. And when, along with them, the ventricular bands (or false vocal bands) begin to vibrate due to muscular tension or inflammation,

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

that ventricular voice can be used at will paralinguistically (e.g. a hoarse cry). Its muscular physiology — opening, narrowing and opening and closing, according to its tension and lengthening or shortening — may reflect, within a limited range of possibilities and together with external kinesic behaviors, voluntary or involuntary indexical information as varied as sex, age, socioeducational status, emotional attitude, and medical state. Open, during normal breathing the air produces at the most a gentle rustling or hissing sound (of obvious paralinguistic value at times, as during certain types of silences), which can augment with the tension of the muscular action and as the flow of lung air through the glottis becomes turbulent; until in distressed breathing there can be not only audible friction in the larynx and pharynx but even visible muscular tension in the neck, truly a paralinguistic-kinesic behavior with communicative status (e.g. after running or under great emotional tension). Speaking, soft or loud voice generally corresponds to equally ‘soft’ or ‘loud’ kinesics, unless we strive to conceal emotion or there is a pathological correlation between voice and movement. Narrowing and closing in different degrees (usually just called closing), the contribution of our vocal bands to our voluntary or involuntary communication can be summed up as follows: whispering,40 when they do not close and vibrate yet, but produce only a hissing quiet whispering; loud whispering, if the vocal folds get closer to each other; and loudest whispering (often called ‘stage whisper’) if only the bands are together with a narrow chink left in between and the glottis friction and air pressure increase as they approach actual voice. Totally closing, the vocal bands tightly together interrupt completely the pulmonic air stream, as opposed to the minimal interference seen in silent breathing. If we close the larynx interrupting respiration momentarily and then release that closure, we produce the so-called ‘glottal stop’ (or glottal catch), a soft h-like explosive sound (the only common laryngeal articulation, and the first phase of retching, coughs, hiccups, expressions of physical exertion, as during heavy lifting, or expressing repugnance with an ‘Eeugh!’). Continuous closing and opening makes the vocal bands vibrate and produce voice; verifiable by stopping the ears and saying words like ‘Savoy,’ ‘fever,’ ‘pagan,’ in which the first consonants are voiceless (i.e. the vocal folds do not vibrate) and the second voiced and producing that buzzing sensation inside the head. Both voiced and voiceless sounds can be produced with ingressive air, rather than exhaled, but only exceptionally, as in the Atlantic Canada ingressive ‘Yeah!’ and ‘No!’ or uttering short interjectional utterances like ‘¡¿Whaat?!’ or ‘Oh, no!’ and certain paralinguistic utterances. According to tension and lengthening or shortening of the vocal bands (but also due to sex, age and personal characteristics), pitch or voice register changes: shortness (thicker vocal folds) produces slower vibration and thus lower pitch (e.g. an indignant ‘Of course not!’), while lengthening (thinner folds) and higher tension produce faster vibration and higher pitch (e.g. a surprised ‘¡¿Whaaat?!’).

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Finally, the mode of vibration produces various types carrying many different meanings as paralinguistic ‘qualifiers,’ such as breathy voice (e.g. ‘I love you!’) and whispery voice, sometimes only overriding some unstressed syllables (e.g. ‘Why, that’s fantastic!,’ with whispered why, fan, tic). Another one is produced when the air (much less than for normal voice) goes in slow periodic bursts through only a small chink near the front end of the vocal folds (not between the arytenoids as for whisper), a “rapid series of taps rather like the sound of a stick being run along a railing, or one of those noise-making devices in which a wooden toothed wheel […] ‘tweaks’ a ‘wooden clapper’” (Catford 1977: 98); this is what is called ‘creak’ (or ‘glottal fry’ or ‘fry’ in North America), also described as a bubbling, cracking type of low-pitched phonation, and as ‘gravel voice’ (Nicolosi et al. 1983: 257), a further step of which is the total closure of glottal stop. An isolated, voiceless creaking noise (like imitating the stork’s cry from the nest) can be modulated with oral resonance and even ‘play music’ with. The creaky effect has also been illustrated by referring to “children playing ‘motor boat’” (Perkins 1971: 518) with these slow glottal pulse rates. By itself, without speaking, it is called glottal trill (Pike 1943: 124–125), and when it is added to voice it is known as creaky voice or laryngealization (also called ‘glottalization,’ perhaps because of the common feature of having a constricted larynx), typical of old age, while lifting a heavy weight, etc., (also in a lower-pitch voice in some types of British English and in low-toned stretches of speech, as in a scornful ‘Oh, you fool!’). Falsetto voice, with very high tension and pitch, is reached paralinguistically by black speakers, particularly males, or in a highly surprised ‘¿Whaaat?!,’ as well as in certain other instances of paralanguage. Pike (1943: 128) points out how passing from voice to falsetto “provides the basis for yodelling” (the typical abrupt alternation between chest voice and falsetto used in the typical songs of the mountain people of Switzerland and the Austrian Tyrol) and also that “most women seem incapable of using false voice,” although “some women can ‘squeal’ or scream in a false voice.” Finally, harsh voice (also described as ‘rasping,’ ‘strident,’ ‘shrill,’ ‘raucous,’ which can modify many paralinguistic utterances) is caused by excessive and aperiodic approximation of the vocal folds with high laryngeal tension and usually pharyngeal tension too and relatively low pitch, an extreme degree of which is a type of ventricular voice. As laryngeal anomalies
–usually accompanied by facial muscular activity that can become a long-term characteristic and part of a person’s kinesic repertoire — we should mention at least pathological hoarseness, one of the most common dysphonias, produced by any interference with normal vocal band vibration, such as inflammation from laryngitis, hoarseness from vocal-fold cancer, or irritation from smoking or after shouting; the latter associated with emotional excitement (accompanied by facial and bodily gestures) and with certain occupations in which the person has to do much shouting). Another disorder in this category is the so-called eunuchoid voice, a high pitched falsetto.

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

3.5

The pharynx

3.5.1

The muscles of the pharynx — between the nasal cavities and the esophagus — cooperate both in swallowing and speech production and even determine certain kinesic behaviors. It is to the vocal folds what a violin box to its strings, serving, together with the nasal cavities and the mouth, as a resonator of the vibrations rising from the larynx to be amplified by the air in those cavities. Swallowing, at times an unconscious muscular movement triggered by social tension, fear, etc., can be used also as part of a kinesic repertoire and accompanied by facial gestures, as in mock fear, and histrionically stereotyped by comic performers. One can exaggerate its sound by extreme pharyngeal constriction and release, but the up-and-down movement of a man’s Adam’s apple can sometimes be a subtle silent clue to concealed tension and emotion. If its cavity is constricted it raises pitch and produces a tense, metallic and strident voice (often called ‘sharp’) which in extreme cases can be externally correlated with muscular tension of face and neck, intense gaze, tense articulation and high-volume or controlled but vehement words; and if the pharynx wall and the tongue root approximate each other the voice becomes pharyngealized, mentioned later as a paralinguistic qualifier of both verbal and paralinguistic voice. But the pharynx can expand if we push the tongue forward and away from the pharynx wall, which lowers pitch and makes voice sound muffled and relaxed through damping of the laryngeal vibrations. The congruent kinesic behaviors for low pharyngeal speech can be shortening of the neck, sometimes lowering the chin too, lip rounding, slight frowning and slight eyelid dropping, accompanied by slower speech and slightly breathy voice. As for the faucal pillars or arches, joining the soft palate to the tongue, pharynx side walls and pharynx, they help in swallowing and in keeping food or drink from returning to the mouth, except when regurgitating or retching, with the typical accompanying kinesic behaviors. The posterior pillars help to raise the larynx and shorten the pharynx, while the anterior ones raise the tongue, both pulling the velum (soft palate) downward and contributing to the regulation of the nasality of sounds.

3.5.2 Any possible articulation in the oropharynx involves the drawing of the tongue-root toward the back wall of the pharynx, but many people can produce a pharyngeal stop which requires a highly unusual and violent muscular movement. Because of their paralinguistic values, one must identify possibilities like: audible swallowing, a violent epiglottopharyngeal muscular movement; audible pharyngeal friction, such as the ingressive one immediately after a pre-speech apicoalveolar click, or a tense egressive friction of impatience; faucalization, a modification of basic articulations by approximation of the faucal pillars; and the secondary articulation known as pharyngealization, a retraction of the tongue root toward the back pharynx, which affects many

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linguistically sounds in Arabic (e.g. the l in ‘Allah,’ God) and can also be a paralinguistic voice modifier.

3.6

The alveolar-palatal areas

3.6.1 The oral cavity is our true sound-box and principal communication instrument where, besides giving shape to all the phonologically agreed words for the exchange of almost countless messages in each individual language, we produce another vast repertoire of ‘unofficial’ yet equally symbolic and eloquent utterances with which at times we can convey the mental subtleties of a message otherwise impossible to put into words. But very often this is possible only when those internal muscular activities, consciously or unconsciously generated, are complemented by the external bodily articulations of our universal, cultural and personal kinesic repertoires, fused to linguistic and paralinguistic sounds in the basic triple structure language-paralanguage kinesics. The commonly called roof of the mouth includes: the alveolar area or alveolar ridge (alveolum), the convexity of the gums behind the upper teeth; the hard palate or palatal area, the first part of the concave mouth-roof; and then its rear part, the soft palate or velar area, a moveable membrane that ends in the flexible uvula, principal tool in the velopharyngeal activities (besides being articulated against by the tongue). Thus, the vocal cavity constitutes an articulatory continuum that gives shape to our thoughts and corresponds to face and body behaviors (e.g. a commiserative apico-alveolar click) that can be evoked even without been seen, as when listening on the phone. Four phenomena in the alveolar-palatal area deserve special attention. One is the mouth-air mechanism, one of the major ways of initiating an air-stream mechanism (besides doing it with lung air, pharynx air, or esophageal air), although very briefly and only for oral ones. In this mechanism the back of the tongue touches the velum firmly (much like for the velar k) and, still touching, is pushed forward to make egressive sounds called clicks (the more common sounds with this type of mechanism), typical of certain African languages, particularly of the Bushmen peoples in different areas of the continent; and, paralinguistically, of many others with different meaning and virtually lexical value, as will be discussed within ‘alternants’ in Chapter 4 of Volume II. The other three phenomena are secondary articulations: palatalization, raising the front of the tongue (tip turned rather downward) toward the hard palate (e.g. in forced babyish palatalized way of speaking); velarization, raising the back of the tongue toward the soft palate or velum (e.g. the n of Spanish ‘lengua’ or certain paralinguistic effects); and alveolarization, raising the tongue-blade further front than for palatalization.

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

3.6.2 The best known abnormality affecting the palate is cleft-palate, a congenital failure of both sides of the palate to knit together, leaving a fissure in the medial line — which may extend through the uvula, soft palate and hard palate (sometimes involving the so-called cleft lip as well) — through which air passes into the nasal cavities. It is characterized, with facial distortions while speaking (e.g. constriction of the nostrils), by hypernasality, inaccurate articulations, frequent substitution of the glottal stops, and nasalization of fricative sounds.

3.7

The dental areas

3.7.1 These areas comprise, as passive articulatory organs, the incisors, canines and premolars (in this order of articulatory importance) of both the upper and lower jaws, the lower one being the more active as it depends on mandibular movements. We may say with tense and aggressive pronunciation, ‘¡First give them their five thousand dollars!,’ in which, besides raising the five fingers in front of the face with intense gaze, we may articulate [f, v] and [Θ ] with the same degree of intensity. Whether the formation of the kinesic composite gestures determines the paralinguistic vehemence or viceversa would be a rather futile discussion in most cases, as they both simply correspond to the same emotional feeling; but, as with other parts of the face used for speech (lips, mandible, nostrils) or during speech (brows, cheeks), the teeth, intimately associated with the lips, contribute to our perception of the speaker and our evaluation of the ‘speaking face,’ where their shape, position and color — encased between the two lips (of positive or negative characteristics themselves) and accompanied by the tongue — appear and disappear in the formation of sounds and, for instance, during smiling speech. Your teeth are like a flock of ewes to be shorn/ which come up from the washing (Song of Songs 4:2, NAB), los dientes menudillos,/ eguales, e bien blancos, un poco apartadillos;/ las enzivas bermejas; los dientes agudillos;/ los labros de la boca bermejos, angostillos (Ruiz, LBA, v. 434), She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit (Wilde, PDG, XVIII).

3.7.2 Although most of the dental articulations engage the teeth as passive articulators with either the tongue or the upper lip (mentioned later when discussing those two organs), the lower teeth can actively produce the following articulations (the term ‘denti-,’ for lower teeth, borrowed from Catford 1977):

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bidental or dentidental fricatives or approximants (without either lips or tongue interfering) while blowing through the teeth (Catford 1977: 148); dentilabial, as Catford (1977: 148) defines the production of a lower-teeth version of labiodentals [f, v], subdivided into dentiexolabial fricatives
–frequent in speakers with a protracted mandible — and dentiendolabial, the labiodental fricative further distorted by the audible friction; dentalization, the articulation of vowels and consonants ‘through one’s teeth,’ can display the labial kinesic component of normal articulation, from lip rounding or protrusion with close front vowels to horizontal distension with close back vowels: ¡Voto… — y miró al cielo y apretó los dientes — que estoy por hacer un estrago en ti (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXXVII)

dental scrapives (Pike 1943: 105), rubbing or scraping the lower teeth against the upper ones, as in tooth gnashing, grating or grinding, an intentionally communicative rasping sound (e.g. with rage); dental percussives, produced by clicking maxillary and mandibular teeth together at different speeds, but typically as a bidental chatter, that is, in a repeated rapid way (as in chattering from cold or fear); with bidental percussives resonating in the oral cavity musical notes can be played up and down the scale in various keys; bidental fricative chatter, with or without percussive contact, an audible ingressive or egressive air stream escaping through the interstices, present sometimes even in certain types of voiceless laughter; dental assisted articulations (i.e. any sound production helped by the hand or hands, or an object), that is, snapping the upper incisors with the second and third fingernails (or just the second) and, by controlling pitch and resonance in the pharyngeal and oral areas, producing perfectly controllable musical notes, possible also with a pencil, small stick, etc. 3.7.3 As speech anomalies caused by the teeth, both malocclusion (misalignment of maxillary and mandibular teeth) and malposition (defective positioning of some teeth) contribute not only to facial cosmetic appearance, but to articulatory defects. For instance, open-bite (anterior upper teeth failing to contact the lower ones) usually distorts the sibilants [s, z, Ú, Š] and even [v] and [3], perhaps produced interdentally but still without sibilance, while cross-bite (upper and lower teeth not aligned vertically with each other) sometimes interferes with linguo-alveolar articulation and produces lisping. Some forms of open-bite, such as overbite (upper teeth slanted forward) are also visual features conditioning facial kinesics, as does underbite (the mandibular teeth overlapping the maxillary ones in a permanent jutted-mandible posture). On the other hand, missing teeth, particularly the upper incisors, and excessive wide separation

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

of upper and lower teeth, distort dental fricatives [s] (‘saint’), [z] (‘Zen’), [θ] (‘thorn’) and [ð] (‘that’).

3.8

The labial areas and the cheeks

3.8.1 Besides their anthropomorphic and anthropophonic possibilities — by themselves and also articulated with the teeth, the tongue and, unlike any other sound organ, with the hands and fingers — the lips can be more expressive and communicative than any of them, as they become in speech an object of visual and acoustic perception: The pronunciation of certain syllables gave to her lips this peculiarity of formation — a formation as suggestive and moving as pathos itself (Dreiser, SC, XV)

In the first place, whatever conscious or unconscious postures are adopted by the lips in our personal interactions depend on their anatomy and on how our listener perceive them according to their estethic preferences, as with the fifteenth-century Spanish Juan Ruiz’s: los labros de la boca bermejos, angostillos./ La su boca pequeña, así de buena guisa (Ruiz, LBA, 434c, 435a)

Our lips alternate between (a) periods of rest as one of the static signs of the face (along with eyes, brows, nose, cheeks, chin and forehead, ears, hair), intellectually evaluated as attractive (sensual, beautiful, innocent), unattractive (repulsive, cold), emotion-laden (sad, happy, nervous, angry, surprised, contemptuous, scornful) or simply neutral and not ‘thought of ’; and (b), due to their great plasticity, periods of everchanging communicative mobility, giving bodily shape to those utterances and allowing us to ‘see what we hear’: words that express abstracts, moral and physical qualities of people, the environment, etc. We should not forget that the cheeks are the anatomical continuation of the lips and therefore the facial element whose expressivity blends with theirs, sometimes causing two characteristic dimples to be formed which, particularly in women, can constitute an attractive feature that seems to belong to their kinesic repertoire, although not always positively perceived: If only she didn’t make herself look like the head nurse, letting her dimples lengthen into disciplinary creases (Bellow, H, 95) with fat little squirrel cheeks and a mouth perpetually primed in contemptuous judgement […] in all ways smug and insufferable (Doctorow, WF, XIII)

Furthermore, the sounding lips give also visual form to functional utterances like interjections (‘¡Wow!’), conjunctions (an emphatic ‘BUT be careful!’), prepositions (‘That’s for you’), and pronouns (‘Oh, I love you’). Interjections are much more

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expressive if we add to audible expressions of fear, hate, repulsion or disapproval their visible kinesic representation, qualified (like all kinesic acts) by muscular tension or intensity (akin to articulatory tension), extent of the movement (similar to syllabic duration), and duration and velocity (similar to speech tempo). [Mrs. Foxe] Always firm, always serious, the coming together of her full, almost sculptured lips expressed more than ordinary gravity (Huxley, EG, IX)

3.8.2 In addition, the visual appearance of the lips as ‘speakers’ can be the object of artificial manipulation, which can change both their interactive role according to both the interpersonal proxemic relationship and the perception of their more permanent characteristics (e.g. fleshy, moist) and their dynamic ones (i.e. their shaping of words and how they qualify those words by additional changes, smiles, etc.). This can be enhanced: by moistening them against each other and, less frequently (with unconscious or conscious social functions), with the tongue, two characteristic kinesic behaviors in themselves; and by using female’s lipstick of various colors and shades that modify the shape of their outer edges. Modifications which, congruently or not, accompany the vocabulary, paralanguage and kinesics of the speaker (again, as sensual, mannish, uncouth, etc.), the kinesic component being in the lips themselves. 3.8.3 Finally, another aspect of the lips which is not included in the taxonomy of labial settings offered below is their anatomical configuration as a permanent postural conditioner. The most typical configurations are: permanent opening posture of the interlabial space, due to a lowered mandible or to a raised upper lip; permanent moderate protrusion of both lips as if ready to speak in the open-rounded position; very fleshy lips or very thin ones; protraction and, more out of habit, a lateral tendency of the mandible, with or without permanently opened lips. The conversational effects of these postures can be consciously or unconsciously evaluated by the listener, while a protracted mandible can nasalize voice slightly. Naturally, any posture of the lips independently of speech qualifies as kinesics, preceding or following words, and may combine with them visually, supporting, emphasizing or even contradicting what they communicate. 3.8.4 Only knowing the basic vertical, horizontal and diagonal movements of the lips,41 and how the main muscles work, can we recognize the communicative importance of their postures adopted intentionally or unintentionally as ‘labial control,’ and the permanent visual-audible conditioning of congenital or pathological configurations, such as slightly open jaws, keeping the lips always parted. Besides those basic parameters, however, one must still add: (a) a series of additional physiologically possible settings across the whole length of the lips and on each side, according to whether they are retracted against the teeth (even turned inwardly around the edge of the teeth) or

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

protruded, that is, turned inwardly; (b) another series of labiofacial positions with the lips closed and involving also the cheeks; (c) another according to whether the mandible is retracted or protracted or swung left or right; (d) the teeth biting the lips; (e) certain labial and labiofacial postures shaped by the position of the tongue behind the lips or cheeks or between the lips; and (f) some external modifications of the lips by the hands, the fingers and even objects (i.e. assisted labiofacial articulations). From among the not less than 1728 scalar settings previously identified (Poyatos 1993a:77) one could mention by way of examples the following lip postures or ‘speaking lip gestures’ of the ‘speaking face,’ bearing in mind that each one shows several degrees (e.g. slightly expanded-expanded-very expanded-maximally expanded). A.Dominant expansion 1.Horizontal expansion. Symmetrical: a basic symmetrical expansion scale on both sides of the sagittal plane distending the mouth corners beyond the neutral position until two small oblong openings appear at the mouth corners, as in some forms of childish or feminine crying and some Japanese paintings; the same, but with an awning-shaped upper lip, typically accompanied by slight horizontal constriction and slight raising of the mouth corners, which in several western cultures I have always observed in socioeducationally lower male speakers (and interestingly enough, in several females with strong masculine traits) in different conversational contexts (e.g. in humble or embarrassed statements); also unilaterally (right or left side), out of habit or as an attitudinal feature, as when wanting to appear tough. 2.Vertical expansion. Symmetrical: a basic scalar setting depending on the lower lip and therefore the lower jaw position lowering from a transversal center line, modified by upper-lip raising and resulting in increasing tooth-showing, or increasing lower-lip lowering and tooth-showing, or both simultaneously; also shaped awning-like; unilaterally, with vertical upward expansion of the right or left side only (as in disgust or confusion) without mandible movements; with mandibular shift to right or left we change facial expression and voice resonance somewhat; facial expression is also modified by mandible retraction or protraction (i.e. chin flattening or protruding); laterally offsetting portrays toughness, anger, derision, aggression, contempt, and similar negative attitudes (stereotyped in films); protraction has similar functions, shown also by some country types, while retraction can be seen in the typically shy and generally stereotyped speech of rural persons. 3.Diagonal expansion. Symmetrical upward: a basic setting (favored by a protracted configuration of the mandible), without changing the vertical basic position and mouth corners raised toward the cheekbones (as in smiling speech); symmetrical downward, favored by some by a permanent ‘tragedy-like’ mouth posture (with permanent or momentary furrows running from the sides of the nostrils to the corners of the mouth); this same setting modified by: lips retracted against the teeth (as in

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some childish or feminine forms of crying, or as shown by old comic actors Stan Laurel and Joe E. Brown); with mandibular shifts of diagonal-expansion (lateral, contraction, protraction), the protracted upward gesture of the cartoon character Popeye and the stereotyped portrayal of villains (in the downward positions). B.Dominant constriction 1.Horizontal constriction. Symmetrical: a basic setting of increasing horizontal constriction (lip pursing) from a neutral lip position, or the same basic setting + upper lip/lower lip, or both (as in a kissing gesture) turned outwardly (protrusion): Judy […] shakes her head and purses up her mouth into No, without saying it (Dickens, BH, XXI);

mandibular shift of horizontal-constriction, affected by retracting, protracting, and right/left mandible displacement. 2.Vertical Constriction. Symmetrical: at the neutral position both lips can press against each other reducing their fleshy sides to just a thin line until they touch; with upper lip stretched downward overlapping and touching the lower one, the latter stretching upward and inward against the lower teeth (farther in by the retraction of the jaw) and the mouth corner vertically constricted (typically with eye-squinting and frowning), it is stereotyped in film base characters. C.Labiodental and labiofacial-cavity settings Besides all the modifications of the interlabial space and the shape of the lips, some muscular activities included in those settings can result in the modification of the upper and lower labiodental cavities between the teeth and the inside surface of the lips, according to: degree of protrusion or retraction, whether or not one introduces the tongue in the lower or upper cavity (this tongue intervention being among the lingual settings discussed later on), and whether in a closed-lip position the cavities are inflated or sucked in along with the cheeks themselves. Symmetrical labiodentallabiofacial expansion, the air pressed inside the upper and lower cavities (with the same or different volume), inflating them in different degrees as a kinesic behavior that stops at that point (e.g. while hesitating, memory-searching, showing impatience, etc.); expansion can be unilateral, the whistling or trumpet-like release of air in the inflated right or left side; the lips retracted symmetrically against and around the upper teeth edge as a kinesic gesture; the same posture followed by an ingressive whistling sound. D.Labiodental-mandibular settings These are a series of settings in which the upper teeth come in contact with the inside upper or outer surface of the lower lip at the center, or the lower teeth contact the lower or outer surface of the upper lip (or with its right or left side).

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

E.Assisted labial and labiofacial settings Apart from the labial settings determined by the predominant active intervention of the tongue — included therefore under lingual settings — a discussion of labial postures and activities can pretend to be exhaustive (from a linguistic and even more paralinguistic point of view) only by acknowledging the formation of a brief but typical series of facial-manual gestures in which the fingers manipulate the lips to produce or accompany certain paralinguistic ‘alternants,’ such as: the index finger pressing vertically against horizontally constricted lips + fricative-like release of air, as with the palatal hushing sound; the web between thumb and index vertically touching slightly open and protruded lips, emitting a prolonged fog-horn type of sound; the index finger reaching the inner surface of either cheek and stretching it outward and then sliding tensely out of the mouth (as when producing the ‘champagne-bottle’ popping sound; the thumb and index finger pressing against the mouth corners, with the tongue protruding minimally between the lips, as in a typical potent whistling; the backs of the finger joints taping the open lips rapidly, as when imitating the NorthAmerican Indian hooping cry; the medial side of a fist pressing against the lips and then blowing into it, as from cold; both little fingers set between the pressed mouth corners to produce another loud whistling: Fernando se introdujo los dos meñiques en la boca y emitió un silbido largo hacia el vendedor (Sánchez Ferlosio J, 85–86)

3.8.5 Many, if not most, of the labial postures identified in the preceding sections can have specific effects on our speech; quite a few could very well be regarded as labialization of some sort; and we do not necessarily have to limit the definition of that secondary articulation or voice qualifier to traditionally called lip rounding. Besides, as was suggested, those lip gestures constitute a repertoire of kinesic behaviors. As for paralinguistic labial articulations (excluding the traditional linguistic ones), the following should be identified:42 exobilabial unvoiced egression, as when blowing, and with paralinguistic meaning (e.g. ‘Oh, well!,’ ‘That’s too much’); exolabiodental affricate, as for German ‘Pfad’ (path) or in a glottalized paralinguistic [’pf] of indifference, contempt, etc. endobilabial trill (bilabial trill), as when expressing cold, which “may still occasionally be heard from a groom as he is rubbing down a horse” (Abercrombie 1967: 49); unilateral endobilabial ingressive fricative, usually very brief, as used by some to express resignation; endobilabial click, a dorsovelar closure and a forward labial one, the latter producing the plosive kissing sound when it is released while an ingressive air current is sucked in;

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exo-endolabial click, that is, between both areas, generally accompanied by a louder dorsopalatal click, thus counted also as a lingual click (e.g. after drinking with pleasure), usually expressed also with a prolonged exhalation: and having surveyed it [the beer in the glass] for a moment opposite the candle, he took a dep draught, and then smacked his lips, drew a long breath, and refilled his glass (A. Brontë, TWF, IV)

bilabial percussive, an airless minor mechanism acknowledged by Pike (1943: 103), by either opening and/or closing the lips; two assisted articulations of the lips and cheeks can be mentioned: the rapid up-anddown flapping of neutral lips with the side of the index finger, and the percussive caused by snapping the cheek with the fingers. As for labialization, besides the effect produced by lip rounding, there are: bilabial retractions (e.g. an emphatic ‘Maybe’); horizontal constriction (e.g. ‘No’ with emphasis or contempt) and expansion (e.g. a prolonged joyful Spanish ‘¡Síii!’); diagonal symmetrical upward expansion (e.g. a bashful, sort of American country-folk ‘Gee, thanks!’); diagonal symmetrical downward expansion (e.g. a stereotyped villain’s ‘I’m going to kill you!’); and diagonal unilateral downward expansion (e.g. in the stereotyped pirate’s or gangster’s talk). An abnormal nonspeech form of labialization is labial trembling (e.g. shivering from cold, pain, fear), often linked to mandibular trembling, but specifically affecting the labial consonants and producing general incomplete articulation: Mac drew himself up and clenched his fists. He spoke very quietly, although his lips were trembling (Dos Passos, 42P, ‘Mac,’ 138)

3.8.6 Three more observations regarding the expressiveness of the lips. One, as an important nonverbal manifestation, the possible soundless word formation during which we can read the lips: he repeats his question without any sound at all; forming with his lips only in words, ‘What do you know?’ (Dickens, BH, XXXII) Mr Guppy screws his mouth into a silent ‘No!’ and shakes his head (Dickens, BH, XXIX)

The other, as anticipating words that are never said, the opening of the lips that compels us to expect those words: She [Sue] looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her lips suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something. But she went on (Hardy, JO, III, VII)

The third, that the anatomy and many possible lip postures constitute a personal and cultural (not universal) nonverbal repertoire interpreted without words as true

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

emblems, although those gestures would determine the sound emission of words with which the same messages would be expressed: Mrs. Raddle tossed her head, bit her lips, rubbed her hands harder […] she was ‘getting the steam up’ (Dickens, PP, XXXII) Mr. Waterbrook, pursing up his mouth, and playing with his watch-chain, in a comfortable, prosperous sort of way (Dickens, DC, XXV) Mr Fairlie arched his eyebrows and pursed his lips in sarcastic surprise (Collins, WW, 180) Sue […] her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream, her little mouth nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful inquiry (Hardy, JO, III, IX) a bitter derision curled her lips (Grey, RPS, VI) His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain (Joyce, U, 245) He shook his heavy head and his lips came together with the pressure of disgust (Bellow, H, 102)

3.8.7 Since the cheeks belong communicatively to the same facial zone as the lips, we must not neglect those nonpermanent dimples that appear in some speakers, actually a voluntary external articulation, typically by women, of which Hardy offers the best example in the sensual Arabella Donn: she gave, without Jude perceiving it, an adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession, by which curious and original manoeuvre she brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund surface a perfect dimple, which she was able to retain there as long as she continued to smile (Hardy, JO, I, VI).

3.8.8 Since the lips provide a powerful visual component in interpersonal interaction, we should regard as anomalies not only those preventing normal sound production, but also the ones that could be neglected as affecting only cosmetic appearance; for the latter, as a component of the interaction, may likewise affect it on different levels, as do most of the labial anomalies: underdevelopment, deficiency from disease, trauma or surgery, restricted mobility and even paralysis, asymmetry of muscular contraction, excessive fullness, etc. For instance, while the so-called ‘double lip’ or permanent swelling of the lips interferes with labial closure and thus with the articulation of [p, b, m], rounded vowels, etc., their additional inner folds may show during smiling (even at rest) and provide a peculiar and generally not pleasant fleshy quality to labial speech movements and kinesics; an abnormally thick or short upper lip fails to cover the teeth and affects the production of sibilants; if the upper lip is retracted (because the maxilla is), it will affect the labiodentals [f, v].

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3.9

The tongue

3.9.1 The tongue appears as the most mobile and versatile speech organ which not only can change positions all around the mouth, from the pharyngeal area to the teeth and over and around the external surface of the lips, almost as far as the chin, but can become straight and narrow, flat and wide, or curled. Since it becomes visible in the formation of some linguistic and paralinguistic sounds, it is also, like the lips, teeth and mandible, though on fewer occasions, an element of kinesic behavior when words can be intentionally emphasized through their interdental sounds by more pronounced, longer and tenser protrusion of the tongue; or when it is displayed in ways which may correspond to the articulations of certain standard paralinguistic utterances, actually paralinguistic kinesic constructs meant as such by the speaker, for instance: in an emphatic, irritated ‘¿¡Why don’t you think for once!?’ (with a prolonged, tongue-thrusting/showing ‘think’), or in the sensual, slow interdental emphasis (‘surrounded’ by sensual lips) used with equally slow and sensual breathy voice by the television female model advertising a perfume brand as she looks intently into the camera.43 Evidently, the function of the tongue is far more complex than just the articulation of a word, which warrants a rather holistic treatment beyond the sort of anatomical, physiological and phonetic discussions found in very competent books. Thus, what was said about the visual symbolic aspects of the lips during speech (including its grammatical and attitudinal silences) can be applied to some instances of lingual behavior. The tongue, like the lips, can become in some persons a conspicuous component of their repertoire and even define some deviant attitudes, such as effeminate tendency to articulate some front sounds with excessive tongue-showing, as in ‘that,’ ‘today,’ ‘yeah,’ ‘dear,’ and in paralinguistic alternants like lingual clicks (which, of course, must be seen together with cobehaviors like rolling of the eyes and/or head tilting).44 Finally, although the tongue is not subject to the sort of shape-modifying and color-modifying practices the lips are, one should mention the westerner’s puzzlement when our colleague in India is conversing with us after chewing his betel and his tongue and gums are colored a scandalously conspicuous vermilion: His mouth had opened in a kind of grin, the teeth red with the juice of betel leaf (Bhattacharya, HWRT, II)

3.9.2 With a complex muscular physiology,45 the tongue is responsible for eight groups of articulations, according to its basic movements: fronting, touching the teeth and/or the lips, expanding the pharynx at the back and sometimes protruding out of the mouth with specific linguistic, paralinguistic and kinesic values (e.g. in a femininely sensual realization of the interdental in ‘I think so…’); raising, touching the palate, or in general the roof of the mouth, narrowing or closing the air passage (e.g. in a drawled

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

‘Ciao!’); front-raising, touching the alveoli and/or the hard palate (e.g. in a palatalized girlish voice, in baby talk, in hissing); retracting, when the back part touches the wall of the pharynx, constricting it (e.g. the pharyngealized voice in some paralinguistic expressions of pain); retracting-raising (of the back), touching the uvula (e.g. the uvularized voice of some ‘gargling-like’ or ‘beast-like’ sounds); raising-retracting, touching the soft palate (e.g. a velarized laugh); lowering of the mass of the tongue (e.g. in what Laver [1972: 193] refers to as ‘hot-potato voice,’ as in a portrayal of an ‘abnormal’ person); and lowering-retracting, the tongue root touching the lower and upper pharynx in a sort of strangulated type of articulation (e.g. a paralinguistic tense gulping sound signifying real or mock fear). Most linguistic and paralinguistic tongue articulations are active contacts of the tongue with the pharynx, the lips, the teeth and the alveolar, palatal and velar areas. And it is by changes in tongue posture that many sounds can be given (in varying speech segments) the peculiar characteristics known as secondary articulations (e.g. alveolarization, palatalization, velarization, etc.). Some of the relevant paralinguistic tongue articulations follow. –

Tip or apex (apico-) Articulations

A reverse apico-bilabial (i.e., triple) articulation on the left or right side, the tongue-tip momentarily showing between the lips followed by its retraction, as when dislodging or spitting out a tiny foreign body with an explosive sound; an apicosublabial-dorsopalatal groove fricative, the tip against the lower lip (either endolabial or exolabial) with the air making a hissing or whistling sound over the tongue; an unvoiced apico-labiodental, the tip inside the upper labiodental cavity, with the blade touching the teeth, a posture during which some speakers may utter a nasal paralinguistic sound, as in hesitation; an apicoendosublabial, the tip pushing the lower lip outward from inside the labiodental cavity until the predorsal area shows, as in a nasal sound of mockery, varying kinesically and acoustically (e.g. lips distended horizontally and audible air escaping on both sides of the tongue; a forceful continuous apicoalveolar trill, produced by the tip (e.g. imitating an engine, in ‘Rrrrr!’); the apicoalveolar click produced by the tip, formed by the alveolar closure plus the dorsovelar one, the former releasing while ingressive air is sucked in, as before speaking; a nasalized apicoalveolar click, as the one above but accompanied by voiced lung-air nasalization, as when expressing commiseration with this double ingressive-egressive mechanism; an apicosubalveolar articulation and epiglottopharyngeal fricative, possible with the tip against the lower alveolar ridge, for paralinguistic purposes (e.g. glottalized fricatives signalling scorn or in some hissing sounds);

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an apicopalatal contact (e.g. the palatal, postpalatal or lateral clicks used to encourage a horse), with the tip against the concave part of the hard palate, or even farther back (retracting the tongue). –

Underapex (subapico- or retroflex) articulations

A silent subapicodental articulation, the underside of the tip against the back of the upper incisors, slightly curving the underblade outward while opening the mouth, thus showing the tongue’s lower surface to the listener (e.g. a feminine conscious or unconscious flirtatious behavior), sometimes accompanied by a drawled nasal sound, as in hesitation; a voiceless retroflex click formed by the underapex, similar to the lateral click (the ‘Geeup’ click in many cultures); –

Blade (lamino-) Articulations

A laminosublamino-interlabial vibratory fricative trill, the blade and underblade showing between and touching the lips, used paralinguistically to produce, for instance, a variety of the scornful American ‘Bronx cheer’ (a forceful air emission over the center of the tongue which makes the inner edge of the upper lip vibrate); a laminodental, the blade against the backs of the upper incisors, the tip just below the rims of the lower ones, in some varieties of dentals [t¯, d¯ , Θ, ¯ ð¯ ], and in whistling and hissing; English laminopostalveolar fricatives [Ú, Š] and africates like [v, 3] (‘church,’ ‘junction’), the blade against the concave part of the alveolar ridge, some in paralinguistic sounds (e.g. a forceful palatal click for some animal calls); the glottalized explosive with abdominal contraction, signifying contempt. –

Underblade (sublamino-) articulations

a sublaminodental (also sublaminolabial), with the underside of the tongue blade or underblade against the rims of the lower teeth, as a prolonged mocking nasalized resonant [æ ~] or a glottalized [?æ] ¯ (e.g. while grabbing one’s throat in a clownish gesture of expected punishment); a sublaminal percussive, with the underblade repeatedly hitting the floor of the mouth in front of the tongue’s frenulum (with a slapping L-like sound), which can be modulated with laryngeopharyngeal and tongue-body changes and varying oral resonance to play a tune quite loudly. All tip and blade articulations can be accompanied by vertical lip expansion, which lends certain visual kinesic characteristics to sound production in paralanguage. –

Dorsum (dorso-) articulations

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

a dorsodental posture used with various paralinguistic pharyngeal or uvular sounds (often with nasolabial fold), the flat tongue-dorsum protruding out of the mouth until the upper teeth lean on it, as when expressing repugnance; the same dorsodental contact, but with rounded tongue, and lips closed around it, as when emitting a nasal sound of mockery; a dorsopalatal, the near-center part of the dorsum touching the highest part of the hard palate, used for typical language palatals (e.g. stops [c, L], fricatives [ç], affricates [ts, dz] nasal [\], lateral [λ], resonant [ε, æ, a]), for paralinguistic continuous resonants [æ] or [a] expressing displeasure (with a congruent facial expression), or for the suction or clicking sound when trying to detach something stuck to the roof of the mouth; a dorsovelar unilateral click (often described as alveolar), the air escaping only along one side while the dorsum (or rather, postdorsum), as for clucking to horses (the ‘Geeup!’ type), with the dorsovelar closure released plosively into a click; postdorsovelar sounds of many languages are formed with the rear part of the dorsum against the soft palate (e.g. stops [k, g] fricatives [x, γ], affricate [kx] the nasal [\] in ‘tongue’), but also many paralinguistic ones (e.g. velar laughter, the fricative velar of repugnance ‘Eeugh!,’ etc.); – Root (radico-) Articulations The tongue-root and the epiglottis retracting toward the pharynx and narrowing it produce various pharyngealized sounds: one kind of ah; with pharyngeal friction (because the tongue gets even closer to the back wall), the Arabic fricatives [A, ’]; and some paralinguistic utterances of, for instance, scorn. 3.9.3 What has been said about the purely kinesic labial repertoire must be applied to the tongue postures and gestures, equally decoded personally and culturally, particularly as emblems: desde allí [Mauricia] les miró con insolencia, sacando y estirando la lengua y haciendo muecas y gestos indecentísimos (Galdós, FJ, II, VI)46 Ruthie mushed her face at his back, pulled out her mouth with her forefinger, slobbered her tongue at him, outraged him (Steinbeck, GW, XX) Le hablaba […] con la lengua torcida en la boca, empujándose el carrillo por dentro, como hacen algunos castizos de Madrid (Ferres, P, I, I)

3.9.4 Speech-affecting Anomalies of the Tongue The best-known speech abnormality in speech therapy (with a typical kinesic behavior) is the interdental lisping due to the so-called tongue-thrusting, an interdental

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tongue protrusion (possible also during swallowing) or a forceful contact against the surface of the teeth (which may be caused to protrude also, thus affecting speech). If the tongue is too small (microglossia) it fails to make normal contact, while an excessively large one (macroglossia) interferes with many articulations.

3.10

The mandible and the chin

3.10.1 The mandible, the only moveable facial bone that participates actively in settings that produce or modify sounds, moves constantly during sound-making in sympathy with the tongue and its hyod bone, although we can still hold a pencil or pipe in the mouth and articulate intelligibly enough with a fixed-jaw position. Those settings are intimately related to labial settings, affecting the raising and lowering of the tongue, and are positively or negatively evaluated by the listener as the speaker’s audible and visual characteristics, which makes the mandible’s anatomical characteristics quite important. In fact, first impressions of people can be influenced by the personality and temperament characteristics attached to morphological features like ‘a squarely-set jaw,’ more appreciated in men (as it suggests the energetic, self-confident, aggressive, forceful type) or, at the other extreme, the ‘lantern-jawed’ person, who typically ads a rather droopy mouth posture and makes unpleasant remarks seem even more unpleasant because of that visual speech component. a handsome fighting chin (Shaw, SJ, I) There is strength and obstinacy in her jaw (O’Neill, DUE, I, IV)

3.10.2 The mechanism of the mandible’s muscular physiology consists of the following movements: vertical (open-closed), horizontal (retracted protracted), lateral (right-left) and rotational (in the coronal plane), the first and last ones used also in mastication (stereotyped in the villains or pirates in the movies), as well as in paralinguistic-kinesic configuration (e.g. someone eating and simultaneously speaking in a rage).3.10.3. 3.10.3 Given the characteristics and possible postures and movements of the mandible, there is a small repertoire of emblems with different meanings and even cultural peculiarities, as when a North American speaker silently lowers the mandible exaggeratedly in amazement or incredulity. After some scraping of his chin with his hand, he [Uriah] went on to say, with his eyes cast downward — still scraping, very slowly, — […] he made his face very lantern-jawed for the greater convenience of scraping, as he answered — […] (Dickens, DC, XLII) Judy, who is found to be silent […], but whose chin has received a recent toss, expressive of derision and contempt (Dickens, BH, XXXIV)

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

Tull’s hard jaw protruded [trying to make Venters leave the place], and rioting blood corded the veins of his neck./ ‘Once more. Will you go? (Grey, RPS, I) Gerhardt stood there motionless another minute or so, his jaw fallen and a strange helplessness upon him (Dreiser, JG, VI)

3.10.4 The most conspicuous instances of the mandible’s visual appearance affecting our perception of the speaker are the ones caused by abnormal growth patterns affecting speech as well, namely: mandibular protraction, which makes the lower teeth touch the upper lip and affects the articulation of bilabials and sibilants because of the dental malocclusion, sometimes making the speaker’s face, at rest or in speech, appear stern or as kinesically qualifying what he is saying; mandibular retraction, a recession of the chin due to an abnormally small mandible (‘micrognathia’), producing also dental malocclusion and a visual effect with various equally negative connotations; mandibular attraction, a shortening of the vertical dimension that brings the chin closer to the lip; mandibular abstraction, a lengthening causing the typical ‘lantern jaw’ and the lanternjawed speaker’s conspicuous gesticulation (used to portray strict, prudish spinsters, mentally retarded persons, etc): His jaw dropped into a expression of imbecile glee (Faulkner, S, VI)

ankylosis of the mandible joints (fused and immobile, often associated with micrognathia), which affects mastication and consonant and vowel articulation and makes voice muffled and very nasal (Bloomer 1971: 742); mandibular trembling, as from cold or fear, or as a temporary nervous disorder, produces a kind of quaver or rumbling in the voice from incorrect or incomplete articulation of mainly consonants: A Mauricia le temblaba la quijada, y sus ojos tomaban esa opacidad siniestra de los ojos de los gatos cuando van a atacar (Galdós, FJ, II, VI)

3.11

The nasal cavities

3.11.1 Having started upward from the larynx, the last speech organ is the nasal cavity or cavities, beginning at the upper end of the nasopharynx, where the uvula acts as the velopharyngeal velic valve, the first of the only two points at which articulations are possible in this cavity. From there on it is divided into the right and left halves of the

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nose, ending in two exits, the nares or nostrils, provided with muscular walls and constituting the second articulatory zone, the narial one. Unlike other organs, the central channels of the nasal cavity have no muscles to modify it, but its important resonatory function in speech is enhanced by the sinuses, the cavities of the hollow bones surrounding the nasal cavity and acting as extensions and resonators for the voice too. Many nasal sound productions (and some oral ones) are accompanied by kinesic behaviors visible on the outer sides of the nose through widening and compressing of the nostril wings, deepening of the nasolabial furrows (from the back of the wings to the corners of the lips) and wrinkling of the bridge and sides of the nose near the infraorbital corners. These ‘facial actions units’ (Ekman 1976), which of course can at times be only kinesic (alternating syntactically with language and paralanguage as we form verbal-nonverbal sentences), can also be inherent in paralinguistic-kinesic and linguistic-kinesic expressions that, individually, culturally or universally, signal emotions (e.g. narial flare + unilateral nasolabial fold + lip distension, while uttering a slight nasal chuckle of contempt), and others which can be coupled to specific sounds, as in doubt, disgust, rage, fear, frustration, skepticism, etc.47 3.11.2 As with other visible speech organs, those actions are among the rapid, dynamic facial signs of our conversational repertoires which activate our static signs and expose them to people’s perception as ‘lively,’ ‘cute,’ ‘nervous,’ ‘stern,’ ‘sour,’ etc. Besides, although not so importantly as the lips or the tongue, the nose can be ‘ugly’ or ‘beautiful’ (according to our own esthetic values), ‘large,’ ‘small,’ ‘beaky,’ ‘flat,’ etc., a person can be ‘snub-nosed’ (with a turned-up nose) or ‘hooknosed’ (with an aquiline nose), have a nose of smooth complexion, scaly, with a wart on it, etc., and in some men with nostril hair sticking out. All those visible features share the effect of nasality in speech, of paralinguistic nasal sounds, and of the verbal messages being delivered. In fact, a delicate sniff produced by a delicately shaped feminine nose is quite different from a man’s nose-twitching and loud ingressive nose-clearing, both susceptible of accompanying kinesics: The girl sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand (Steinbeck, GW, XX)

3.11.3 First of all (before defining the actual intervention of the nasal cavity), if the uvula is raised against the nasopharynx and acts as a closed valve, the air vibrates only in the oral cavity through which it goes out, and there are many verbal and paralinguistic sounds produced in that way, called oral sounds, such as in ‘Oh, it’s late!’ or ‘Ssss!’; but the nasal cavity can still resonate without any air passing through it, thus nasality many times is not totally absent. If, however, the velum is lowered so that the oropharynx, nasal cavity and oral cavity are connected and the air goes through the three of them, oral sounds are then nasalized, that is, modified by the effect known as nasalization, during which the air passes into the nasal cavity (although not necessarily on through

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

the nostrils or nares), as in a nasalized ‘Oh!,’ the a in Portuguese são, French banc, Spanish tango, etc., or a paralinguistic ‘Eeeungh!’ But “nasality is essentially a condition of resonance […] and the nasal cavity can resonate without the passage of air through it as when the nostrils are held tightly closed” (Laver 1980: 80). Nasalization — also called ‘secondary feature’ added to an oral sound — is also what results in the so-called ‘nasal twang,’ typical, for instance, of the speech of the stereotyped American hillbilly, who seems to speak with “a vigorous lowering of the velum, plus some constriction of the palato-pharyngeal arch” (Pei 1966: 176; cf. Laver 1980: 86). The audible inhaling-exhaling phases of breathing through the nostrils, or nostrils and mouth simultaneously, are also nasalized sounds that can have paralinguistic value, as was mentioned when discussing the lungs and respiration. 3.11.4 As for nasal articulations, particularly paralinguistic ones, there are two types: velic and narial. –

Velic Articulations

A velic stop, the smallest and briefest velic articulation, is mainly ingressive (but also egressive), typically while sleeping with the mouth open, but also made at will, similar to the more powerful dorso-velar snort; ingressive velic nasal plosive can occur if the air goes into the nasal cavity, and the velic closes for the stop and releases air through the velopharyngeal passage into the oropharynx, but producing only a low-volume pharyngeal friction with oral resonance after the nasal one; or, if it is articulated with the mouth closed and only nasopharyngeal resonance. Both with paralinguistic value, as in a repressed expression of pain (often followed by an egressive glottalized vowel sound); a true velic fricative occurs if the velic air passage is narrowed and the inspirationexpiration phases produce an audible friction, likened by some phoneticians to “a variety of catarrhal snort” (Catford 1977: 139); a sort of velic nasal affricate (if the fricative friction becomes tenser and the velic contact is made tighter by the upward pressure of the tongue-back in a quick succession of plosive + friction) results when clearing the nose (mouth closed or open); with open mouth, oral resonance is added to the nasal one, used paralinguistically to convey, for instance, contempt; an ingressive velic nasal fricative if the latter is made with open mouth, or with closed mouth (and quite rapid, or it can become a trill), causing a clean stronger friction (e.g. clearing the nose inwardly), as a physiological reaction, an unconscious behavior or a way of encoding various feelings (e.g. readiness, while rubbing hands); an ingressive vibratory velic trill (a typical snoring sound) occurs with rising and falling in the inner side of the uvula (raising and lowering pitch accordingly), to which mouth

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resonance is added according to the degree of mouth opening and shaping; a wet trill, as we can call it, results when in either the ingressive or the egressive form (but more easily in the former) saliva concentrates in the oropharynx and the vibration acquires a slight gargling quality in either phase of the trill; a loud suctional dorso-velar/uvular click is produced if between the two respiratory phases we bring the tongue-back up against the soft palate and contract the pharynx in a swallowing movement, interrupting the air flow, which typically awakes the sleeper — sometimes with momentary gurgling as the passage is cleared of saliva — and is often followed by a violent glottalized radico-uvular plosive sound and a swallowing sound. – Narial Articulations Narial sounds (i.e produced at the nares or nostrils) are of the fricative type (the only possibility at that end of the nasal cavity), either ingressive or egressive, the latter always weaker. They all fall within paralinguistic alternants, discussed in Chapter 4 of Volume II. a narial fricative, as an ingressive or egressive continuous sound and with heavier breathing and without voice, out of fatigue or emotion (e.g. rage), usually with visible flaring of the nostrils and a congruent facial and bodily gesture; a forceful ingressive narial fricative can be the same articulation, as in heavy sniffing, often followed by a velic trill, as when clearing the nose forcefully, with various unrefined nasofacial gestures; an explosive narial fricative occurs as the release phase of a velic stop, as a nervous tic or as an explosive onset of nasal laughter with open or closed mouth (or a single-pulse chuckle), often accompanied by a slight jerk of the head; an egressive voiced narial bilabial nasal is produced if we close the lips and force a voiced air current through the nostrils, with various paralinguistic meanings (e.g. in hemming and humming, Mmmmmm, good!’). assisted narial articulations can be produced by pressing and releasing the nostrils with the fingers, as in the often unconscious masculine behavior of rapidly drawing thumb and index finger down the sides of the nostrils, interrupting the air flow momentarily and then letting it out in a forceful ingressive or egressive fricative; also pressing just one nostril, like in the typical boxer’s gesture, or when taking snuff. 3.11.5 Aside from the phonically modifying effects, there is the effective visual function of the nose within the triple structure word-voice-gesture. As well, there are certain nose movements apart from discourse that act as true emblems: His nostrils dilated, and his fists clenched involuntarily, as he heard himself addressed by the villain (Dickens, PP, X)

The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

3.11.6 Finally, as anomalies affecting paralanguage and paralinguistic effects of verbal speech, as well as the visual appearance of the face, are: nasality, depending on its intensity, related physiologically to the size of the velopharyngeal opening (not closing properly) and the degree of closure of the mouth cavity; denasality, a reduction of the expected normal nasality, or total absence of nasal sounds (caused by obstruction of the nasopharynx or the back of the nasal passages), which (if not chronic) happens, for instance, with a common head cold, during which the blockage caused by inflammation of the mucous membrane lining the nasal passage (rhinitis) makes one speak with ‘head-cold speech.’ Nasal sounds are still possible, since sound waves travel also through the tissues to make the cavity resonate with a very damped nasality, that is, head-cold voice; the disorder due to adenoids, an enlargement of the pharyngeal tonsils above and behind the soft palate which produces adenoidal voice, basically a velic closure, velarization (tongue tendency toward the soft palate) and open mouth (i.e. ‘adenoidal gape’)48; the congenital anatomical malformation known as cleft palate, a fissure of the soft palate and roof of the mouth which lets air into the nasal cavity and makes all sounds nasal or nasalized (except the normally nasal [m] and [n]), the socalled cleft-palate speech; and the need in mouth breathers of breathing through the mouth, noticeable in their thin nose and constricted nares (the nostrils cannot flare on deep inhalation), with a peculiar facial kinesics: the face becomes elongated and narrow because mouth breathing has been affecting orofacial growth caused by the dropping of the mandible (with parted lips) and the pressure of the cheeks on the sides of the upper arch, the nostrils have narrowed from disuse, facial expression is dull and drawn, and the tongue can be postured forward and even rest between the teeth (Brackett 1971: 457).

3.12

The vowel sounds as degrees in tongue and lip position: Sound and gesture49 What we do to form vowels produces also the visual facial components of speech, since we modify the shape of the lips, the opening between the jaws, the position of the soft palate and, above all, the shape and position of the tongue inside the mouth. Two parameters are differentiated: tongue position: high (close), mid and low (open), and front, central and back, corresponding to close-, half-close, -half-open and close in jaw position; and shape of the lips, from unrounded or spread in palatal or front vowels to rounded in velar or back ones. These positions, however (and others possible in linguistic and paralinguistic sound production), determine peculiar facial expressions varying among speakers and according to attitudinal changes. For instance, ’But I could not see the other car, dear!,’ said in a low-key fearful way and then in a loud and/or very vehement voice, with emphasis on the personal I, the negation and its verb, the reference to the other car and the affectionate manner of address. If we silently

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articulate only the vowels of that sentence, first in one way and then in the other, we can appreciate their kinesic qualities. And since vowels constitute the articulatory skeleton of language sounds, vocalic gestures have a strong kinesic-communicative potential, accompanied by degrees of eyelid opening and brow raising, lowering and knitting, and by hand and body kinesics. Some vowels can differentiate certain kinesic repertoires, as with the [y] sound in these two nonsense sentences: French ‘Le duc du Mur dût dire du mal du musle après qu’il l’eut vu dans la rue d’Ulm’ and German ‘Er führt uns über die grünen Hügel in die Wüste.’ Finally, considering the visible characteristics of the speech organs discussed, it remains to say that the opening required for the different vowels lead to a greater or lesser exposure of not only the teeth and tongue, but also deeper mouth areas, all framed by the lips in frequent verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic blends: ‘Ah, my life!’ said Eustacia, with a laugh which unclosed her lips so that the sun shone into her mouth as into a tulip, and lent it a similar scarlet fire (Hardy, RN, I, X)

3.13

Conclusion Much too often students of language or communication neglect the intimate relationship between ‘official’ language sounds (and how they are produced of conditioned in each of the phonatory areas) and other activities. This leads to ignore the semiotic, semantic and communicative levels of what is truly speech, as well as the mutual inherence of sound and movement in the face as an essential language tool. No wonder many nuances of expression escape them which are possible only by means of the subtlest combinations of verbal and nonverbal signs (or perhaps only verbal) and its audible qualifiers; let alone the veritable vocabulary, beyond the official dictionary, of paralinguistic ‘alternants.’ However, any realistic approach recognizing the value of the nonverbal part of speech shows not only one’s own communicative repertoires, but countless possibilities for linguists, phoneticians, anthropologists, psychologists and students of literature. In the first place, each speaker’s audiovisual repertoire is channelled through a set of strictly personal facial features whose characteristics must be valued for their positive or negative qualities. Besides, that face can be specifically affected by the distance between the interactors’ ‘speaking faces’ and the light moulding them. Therefore, only by looking at sound and movement as inseparable coactivities can we interpret them in their whole signification and acknowledge their different levels and components within language as a tripartite activity (as is recognized in the next chapter) and within personal interaction (as was discussed in the previous chapter).



The audiovisual reality of interactive discourse

3.14

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.Permanent facial features in the formation of interactive first impressions. 2.The social-interactive effects of changing facial features in men and women. 3.The social-interactive effects of artificial facial features during speech and at rest. 4.Literary individualization of characters through permanent and dynamic facial features. 5.Permanent, changing and dynamic facial features in film characters. 6.Correlation between phonetic articulation and gesture: audiovisual study of laryngeal phenomena. 7.Correlation between voice anomalies and gesture. 8.Sound and gesture in a geographical-cultural area. 9.Subcultural differences in audiovisual features of speech. 10.Audiovisual inventory of labial postures in speech. 11.Static and dynamic facial features during speech. 12.The ontogenetic development of audiovisual features of speech. 13.Sound and facial features in television commercials. 14.The politician’s campaign language and facial features. 15.Language and facial features in the professions. 16.Social perception of facial features in speech. 17.Language and facial features in the theater and the cinema: differences, limitations, possibilities. 18.Perception and temporal dimension of static and dynamic facial features. 19.Gender differences in interpersonal attraction of the audiovisual features of speech. 20.Literary creation and recreation of speech: perception and intuition of cultural, linguistic and personal features. 21.The speaking face in film dubbing: problems of synchronization and visual correspondence. 22.The speaking face in story-reading/telling to children. 23.Audiovisual features of speech in comparative linguistics. 24.An interlinguistic comparison of speech labial kinesics. 25.An interlinguistic comparison of teeth- and tongue-showing in speech.

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Chapter 4

Language-paralanguage-kinesics The basic triple structure of human communication “Oh! To hear him!’ cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a scream together (Dickens, GE, XV) The heavenly gentleness of his smile made his apologies irresistible. The richness of his deep voice added its own indescribable charm to the interesting business question which he had just addressed to me (Collins, M, ‘Second Period,’ II)

4.1

The basic triple structure of discourse: Language-paralanguage-kinesics When over thirty years ago I began to study all that traditionally was not regarded as ‘language,’ that is, the various sign-producing systems that did not even have to coincide with words, I realized that when people talked to me, accompanying or alternating with the strictly linguistic elements of their speech, supporting or contradicting the essential messages conveyed by their words and sentences with their intonation contour, they also utilized other elements that were subtly structured. Although some of these elements had already been called ‘paralanguage’ (mainly in Trager 1958) and ‘kinesics’ (Birdwhistell 1952), they were not being studied together. Neither did they seem to pay attention, from an interactive point of view, to other systems which I realized could not be dissociated from what I was already seeing as an indivisible tripartite structure: language-paralanguage-kinesics. Having admitted quite blindly that verbal language is the most perfect interactive tool, it had so far been allotted a very vague and limited connotation, rather than seeing it as something integrated in the extremely complex grid of somatic exchanges, as was discussed in the previous chapters. In fact, it had been thought possible to analyze its reality in a live interactive encounter by perpetuating the greatest flaw in discourse analysis and communication in general: not to see the triple reality of live, spoken language, which exists only as a verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic continuum formed by sounds and silences and movements and stills. And this was what I since then began to study as ‘the basic triple structure of communication.’50 For, when a person was talking to me, I realized

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that I was, more or less consciously (but always, to be sure, affected by it) perceiving and valuing not words alone, but what in audible and visual images was defining and communicating to me, and displaying to my eyes and ears in an always fascinating blend, that unique, unrepeated person and not any other. [Virginia Woolf] an autumn, indoor, person […] stretching tapered fingers toward the fire, elaborating her fantasies […] matching gestures to her words, drawing back her long hair from her forehead as a new fantasy occurred to her, smiling often, laughing seldom, and with never a giggle in her laugh (Nicolson, PM, 200)

It would be fitting to close this intoductory section with words from a conference contract quoted by Alfred Hayes, which I am sure encouraged my already developing concept of the triple structure of speech: The speaker is free to choose his message. He is not free to choose the code of his message — this is strictly imposed by the language […] The speaker is, however, free to color his message in certain ways, and these ways are predominantly paralinguistic and kinesic. If these signals, differently conditioned by every cultural system, with different effects on the linguistic system, are not properly received and sent, communication is impeded (Hayes 1964: 145)

4.2

The semiotic-expressive limitations of spoken words and the verbal-nonverbal expression of the ineffable

4.2.1 If I see o write a simple phrase like ‘ We-e-e-ell, George, what did you think of that girl, uh?!,’ I can hardly ‘read’ it in my mind without imagining certain paralinguistic (besides those graphically represented: hyphenation, [?], [!]) and kinesic elements, which might vary from one speaker to another but still bear more or less the characteristics shown in Fig. 4.1, ‘The basic triple structure.’ Lecturing once to students at Bogazici University (Istanbul) Tourism and Hotel Department I pointed out, after looking at this example, that even a simple word like ‘Well’ could mean, among other things: ‘It’s over now’ (with sadness), hesitation, ‘Actually — ,’ ‘No, never mind,’ ‘In that case, yes!,’ ‘If there’s no other choice, what can I do?,’ ‘I’m shocked,’ reaction to the unexpected, ‘Better not talk about it,’ ‘Okay, let’s go!’ (snappy), ‘What do you have to say for yourself?,’ ‘Answer me!,’ ‘Who cares!,’ ‘Who could have thought of that?’ ‘Look at him,’ as a speaker’s turn-opening in conversation, etc. In fact, words, whether coined and utilized as arbitrary signs(‘house’) or echoic signs (‘swish,’ ‘gurgle’), lack the capacity to carry the whole weight of a conversation, all the messages being exchanged in the course of it. If we had to conduct a natural conversation solely by means of ‘stripped words’ (rather hard to imagine), there would be not just an intermittent series of ‘semiotic (yet not signless) gaps,’ but some

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

105

LANGUAGE

PARALANGUAGE [>Tz’> :] apico-alveolar click + pharyngeal ingression

We-e-e-ell, George!

mid-to-high pitched drawl lower pitch paralinguistic pause

KINESICS brows begin to rise direct eye contact with wide-open eyes and without blinking stilled raised brows kinesic pause

What did you think

Lower-higherlower pitch

knit brows + lower eyelids + head nod

of that girl,

same lower pitch

brows still knit + lateral pointing nod of absent referent

uh?!

higher pitch

eyes more open, then eye wink + unilateral lip distension (smile)

Figure 4.1.The basic triple structure

overriding vacuums as well; however, we make no such vacuums as we speak, for they are actually filled by nonverbal activities, either clearly separable among other parts of our delivery (e.g. a click of the tongue, a sigh or a meaningful silence) or stretching over varying portions of it (e.g. quavery voice, high pitch), from single phonemes to sentences to the complete conversational segments called speaker’s turns. We could express anguish with the single word ‘God!’ said ’with anguish,’ doubt with the word ‘Maybe’ said doubtfully, and fear with a fearful ‘Oh!’ — already adding to them, as can be seen, certain prosodic and paralinguistic modifiers. But, how could we utter just one of those words and express all three emotions, and even add perhaps an element of surprise? Such an emotional blend could not be expressed either by means of a morphologico-syntactical arrangement of words, since we would not, in such a state, include in one periphrastic expression the lexemes ‘anguish,’ ‘doubt’ and ‘fear.’ But what can actually suffuse any of those words with life and convey all three emotions in an attitude of surprise is a series of paralinguistic and kinesic elements subtly interrelated in perfect mutual inherence and cohesion. We find in the more sensitive writers many such instances of this mutual inherence: ‘[…] I [Ada] would have married him just the same, Esther. Just the same!’/ In the momentary firmness of the hand […] a firmness inspired by the utterance of these last words, and dying away with them — I saw the confirmation of her earnest tones (Dickens, BH, LX) He forced his lips to smile and his voice retained the gentle, persuasive tone the effect of which he was so fully conscious of (Maugham, PV, I) “The old familiar grind,” he [Mr. Beavis] explained to Mrs. Foxe in a tone of affected selfpity and with a sigh that was hardly even meant to carry conviction (Huxley, EG, IX)

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4.2.2 Naturally, any other type of somatic signs, particularly chemical and dermal, can be added to the verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic complex, such as blushing in what may constitute ‘blushing speech’ or ‘speaking blushingly’: Then she [Caddy] good-humouredly and blushingly got up again, and while she still laughed herself, said, ‘Don’t laugh at me, please […]! (Dickens, BH, XXXVIII) Blushing, he did his best to smile it off. “Angry? Why on earth should I be angry?” But she was right, of course. He was angry (Huxley, EG, XXXIII)

4.2.3 As well, a sole nonverbal activity may contain a whole emotional complex: Miss Ophelia looked […] as if she was afraid she should say something; but she rattled away with her needles in a way that had volumes of meaning in it (Beecher Stowe, UTC, XVI) a human head […] smiled affably […] in a manner that was at once waggish, conciliatory, and expressive of approbation (Dickens, MC, VII) a warm note of pride, almost of defiance, came into her voice (Huxley, EG, IX) “Reeking with germs!” he heard his mother’s angrily frightened voice repeating (Huxley, EG, IX)

In the same words, paralanguage or kinesics we can even combine positive and negative feelings and reactions: Helen […] gave vent to her emotions. She cried because of fright, nervousness, relief, and joy (Grey, LT, XIV)

Besides, the nonverbal behavior can, at the very least, add emphasis to the words, whether voluntarily or not: “[…] Now, mind yourself,” he said, with a stamp and a fierce glance (Beecher Stowe, UTC, XXXII)

We see, therefore, that words are not always what exerts the greatest effect upon the listener (just what we mean by ‘It wasn’t what she said, but how she said it!’): Something in the tone, even more than in the words, went straight to my heart (Collins, M, ‘Third Narrative,’ VII)

4.2.4 We should remember that any of the signs emitted as chemical, dermal or thermal reactions (among those included in Fig. 2, Chapter 2) can perform perfectly communicative and quasilexical functions by virtue of their undeniable eloquence (that is why we must include them in the kind of transcription suggested in Chapter 5), as they may appear in two ways):

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

a.Adding unverbalized information to the words said, which often we simply do not perceive or do not know how to interpret: When these [clothes] are gone I’ll get no more except linsey ones,” she said brightly, yet her eyes shone with a wistful uncertainty of the future (Grey, LT, IV) Her eyes were all aglow, alight with girlish appeal […] Promise was there, too, could he but read it (Grey, LT, IV)

b.Performing by themselves that quasilexical function in the total absence of words, which just a tearful glance can do, even containing the sort of emotional complex mentioned earlier, as in an eloquent stare (a static behavior, but as kinesically valid as a posture): The borderman eyed him steadily; but in silence. Words could not so well have conveyed his thought as did the cold glance of dark scorn and merciless meaning (Grey, LT, XIII) –¿Hija de usted? [Mariflor, ill]/ Respondieron unos ojos llenos de lágrimas (Espina, EM, XIX)

Evidently, the kinesic elements that make face and body features dynamic possess the capacity not only to be ‘lexicalized,’ but to go further, or deeper, and express what otherwise would be ineffable. That is what we see in the best scenes of silent films as equivalent to literary description, when, as spectators, we approach what Balázs (1979:295) calls the “world of microphysiognomy,” for, as was discussed in Chapter 3, the face possesses the greatest wealth of expressive means. That is why Balázs refers to the very expressive monologues, and even mute dialogues, of the last years before sound films; which attained a richness of communicative subtleties that later, we would add, could easily pass unnoticed once they were already accompanied by sounding words, so often a veritable ‘noise’ when coupled to such an expressive kinesics.51 4.2.5 It should follow from these considerations that one ought to revise the very concept of ineffability and admit that that barrier, imposed by a purely lexical limitation, is often overcome by means of any nonverbal elements of that type we may add to words, typically paralinguistic and kinesic — but, again, of any other kind as well — and at times mutually combined and blended in the subtlest way. What was inexpressible, ‘unsayable,’ becomes, therefore, perfectly expressible and, what is more, usually without any ambiguity, although not strictly ‘sayable,’ as in the last quotation above, or in the following two: The colour rushed over her face and neck, and she tossed her head in silence with an air of ineffable contempt. At last, biting her thin lips, and bridling up, she said — /’It can’t be. I won’t believe it (Dickens, PP, VIII)

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Slingerland [a trapper, vowing to help the girl Allie] shoved out a horny hand and made a giant grip express what evidently just then he could not express in speech (Grey, UPT, VII)

On the other hand, paralanguage and kinesics reveal involuntarily what we want to conceal when we try to filter it through a hardly achieved ‘naturalness.’ The influential Swisss psychiatrist Paul Tournier defined as neurotic this falsification of feelings: It is impossible completely to avoid all affectation when faced with a sick person […] sentimental commiseration, calculated optimism, worried pessimism, veiled irritation, or helplessness […] every failure to act naturally brings into being an element of neurosis which in its turn compromises the treatment and inhibits spontaneity (Tournier 1983: 53)52

4.2.6 Given the expressive functions of nonverbal systems, one should consider whatever concerns the triple structure in any situations within the realm of what in Chapter 8 of Volume II is discussed as reduced interaction (with or among the blind, the deaf, the armless, etc.), as it constitutes an interesting and needed research area. People who, without being able to speak, wish to express themselves can compensate for that expressive limitation with paralinguistic and kinesic nonverbal systems; these systems are perfectly codified from their point of view, but nevertheless they become lost after they are emitted, because their listeners, accustomed to certain fixed structures established for ‘normal’ speakers, do not perceive them as such and therefore fail to decode the intended messages.

4.3

The written word and the feasible ‘orality’ of writing

4.3.1 As for the written word — which we utter mentally as we see it graphically represented — it is farther removed from the reality of the verbal-nonverbal construct. For this reason the narrative writer refuses to just let his characters speak in a printed language without once in a while commenting on that language himself and describing its paralinguistic features, and, in fact, its inherent kinesic elements. Written words are not just printed symbols on a piece of paper. First, the paper itself (snow-white, rough and smelly, or time-yellowed) becomes semiotically interrelated with both the events in the story and its readers’ attitudes and sensitivity’53; then, those words are mentally (if not sotto-voce) uttered by the reader, who must ascribe to them a series of linguistic, paralinguistic and kinesic elements; besides all the situations described, represented, evoked or present between-the-lines, which transcend the page and constitute an important part of the story. On the other hand, we can refer to the orality of writing as a tendency in many of us while writing, but also as what we might favor as a norm, namely, a mimesis of

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

speaking which will enrich the expressive capacity of our text and lend a greater realism to the visually represented words when we actually seek such realism. We can thus make that written text much more dynamic, and to this end we can count on a lexicon and on the more typical expressions of our spoken language, increasing their expressivity by means of as innovative as possible a use of our punctuation symbols, as discussed in Volume III, Chapter 5. Even in a truly personal epistolary text, we as letter-writers should sensitize ourselves to addressing our readers by ‘speaking to them’ as we know we would faceto-face. If many of us strive to write as we would speak to our addressees in an intimate, familiar or informal letter, there is no reason why we should not take advantage of all the means ‘officially’ at our disposal. We can even improve them with our own ingenuity — just as through the centuries they gradually and quite arbitrarily invented punctuation marks for the better evocation of living language — and make more extensive use (though with some unavoidable limitations) of that expressive richness we would freely utilize in a direct encounter.54 Conversely, when it comes to present orally what we first have as a written text, we need, first of all, to use in our delivery an abundant gamut of paralinguistic and kinesic elements. Even the oral presentation of a sublime text like God’s Word requires (but, unfortunately, that is not always how it is read to us) a paralanguage — and even kinesics, though more subtly — that are truly ‘evangelizing.’ Hans Gauger, in a course I shared with him and other colleagues,55 quoted these words by Martin Luther: It is altogether different to present something live or in dead letters […] ‘evangelion’ means to preach and vociferate the grace and mercy of God earned through Christ our Lord and his death; and it is not in reality what in the books is expresed by letters, but rather an oral preaching and a live word and a voice that resounds in all the world and is proclaimed in such a way that it is heard everywhere (“Epistula Sancti Petri,” 1523) Letters are dead words, discourse consists in living words which do not become letters as adequately as the spirit or the soul passes through the mouth (“On David’s Last Words,” 1543)

Although it would be impossible to refer to the Word of God as “dead words,” we could assert that Paul’s and Peter’s words, as we ‘see’ and almost ‘hear’ in the Acts of the Apostles, or Jesus’ words, were never recorded in the New Testament as “trough the mouth.” And when Matthew and Mark assure us that Jesus spoke with “authority,” that authority would be not only in what He said (verbal language) but in how He said it and moved it (paralanguage and kinesics), which, conditioned, as with any other speaker, by his culture, constituted the style of speech of God made man, for it was recorded that “When Jesus finished these words [at the Sermon of the Mount], the crowds were astonished at his teachings, for He taught them as one having authority” (Matthew 7:28–29, NKJ).56

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4.4

Lexicality and grammaticality of paralanguage and kinesics and the other sensible systems The basic triple structure is the only communicative complex in which an object of the tangible world or an abstraction can be indistinctively denoted by a word from our established lexicon, a paralinguistic construct, or kinesically. A bad odor, for instance, after impinging on the olfactory epithelium and being decoded in the brain, can elicit a verbal reaction (‘That stinks!’), a paralinguistic one (‘Eeugh!’), or a handto-nose gesture. Furthermore, considering the capacity of these three systems for mutual substitution within a preserved syntactical order (altered only from a ‘linguistic’ point of view), we can argue that the sentence ‘¡Oh, I feel — !’ can be completed, rather than verbally (‘¡Oh, I feel like kissing you!’), proxemically, moving toward one’s interactant while displaying a congruent facial expression; or that blushing can act as a cutaneous predicate of ‘¡Oh, I’m so--(embarrassed)!’ But this internal co-structuration is never so deep as within the triple structure, where verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic expressions combine invariably in a live sentence. Thus, what makes language-paralanguage-kinesics a functionally cohesive structure — and therefore the true core of human communication — is, first of all, their common kinetic generator, and then their combined semanticity and lexicality and their capacity to operate simultaneously, alternate with or substitute for each other as needed in the interactive situation. But, of course, any nonverbal reaction has the capacity to act as the sole expressive construction: when […] Elizabeth-Jane produced [a terrible handwriting] […] he [her father, in front of someone else] reddened in angry shame for her (Hardy, MC, XX)

Paralanguage and kinesics may appear (in what is actually a complete verbal-nonverbal sentence) in three basic different ways in relation to verbal language: a.simultaneously to verbal language, that is, superimposed to it: Pg pitch 2–pitch 3–pitch 1–drawling + glottalization Lg But….that’s terrible! K frowning + headshake b.as a syntactical replacement for verbal language, alternating with words in the same sentence: Pg forceful narial egression — click [tz’] — glottalized voice Lg Get out of here! K tight lips + unblinking gaze + /2 pronominal deictics/ + /get out!/

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

but that sentence could also begin verbally-paralinguistically and end kinesically only, with the two pronominal deictics, Pg drawling + palatalization Lg You and you! K Out of here! c.independently of verbal language, paralanguage being an unambiguous sentence-like construct, accompanied only by kinesics, as in an expression of approval which would be equivalent to ‘I see, I think that’s very good!,’ Pg Mmmmmmmmm Uh-huuuuu! Lg K smiling + raised brows + repeated head-nodding

4.5

New information, communicative economy, verbal deficiency, anticipation, and formal and semantic congruence When Kendon (1972a:451) expressed so rightly the obvious but neglected thought that “we must consider movement as well as speech [of which the former is but an inherent part, we may add now] if we are to understand what is entailed in what we somewhat loosely refer to as an act of speech” — and I would link this statement with those just made in Chapter 2 regarding the kinesic-audible basis of speech and communication — he confirmed the additional information provided by kinesics to what is being said (besides phonetic stress and kinesic grammatical markers): I told him he was a goddam dirty moron. “What’s that?” he said. He put his hand behind his ear, like a deaf guy. “What’s that? What am I?” (Salinger, CR, XIV)

This shows that besides the very doubtful redundancy of kinesics in most situations, it is also an economy device, as it ‘says’ something else in the same length of time, while the verbal message is being uttered. This is seen in other instances, as when the same person addresses two receivers simultaneously, one verbally and nonverbally and another kinesically only while giving directions to a waiter without interrupting his conversation with them, or when someone who is engaged in a telephone conversation with one cointeractant initiates a simultaneous exchange with a second by using a string of kinesic emblems to say (i.e., move) to him: ‘/Come in/, /I’ll be with you in one minute/, /Good to see you!/, /Sit down/ /look at this in the meantime/,’ while listening to his speaker on the phone (cf. Johnson, Ekman and Friesen 1975: 342). As for paralanguage, we can also see it as providing additional information (e.g.

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when a tone of suspicion or mistrust is added to the statement ‘Oh, yes, he’ll do it for you’) and as an economy device (e.g. a glottalized utterance dismissing the subject rather impatiently). In addition to these two functions, paralanguage and kinesics can act as an anticipation of the verbal message that follows, an extremely important role in interaction, particularly by kinesics, since in many instances the gesture that illustrates what is being said verbally begins, or is even completed, before the words are said, which can have interesting interactive consequences in face-to-face conversation.57 This can happen: a.in a conscious and voluntarily anticipatory fashion which we understand as already initiating the person’s attitude and verbal or nonverbal statement: Hizo con los dedos de su mano derecha un manojo y, llevándoselos a la boca, los apartó al instante, diciendo: — Es una mujer… [drawling the word ‘mujer’] hasta allí — (Galdós, FJ, II, VI) She [Miss Melbury]was announced […] She came forward with a smile on her face, and told the young girl it was good of her to come (Hardy, W, VIII) He hesitated, smiled in anticipation of what he was about to say (Huxley, EG, IX);

b.or, as is more common, because the gesture actually starts first: He [Mr. Deasy] raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke./ — Mark my words, Mr. Dedalus, he said, England is in the hands of the jews (Joyce, U, 33)

Furthermore, gesticulation can be used also for lack of words, that is, out of verbal deficiency (as mentioned in Chapter 2.8). The same lack of appropriate words can be compensated for sometimes by paralanguage, as when a foreign speaker may say ‘Aaah!’ with a tone of disbelief in answer to ‘What do you think of him?,’ instead of saying verbally ‘You cannot really trust him,’ which, of course, can also be used by the native speaker as an economy device. On the other hand, we can reach a nonverbal periphrasis, a concept worth acknowledging in order to evaluate the exact role of paralanguage or, much more, kinesics (e.g. the description of the chandelier), in faceto-face interaction. At any rate, we see that the nonverbal parts of our discourse are perfectly costructured with words (or with what we would say verbally) and in perfect congruence with them, for instance: a mother’s ‘gentle’ words, loving tone of voice and calm, slow smile and movements as she tucks her child in and kisses him goodnight), ‘tensely’ (e.g. the same mother uttering a scolding ‘¡You should be ashamed of yourself!’ with low pitch, glottalization and tense facial expressions while nervously tucking him in and with a final pull and slap on the bedspread which looks like an angry ‘There!’), or ‘authoritatively’ (e.g. a superior slowly addressing a subordinate from behind his desk with carefully articulated words marked by slow but ample, intimidating gestures). In fact, even verbal actions seemingly not related with speech proper can occur in that perfect congruence with the ways words are uttered:

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

Lavinia’s bell rung furiosuly, twice […] “Lavinia!” she [Mrs. Jaspar] called, in a high irritated voice (Wharton, AH, III)

4.6

The precarious reality of read discourse Having referred to live discourse, to the written word and, in the previous chapter, to the ‘speaking face,’ all that and whatever is said here concerning the tripartite nature of our speaking should be related with what it means to speak from a written text. By ‘speak’ is meant not the ‘reading’ of a text (e.g. reading a letter or a newspaper article to someone), but the ‘read discourse’ involved in the reading of a text written to be delivered to an audience, such as a political speech, or some remarks read at an official ceremony. Naturally, to speak of ‘read discourse’ may sound like a contradiction, for there can hardly be, in the first place, a true discurrere, a flowing of ideas become oral words, when the three elements of the structure language-paralanguage-kinesics do not flow spontaneously. Thus, the ‘naturalness’ of a read speech consists precisely in attaining a degree of apparent spontaneity by skilfully combining those three components audio-visually. We are all familiar with the difference between, on the one hand, the public speaker who, having tried more or less to memorize a written text (as an actor does), addresses an audience without reading that text; and on the other, the one who somehow does depend on his written words, at which he glances intermittently, and not always when he truly needs to do it, but also, and very much against his will (which causes him anxiety), at certain moments when he much rather not do it. The actor who has completely memorized his lines has managed to externalize that text — assuming he is a perfect actor, something more feasible in the cinema than on the stage, because of the narrower range of expressive subtleties imposed by the latter — with a naturalness that depends on the constantly achieved congruence between paralinguistic and kinesic elements and words; words that do not just issue forth through his mouth and his ‘speaking face,’ but from his whole body, since facial features as much as gaze, hands, trunk, etc., contribute in the exact measure they would if that actor found himself in the actual real-life situation he is trying to portray.58 However, two things may happen to the speaker who is incapable of addressing an audience without a piece of paper in the hand. One, that he will need to read the whole — or almost the whole — text, in which case he cannot give his audience the desired intermittent eye contact, and his gestures will not complement nonverbally the verbal message, normally accompanied by that eye contact; much less if his excessive attention to his written text obliges him to omit them and thus mutilate the structure language-paralanguage-kinesics, as we so often observe. The other is that he may need only to cast a quick glance at the text to maintain the thread of his presentation, something possible to do with an outline as well. Then,

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since that presentation does not require an almost uninterrupted contact with his notes, the flow of visual elements might be subject (but not necessarily so) to a slight decrease in dynamism only those times when his eyes will look for the text. But even so, strictly speaking, his speech will never be a communicative continuum, considering that those very brief pauses are far from being communicative pauses, but an integral part of the continuous interactive flow, as they are but interruptions. Nevertheless, a different thing is to read when, for instance, one is quoting a text, or reading a poem or a play. In such cases the audience appreciates any attempt at naturalness on the part of the reader, without expecting what they would demand if he read his own words, which even as a reader he should deliver rather conversationally to his listeners .

4.7

A brief introduction to verbal language, paralanguage and kinesics

4.7.1 Verbal language, in the sense of the spoken string of words and sentences, shows, morphologically, (a) a segmental level or ‘layer’ formed by vowels and consonants made up of phonemes, or smallest distinctive units (with their allophones or variations), combined to form morphemes (words, suffixes), or smallest semantic units, which are themselves combined to form syntagms and syntactic co-structurations; (b) to that almost lifeless body we must attach a suprasegmental layer formed by what is commonly referred to as intonation, consisting of about four degrees of relative loudness (stress), four different pitches, and three terminal junctures (rising, falling, level). These intonation patterns have no referential meaning in themselves, unless they qualify the lexical construct; although a paralinguistic unarticulated closed-lip expiration of air can convey different meanings simply by varying its most important component, intonation. But we can say that in a real communication situation a phrase with its intonation contour is ‘colored’ by certain paralinguistic and kinesic elements, and that only then are many semantic changes and many otherwise ineffable nuances expressed, as it is then that that phrase reaches completeness. 4.7.2 As for paralanguage59 — nonverbal qualities and modifiers of voice and independent sounds and silences with which we support or contradict the simultaneous or alternating verbal and kinesic structures — it shows a series of equally segmental (but even more nonsegmental) vocal and narial effects as well as sounds determined, first of all, by the anatomy and physiology of the speaker’s organs and, in addition, by his or her idiosyncratic use of those possibilities. That is why we can differentiate in paralanguage:

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

a.primary qualities, which ‘individualize’ people and are the closest to the suprasegmental elements of the linguistic structure: timbre (personal, cultural, abnormal), resonance (oral, nasal, pharyngeal, etc.), intensity or loudness (personal, cultural, attitudinal), pitch register (personal, cultural, attitudinal, etc.), intonation (monotonemelodious), syllabic length (drawling-clipping), and rhythm (smooth-jerky) ‘I’m glad you were afraid.’/ ‘Why? she asked in slow surprise (drawling) (Grey, RPS, XIV)

b.qualifiers, which can be also basic permanent qualities, but in general constitute different types of voice: respiratory control (egressive or ingressive ‘Ah!’), laryngeal control (whispering, harshness, hoarseness, stridency, etc.), esophageal control (esophageal voice), pharyngeal control (hollow voice, muffled voice, etc.), velopharyngeal control (whimpering, grunting, bleating, etc.), lingual control (retroflex voice, velarization, etc.), labial control (with expansion or constriction), mandibular control (clenched-teeth voice, mumbling, etc.), articulatory control (overarticulated voice, slurry voice, etc.), articulatory tension control (tense voice, lax voice), and objectual control (speaking while eating, or with a pipe in the mouth). ‘I meet such charming friends’ — and her voice seemed to caress that description of these persons (breathy voice) (James, A, XXI)

c.differentiators, actually paralinguistic-kinesic constructs, and sometimes qualifiers of language, which characterize physiological (many of a reflex nature) as well as psychological states and emotional reactions, produced naturally (mostly uncontrollably) or voluntarily: laughter (e.g. of affiliation, aggression, anxiety, joy, comicality), crying (e.g. bereavement, empathy, frustration, deception), shouting (e.g. aggression, fear, mirth), sighing and gasping (e.g. pleasure, displeasure, love, wonder, weariness, sadness, fear, relief), panting (e.g. medical state, physical and psychological strain), yawning (e.g. boredom, fatigue), coughing and throat-clearing (e.g. interaction regulation, uncertainty, social anxiety, reproach, anger), spitting (e.g. random, ‘social,’ rejection, aggression), belching (e.g. physiological, ‘social’), hiccuping (e.g. ‘social’), and sneezing (e.g. social norms, superstition). Sam and Andy […] broke into a low, immoderate laugh, snapping their fingers and flourishing their heels with exquisite delight (Beecher Stowe, UTC, VI)

d.alternants, word-like single or compound utterances occurring either isolated or alternating with words and kinesics which constitute a veritable vocabulary beyond our ‘official’ lexicon (and with a growing dictionary status): tongue clicks, narial (nasal) frictions, language-free sighs, hisses, moans, groans, sniffs, snorts, smacks, blows, slurps, gasps, pants, ‘Uh-hu,’ ‘Uh-uh,’ ‘Mm!,’ hesitation vowels, momentary silences, etc. Although traditionally shunned as ‘non-speech’ and ‘marginal,’ they occur very frequently, whether isolated or alternating with words and gesture, consistently encoded and decoded in each language and culture (often as semantic blends) as

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unambiguously as dictionary items (which quite a few are now). The correct interpretation and representation of paralinguistic alternants is a very specific responsibility of the translator, since some of them appear written in their original language, but he just cannot render them correctly in the target language due to his lack of culturalparalinguistic fluency; he does not retain the original alternants, either because there is truly no equivalent or because it was the character’s idiosyncratic utterance whose meaning is not suggested by the context either. Mr. Bird […] grumbling to himself. “Pish! pshaw! confounded awkward business!” (Beecher Stowe, UTC, IX) A faint ‘tin-ting’ resounded from under Coggan’s waistcoat. It was Coggan’s watch striking the hour of two (Hardy, FMC, XXXVI)

4.7.3 Kinesics60 consists of conscious and unconscious gestures, manners and postures of visual, visual-audible, and tactile and kinesthetic perception, isolated or in combination with words and/or paralanguage or any other somatic or extrasomatic signs. The following aspects should introduced here: a.The necessary distinction between gestures (e.g. smiles, eye movements, beckoning, ‘emblems’ like ‘money,’ ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘stop,’ ‘crazy’): “[…] Don’t you like it?”/ Like it! Mrs. Portway beat the air with her hand. I hate it! I detest it! […]” (Wilson, ASA, II, II)

manners (the ‘manner’ in which we perform a gesture or adopt a posture, and the way we eat, smoke, shake hands, walk): Mr F.’s Aunt [after eating a piece of toast] then moistened her ten fingers in slow succession at her lips, and wiped then in exactly the same order on the white handkerchief (Dickens, LD, II, IX)

postures, of much communicative value socially and personally: Madame de Chancelle continued, leaning confidentially forward […] (Wharton, R, XX)

All three (most conspicuously gestures) show a formative or shaping movement (manner), each one with a central or peak movement or point (i.e., the one represented in gesture books, paintings, etc.) and a releasing movement (manner), and always qualified by the parakinesic qualities of intensity, range, speed and duration, and subject not only to intrasystem cobehaviors (i.e., within kinesics by different parts of the body), but also to intersystem (bodily) relationships (i.e. with words, paralanguage, proxemics, tears) and further related to clothes, furniture, etc. b.The segmental character of gestures, manners and postures, just as that of words and paralinguistic alternants like ‘Tz’ or a grunt.

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

c.
The intersystemic kinesic co-structuration, that is, kinesic’s relationship with words, paralanguage, blushing, etc., even in the same phrase, and intrasystemic co-structuration, for instance, between facial expression and smoking style, or any other combination of two or more body parts within the same system: ‘Oh!’ cried the old man, moaning impatiently, as he tossed one restless arm upon the coverlet (Dickens, MC, III) Their hostess [when they are being indiscrete] frowned and put her finger to her lips for silence (Wilson, ASA, II, II)

d.
The importance of parakinesic qualities (equivalent to the paralinguistic ones with relation to verbal language): intensity, range, velocity and duration (similar to stress and articulatory tension, drawling and clipping, and rhythm and tempo of speech), which differentiate personal and cultural styles and all sorts of normal and abnormal visual behaviors: I […] departed with a cordial pressure of the hand (A. Brontë, TWF, XLV)

It only remains to mention here what is most obvious: that kinesics, however minimal, is always present when we speak, and that the communicative repertoires of each culture, filtered through personal style, are characterized as much by their visual peculiarities (gestures, manners and postures) as by the lexical and paralinguistic ones. And then, that even on ocassions when one would not think specifically of kinesics, nor of the basic triple structure, it is precisely the composite nature of the latter that is affecting our perception of, and feelings about, an interaction, as in: He [old Jolyon[] enjoyed that stroll […] the sound of her voice, the glancing of her eyes, the subtle beauty of a charming form [Irene’s] moving besides him (Galsworthy, ISF, II)

4.8

On intonation as communication The fact that a number of nonvocalic, nonconsonantal, closed-lip or open-lip nasalized utterances are regarded by many as intonation (‘intonation without words’) leads some to the equivocation that intonation can be isolated, separated from a segmental stretch of speech and uttered alone, when in reality we are again producing the two levels referred to above, the segmental one (in this case a paralinguistic construct) and the nonsegmental or intonational one. Such is the case of a paralinguistic alternant like a glottalized gliding mid-to-higher-back vowel (segmental), with open or closed lips, overridden by a pitch contour 4–2, two stresses and a falling terminal juncture (nonsegmental), meaning, according to context and pitch variations, ‘Oh, I see!,’ ‘Good!,’ ‘Delicious!,’ etc.

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Although intonation can be both grammatical and attitudinal (Crystal 1971: 200) it cannot carry any more meaning than nasality or whispering would by themselves, unless they occur with words or with paralinguistic alternants (considered segmental) like ‘¡Eeugh!,’ ‘Hmm!.’ One cannot speak with intonation alone. We can modulate a long stretch like ‘Mmmmmmmm,’ attaching to it the intonation contour for ‘May I go with you?,’ for instance, or ‘I don’t know where she went’; and if done face-to-face, it would be doubly expressed by facial and other kinesic activities. But when we do that we are simply evoking an established and perfectly coded verbal or paralinguistic utterance, to both of which either a person or a domesticated animal will easily react. And if that person (e.g. child) or that dog has only heard our ‘Mmmmmm,’ that paralinguistic construct is like a perfectly lexical item of that established repertoire.

4.9

Segmentable and nonsegmentable elements in the triple structure The example of the triple structure in Fig. 4.1 allows us to see the segmental and nonsegmental levels in the succession of signs that constitute speech, as indicated in Fig. 4.2, ‘Segmental and nonsegmental elements in the triple structure.’ Paralinguistic alternants

Paralinguistic silences

Kinesic constructions

SEGMENTAL

Words

NONSEGMENTAL

Intonation Paralinguistic features primary qualities, qualifiers, differentiators

Static positions

Intensity, range, velocity, duration

Figure 4.2.Segmental and nonsegmental elements in the triple structure

a.segmental, preceding or following each other as discrete portions of a noncontinuous whole: words (i.e., phonemes), paralinguistic alternants (e.g. ‘Uh,’ a narial egression of contempt), silences or measurable breaks in that audible chain of segmentable events, conversational kinesic constructs (e.g. a wink, a hair-preening gesture) which coincide or alternate with the audible ones (although some movements can be heard as well) and are also discrete semantic segments, and still positions of one or several body parts within the kinesic stream; b.nonsegmental, clearly changing throughout that communicative stretch of sounds and movements and silences and still positions, with not-so-clear boundaries and overriding those other elements, from syllables or simple kinemic constructs, or both, to much longer portions of speech or whole kinesyntactic complexes, varying slightly but with a cumulative impression never given by the clearly discrete parts, therefore not being segmentable: intonation, primary qualities (e.g. volume, tempo), qualifiers (e.g. laryngeal control) and differentiators (e.g. laughing or sighing while speaking),

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

and the parakinesic qualities of intensity, range, velocity and duration. Naturally, while two segmental vocal constructs cannot go together (e.g. silence with an apico-alveolar click), vocal segmental constructs and kinesic segmental ones can (e.g. a word with a gesture), and so do vocal nonsegmental and kinesics (e.g. high pitch and gesture).

4.10

The ten realizations and mutual combinations of language, paralanguage and kinesics From what has been said so far, we see that we can communicate with words accompanied by an almost imperceptible amount of paralanguage o kinesics, with a gesture and without emitting any sound, or with only throat-clearing and a neutral facial expression; a rather false concept, since that absence of expression communicates already by itself, which suggests the presence of deeper levels in interaction which have not been duly studied, although they are intimately related to language.61 Thus, all three systems in the basic structure of speech can occur singly or combined in ten different realizations: verbal language, in a rather neutral way, not qualified by any conspicuous and meaningful paralanguage or kinesics: a straightforward ‘What time is it?,’ ‘Guten Morgen,’ etc. verbal language-paralanguage, when the specific meaning is conveyed precisely by the verbal part: an unambiguous ‘I hate you,’ even if it is qualified by not-so clear paralinguistic features: Why, you’re only a cheap four-flush — damned, bull-headed rustler!”/ Duane hissed the last word (Grey, LSR, XVII)

verbal language + kinesics, verbal expressions which are always accompanied by the corresponding kinesic equivalent, either because there is a verbal reference to the gesture or because the speaker of that culture typically accompanies specific verbal expressions with fixed kinesic cobehaviors, that is, as emblematic constructs or as speech markers or identifiers (those ‘most native’ speech-accompanying behaviors): Spanish ‘El metro estaba así’ (‘The subway was like this,’ ‘así’ simultaneously accompanied by a chest-high upward movement of the bunched fingers of one hand which then open and close once or twice, meaning ‘crowded’); the North-American’s ‘How much is that fridge, please?’ with pointing head-nod accompanying the verbal demonstrative: She [Sophy] stood up with a smiling head-shake. “Oh, it’s not so often that people try to give me any pleasure […]” (Wharton, R, VII)62

verbal language-paralanguage-kinesics, the most conspicuous constructs, as the three cosystems are behaviorally balanced and thus constitute the best examples of a

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speaker’s ‘nativeness’: the emphatic ‘Oh, no!,’ drawling both words + half-closing eyes, dropping shoulders and turning to one side as though avoiding seeing or thinking of the cause of the failure, French ‘Oh, là, là!,’ with drawling + eyebrow raise, rounded lips, wide-open eyes and shaking a horizontal hand up and down parallel to the shoulder. Oh! To hear him!’ cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a scream together (Dickens, GE, XV)

paralanguage alone, that is, the segmental vocal or narial utterances called alternants (e.g. a hiss, a click, ‘Hum!’) and the so-called differentiators (i.e. laughter, crying, yawning, which can co-occur with words and also by themselves), when they are not conspicuously and semantically accompanied by kinesics (whose total absence is very rare): a beckoning ‘Pss!,’ English emphatic negation ‘Uh-uh!,’ a sardonic laugh, disconsolate weeping, etc: Sólo pudo articular un sonido gutural, débil expresión de su ira, atenazada por la dignidad (Galdós, LDB, XLVI) “Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work tonight. Christmas Eve […] “Hilliho!” […] “Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!” (Dickens, CC, II)

paralanguage-verbal language, when the paralinguistic component of an expression is much more conspicuous and meaningful than the verbal part, as in a drawled, almost whispered, ironic ‘Oh, I seeee…!,’ with rather sustained pitch, or the low-pitched ‘Naaa!’ of dismissal or negation: “Did you take part in the ‘dig’?” asked Clarissa in a sporty voice that she somehow felt necessary for the colloquialism (Wilson, ASA, I, I)

paralanguage-kinesics, where the more important part is still the kinesic one, as in the typical Italian slightly glottalized, drawled, central vowel ‘Aaaa!’ + slight eyebrow raise and slight shoulders-and-hands shrugging to signify (as typically stereotyped in so many films) ‘I can’t do it, anyway,’ ‘What can I do?,’ ‘That’s life,’ ‘I don’t have a clue,’ etc., a so-called ‘ideograph’ within the nonverbal categories (Chapter 6): ‘Ho!’ cries Mr Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful chuckle (Dickens, BH, XXVI)

kinesics alone, the most conspicuous and popular nonverbal occurrences of communication, although many kinesic behaviors escape the usual cultural inventories for their subtlety and evasiveness, as with all those visual behaviors that constitute the essence of what, for instance, we regard as Spanish, Italian or Japanese style in conversation, that almost intangible kinesic ‘foreign accent’: Lance spread wide his hands to the watching men, as if to say “Now see what you’ve done” (Grey, MR, VI)

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

kinesics-paralanguage, constructs in which often the paralinguistic part can be absent without detriment to its semantic content: one of the most North-American emblematic gestures, an oblique sharp tilt of the head (with or without thrusting the fist in front of the chest) when accompanied by a lateral-palatal click + eye wink, meaning ‘Well done!,’ ‘You got it!,’ ‘Thataboy!’: and Colonel Zane laughed as he slapped his friend on the shoulder (Grey, LT, II)

kinesics-verbal language expressions whose kinesic behavior is semantically more important than the verbal itself, as in a slow, hateful head-shaking of negation preceding, simultaneous to or lingering after ‘no’: Well, then, I’ll not,’ said George, with an obstinate jerk of his head (Dreiser, JG, III)

Speaking on the telephone, or seeing others do it, we realize which of the three systems is more important in a verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic construct. If the gesture does not seem semantically indispensable, it will turn out to be a verbal-paralinguistic expression mainly; but, if it is ambiguous because we cannot perceive its visual part, it will be a kinesic-paralinguistic one instead, since we could do without words.

4.11

Ontogenetic and social development, spatial and temporal transmission, and balance and pathology in the triple structure

4.11.1 What is said in Chapter 5.6 about the acquisition of verbal and nonverbal systems by the native and foreign learners will summarize already the developmental curve for the language-paralanguage-kinesic structure, therefore the reader is referred to that section. We must again emphasize, however, the need to not look exclusively, as has been done in so many studies, at ‘language development,’ for it will be seen that the three repertoires of the basic speech structure — intimately related with the rest of the somatic and extrasomatic systems — keep maturing simultaneously. For this reason it is always totally unrealistic to want to focus only on language. That triple development is carried out throughout the biological (above all anatomical) and cognitive growth until the individual reaches adulthood. On the other hand, while the ontogenetic development of language, paralanguage and kinesics takes place parallel to each other for some time — thus any imbalance can immediately reveal some abnormality of development — later the musculo-skeletal configuration and facial features become established for kinesic behaviors by adolescence. But the cognitive-social process continues, during which the acquisition of vocabulary, of certain paralinguistic features and alternants and some significant gestural and postural additions (not only physiologically functional) continues through life, even though perhaps hardly noticeably at times in paralanguage and kinesics. At the same time, social development is related to socioeducational opportu-

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nities and status, since various types of social deprivation (in terms of lack of sufficient exposure to a variety of social situations) in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood result typically in more limited and often inhibited verbal and nonverbal repertoires. These are the types of limitation, referred to in the section that follows, regarding speakers of different socioeducational levels, particularly when speaking of the lowest one. Lacking the capacity to refer to certain higher-level topics and concepts, and the social situations in which they could acquire them, they possess fewer expressive forms within their verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic repertoires. However, today television has a decided influence in that respect, which is worth studying, since we observe, for instance, certain verbal and nonverbal borrowings that strike us as even incongruent with respect to the general style of specific speakers. I think it rather curious that my two eminent colleagues and friends, the linguists Walburga von Raffler-Engel and Mary Ritchie Key63, should have misunderstood on several occasions my references to the ‘expressive limitations’ of speakers of a socioeducationally lower status. I would never deny the expressive richness of their repertoires within their more limited cognitive experience and within their own choices of conversational topics, as happens with the more versatile paralinguistic and kinesic expressiveness of the average woman in southwestern Spain, regardless of her social background; in fact, she clearly surpasses the expressive means of the rest of us while discussing identical topics and in identical situational context. And yet, we also identify (as in any other areas) the above-mentioned inferiority of their verbal and nonverbal ‘vocabularies.’ In a word, if speech is made up of words, paralanguage and kinesics, it is only logical that their acquisition and use should not reach the versatility attained by other speakers who are exposed to a greater variety as well as more models. Again, this does not apply only to kinesic illustrations of the words said; for instance, the light rubbing of thumb and forefinger when saying ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s something…very subtle, something hard to define, you know?’ since that speaker, to begin with, will not use the word ‘subtle.’ The Spanish psychiatrist-novelist Martín Santos sums up quite eloquently what has been said so far: Todo aquel mundo donde las palabras alcanzan una significación que él [Pedro] no posee […] y donde los gestos alcanzan su belleza en una gama que para él permanece invisible […] constituye un reducto de seres de otra especie (Martín Santos, TS, 139)

On the other hand, that richness or poverty of kinesic repertoires applies not just to gestures, but to manners and postures as well, which do not develop so widely in speakers who have not reached more ‘refined’ levels of expression; for instance, the woman who pushes her hair from the forehead with a delicate gesture of the index and middle fingers, while the rustic one tends to do it with the whole hand, just as the latter removes a speck from her lower eyelid with the heel of the hand and not with the tips of the little or middle finger, as the more refined usually does. Similar observations can

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

be made regarding postures: standing, sitting with or without crossed legs or ankles, the way arms are crossed, etc. Besides, these behaviors betray different esthetic levels, that is, estethic concepts, across society: what is elegant, ladylike, gentlemanly, corny, etc., in our perception of others. 4.11.2 We must also realize how in humans visually perceived movement and auditorily perceived sound travel through time, in spite of their also rapid fading, while many animal species exchange chemical messages of very long duration. A derisive smile, an intent static look or an anguished tone of voice can linger and linger and truly regulate our subsequent behaviors and thoughts as the stored visual and acoustic images are repeated as in a ‘playback’ time and again in our memory. We can also reconstruct the physical appearance of a person by gradually fitting together mainly language, paralanguage and kinesics until that triple structure brings the person to life in our minds; and with no mental effort whatsoever one may easily relive the physical presence of someone else — and even act on it in different ways — by carefully seeing and hearing with the eyes and ears of the memory, as described often in literature: He [Beaton] tried to read […]; but Alma’s looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and through the woof of the story like shuttles (Howells, HNF, II, VI) The voice of Tanis Judique [on the telephone] was clear and pleasant. The black cylinder of the telephone-receiver seemed to hold a tiny animated image of her: lustrous eyes, delicate nose, gentle chin (Lewis, B, XXVIII)

4.11.3 Finally, if language, paralanguage and kinesics under normal circumstances show such perfectly co-structured balance, abnormal circumstances should be reflected in a characteristic lack of equilibrium among the three cosystems; not only as regards lack of congruence between the verbal and nonverbal behaviors (which might respond to intentional or unintentional deceit), but as truly symptomatic of pathological states (e.g. the animated display of language, paralanguage and kinesics during the more elated and physically active phase of the manic depressive, and then their very low-key behaviors during the depressive phase). In fact, even in ordinary medical situations, as between admission for major surgery and then discharge after a successful outcome, the lay person usually notices how differently the patient talks and moves as a well person again (‘She’s her own self again!’).

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4.12

The total conditioning background of the triple structure and of communication in general All the somatic and extrasomatic systems mentioned in Chapter 1 and after are conditioned by a series of factors that must be considered in any study of communication, although here it is applied mainly to the basic triple structure. These factors, shown in Fig. 4.3., ‘Conditioning background of communicative activities,’ are outlined as follows. TOTAL CONDITIONING BACKGROUND

Biophysicopsychological

Ethnic group Gender Age Physiological state Medical state Nutritional habits Psychological configuration Emotional state

Environmental

Natural environment Modified environment Built environment Objectual environment Socioeconomic and educational background

Cultural patterns

General cultural style Regional or subcultural groups Religious (or superstitious) and moral values Relationships and role expectations Norms of etiquette and good manners Esthetic values

Socioeconomiceducational levels

Hyperrefined Average educated Middle-low socioeducational status Pseudoeducated Lowest socioeducational status

Shared behaviors

Family borrowings Conjugal borrowings Borrowing from social models Social and occupational groups

Figure 4.3.Total conditioning background of comminucative activities

1.Biophysicopsychological a.Race, sex and age (and their anomalies) determine, for instance, people’s voice timbre, qualifiers like the creaky voice of old age, as well as many gestures, manners and postures:

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

[the old clerk] rubbed his hands, nodded his palsied head, winked his watery eyes, and cried in his whistling tones, ‘Good! Good! (Dickens, MC, XI) Su voz estaba ya cascada por los años y por los achaques (Cela, PD, 167).

b.The physiological state of cold, heat, pain or any momentary abnormality (e.g. due to physical exertion) triggers also different paralinguistic and kinesic behaviors: the second C. I. D. man was back, puffing frantically in haste. Gasping for breath, he shouted (Heller, C22, 99)

c.Our medical state can make us lower the loudness and tone of voice or adopt postures and gestures of physical and psychological discomfort: she [Helen] breathed a little fast and coughed a short cough [from comsumption] (C. Brontë, JE, VIII)

d.Nutritional and pseudonutritional habits (involving solids as well as liquids) can be betrayed permanently or circumstantially, for instance, by frequent belching (with its associated culturally prescribed kinesic behaviors), and even have certain traumatizing effects on paralinguistic and kinesic behaviors (particularly in the type of voice and postures they condition) as well as in those that cannot be displayed (e.g. due to intoxication, accumulation of fat deposits, the excessive comsumption of beer that causes ‘beer belly’): ‘I’m sure I’ve — hic! Oh dear!
–got one’ […] ‘Do you think if I drink water it would take off the hiccup? Hic! Oh, I feel perfectly helpless’ (Lawrence, WL, XXVIII)

e.The psychological configuration, as regards personality features and pathological states, is reflected (as with medical state) in the presence or absence of certain paralinguistic and kinesic behaviors, such as the monotonous speech of the manic-depressive patient, in the liveliness of the extrovert, or in the reactions of the shy person: (In the living room Laura [a crippled girl who cannot properly attend to her caller] clenched her hand to her lips, to hold back a shuddering sob (Williams, GM, VI)

f.Emotional states are reflected in our paralinguistic and kinesic behaviors (e.g. passionately and breathily whispering, speaking in fear brokenly and with gasps and audible breathing, in gestures of surprise, grief, etc.): there was a strained silence; then she said, with a voice that had too much of a sob in it for him not to suspect the truth (Dreiser, JG, V)

2.Environmental a.The natural environment, as when we admire an awesome view (‘Aaaaah!’), stretch pleasurably on the grass, those typical ‘beach displays,’ or walking with hunched shoulders from cold:

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The whipping air made him stretch out his hands to the fire (Grey, RT, III)

b.The built environment, from wide spaces to very small ones (with their lighting and perhaps ‘public’ or ‘intimate’ music, colors, etc.), the stone benches or porch steps in certain cultures (eliciting the gathering of people at certain times of day and in certain seasons), the proximity and visual and acoustic separation of dwellings, etc., all eliciting in each case conscious or unconscious choice of vocabulary, paralanguage and gestures and postures: Although they all spoke in whispers, their arrival [at the opera] was the signal for certain murmurs of “Sh! Sh!” (Norris, P, I)64

c.The objectual or artifactual environment, because of the influence on our communicative behaviors (not always acknowledged and utilized) of the ‘relaxed’ or ‘stiff’ characteristics of furniture — and, for instance, what has been called (Sommer 1969) its ‘sociopetal’ (positive) and its ‘sociofugal’ (negative) layout for personal interaction — interior decoration, presence or absence of certain elements and their social significance (e.g. for the guests of a host whose much higher social status is revealed by his ‘intimidating’ environment): she [Fay] climbed on a chair and straddled it with her arms folded across the top of its back and rested her chin in her arms (West, DL, XI) Ernesta [an uneducated small-town woman] estaba escuchando, sentada casi de perfil y en el borde de la silla (Aldecoa, FS, 322)

d.The socioeconomic and educational background, which conditions our language, paralanguage and kinesics because of the degree of socialization and sensitization (and, therefore, of the opportunities we had for enriching our communicative repertoires), as well as the maladjustment affecting some speakers in a milieu above their own: en viéndome delante de una persona principal […] no se qué decir, ni qué hacer con las manos… (Galdós, TC, I, III) [the famous architect Mr. Pecksniff, about to lay the corner stone] when he chatted with the Mayor, they [the public] said how easy! when he folded his arms they cried with one accord, how statesman-like! […] When […] laid his hand upon the man’s shoulder, giving his directions, how pleasant his demeanour to the working class (Dickens, MC, XXXV) [when the boss offers him a job] Fainy shuffled his feet. He had a husk in his throat […] standing first on one foot and then the other (Dos Passos, 42P, ‘Mac,’ 34)

3.Cultural patterns a.General cultural style, quite obvious as the verbal and nonverbal production of speech which involves linguistic, paralinguistic and kinesic repertoires common to all members of a culture, together with proxemic patterns. For instance, the Indian

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

novelist Raja Rao refers to a specific Anglo-Indian “tempo” which is precisely an important part of each cultural style. He concedes that Indians are all “instinctively bilingual,” but that [their] method of expression has to be a dialect that will some day prove as distinctive and colorful as the irish or the American […] The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression […] We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly (Rao, K, “Foreword”).

b.The characteristics of regional or subcultural groups, which sometimes determine dialectal verbal and nonverbal peculiarities, not only in conversational interactions but in the performance of certain activities: as English rustics have their slice of cheese, he had a cake of tobacco; in his right a penknife […] cutting a quid or plug from his cake of tobacco, and whistling softly to himself the while (Dickens, MC, XXI)

c.Religious (or superstitious) and moral values, or their absence, are often reflected verbally (topic selection) and nonverbally (e.g. voice loudness and pitch of indifference or lukewarmness when discussing religion or visiting a church as a tourist, voice and gestures lacking commiseration when referring to others’ misfortunes): Mío Cid […] La cara del cavallo tornó a Santa Maria, alçó su mano diestra, la cara se santigua (Poema del Cid, v.215) She [Coral] crouched low in the hole with her fingers crossed for good luck (Greene, ST, IV, IV)

d.Relationships and role expectations, as denoted by voice, gestures and postures between lovers, close friends, employer-employee, doctor-patient, master-servant, husband-wife, etc.: The train came. Witla [his father] grabbed his hand [Eugene’s] affectionately. “Be a good boy,” he said, swallowing a gulp (Dreiser, G, I, III)

e.Norms of etiquette and good manners (which we accept or reject) dictating peculiarities of voice and kinesics in certain situations, the verbal and nonverbal behaviors when coughing, yawning, sneezing, etc., in different social backgrounds and settings, of a very interesting historical development (Wildeblood 1965) and a worthy research area in each culture and according to its own conditioning factors (moral code, dress, furniture, etc.): Ana, al darle la mano [to Mesía, he] dio aquel tirón enérgico que él siempre daba, siguiendo la moda que en Madrid empezaba entonces (Alas, R, XVI) Elinor […] wondered how Walter could have lived with anyone who crooked the little finger of the hand that held the teacup and who took such horrible small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth (Huxley, PCP, XXI)

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[David] had fairly good manners; he did not wolf or gulp or gobble or crunch or talk with his mouth full (Porter, SF, III)

f.Esthetic values, of cultural and social character, but rooted in personal sensitiveness), which prescribe certain characteristics of language, paralanguage and kinesics (e.g. voice loudness, laughter, paralinguistic emotional expressions, gestures, manners and postures), often constituting an unconscious and natural personal and group style: native distinción […] aroma aristocrático lleno de atractiva sencillez […] el noble reposo de sus maneras […] en sus mismos silencios observantes y pensativos […] un grave misterio señorial (Espina, DM, I, VIII) Jasper Stringwell-Anderson crossed his legs elegantly and observed Gerald closely through narrowed eyelids (Wilson, ASA, I, II)

4.Socioeconomic-educational levels a.The hyperrefined, meaning those persons who can often show affectation in both vocabulary and voice, way of laughing, studied gestures, manners and postures: cómo manejan el abanico, cómo dan el brazo, cómo se sientan a la mesa, cómo entran en el palco, cómo se quitan y ponen el abrigo (Galdós, D, I, XVIII) [Polly] rolling the r’s, hissing on the s’s, humming like a bee on the m’s, drawing out the long vowels and making them round and pure. “Ghost rattle of ghost rifles, in-finit-es-imal ghost cannonade” (Huxley PCP, XI)

b.The average educated, of simply standard verbal and nonverbal repertoires. c.The middle-low socioeductional status persons, identifiable in many cultures by their less refined and less controlled repertoires and a ‘louder tone’: Big Bill grasped his cup around the top so that the spoon stuck up between his first and second fingers. He drew in a snort of air with the coffee to cool it (Steinbeck, GW, XV)

d.The pseudoeducated persons, an intriguing subject of study, socioeducationally astride the educated groups and the least educated ones, often unwilling to identify themselves as members of the less educated community (perhaps ‘small-townish’) to which they nevertheless belong. To this end, they typically display verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic expressions that are standard to the higher-up, show certain arrogance when poorly handling a conversational topic, may display certain incongruities and lack of judgement in their clothes and accessories, as well as in the use of certain verbal and nonverbal hyperurbanisms, and they often disdain and even mock the speakers of their own group. They are, in a word, somewhat hybrid social elements, a complex product of social, psychological and sometimes economic pressure, all characteristic of one of Galdós’ heroines:

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

tenía [Rosalía Pipaón de la Barca de Bringas] un orgullete cursi, que le inspiraba a menudo, con ahuecamiento de nariz, evocaciones declamatorias de los méritos y calidad de sus antepasados (Galdós, T, IV)

e.The lowest socioeducational status, diametrically opposed to the hyperrefined, unaware (or on occasions consciously ignoring) of the social rules of the other groups, much less ‘articulate’ and therefore of a more general naturalness; this is reflected in less conscious self-control in their postures, in more of a tendency to speak louder, the less smooth speech rhythm, laughter, the managing of reflexes like coughing, yawning and sneezing: the man blew his nose into the palm of his hand and wiped his hand in his trousers (Steinbeck, GW, XVI), [the small-town woman] Come un trozo de patata sin separar la cuchara de la boca y sorbe el caldo (López Pacheco, CE, I, I)65

5.Shared behaviors a.Family borrowings (apart from inherited traits) within the family, between different generations and within each one, easily observable even in famous families: She looked the image of her father, standing there with her hands behind her back (Woolf, Y, 1880)

b.Conjugal borrowings, observable sometimes while speaking with a husband or a wife at a social gathering, and then with the other, even before knowing their relationship: Lou’s wife, formerly Annie lee, has grown to look curiously like her husband. Her face has become longer, sharper, more aggressive (Cather, P, II, III)

c.Borrowings from social models whose social status or personality somehow hold ascendence over some or many and can easily become behavioral models, whether they are public figures (particularly politicians and actors) or individuals who have an influence on us and consciously or unconsciously we admire: [Mesía, from Madrid, at the provincial theater] Ponía los dedos en el antepecho del palco y cruzaba las manos, y se volvía para hablar con sus amigos […] de una manera singular que Trabuco no supo imitar en su vida (Alas, R, VII)

d.Verbal and nonverbal codes within specific social and occupational groups, as with the characteristic nonverbal style of many preachers, certain teenage behaviors, the deafmutes’ sign language, sport codes, etc.; which implies also the frequent difference in the verbal and nonverbal style of our own speech, whether interacting in a familiar milieu or a formal one (e.g. ‘You can tell when he’s speaking to his boss on the phone’): toda la chusma le saludó como es usanza cuando una persona principal entra en la galera, diciendo: ‘¡Hu, hu, hu!’ tres veces (Cervantes, DQ, II, LXIII)

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[a lawyer in court, observed by his sister] the way he flung his arm out. That belonged to his public life, his life in the Courts. And his voice was unfamiliar. But every now and then […] it was his private voice (Woolf, Y, ‘1891’).

4.13

Conclusion After identifying all the communicative possibilities of sound and movement (soundproducing external movements are treated in Volume II) and the mutual inherence of both in the production of language and paralanguage and kinesics (speech facial gestures), this chapter has explained the tripartite reality of our speaking and how what verbally would be simply ineffable can actually be expressed with the assistance of nonverbal somatic signs; this even beyond the ten realizations of words, voice and gesture, which, like those three activities, possess lexical and grammatical qualities and can be perfectly segmented along the speech stream. On the other hand, it has been seen what happens to the written representation of our speaking activity — a topic developed throughout Volume III, devoted to the literary text — what is, or can be, the orality of that text, and the limitations of read discourse. Finally, after pondering the personal development of nonverbal repertoires, their socioeconomic and educational differences and the capacity of nonverbal systems to persist particularly through time, a host of factors have been identified which condition the production of audiovisual speech, thus rejecting so many simplistic interpretations and conclusions regarding, for instance, voice or gesture, so prevalent in the less scientific literature. Much of what has been said in this chapter could be summarized in the autobiographical words of fourth-century Saint Augustine’s about how he began to communicate as a child: I myself, with that mind which you, my God, gave me, wished by means of various cries and sounds and movements of my limbs to express my heart’s feelings, so that my will would be obeyed […] when they named a certain thing, and, at that name, made a gesture towards the object, I observed that object and inferred that it was called by the name they uttered […] That they meant this was apparent by their bodily gestures, as it were by words natural to all men, which are made by change of countenance, nods, movements of the eyes and other bodily members, and sounds of the voice, which indicate the affections of the mind in seeking, possessing, rejecting, or avoiding things […] to those among whom I was I communicated the signs of what I wished to express. I entered more deeply into the stormy society of human life […] (Augustine, C, Book I, 8).

Language-paralanguage-kinesics

4.14

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.Semantic and grammatical functions of paralanguage and kinesics in conversational discourse. 2.Intrasystemic and intersystemic co-structuration of language, paralanguage and kinesics in a given language. 3.Intrasystemic and intersystemic co-structuration of language, paralanguage and kinesics cross-regionally. 4.The ontogenetic development of linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic constructs. 5.The ontogenetic development of the basic triple structure as observed in one’s own children. 6.Socioeconomic and educational differences in nonverbal repertoires. 7.Linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures of colloquial______[a language]: towards a verbal-nonverbal atlas. 8.Colloquial linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures among Anglo-Indian speakers. 9.Colloquial linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures among Souther and Northern North American speakers. 10.Pathological imbalance in conversational linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures. 11.The ten realizations of language, paralanguage and kinesics in colloquial_______ [a language]. 12.An inventory of linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures for the teaching of _______ [a language] as a foreign language. 13.Social stratification and etiquette of linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures. 14.A manual of good manners at the lower social levels. 15.The pseudoeducated speaker: communication and social environment. 16.The development of the linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structure of the foreign speaker. 17.Development of linguistic-paralinguistic-kinesic structures through treatment in medicine and psychiatry. 18.Presence and description of language, paralanguage and kinesics in a literary author. 19.Language-paralanguage-kinesics style in specific occupations. 20.Teenagers’ speech: vocabulary, voice, kinesics. 21.The campaigning politician’s speech: vocabulary, voice, kinesics. 22.The verbal-nonverbal style of preaching: an interdenominational perspective. 23.Occupational verbal-nonverbal speech repertoires.

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24.The triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics of television talk-show hosts and hostesses. 25.The singers’ triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics of opera and musicals.



Chapter 5

Two applications of the basic triple structure model Speech transcription and foreign-language teaching Lily put down the tea-caddy with an abrupt gesture. She felt that her hands were trembling and clasped them on her knee to steady them; but her lip trembled too, and for a moment she was afraid her tremor might communicate itself to her voice. When she spoke, however, it was in a tone of perfect lightness (Wharton, HM, X) –¿Allí había bastante?/ — ¿Bastante de qué?/ — Bastante de comer — aclaró, llevándose hacia la boca, juntos, los formidables dedos de su mano (Ayala, T)

i.

the transcription of interactive discourse

5.1

The need for a realistic transcription of speech When I began to think of transcribing language, paralanguage and kinesics on three parallel levels, I had not gone too far beyond the triple structure in my study of communication.66 Then, as I progressed in the analysis of the structure of conversational speech and saw the joint functioning of language, paralanguage and kinesics, I realized that a transcription containing only verbal language, paralanguage and movement would be insufficient. In fact, not going any further seemed to me tantamount to not understanding the true nature of speech (about which some many pages full of abstractions continue to be written), for certain things happened in the course of a conversation which seemed to even have an effect on the lexical selection during the encounter, on how words were emitted paralinguistically and on the gestures and postures that accompanied them. It is this fine co-structuration among all the possible components of the interaction that reveals its deeper levels, obliging one to register in a transcription any phenomena that would be related to language, paralanguage or kinesics. One cannot but wonder how a transcription of only verbal speech could ever reflect anybody’s discourse, when speakers utilize at least, verbal language, paralanguage and kinesics, the two latter cosystems performing quasilexical and syntactical

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functions. It would lack those paralinguistic voice features that can modify the meaning of words (emphasizing, contradicting or masking them) and those eloquent independent paralinguistic elements that alternate semantically and grammatically with words (e.g. a throat-clearing); and it would likewise miss the kinesic behaviors that can also modify the meaning of words and signify by themselves with perfectly lexical functions as nouns, verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, etc. When we are shown an exclusively verbal transcription, no matter how faithfully those words have been registered, we know it is but a mutilated rendering, for we know for a fact that, for instance, paralanguage and kinesics were also communicating in that situation, and not precisely as redundant elements with respect to words, but replacing them or at least ‘adding’ information which remains ‘invisible’ in the transcription, just as the omitted paralanguage remains ‘unheard.’ Even ‘word transcriptions’ that may claim to include ‘what sounds’ do not truly contain everything that we suspect sounded while those words were said, since they have ignored, to begin with, all the paralinguistic activities (e.g. a relevant pitch change, a hesitating throatclearing) and any audible movements (e.g. an emphatic rapping on the table). On the other hand, it is not a question of indicating elsewhere that at a given moment laughter, for instance, occurs by itself or as laughed speech (quite a different thing), but of transcribing that laughter precisely where it occurs on the paralinguistic level of the notation (identifying, in addition, its paralinguistic and kinesic features, so variable among persons and so revealing as to their personalities); and it is not enough either to write that someone raps on the table (perhaps the same person who laughs while rapping), for that audible movement must be properly synchronized between the paralinguistic and kinesic transcription levels. Likewise, if the notation of a conversational corpus showed only the verbal and paralinguistic levels, we would feel the need for the visual one (kinesics), without which we cannot even complete the basic structure of speech; neither could we, among other things, obtain a truthful document for the diachronic and synchronic study of the verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic cultural repertoires, since they are subject to verbal and nonverbal intercultural borrowings and to their own changes. Finally, it must be emphasized, first, that a transcription of speech must never look solely for ‘what happens,’ or ‘what is said,’ nor seek only the cause-effect relationship in the flow of conversation, for that shortsighted perspective will hide from us the importance of what is not said (what was silenced) or is not visually performed (what did not move), particularly when it was expected, as well as the effect of those very behaviors that never were in the interactive exchange of the participants. All these considerations led me, therefore, to conceive of a more realistic type of transcription that some may hastily dismiss as ‘too complicated.’ The model that follows, refined through the years,67 takes advantage of two other models that are presented later in this volume and in Volume II (therefore only an initial brief outline of each one is offered here): the interaction model and the conversation model.

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

5.2

On the relevance of the registered signs and the risks of their omission As for the pertinence of the signs to be registered, it should be quite obvious that we cannot set out to carry out a transcription of a conversational encounter (or not strictly conversational) without having a very clear perspective of all that can happen in the course of it and without knowing what exactly we wish to include and what we believe we can exclude and why. This means that the transcriber must begin by defining his own objective depending on the nature of the encounter and decide whether he will need a very detailed notation or a more general one. One thing is a totally informal conversation between or among friends, in which we might be primarily interested in their words, paralanguage and kinesics as basic elements of a given type of speech; and evidently it would be totally unrealistic to remain below this level and exclude paralanguage or kinesics, including only words, since all three occur in a mutually inherent structuration, as has been sufficiently discussed in the previous chapter. But a very different thing is, for instance, a clinical or business interview, in which we find much meaning in any manifestations of anxiety or in any emotions repressed or masked with nonverbal signs, as well as in any reactions toward any elements external to the encounter proper. Linguistics today must encourage those researchers who seek a written representation of discourse through a transcription to not neglect the possibility that certain elements may be left out because they are deemed irrelevant and therefore unnecessary, when in reality they play functions that deserve especial attention; in other words, they must begin from the premise that any observable phenomenon — by the mere fact that it takes place within the temporal limits of the encounter under analysis — may very well communicate and is therefore pertinent until proven otherwise; and further, that it is much wiser to consider that possibility and then make a selection of the data to be included (according to one’s strategy and particular interests) than to ignore and discard anything a priori. But, of course, we will know this only if the transcription allows for all the necessary levels, as will be seen.

5.3

Two background models for the exhaustive organization of a transcription: Interaction and conversation

5.3.1

To be sure that a transcription of speech does not omit any of its possible pertinent components, there are two basic models to be guided by — both intimately linked to the transcription model here proposed — which can prove very useful to the researcher, and to which the reader is referred. The first model is that of personal and environmental interaction, which begins by identifying the elements in a given interactive encounter or situation, for which it will suffice at this point to glance at Fig. 8.1, ‘Components of Personal and Environmental

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Interaction,’ in Volume II. Until proven otherwise, as has just been pointed out, any of those components may carry a function that we may want to annotate in the transcription or analysis of the encounter. Apart from language, paralanguage and kinesics, others can be very important as well, for instance: some proxemic changes; visible chemical reactions like tears or emotional sweat, or a dermal reaction like blushing; conversational silences and still attitudes; activities like smoking or drinking; the more or less conscious handling of different objects (e.g. eyeglasses, unconscious but eloquent flicking of imaginary lint); the layout and characteristics of furniture as a conditioning factor of certain visible attitudes; still others, such as the ringing of a telephone or the slam of a door (perhaps disrupting the interactive flow); and nonactivities like age and physical appearance, clothes, and even the architectural spaces in which the encounter takes place. In addition, we must consider three potential types of basic qualifiers in these components, whose degree of presence in the encounter can be of capital importance: a.location of any somatic, extrasomatic of environmental activity or nonactivity within the encounter with respect to its real presence between its beginning and end, that is: ‘where it occurs’ (a temporal function that can be permanent or momentary), or the exact point at which ‘it affects’ the interaction in any way (the function proper); and, in one way or another, anything momentary and flitting (e.g. noticing the threadbare sleeve of another participant), something that lasts longer (e.g. shiny eyes on the brink of tears), or an element that spans throughout the whole encounter (e.g. perfume); b.duration, or exact temporal dimension, which may affect the surrounding behaviors and the whole encounter, for instance; syllabic duration (between clipping and drawling), a leg-crossing or uncrossing movement (slow, rapid), a real or imagined (on our part) thought by our interlocutor (which may affect us), the ringing of the telephone, or the sound of rain; besides an ‘effective duration’ beyond its actual duration, the effect we want to measure can be an ‘intermittent effect’ (e.g. facial muscular tension triggered by the recurring memory of an insult); c.as for the mutual co-structurations of the components with others preceding, simultaneous or succeeding, we must remember that they can affect each other in three ways: a posteriori (e.g. his vehement ‘I love you!’ elicits her simultaneous fixed look, but it could have been triggered by his immediately preceding behavior, or a previous one); simultaneously (e.g. the blushing of one of them can affect his or her own paralanguage, gestures and postures, just as their whispering can condition their confidential facial expressions, although at times they appear at least immediately before the affected or elicited behavior and end before or after); a priori, the most neglected aspect of intrapersonal and interpersonal co-structuration, most typically in what can be called ‘advanced hidden feedback’ (e.g. the man thinks of his or their embrace and his look and facial muscle tone have allowed her to foresee that embrace

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

and even prevent it). Certainly, the sometimes a posteriori or simultaneous reactions of participants can be quite meaningful, as they are when we notice them in our interactions: “[…] And how many [courses] are you failing in?”/ “Four.” I moved my ass a little bit on the bed [he was sitting on] (Salinger, CR, II)

5.3.2 The other model that offers a systematic analysis of a corpus to be transcribed is the one for the study of the structure of conversation, developed in Chapter 7, as it allows the researcher to observe and identify all the structural changes that take place during a conversational encounter and observe and annotate the mutual relationships of the participants’ activities or nonactivities and between them and any other extrapersonal components. Fig. 7.1, ‘The Structure of Conversation,’ suggests the particular relevance of quite a few of the activities it includes, for instance: among the speaker’s and auditor’s initial behaviors, ‘initial-turn claiming,’ before the beginning of the conversation proper, or the ‘initial turn offering’ by one of the participants; among the turnchange behaviors
–almost always showing a ‘pre-behavior’ that gradually or rapidly fades out (e.g. a smile, a postural shift) — a transcription would show, among others: ‘turn-claiming’ (e.g. ‘Uuh — ,’ ‘Well — ,’ ‘pre-speech inhalation’, lip-moistening), ‘turn pre-opening’ (not always present, as with an audible inhalation, or blowing out smoke), ‘turn-taking’ (e.g. ‘No, I was gonna say that — ,’ ‘pre-speech click’ ‘Tz’); as secondary turn-change behaviors, for instance, ‘turn-claim suppressing’ by the speaker (e.g. ‘Let me finish,’ increasing voice loudness); as listener’s speaker-directed behaviors, the more important ones in a transcription would be, of course, the ‘feedback’ behaviors, particularly nonverbal, addressed to the speaker to indicate interestdisinterest, attention-inattention, approval-disapproval, etc., besides others that a transcription should not ignore either (even perhaps for their possible cultural value), as with ‘request for clarification,’ ‘verbatim repetition’ of the speaker’s last statement (a habit with some listeners), as well as the ‘interruptions’ that actually disrupt the flow of discourse, and the ‘prompting signals’ that serve to verbally or nonverbally control the speaker’s intervention (e.g. throat-clearing to make someone say or not say something); within the interlisteners’ behaviors, a faithful transcription must register, for instance, certain forms of ‘interlistener’s speaker-directed behaviors’ (e.g. approving, laughing at a joke); there are also speaker’s secondary behaviors, commenting on his own behaviors and on his listeners’s by means of ‘counterfeedback’ toward the listener’s feedback, his ‘feedback request’ (‘Eh?’, ‘Understand?’), or his ‘self-correction’ when stammering or using the incorrect word; also simultaneous behaviors, since a normal conversation does not always proceed smoothly, but is disrupted by multiple speaker turns, overlapping behaviors and even crisscrossed conversational axes, all managed differently according to culture and situational context, thus quite relevant in a transcription; and then a whole series of intentional or unintentional highly

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communicative acoustic and visual pauses (i.e. paralinguistic and kinesic) of positive or negative functions (e.g. hesitation, manipulative, absent turn-claiming, memorysearching, word-searching, by external interference, while eating, drinking or smoking, and many more). This succinct review of interaction and conversation models demonstrate, therefore, that transcribers should have them virtually in front of them while working, for instance, on a videotaped encounter; otherwise they will miss interactive and conversational elements that play very specific functions. This need to acknowledge all potentially communicative elements, and only then discard what is clearly not relevant, is eloquently illustrated by the following descriptions of two encounters (even better by the second, richer in verbal and nonverbal components, including silences): during the whole dialogue, Jonas had been rocking on his chair, with his hands in his pockets, and his head thrown cunningly on one side. He looked at Mr Pecksniff now with such shrewd meaning twinkling in his eyes, that Mr. Pecksniff stopped, and asked him what he was going to say […]/ ‘Jonas!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, much affected […] […] Here he gave the hand of his son-in-law a fervent squeeze (Dickens, MC, XLIV) La discusión tomaba carácter personal y agresivo […] las tazas del café chocaban furiosas contra los platillos; don Manuel, trémulo de coraje, vertía el anisete al llevarlo a la boca; tío y sobrino alzaban la voz mucho más de lo regular, y, después de algún descompasado grito o frase dura, había instantes de armado silencio, de muda hostilidad, en que las chicas se miraban, y Nucha, con la cabeza baja, redondeaba bolitas de miga de pan, o doblaba muy despacio las servilletas de todos, deslizándolas en las anillas (Pardo Bazán, PU, XIII)

If we tried to indicate on paper the intense personal exchange of visual signs described in the first example, we would register the continuous movement of Jona’s rockingchair (a ‘body-adaptor’ that characterizes the whole situation), his hands in his pockets and his bent head, as well as his piercing look that triggers Mr. Pecksniff’s question, and then the warm hand squeeze; all kinesic behaviors (plus the parakinesic quality of fervency, or degree of pressure, in the squeeze); as audible signs, Mr. Pecksniff raises his voice emotionally (a paralinguistic qualifier). As for the second encounter, audibly we would have to register: the rattling of cups against their saucers (with the parakinesic quality of ‘fury’), the raised voices of uncle and nephew with occasional shouts (paralanguage), and those tense silences; visually, the uncle’s trembling hand which makes him spill his anisette (parakinesic again), the girls’ eloquent exchange of glances, Nucha’s posture and her busying herself with bread crumbs and with a slow folding of napkins and their sliding them into napkinrings (kinesics and parakinesics), a slowness that correlates with the temporal dimension, that is, the chronemics of the encounter.

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

5.4

The transcription of a conversational corpus Having identified those aspects of conversational speech that the researcher must keep very much in mind, what follows is an outline of the various components or levels (obviously not all of them present or relevant in every situation) of a truly realistic transcription, always subject to the specific needs and strategies in each case. Fig. 5.1., ‘The total transcription of interactive discourse,’ shows the following components on different superimposed levels and with equally parallel bands or sections for the different participants (e.g. A and B for the two interchangeable speaker and auditor) 1.Transcript, which can be easily read by following each page. 2.Phonetic transcription, including the basic intonation features and utilizing the IPA’s (International Phonetic Alphabet) and any others that might be necessary, such as the ones suggested by Poyatos (1993a, 1994b). 3.Paralinguistic transcription — using one own’s notation symbols, or those proposed by Trager (1958), Pittenger et al. (1960), Crystal and Quirk (1964), Austin (1965), McQuown et al. (1971), or the computer-based notation by Poyatos (1993a) — with levels for the four types of phenomena: primary qualities, or individualizing features, with three degrees above and below a baseline (timbre, loudness, pitch, intonation range, etc.), plus any of the qualifiers (the next category) that may function as permanent personal features: ‘Indeed,’ the rector said, in a voice dry and without inflection (Hardy, PBE, IX)

qualifiers, or voice types (husky, whispery, tremulous, etc.): [Spain’s President Aznar] Literally squeaked […] often broke into a bray when he got finger-wagging worked up during his days in opposition (Usher 2000) [Dismukes] clearing his throat of huskiness [speaking with emotion] (Grey, WW, XXIV)

differentiators, when they modify words — otherwise they can go in the next section — (laughter and laughed speech, weeping and weeping speech, sighing and sighed speech, coughing, etc.)68: Mark patronized his [own] joke by a quiet introductory sniggle (Beecher Stowe, UTC, VIII)

alternants of quasilexical value (clicks, hesitations, audible inhalations, narial frictions, grunts, etc.), among which momentary paralinguistic silences would be included: Laura […] shut the door behind her with a long breath of satisfaction (Norris, P, IV)

4.Kinegraphic and parakinegraphic transcription, which should initially indicate each participant’s static features or postures as well as any overriding dynamic features, as in:

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1

Orthographic transcription

A B

2

Phonetic transcription

A B

Paralinguistic Transcription Qualifiers

A B

Differentiators

B A

Alternants

A B

Primary 3 Qualities

4

Kinegraphic and Parakinegraphic Transcription Face: eyes, eye direction, brows, forehead, nose & wings, cheeks, mouth, mandible Head, trunk, legs, feet Shoulders, arms, forearms, wrists, hands, fingers

A B

5

Audible kinesics

A B

6

Chemical & Dermal reactions

A B

7

Proxemic notation

A B

8

Other speakers and listeners

A B

9

Contextual/Interfering Activities/Nonactivities

A B

10

Chronemic notation

A B

11

Contextual description

A B

Figure 5.1.The total transcription of interactive discourse

[his] beautifully cut mouth had a proud and somewhat sarcastic expression, while an air of free-and-easy superiority sat not ungracefully in every turn and movement of his fine form (Beecher Stowe, UTC, XIV) a thin nose, and habit of looking slightly disgusted (Wharton, R, I).

Then, using the kinegraphs by Birdwhistell (1970), or the abbreviated system suggested by Kendon (1969), or, freely but consistently, using one’s own notation — as I did

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

once for the Nancy project (see Note 66; in Poyatos 1994a: Fig. 4.6), as shown in Fig. 5.2, ‘Some suggested kinegraphs for the transcription of kinesics’) — bodily movements (gestures, manners and postures) and static positions (similar to brief paralinguistic silences) can be indicated throughout the transcription by differentiating three main zones: face (eyes and eye direction, brows, forehead, nose and nose wings, cheeks, mouth, mandible); head, trunk, legs, feet; shoulders, arms, forearms, wrists, hands, fingers. Parakinesic features (intensity, range, velocity and duration) can be indicated either at the beginning of each intervention, if they are the speaker’s or listener’s personal characteristics (e.g. TK/RKR, for tense/rapid kinesics) or for specific behaviors. throwing back her head wearily, she sighed: ‘Oh, I’m so worthless’ [superimposed paralanguage and kinesics] (Maugham, PV, XLV) Sue […] sat down […], laid her hands in her lap, and looked into the fire (Hardy, JO, V, II)

Naturally, certain kinesic behaviors of very low magnitude, which in Chapter 5 of Volume II are identified as microkinesics, can sometimes be quite relevant in the interaction we wish to transcribe, for instance: Dorian Gray smiled. There was a curl of contempt in his lips (Wilde, PDG, XII) She [when her husband tells her that her first husband wishes to see her] looked downward, twisting herself a little in her seat (Wharton, OT, IV)

5.Audible kinesics, a transcription level including any of the eloquent ‘quasiparalinguistic’ sounds generated by movements, like slapping one’s thing or someone else’s back (probably along with words), drumming on a table or angrily hitting it with an object, clinking glasses in a toast, slamming a door (perhaps preceding the verbal exchange, but already affecting it at that moment), etc. ‘Don’t lose your temper as well as your money,’ says Mr George, calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe (Dickens, BH, XXI) He cracked his knuckles (Malamud, T, 73)

6.Chemical and dermal reactions, that is, activities like blushing, tear-shedding, sweat or emotional pallor, indicating their duration, what portions of speech they cover, or whether they alternate with words; and, naturally, on the interlocutor’s level, which of his behaviors respond to those reactions. “[…] you’ve had an armour […] To protect yourself against me […].” She [Mrs. Foxe] smiled at him. Anthony dropped his eyes, blushed and mumbled some incoherent phrase (Huxley, EG, LII)

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7.Proxemic notation, depending on the kind of interaction under analysis, perhaps registering the proxemic behaviors between the participants (and their own spatial relationship with respect to a desk, lectern, etc.), including not only interpersonal distance but their mutual orientation (frontal, lateral, at an angle, etc.); besides furniture layout and the general characteristics of the space where the encounter takes place (ideally indicating it on a floor map). Jane impulsively stepped forward. ‘Oh! Elder Tull!’ she cried (Grey, RPS, II)

8.Other speakers and auditors, whose behaviors may sometimes play functions that should be acknowledged for their effect on the encounter, as they may be directly linked to those of the main speaker and somehow serve as interactive regulators (e.g. by providing feedback, causing interruptions, distracting the main participants, etc.). Theo jangled the coins in his flannel-trouser pocket (Wilson, ASA, I, I) Tommy guffawed, scraping his chair along the floor (Faulkner, S, VIII)

9.Contextual or interfering activities and nonactivitities, since the basic activities of discourse can be significantly related to certain extrapersonal contextual elements, in which case those elements become interaction components, although they may or may not affect the participants, and must be registered according to their relevance.69 These sensible environmental components of the encounter, eliciting perhaps gestures or comments (when they are truly components, not by their mere presence), are: a.behavior-based activities (e.g. the sound of door-knocking, footsteps, doorslamming, the ringing of the telephone, a musical instrument, etc.): As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously (Wilde, PDG, XIV) The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room (Wilde, IBE, I) a familiar step sounded on the loose boards of the porch (Grey, MF, XVIII)

b.others produced mechanically (e.g. the sound of a train in the night, a possibly ‘intimate’ ticking of a clock) ‘It’s eleven o’clock striking by the bell of Saint Paul’s […]’ (Dickens, BH, XXXII) The formal monotonous ticking of the Louis Quatorze clock annoyed him (Wilde, PDG, IV)

c.other sensible signs like the neighbor’s television, cooking smells, the smell of something burning, etc.: the little accessories that meant so much — the smell of violets, of good tobacco, of fragrant coffee (Norris, P, VI)

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

d.still others caused by the environment (e.g. the rain pattering against the window panes, the howling wind, the rumbling storm, street sounds, a pervading fragrance during an interaction): a steady downpour, accompanied by sullen grumblings of very distant thunder (Norris, P, V)

e.the static but possibly influential characteristics of the setting where the encounter takes place (e.g. furniture and its layout, carpets, art objects, books): The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished (Wilde, IBE, I)

10.Chronemic notation,70 indicating the temporal features of any activity or interactive element whose duration we deem significant (e.g. exceptional drawling of a word or shout, of whispering, of an anguished gesture, a posture, a distracting sound), including the beginning and end of the encounter itself. She [Ellen] put out an appealing hand, which Sprague quickly took in his own, as if to reassure her (Grey, TLM, X) It was a slow smile which started in his clear blue eyes (Maugham, PV, II)

11.Contextual description, since the transcription must not register only the physical events during the encounter, but also the nature of the encounter, its sociocultural setting, the participants’ background and their personal characteristics (besides static facial features, indicated at the onset of the kinesic notation), such as dress, hairdo, etc., their apparent personality (at least impressionistically, in the absence of more precise information), socioeconomic and educational status, and, naturally, the relationship between the participants: blond and well dressed, with the physical distinction that comes from having a straight figure (Wharton, R, I)

Again, the notation of the speaker’s and listener’s behaviors must run parallel to each other to easily see their interrelationships at all times, for instance: what happens during pauses, any type of feedback, interfering elements.

ii.

nonverbal communication in foreign-language teaching

5.5

The unrealistic classroom acquisition of a foreign language and the academic target of verbal-nonverbal fluency71 The unreal situation of the traditional classroom acquisition of a foreign language becomes quite apparent when we consider the blatant discrepancy between the

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textbook-author-instructor team and the true reality of the living language. As native speakers of our language, we know that we cannot dispense with any of the two modes of communication which we use daily along with verbal language, that is, paralanguage and kinesics (as seen in the ten different realizations of the three components within the basic triple structure of speech, seen earlier). Any foreign-language instructor must recognize the indispensability of the two nonverbal systems for natural, spontaneous communication. Furthermore, it is obvious that, although he is training his students to ideally become ‘verbal speakers,’ he is not training them to be actually ‘paralinguistic speakers,’ nor ‘kinesic actors,’ let alone ‘listeners’ and ‘visual decoders’ of the associated or independent nonverbal messages. And yet, those students will later have to face fully equipped native ‘speakers-movers’ who not only use a much more versatile verbal lexicon and grammar, but all their possible combinations with the other audible and visual repertoires. In short, the instructor is training them solely in the verbal means of expression of another culture, which training produces a severely mutilated language for want of what has already been discussed in Chapter 1 as cultural fluency. A second reading of the example I offer in that chapter, based in the first experiences of my old roommate, would serve to introduce and justify this section. However — and despite the efforts, quite a few years ago already, to foster the implementation of the nonverbal in foreign-language teaching (e.g. Brault 1963; Hayes 1964; Poyatos 1970) — even most of those who recognize these serious limitations tend to want to assure us that “the rest can be learned later,” “once they are immersed in the culture,” “when they practice the language in its own country,” etc. A valid academic argument to justify nonverbal training when learning a foreign language is that classroom learning equips students for reading the literature of the culture whose language they may be also studying, since, in the case of university students — most, true, are not in that category — they are also taking literature courses.72 What happens is that even the person who teaches that literature may have often possess an excellent passive knowledge of the language and the culture, but lacks oral fluency and, even more, paralinguistic and kinesic fluency, as well as an adequate knowledge of the living culture often implicitly present in the texts they are analyzing; in other words, true ‘cultural fluency.’ This means that his or her own experience of the reading act is an activity that remains limited and with unsuspected gaps, because of their own lack of knowledge of the culture and what constitutes its ‘culturemes’; for we know that there are in a novel, for instance, many components that qualify that visual medium of the text, beyond its explicit descriptions of voice and movements and positions (which the foreign reader does not necessarily ‘hear’ or ‘see’ either). But if the implicit components are not correctly interpreted, that novel will conceal countless cultural elements from that culturally untrained foreign reader, from typical paralinguistic features to a whole kinesic repertoire of gestures, manners and postures. The native (or culturally fluent) reader, however, can appreciate and integrate in the text (knowing how to imagine them) the verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic constructs as they

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

actually are, or, with a small margin for error, as they can be, for sometimes they may have other alternatives.

5.6

The acquisition of linguistic and cultural repertoires: Native learner versus foreign learner When dealing with intercultural communicative problems, we must consider that when we are foreigners with respect to a culture, with its language and the rest of its systems, we find ourselves in a learning situation quite similar to that of the adult person who has to learn a foreign language, for we have already developed a whole series of repertoires as members of our own culture and are not starting as tabula rasa, which is the case of the child in his or her native language and culture, with its specific social context (cf. Slama-Cazacu 1976; Soderbergh 1976; on bilingualism, von Raffler-Engel 1976). That difference between the two is represented at a glance in Fig. 5.2., ‘Basic Learning Problems in the Acquisition of Language and Culture’ (Poyatos 1992d). The native child, both as emitter and receiver, learns progressively the phonemics of his language and its intonation, through a period of misarticulations he keeps overcoming by parental correction and imitation; he learns and corrects the morphological changes of words and their communicative values to signify gender and number in some languages, past and future, diminutive, etc.; he simultaneously acquires a ‘feeling’ for different syntactical arrangements along his speech stream, knowing where to place verbs, nouns and adjectives, and, for instance, how to turn a statement into one form of question in English, which he also, learns to do by means of intonation; and he keeps building up his vocabulary and even recognizing, for instance, certain synonyms. But at the same time this native apprentice keeps acquiring the paralanguage of his language and culture: quasi-words (hissings, subtle nasal inhalations and exhalation, tongue clicks, etc.) and, above all, voice modifications and specific voice types (the functions of whispering, of laughter, of creakiness that may denote sarcasm, of huskiness, falsetto, etc.). In all that, he is being monitored in a gradually more sophisticated socializing environment which, in sum, has been teaching him, simultaneously, and not in an unnatural order (as happens to the foreign classroom learner), the three fundamental components of speech. Thus, to the first two speech components he keeps adding, as a normal part of his development, not only the universally innate gestures, manners and postures (cf. Darwin 1872, Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1988), but others, perhaps idiosyncratic, and those he imitates as the repertoire of the kinesics of his culture. And he uses them in combination with sounds, as well as independently, and modifies their meaning with certain parakinesic qualities that lend him his specific ‘cultural accent’; although still without the subtleties and the ‘kinesic vocabulary’ of adults, nor mastering and interpreting

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Systems

Native learner

Foreign learner

Phonemics

Misarticulations

Misarticulations Interference by own system

Morphology

Misformations

Misformations Interference by own system

Syntax

Misformations

Misformations Interference by own system

Vocabulary

Lexical deficiency

Lexical deficiency Interference by own system

Paralanguage

Misarticulations Functional deficiency Deficient repertoire

Misarticulations Functional deficiency Deficient repertoire

Kinesics

Misformations Functional deficiency Deficient repertoire

Misformations Functional deficiency Deficient repertoire

Conceptual deficiency Deficient repertoire

Conceptual deficiency Interference by own system Interference by own system

Chemical reactions Dermal reactions

Conceptualization Display rules Zero decoding False decoding

Interference by own system in conceptualization, display rules and interpretation

Body-adaptors Object-adaptors

Conceptualization Display rules Zero decoding False decoding

Interference by own system in conceptualization, display rules and interpretation

Built environment Modified Environment

Conceptualization Zero decoding False decoding

Interference by own system in conceptualization and interpretation

Proxemics

Figure 5.2.Basic learning problems in the acquisition of language and culture well all their functional possibilities. To this tripartite complex, the native learner keeps adding different proxemic attitudes and situations, evaluating with growing accuracy the functional meaning of interpersonal distances and physical-contact characteristic of his culture, in his interaction with peers, parents, acquaintances, close friends or strangers, also through a learning period not devoid of errors and misformations. And, beyond these basic interactive somatic systems, that individual develops also the conceptualization and social meanings of the other surrounding corporal systems, namely: chemical reactions, such as the manifestation and display rules of crying and

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

tear-shedding in that culture and their morphological realizations; dermal reactions, particularly blushing and the situations that elicit it, its concomitant activities and its interpretation, as well as the reaction to one’s own and others,’ all developing with his cognitive and socializing abilities. Finally, but still within the person’s communicative skills — whose ontogenetic development has been insufficiently researched as regards the appearance of specific behaviors and the attitudes toward them — the native speaker keeps acquiring certain culture-specific (or more or less pancultural) behavioral patterns, as regards, for instance: body-adaptors, such as food, clothes, perfume and cosmetics, jewelry, eating utensils, etc., whose various meanings and social functions he learns to associate with the setting (formal or informal dress, degree of body exposure, appropriate colors, etc.) or with his co-interactants (e.g. determining certain table manners, type and amount of food offered to a guest or accepted from a host according to the culture, the correct handling of chopsticks); object-adaptors, that is, the artifactual environment with which we interact, particularly using chairs, sofas, etc., according to the social situational context; his ideas about the built and modified environments, as related to one’s behavior and attitudes (e.g. the characteristics of the home and its landscaping and lawn ornaments as social identifiers); and, little by little, his involvement in and interpretation of the intelligible systems, as seen in Chapter 1. If we now compare the foreign learner’s acquisition process with the native speaker-actor, the first thing we must consider is that he does not begin as a clean slate, and that not only is he already a speaker-actor of his own language, but an experienced member of a culture who already possesses a sizable repertoire of behavioral choices and an understanding of his native systems and their components and functions. The order in which we acquire the various skills as foreign learners, however, is the same as the natives. Taking the average Spanish speaker as an example, he is first taught, and is conscious of, a new phonemic system, but is confronted with an inevitable phonetic interference due to his already very well trained ‘Spanish tongue’ within his mouth, and so he misarticulates some or many sounds, for instance, by bringing the tongue tip to the alveolum (as for his ‘perro’), rather than toward the palate for the subapicoprepalatal retroflex of the American [r] in ‘Reynolds’; and he cannot quite find the precise mouth opening for the lower-mid front [æ] of ‘cat,’ which comes out something like the lowest-front [a] in ‘car’ (as for his ‘gato’). This interference affects also the rest of his speech activities: morphological (e.g. ‘they are bads,’ because of the Spanish plural for adjectives), syntactical (e.g. ‘Tomorrow we come all’), lexical (e.g. ‘Excuse me, may I molest you for a minute?’ when that false cognate for ‘molestar’ is supposed to be replaced by ‘bother’), paralinguistic (e.g. ‘And he took his pistol and ‘¡pum-pum’!’ [as in ‘fool’], instead of ‘Bang-bang!’, or ‘¡Uuuuy, he’s very old!’ instead of ‘O-oh, he’s very, very old!’), and kinesic (e.g. showing the English speaker a totally foreign gesture that probably has an exact English equivalent). In other words, while neither the native child nor the foreign learner have as yet acquired fully functional

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verbal and nonverbal repertoires, the latter, instead of leaving unfilled lexical, paralinguistic and kinesic gaps, tends to: (a) apply to the target language his own native words; (b) modify them with his native paralanguage; (c) accompany them with independent paralinguistic utterances; and (d) with equally modifying or independent kinesic constructs from his own repertoire (as did my roommate, mentioned in Chapter 1.6). In other words, because of the basic mutual inherence of language, paralanguage and kinesics, he responds, mostly unconsciously, to speech structures whose unlearned parts tend to be replaced by his own native ones. We may think, as a further illustration, of the English speaker who wants to express in Spain lack of serious concern and not only utters the exclamation ‘¡Oh!’ with the negation ‘no,’ but does it like his own ‘Oh, nooo!,’ thus sounding like ‘Of course not!’ When expressing the same idea in the target language, he most typically will say ‘¡Oh, nooo!,’ instead of, for instance, ‘¡Tz, noo, no!,’ that is, an apicoalveolar tongue click and two no’s (‘Oh’ being definitely not typical of Spain). But in reality that expression is not coded just audibly (with language and paralanguage) but also visually, and it could not be otherwise even if he has not yet learned the appropriate kinesic accompaniments. Thus, the total construction ‘Oh, nooo!’ would probably include a facial gesture (unilaterally diagonal open-mouth downward jaw movement) of utter dismissal and a synonymous short-range downward hand gesture of dismissal away from the body, both momentarily stilled during the drawling of ‘no.’ As for our understanding of a foreigner’s acquisition of the rest of the communicative and cultural systems, we just have to consider the ‘natural’ process we follow in our own culture and compare it with what we go through in a target culture, namely: the proxemic misunderstandings posed by the clashing conceptualization of, for instance: what is intimate or only personal or social in interpersonal spacing and touch; how we may also misunderstand the absence of tears of bereavement when we would freely display them; the things that may or may not trigger blushing and in whom; the amount of shaving lotion expected in the average male, or what occasions may require what sort of clothes; how to sit on a chair or couch; the visual ways in which the characteristics of a home may identify the people’s status and culturallydetermined esthetic values; plus the ‘intelligible systems’ identified in the mapping of a culture as offered in Chapter 1.3.

5.7

The presentation of paralinguistic material

5.7.1 As we experience while travelling in another culture, or relate to its members in various ways, even watching a movie (not necessarily in its original version), it is easier to imitate and memorize the kinesic material (because of its visual nature) than changing our voice. However, it is feasible to adopt certain norms for the inclusion and teaching of the basic paralinguistic repertoire of a foreign language — always

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

contrasting it with own’s own — based on theoretical and methodological models contained in the first two volumes. Literary illustrations would undoubtedly help students to understand the communicative reality of paralinguistic effects. Obviously, there must be a logical gradation of the paralinguistic expressions throughout a course program. First, according to the interactive frequency of the social situations and settings in which they occur; and then considering their more typical combinations within the ten realizations of the basic triple structure (identified in the previous chapter), particularly those in which the paralinguistic feature seems to dominate, for instance: paralanguage alone, that is, alternants (hissings, lingual clicks, ‘Um!’ etc,) or differentiators (laughter types, coughing, sighing, yawning, etc.), when they are not clearly accompanied by kinesics (whose total absence is quite improbable): calling with a ‘Pss!,’ the emphatic English negation ‘Uh-uh!,’ a sardonic laugh, etc.: “Yo ho, my boys!” said Fezziwig. “No more work tonight. Christmas Eve […] “Hilliho!” […] “Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!” (Dickens, CC, II) Sólo pudo articular un sonido gutural, débil expresión de su ira, atenazada por la dignidad (Galdós, LDB, XLVI)

paralanguage-verbal language, if the paralinguistic component of an expression is much more notable and meaningful than its verbal part, as in an ironic Spanish ‘¡Aaah, ya veo, ya veo!,’ drawled, almost whispered and with a pitch level very much like for the English negation ‘Naaa!’: “Did you take part in the ‘dig’?” asked Clarissa in a sporty voice that she somehow felt necessary for the colloquialism (Wilson, ASA, I, I) Pues yo the digo…. — agregó Nicolás, descompuesto, trémulo (Galdós, FJ, II, I)

paralanguage-kinesics, in which paralanguage is more important: the very Italian realization of the central vowel ‘Aaa!,’ quite prolonged, slightly glottalized + slight brow raising and hands-and-shoulders shrugging, to express ‘But I cannot, impossible!, or ‘Ah, and what can we do?,’ etc.: ‘Ho!’ cries Mr Smallweed, rubbing his hands with an artful chuckle (Dickens, BH, XXVI)

Naturally, the accompanying kinesic behaviors are often inherent kinesic qualifiers in true audiovisual expressions, such as the commiserative tongue click ‘Tz + head-shake’ while looking down; the ‘Lip-and-nose puckering + Uuff!’ when referring to a wound or a blow or something hurting one or someone else; the lateral click ‘Lj!’ while winking at someone in approval. 5.7.2 In one way or another, paralinguistic usage expresses attitudes; but, although an attitude (like an emotion) will be found to be universal, its display in interaction can

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be quite different between the source and the target language. The first four chapters of Volume II (or the lengthier treatment in Poyatos 1993a) will allow the reader to select the paralinguistic features from each of the four categories which would lend the learner’s speech that distinctive touch of nativeness at a level not generally taught, combining expressions and voice qualities typical of specific attitudes and social situations. Some examples will suffice. – Primary qualities After a brief introduction to the various paralinguistic categories, the following can be contrasted between source language and target language: loudness, when it has grammatical value, as with a major stress: ‘But I’m telling you’; A.’It’s getting cold.’ B. ‘I know!; in direct quoting: ‘Well, you know, he said he didn’t know’; pitch level, as with the falsetto or almost falsetto in a surprised or indignant ‘What?!’, ‘Really?!, ‘Are you crazy?!’, ‘Yes, I did!; the low-pitched of a disappointed ‘Oh’; pitch interval, as with the typical spread interval of a drawled call, ‘Come-and-get-it! (a meal), ‘Joh-ny, where are — you — !’ intonation range, as in a North American intoneme of a daughter’s upset ‘Mo — ther!, with high and then low pitch (meaning ‘How can you say that in front of these people?’), which for that or any similar situation must be learned, for instance, by the Spanish speaker (a daughter would simply use a low-pitched, ‘¡Pero mamá!); syllabic duration in certain expressions will lend, for instance, a North American native style to a meaningful drawled ‘Yeaah’ (with falling register if discouraged or disappointed), ‘Yeaah! (rising pitch for an enthusiastic or indignant affirmation); as will the typical clipped ‘Yeah,’ ‘Yep,’ and ‘Nope,’ with various meanings; rhythm can be identified, for instance, when, even with a similar meaning, the speaker’s attitude can vary from humorous familiarity to a more serious stand, as with a brisk, stacatto ‘Well, I better go see what those kids are doing’ to a glissando, pondering ‘Well, I better go and see — .’ – Qualifiers Many are the voice types, or qualifiers, but a cultural-linguistic community uses certain typical expressions through the various voice controls, for instance: laryngealized (creaky) voice, as in French ‘Mais naturellement!’, ‘Aaah, mais oui, monsieur!’; in English, creakiness diminishing through the sentence, as in an indignant ‘Why, of course not!’ or ‘How dare you?!’, a weary ‘Oh, not now’; nasal voice should be part of the student’s training in the desired naturalness in ordinary speech, perhaps identifying marked intercultural differences in its attitudinal use, for instance: a lazy attitude, boredom, sounding tough, coaxing; lingual postures, which determine, for instance, the ‘dya-dya’ palatalization of a babyish way of talking, or the scornful ‘Nyaah!’ of dismissal or contempt;

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

– Differentiators The fact that differentiators reflect emotional and physiological reactions does not automatically imply a common style among the linguistic communities of the different cultures. Since Chapter 3 of Volume II offers many intercultural examples, only a few will be given here for space sake: laughter of men and women, for instance, not always the same in North America and Japan, Ghana, Finland, Spain or France, and students of their languages should certainly be made aware of that, for instance: the expected giggling of the well-bread Japanese woman, or the North American ‘Ho-ho!’ (dismissing a bluff, incredulity in a familiar or aggressive situation). But ‘cultural notes’ should also be provided about the social norms that dictate aspects such as loudness of laughter and whether it might not even be allowed in certain situations; sighing speech (often its first inbreathing phase only), not necessarily applied by the learner in expressions like ‘Oh well,’ ‘Oooh, look at that!, ‘Oh, my! (‘That’s wonderfull’), so their verbal-nonverbal forms can be included in drills and in specific paralinguistic selections; yawning and belching, among the differentiators that are basically physiological reflexes, but nevertheless differ cross-culturally in how they are managed, which include three aspects: whether or not one must try to avoid them or curb them, the prescribed kinesic behavior as they occur, and the following verbal expressions prescribe in each culture; and sneezing, with important verbal and nonverbal cobehaviors that must likewise be learned in the foreign-language classroom. – Alternants Far from being merely ‘interjective’ or ‘for expressing emotions,’ as it is said much too often, alternants constitute a veritable vocabulary of quasilexical utterances, many of which have become dictionary entries. It is only logical, then, that a representation from each cultural-linguistic community (easily gleaned from Chapter 4 in Volume II, or from Poyatos 1993a:Chapter 7) should be selected for both textbooks and audiovisual materials according to their frequency and situational context. This selection could follow, first, two mutually complementary avenues: (a) the classification that identifies their status in terms of names and written forms, or lack of them (making the learner aware of the possible inconsistency in the way some are written), and (b) their functional classification. As a vivid complement, those found in comic strips and books, as well as literary works, could serve as vivid illustrations throughout a textbook. In fact, following the methodological suggestions given below, textbooks and written class drills should include, besides literary examples, selected comic strips and some of their representations of alternants, or ‘soundgraphs,’ in both languages in order to familiarize students with their interlinguistic and intercultural similarities, the differences and problems, and how to verbally refer to them and also write them down.

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A.First, one must look at the availability or lack of spoken and written alternants as follows: labelled and written (here indicating the verb or noun form): to bang / ‘Bang!,’ to blahblah / ‘Blah-blah’ (nonsensical, continuous talk), to boo / ‘Bo-o-o-oh!’ (disapproval, whistling in Spain), to boo / ‘Boo!’ (to startle), to giddyup / ‘Giddyup!’ (urging a horse), to laugh / ‘Ha-ha!,’ ‘Ha-ha!,’ ‘Hee-hee!,’ to hee-haw / ‘Hee-haw!’ (donkey’s braying), to hem / ‘Hem!’ (attention getter, embarrassment, covering up something), to hiss / ‘Sss!’ (disapproval), to pish / ‘Pish!’ (disgust, impatience), to pooh-pooh / ‘Poo-pooh!’ (disdain, belittling), to shoo/ ‘Shoo!’ (driving away some animals), tsk / ‘Tsk-tsk’ (or ‘Tz-tz’) (disapproval, sympathy), etc.; “Pshaw, pish, nonsense — little fool!” he blustered (Norris, P, ‘Conclusion’), the wild, piercing stacatto note of Indian whoop (Grey, FC, XI) I ordered a Scotch and soda […] I said it fast as hell, because if you hem and haw, they think you’re under twenty-one (Salinger, CR, X) the pony started to clip-clop about, turning in circles on the sidewalk (Doctorow, WF, VIII)

labelled but not written, as are most alternants used in speech (for which students can resort to comic books’ soundgraphs and suggest, as in the blanks shown below, their own initiatives): bark [Waw!/Arf-arf!], boom [Boom!], Bronx cheer of derision [Zrrrrr!], buzzing/humming sound [Ssssss!/Hmmmm!], clink, as with glasses [Clink!], flump,(moving heavily and noisily) [Flump-flump!], gag, retch or choke [Aagh!], gargling [Gurgl-gurgl!], giggling [Hee-hee-hee!], huffing [Huff!], a kiss [____], moaning [Awwn!], bell ringing [Rrriiinnng!], roaring lion [Rrowgh!], a sigh [____], sneezing [____], sniffing [____], sniffling [____], snoring [Ugh-grsszz!/>Grr!], spitting [Hhs-thzp!], thudding [____], thumping [____], twittering/warbbling bird [____], whistling [____], whistling [____], yawning [Uuh-uuuuuuuw!]: Smoke [a Dacotah Indian] sat cross-legged on a buffalo robe, and his grunt of salutation as we entered was unusually cordial (Parkman, OT, IX) Larry (a cowboy) tugged at his boots and groaned as he finally pulled them off (Grey, UPT, VI) Milo answered indignantly, drawing great agitated sniffs of air through his hissing, pale, twitching nose (Heller, C22, XXIV).

written but not labelled, as are so many oral and written imitations of sounds which have only rather ambiguous labels (e.g., ‘clatter’), but no verbs or nouns with which to refer to them in speech or writing (as we do with, for instance, ‘he gasped,’ ‘he smacked his lips’); students should be made aware of the written unlabelled alternants found in the dictionary, and of some possible lexical identifications, which we may

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

find in one language but not in the other: ‘Aha!’ (satisfaction, triumph, irony), Ahem! (for attention, warning, pause), ‘Aw’ (protest, dislike, disgust, sympathy), ‘Ha!’ (wonder, surprise, anger, triumph), ‘Hm/h’m/hmm’ (hesitation, pondering), ‘Humph’ (grunting doubt, surprise, disdain), ‘Oops!/whoops!’ (after blunder, etc.), ‘Ouch!/Ow!’ (sudden pain; cf. Spanish ‘¡Ay!’), ‘Pfui!/Phooey!’ (disgust, contempt), ‘Psst’ (for attention), ‘Ugh’ (disgust, horror), ‘Uh-huh’ (affirmation), ‘Uh-Unh’ (negation), ‘Wahoo!’ (enthusiasm, exhilaration), ‘Wow!’ (surprise, wonder, pleasure), ‘Yipe!’ (pain, dismay, alarm), ‘Yipee!’ (joy, delight): “[…] Look out now.”…Crack! Smack!…Zugg!» (Grey, DF, XIII) A train coming. A rapid Chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck […] the Pacific Flyer […] whistling […] Uuuuuu! — faint, nervous, distrait horn […] Uuuuu! Uuuuu! […] Uuuuuuu! — fainter (Lewis, MS, XIX) “Hew!, it’s getting hot around here,” said the younger man, running his handkerchief into the back of his collar (Porter, SF, I) ‘Whooee’ yelled Dean. ‘Here we go!’ (Kerouak, OR, VI)

neither labelled nor written, thus having neither a single-word verb or noun to denote them, nor a written representation, although they are as frequent and communicative as the others; they pose another interesting challenge, not only for language students but for the readers of a foreign-language literature, since their verbal descriptions can be interpreted correctly only if they recognize them from their own language (e.g, ‘he made a popping noise with his lips,’ ‘She made a noise of pain’): ‘If I find out who it is, By God I’ll …’ he made a popping noise with his lips (Dos Passos, MT, II, III)

B.From a functional point of view, we can gradually offer spoken or written alternants for instruction and drilling by following the instructor’s own criterion, for instance: interactive-regulatory: prefatory (pre-speech click ‘Tz’); calling attention (throatclearing, ‘ahem!’); acknowledging someone (‘Aah!’); affirmation (‘Uh-hu’); negation (‘Uh-uh’); descriptive-illustrative: time markers (‘Oooooh, a long time ago!’); deictics (‘Mm!’ pointing with nod/chin); pictographs (‘Wooiish!’ indicating a spiral); ideographs (‘Heeeei!, imagining a pleasurable situation); event tracers (‘Oooooh, I could never see the end of it!’); identifiers (‘He is ungh!, the energetic type’; ‘How is he?’ — ‘Uuuuuhn, I don’t know’); externalizers (Ouch!, for pain); imitative-illustrative (easily suggested by the nonverbal categories studied in the next chapter): body-adaptors (‘He was glug, glug, drinking it all’); alter- adaptors (‘He went pow!, knocked him flat’); object-adaptors (‘He came down, thump!’); artifactuallymediated (‘He went sswissh, sswissh, swissh, with his sword); animal (‘That dog! Warf, warf, warf!’); artifactual (‘The train went up slowly, chuck-a-chuck-a-chuck-a,’ ‘It fell, bonk!’; ‘Bbrrwoouuhhmm!’, ‘Kkrragsz!’);

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attitudinal: affiliation and positive attitudes: agreement (‘Ah-ha’), public approval (whistling), disagreement (‘Uh-uh!’), approval (‘Lj!’, ‘Mmm!, ‘A-ha!’), interest (‘Mmm!’), curiosity (e.g., ‘Hm?’), coaxing (‘Uuuung, come on!’), flirtation (Sp. ‘Tztz’), praise (a yell), admiration (a gasp), relief (‘Whew, that was close!’); aggressive and negative attitudes: disagreement (‘Uhn!’), dismissal (‘Bah!, ‘Pooh!’), disbelief (‘Ho-ho!’), disapproval (‘Uh-uh!’, ‘Tz-tz’), suspicion (“Mmmmm’), contempt (high narial egression + gesture), scorn (‘Pff!’); happiness, joy: self-confidence (‘Hmmm’), delight (‘Mmm!’), elation (‘Wheee!’, ‘Whoopy!’), surprise (‘Uh!’), celebrating triumph (lay (high-pitched screaming and high-pitched short yells); sadness: regret, sympathy (‘Tz’). Resignation (‘Tz, Oh well’); physical pleasure: relaxation (‘Aaaaah’); physical displeasure: exertion (‘Umph!’), fatigue (‘Phoo!’), pain (‘Ouch!’, ‘Ooow!’); animal calling: contrasting the calls for different household pets, as well as a horse, etc., in each culture.

5.8

Illustration and drilling for paralinguistic instruction

5.8.1

As for the method of illustration of the paralinguistic material, although some can be offered visually in their written form, the more realistic would always be through the following mutually complementary avenues: the instructor himself or herself, whose paralinguistic-cultural fluency will always vary from one to another, and who can demonstrate and drill with the students; native informants, a commodity not always difficult to provide, particularly at an institution with international students; videotaped interactions and feature films with a marked cultural component, and selections from the latter; textual selections from novels and plays (as used throughout the three volumes of this work), in which certain distinctions should be made — properly placed at the various graded levels of instructions and according to their degree of difficulty — depending on their presentation, that is: –

when the paralinguistic or kinesic behaviors are described and their meaning is explained too: Pablo made disapproving clucking noises with his tongue (Steinbeck, TF, III)

–

when the behavior is described, but its meaning is not given (requiring the instructor’s or informant’s illustration): ‘T-t-t-t!’ went Mrs. Morel rapidly with her tongue (Lawrence, SL, VIII)

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

–

when the meaning is identified, but not the behavior (another challenge that needs proper instruction): ‘No,’ returned Carrie [an American] with a touch of pride (Dreiser SC, IV)

5.8.2 Different drills and practical exercises, as well as material for written, oral and audiovisual tests, will have been sufficiently suggested by the preceding sections. One challenging form of exercise consists in giving the learner the meaning of a behavior but not the behavior itself, for instance: ‘Say, with great frustration, that you won’t be able to go.’

5.9

Distribution of the kinesic material

5.9.1 The distribution of the kinesic material can follow two criteria or models for classification. One is the distinction between gestures, manners and postures, both free (without any contact) and bound (contacting another person or object); precisely in this order, since this way the student would first concentrate on the simple unisystemic forms (e.g. /Come/, /That one/, /Okay/) to later combine two or more systems (e.g. verbalkinesic greetings), that is, learning also that certain gestures can go alone or as part of verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic clusters, as would be done for paralanguage: a.those better known realizations in which kinesics appears alone, for instance: the Spanish gesture for ‘eating’ or ‘Let’s eat,’ You want to eat?,’ /the bunched fingers of one hand approaching the mouth once or twice/ when nothing is said verbally or used at a distance; or a significant postural shift: Lance spread wide his hands to the watching men, as if to say “Now see what you’ve done” (Grey, MR, VI)

b.kinesics-verbal language, in expressions in which kinesic behavior is semantically more relevant than the words themselves (e.g. a slow head negation, displays before, simultaneously to or after saying ‘No,’ perhaps prolonging it): Well, then, I’ll not,’ said George, with an obstinate jerk of his head (Dreiser JG, III)

c.kinesics-paralanguage, where often the paralinguistic part can be left out without detriment to the semantic contents, as with one of the most typically Anglo-American emblematic gestures: the diagonal head-bent (with or without the fist cutting the air horizontally in front of the chest) + lateropalatal click + eye wink, meaning ‘Good!,’ ‘Well done!’: Isidora le miró con ira, y respiro fuerte apretando contra el talle el lío de ropa (Galdós, D, II, XVIII) and Colonel Zane laughed as he slapped his friend on the shoulder (Grey, LT, II)

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5.9.2 The other model is that of the nonverbal categories (the subject of the next chapter) particularly useful in the orderly teaching of a cultural kinesic repertoire. In order to weigh its importance, the student must be aware of the problems involved in the good or bad use of the kinesics of the target language in an intercultural interaction one might try to carry out with an exclusively linguistic training. There is nothing better than making students familiar with the possible problems that, in the absence of cultural fluency, can even go unnoticed when one is confronted with the speakers of the other language. The instructor can do this by using examples like those in the model of the semiotic-cultural processes, offered in Chapter 1. Having done this, it would be a matter of presenting in each of the nonverbal categories (defined in Chapter 6) those expressions common to both languages, for instance: emblems for greetings, beckoning, rejecting, stopping, urging; alter-adaptors (touching others) in greetings, so crucial for establishing a good initial rapport; objectadaptors like those constituting eating manners (at a high table, a low Japanese table, on the floor), furniture-based postures according to the situational context, etc. Naturally, this model suggests a distribution by subjects, for instance: good and bad manners, greetings, our own and other person’s emotional reactions and how to manage them, postures in informal or formal settings, etc.

5.10

The order of presentation of gestures, manners and postures If a book, or book series, normally present the linguistic material (morphological, syntactical, lexical) progressively from easy to more difficult, and according to frequency, the same gradation must be applied to kinesics, following the levels of instruction, that is: elementary, in which one can present the basic standard greetings, the most frequent and useful emblems, perhaps some offensive gestures that should be recognized, etc.; intermediate, already including other emblems, some less indispensable alter-adaptors, etc.; and advanced, in which students can learn a few less frequent offensive gestures, certain language markers that at this point they would appreciate and would lend their speech a more fluent native style, etc. Within each of these three levels a point should be made to present, accompanying in small groups the vocabulary offered in each lesson, the true kinesic cognates (homomorphs-synonyms), for instance, between English and Spanish: /You got a cigarette?/, /He’s a little crazy/, /No/; as well as the more problematic false kinesic cognates (homomorphs-antonyms), for instance: the finger-ring gesture, meaning ‘Okay’ or ‘Good’ in English, or used in Spanish for emphasis in a conversation, but quite obscene in Venezuela; the central phase of the hand-purse gesture (usually opening and closing twice), used for ‘crowded’ in Spanish, but as questioning gesture in Italian (without opening and with a slight head-toss):

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

Acompañaba sus fatigosos discursos de una lenta elevacion del brazo derecho, formando con los dedos índice y pulgar una especie de rosquilla para ponérsela a su interlocutor delante de los ojos (Galdos, LDB, XXXVII)

If, for instance, we have opted for distributing the kinesic material following the nonverbal category model, and the first lesson includes greetings, we would teach there some free emblems and some of the alter-adaptors in different social situations. Or they could be frequent emblems (e.g. ‘Come,’ ‘Go,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘I don’t care,’ ‘You want a drink?’). We would keep presenting the others in successive lessons, as their context would suggest, from published repertoires or the instructor’s own material (e.g. from Payrató 1994). In sum, the criterion here would be to offer the categories that keep following the program of the course, or its textbook; and, within each one, according to their interactive frequency or degree of communicative value. What is important is to make sure that the nonverbal material corresponds all along to the topic studied each day, in other words: a.the grammar topics: if, for instance, one is teaching the verbal tenses, it would be appropriate to add the kinesic time markers (e.g. ‘O-o-o-oh, that was a lo-o-ong, lo-oong time ago!’); if the personal and demonstrative pronouns, we would complement them with kinesic deictics (e.g. pointing always with a head-nod, and not a head-toss as, with some subtle social differences, in Spanish); numeral adjectives would afford the opportunity to show (even though it is not a real intercultural barrier) how to count with one’s fingers in each language, often totally and interestingly different; the affirmation adverb ‘Yes’ + head-nod will be the new form for the Hindu or AngloIndian speaker, replacing their typical head-rocking; the English or Spanish speakers must substitute their head-shake ‘No’ for the ‘No’ + slight head-toss of Turkish, Greek and Bulgarian speakers (with slight differences); even the adverbs of time, place or amount, as well as certain verbal constructions, can have a peculiar kinesic expression in each language; b.some of the idioms and verbal expressions that appear in the day’s lesson, for instance: French ‘Oh, la, la!’ + repeated up-and-down shake of one hand at chest height; c.the day’s vocabulary, for instance: ‘money’ denoted with a finger-ring gesture in Japanese, but thumb-and-finger rubbing (with variants) in many other languages; ‘attractive woman’ by sliding the forefinger down one’s cheek in Saudi Arabia, but making the hour-glass gesture with both hands.

5.11

Illustration and description of the kinesic material The illustration and description of gestures, manners and postures depends, in the first place, on its vehicle.73 The ideal instructor would be (as for paralanguage and whatever else is studied as

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nonverbal) the native one or the one sufficiently conversant with the target culture to demonstrate its kinesics for the students to imitate and learn. The textbook can include, besides basic paralinguistic transcriptions, photos (as in Meo Zilio and Mejía 1980, 1983; Rector y Trinta 1985; Diadori 1990; Cestero 1999b), drawings (as in Nierenberg and Calero 1973; Cestero 1998; Diadori 1990), and verbal descriptions of each kinesic act. The graphic illustrations should, as required, indicate by means of arrows (as in Meo Zilio and Mejía 1980, 1983; Diadori 1990) the itinerary of the gesture (and not just its central phase), especially for compound gestures (e.g. Japanese for ‘He’s crazy,’ quickly opening the fingers after making a circle with forefinger in front of the temple). Sometimes the verbal descriptions can be especially chosen and detailed literary quotations, for instance: [for /I can’t believe it!/] “[..] I was a prisoner, Charles. I broke jail — I escaped.”/ Charles’s mouth was open. “What are you talking about?” (Steinbeck, EE, X, III) [for /Money/] “Two dollars,” she [the Spanish girl] said, holding out her palm slightly cupped, rubbing thumb and forefinger together (Porter, SF, II) [for /That/] ‘Who’s that chap […]?’ said the milkman, nodding towards a figure of that description (Hardy, HE, I)

The language laboratory can provide audiotapes and videotapes that would follow the textbook, used for the student’s observation and imitation. In addition, it should make available videotaped interactions and kinesic inventories, including the ones prepared for the course. An excellent complement to the teaching of a foreign language is the use of feature films with a marked cultural component, or selections from the latter; not only when there is no native instructor, but when the native one could point out and explain those situations in the film. Apart from these basic materials, another excellent complement for the learning of kinesics — which I have utilized for many years in my nonverbal communication courses, although for a different purpose — is the direct contact of students with native informants, who should be invited to the classroom. The five informants that annually for twenty years (always with some new cultures) I have invited to my Anthropology and Sociology courses have also benefitted themselves from that cross-cultural experience, while providing my students with very valuable information on their cultures. In each case, the whole class received a sheet with a list of twenty concepts for which we were to see whether or not there was a gesture in each of the cultures,74 as demonstrated by their informants. Sometimes that concept (e.g. ‘to eat,’ ‘crowded,’ ‘suicide’) would not have a kinesic representation in all the cultures present. This in itself discloses most interesting differences reflecting important cultural peculiarities and attitudes, including the total absence of certain gestures for reasons worth

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

discussing (e.g. no gesture for ‘suicide’ in Malaysia, given the rarity of such occurrence, nor for the very act of kissing in Ghana, as it is seen only as lustful, nor for ‘crowded’ in English). In addition, the informants would often demonstrate also the paralanguage that would typically accompany certain gestures. Following are two selections (shown in a column in the actual sheets, as indicated earlier) suggesting the gestures that, subject to occasional substitutions, seemed more useful: A.1. Yes-No. 2. Hungry/Eat. 3. Thirsty/Drink. 4. Delicious! 5. Crazy. 6. 1–2–3–4–5– 6–7–8–9–10. 7. Person/Animal Height. 8. Forgive me! 9. Come here. 10. Go away. 11. Hi! 12. Goodbye! 13. Silence! 14. Affectionate greeting. 15. Hitch-hiking. 16. Money. 17. Frustration. 18. Bad smell. 19. A gesture from your culture. 20. A gesture from your culture. B.1. I, me. 2. I’m hot . 3. I’m cold. 4. I’m angry. 5. It is crowded. 6. Don’t talk!/Silence! 7. What time is it? 8. Repugnance. 9. Finished! 10. Mockery. 11. He committed suicide. 12. Pointing. 13. I got an idea! 14. Smoke/cigarette. 15. A long time ago! 16. Giving/taking. 17. Woman/attractive woman. 18. Calling cat/dog. 19. Public disapproval. 20. A gesture from your culture.

5.12

Classroom drills, tests, and course projects In the classroom, several activities can be offered alternatively, for instance: – – – – –

the instructor’s performance; the instructor gives the meanings of the gestures and the students provide the gestures; practice of kinesic cognates and false cognates; videotaping of the students’ performance and review for practice and subsequent correction; previously prepared interactions among students.

The mid-term or final examinations must be based on the material in the book as well as on a selection of other classroom and laboratory materials. Gestures selections with the information provided by the native informants should be utilized too. In the laboratory, the students can be shown a static illustration of gestures; or a portion of a videotape or film where the sound has been masked, so that they must identify the meanings. As for course projects, one of the most educational activities for acquiring not only cultural fluency, but cross-cultural understanding, is to interview native informants from the culture whose language is being learned. The interview can be based on the list seen above, or similar inventories, describing the gestures (if at all present in that culture) and discussing any cultural peculiarities regarding their performance as well as their cultural significance; and, of course, their very absence. These projects must never be limited to emblems (as we usually see in the existing inventories), but

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recognize the importance of certain manners and postures as regards, for instance: greetings, giving and taking (e.g. always with both hands in Japan, with the right in Muslim countries; eating and drinking; sitting, the utter unaceptability of stretching in front of others in certain cultures, or of showing the plant of the feet in an Arab Muslim country. The interviews can be shown on videotape, registering also the questions and the cultural observations of both interviewer and interviewee.

5.13

Beyond language acquisition: A course on ‘Intercultural Awareness’ A course on ‘Cross-Cultural Awareness’ — and certainly not overemphasizing kinesics, although its broader understanding makes it more important than if we limit it to ‘gestures’ — should prove a very useful asset, not only for students of different languages coming together, but for those, who beyond the foreign-language field, are contemplating a career in anthropology, sociology, interpretation, translation, tourism, medicine or nursing, missionary work, customs and immigration, international business, advertising, international relief, etc. The main topics to be covered could be gleaned from the course outlines of my nonverbal communication courses of twenty years (Appendix). Such a course would be designed not only for those native to the culture where the course is offered, but for the foreign students as well, its objective being precisely as wide a multicultural participation as possible. Ideally, besides the active participation of native informants, other materials should be added, such as the kind developed by Dane Archer’s videotape series (Archer 1991, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c, 2000). Also a wider participation of international informants (most of which would hopefully be taking the course) from specifically distinct cultural blocks (e.g. Southern/ Central/Eastern/Northern Europe, South and Central Latin America/the Caribbean, North America’s United States and Canada and its northern peoples, Oceania, India, South-East Asia/China/Japan, Northern/Central/South/ Western/Eastern Africa, etc.), as well as carefully chose feature films. This course, then (which its instructor would interperse with the audio-visual materials and with periodically scheduled demonstrations by native informants), could consist of the following main discussions. 1.Culture as communication: Sensible and intelligible systems. Somatic, objectual and environmental sign systems and their intelligible background. 2.The basic triple structure of human communication. Language, paralanguage and kinesics. An introduction to the triple reality of speech. 3.Interactive nonverbal behaviors. Externalizers. Alter-adaptors: Cross-cultural differences in interpersonal touching.

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

4.Paralanguage 1. Cross-cultural aspects of coughing, yawning, belching, spitting, hiccuping, and sneezing, and their associated verbal behaviors. 5.Paralanguage 2. Cross-cultural similarities and differences of word-like utterances like tongue clicks, uh-hu’s, m-mm’s, moans, hisses, silences, etc. Calling animals in the different cultures. 6.Kinesics: gestures 1. Universal and culture-specific displays. Emblems. 7.Kinesics: gestures 2. Invited informants from five cultures. 8.Kinesics: gestures 3. Illustrators of space and time: space and time markers. Deictics. Identifiers. 9.Kinesics: gestures 4. Invited informants from five cultures. 10.Kinesics: manners 1. Greeting behaviors cross-culturally 1. First encounters, acquaintances. 11.Kinesics: manners 2. Greeting behaviors cross-culturally 2. Friends. Relatives. Culture, age, sex, and socioeducational levels. 12.Kinesics: manners, 3. Social etiquette. Good and bad manners cross-culturally. Eating and drinking manners. 13.Kinesics: manners 4. Invited informants from five cultures. 14.Kinesics: manners 5. Invited informants from five cultures. 15.Kinesics: postures. The anthropology and sociology of posture. Cultural evolution and conditioning factors: furniture, occupations, etc. 16.Gaze behavior as a research area. Cross-cultural differences in social gaze behavior: functions of eye contact and gaze aversion. 17.Proxemics: the behaviors of interpersonal space. Cross-cultural similarities and differences in social, personal and intimate distance among people and according to relationships. 18.Chronemics: the behaviors of time. The cross-cultural concept and structuration of time: urgency, punctuality, duration of business and social visits. Intercultural problems. 19.Nonverbal communication cross-culturally. Potential intercultural problems in the various areas of nonverbal communication. Problems of acculturation experienced by the participants in the course. 20.Verbal-nonverbal communication in shared quarters. The participants’ positive and negative experiences in town and campus shared rooms and apartments. 21.Nonverbal communication in the professions: the health sector. The doctor/nurse-patient relationship: paralanguage, kinesics, proxemics and touch, the concept of privacy, chronemics.

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22.Nonverbal communication in education. Intercultural nonverbal differences and the potential problems in the classroom. The multicultural classroom. Nonverbal communication in teacher/professor-student relationships. 23.Nonverbal communication in business 1. The businessperson’s personal characteristics: cross-cultural differences and potential problems. Dynamics of business meetings cross-culturally and potential problems: participation rules crossculturally, silences, the chronemics of time managing. 24.Nonverbal communication in business 2. The employment interview: the structuration of the encounter. Interviewer’s and interviewee’s positive and negative verbal and nonverbal behaviors research. 25.Intercultural communication problems. Encoding and decoding situations and problems. Nonverbal acculturation. Cultural fluency. Sensory involvement with the environment cross-culturally: visual, audible, olfactory, kinesthetic and tactile. Intercultural implications. Course projects should be required, always favoring appropriate topics like paralinguistic or kinesic inventories of the cultures involved, gathered by first-hand interviewing of, and interaction with, foreign students, as many of my students have done through the years in my nonverbal courses. A last comment, suggested by the very topics treated in all three volumes, would concern a still almost untapped wealth of research possibilities and topics. Beyond foreign-language instruction, the scope and depth of the curriculum in highereducation departments devoted to the teaching of one’s own language and literature would gain much by the diachronic (meaning ‘reconstructive’ sometimes) as well as synchronic integrative teaching of, and research on, the verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic characteristics of national or dialectal speech, and of their documentation in literature.

5.14

Conclusion Two models have been proposed based on the unreality of what is still being perpetuated in two specific areas of work and research: the transcription of spoken language and the teaching of foreign languages. It has been seen how a transcription (specifically of two or more participants) would never reflect our daily speech and whatever elements constitute a personal interaction unless it strives to register all that may carry meaning in the course of it; this would include — beyond language, paralanguage and kinesics and their cessation through silences and stillness — not only the other strictly sensory interpersonal exchanges that have been identified in Chapter 3, but the various ways in which the immediate and not so immediate environment surrounding the participants could possibly elicit or affect those

Two applications of the basic triple structure model

exchanges. For this to be achieved, it would seem indispensable to keep in mind, on the one hand, the model established for the analysis of personal and environmental interaction (Chapter 8, Volume II), and on the other, the model that identifies all the intricacies of a conversation (Chapter 7, Volume I). As for the implementation of nonverbal communication in foreign language teaching, the very discussion of discourse transcription proves beyond doubt how the traditional classroom methodology will always fail to provide the much needed nonverbal cultural fluency besides the verbal skills that seem to fully occupy the instructor-learner team. It is a question, then, of making foreign language teaching equally realistic in the light of its present limitations. While it is true that one is able to communicate with only verbal fluency, it is also true that in many real-life instances a minimal competence of interactive fluency depends mostly on the nonverbal elements as much as on what is being said. The only realistic acquisition of a foreign language — unless one should seek only a totally passive, ‘uncultured’ knowledge — requires, therefore, a minimal teaching of its basic paralinguistic and kinesic repertoires and, also throughout the various levels of training (in the textbooks as well as in the audiovisual language laboratory), of the different nonverbal systems that characterize the culture under study.

5.15

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.The primary qualities of speech in the transcription of interactive discourse. 2.The paralinguistic qualifiers (voice types) in the transcription of interactive discourse. 3.The paralinguistic differentiators in the transcription of interactive discourse. 4.Paralinguistic alternants in the transcription of interactive discourse. 5.A repertoire of kinegraphs for the transcription of interactive discourse. 6.Proxemic and chronemic notation in the transcription of interactive discourse. 7.Silences in the transcription of interactive discourse. 8.Synchronization of components in the transcription of interactive discourse. 9.Contextual elements in the transcription of interactive discourse. 10.The transcription of pathological verbal and nonverbal discourse. 11.The transcription of a conversational encounter in a narrative text as a linguisticliterary analysis. 12.The transcription of a scene from a play as a linguistic-literary analysis and as production material. 13.Transcription of televised material.

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14.An inventory of false kinesic cognates for the teaching of a foreign language. 15.A basic kinesic manual for the teaching of a foreign language. 16.Verbal-nonverbal fluency in foreign-language teaching. 17.The acquisition of verbal and nonverbal repertoires in intercultural interaction. 18.A basic comparison of paralinguistic features between source and target language. 19.A comparative inventory of kinesic social norms: greetings, table manners, classroom manners, in public places. 20.An inventory of paralinguistic alternants for the teaching of a foreign language. 21.A comparative video-taped inventory of gestures: source and target languages. 22.A comparative video-taped inventory of manners: source and target languages. 23.A comparative video-taped inventory of postures: source and target languages. 24.A study of nonverbal intercultural problems experienced by international students. 25.A study of nonverbal intercultural problems experienced by international immigrants in the researcher’s culture.



Chapter 6

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers A model for the analysis of social interaction He laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection (Wharton, HM, II, VIII) What oppressed him [Freud] about New York was its noise. The terrible clatter of horses and wagons, the clanking and screeching of streetcars, the horns of automobiles (Doctorow, R, VI)

6.1

The need to classify and label behaviors As I deepened my field observations and study of interactive and noninteractive behaviors and of whatever we utilize from among all that surrounds us to voluntarily or involuntarily communicate, I was also aware of the many difficulties my students had when, while gathering data, they would try to define what they observed. This made me recognize our need for a system of categories that would allow us not only to identify but to define those behaviors and, in addition, call them by their names in a consistent fashion. Both they and I wanted to analyze people’s interactions in public places, or our own (e.g. with hospital patients), the repertoires of television celebrities and campaigning and debating politicians, the characters in a novel, or the actors on the stage. Although the system designed by Ekman and Friesen (1969, 1980, partly inspired by Efron’s [1941]) seemed to work for us for a while, the fact that they referred only to “any movement or position of the face and/or body” (49) that is, kinesics, proved insufficient, since I could see the communicative and interactive functions performed by somatic activities like sighing, tears or blushing, or by the slamming of a door or the wearing of a gaudy tie. In addition, besides encountering great lacunas in their unquestionably inspiring model, I was also missing a series of categories that I kept adding as I logically needed them. This chapter enlarges upon my own previous treatments of this subject,75 including now a good number of literary examples that eloquently illustrate each category. Fig. 6.1., ‘Interactive and noninteractive nonverbal categories’ suggests that paralanguage and certain other somatic systems are also susceptible of performing

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INTERACTIVE AND NONINTERACTIVE NONVERBAL CATEGORIES ParaKine- Proxe- Che- Der- Ther- Objec- Noninterlanguage sics emics mical mal mal tual action Emblems

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Figure 6.1.
Interactive and noninteractive nonverbal categories

communicative functions. X and (X) indicate the more common conveyors for each category and the less common ones, respectively. Three preliminary observations about these categories should be kept in mind throughout the chapter. First, that they are not mutually exclusive (e.g. an ‘emblem’ like a negation gesture can be also an ‘externalizer’ if it is expressed with great frustration) and, therefore, their identification would depend on which one predominates in the message, in such a way that the emblem just mentioned would be more like an ‘externalizing emblem.’ Second, in order to weigh more in depth the communicative values of each phenomenon at levels that are not always obvious we must consider each category as informed by the different conditioning factors studied in Chapter 4 (Fig. 4.3), to which the reader is referred by way of introduction. And third, that, in the light of those factors, the many variants of any category are conditioned culturally (e.g. the different way of handling cutlery by the average North American and European), socially (e.g. the socioeducational stratification of table manners) and

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

personally (e.g. idiosyncratic emotional displays), the latter both normally and pathologically (e.g. table manners or grooming in the two states of a manic-depressive patient).

6.2

Emblems: Gestures for words

6.2.1 Emblems were first defined by Efron (1941) as only arbitrarily coded gestures, but later more broadly by Ekman and Friesen (1969), Johnson, Ekman and Friesen (1975) — adding iconic gestures — and Scherer (1977), with whom I seem to coincide in referring to possible paralinguistic emblems (e.g. an impatient narial egression signifying ‘It’s late!’). An emblem must be defined mainly as: a gesture unambiguously represented by a verbal equivalent in a given culture (e.g. in Niger, /crowded/, by closing a vertical fist with the palm of the other hand). Regrettably, precisely because of their lexicality, popularity and cross-cultural relevance, they are almost the only material included in the cultural kinesic inventories available today. Since they are specific equivalents of words within social groups and cultures, their coding can be:76 a.arbitrary
–an otherwise deceitful arbitrariness if we do not know its iconic origin — as most of them are (e.g. /I don’t care/, by a shoulder shrug with qualifying facial expression: downward unilateral labial expansion; the North American /Okay/, with a vertical finger-ring gesture; /Yes/ and /No/, with cross-cultural differences (cf. Darwin 1872 (1970):272–277); paralinguistically imitating the whirring of an airplane, etc.: She [Coral] crouched low in the hole with her fingers crossed for good luck (Greene, ST, IV, IV)

b.intrinsic if the gesture resembles its referent (e.g. if a nurse makes a swallowing gesture to a deaf patient): –¿Allí había bastante?/ — ¿Bastante de qué?/ — Bastante de comer — aclaró, llevándose hacia la boca, juntos, los formidables dedos de su mano (Ayala, T)

However, for the same concept this other more pancultural gesture is not so strictly intrinsic: [the Navajo Indian] said: ‘Chineago — ping!’ and rubbed his hand over his stomach./ ‘He says you need meat — lots of deer meat,’ translated Naab (Grey, HD, XVIII)

Obviously, the iconic value of some intrinsic emblems is known only to those who know their origin, as with the Spanish bullfighting gesture of taking a pass, meaning that someone is being manipulated. As for sign-meaning relationship, most emblems have a shared meaning because

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they are part of a true kinesic lexicon used by certain groups (e.g. longshoremen, hunters, medical professionals in the operating room), a culture (India’s polysemic head-tilt or head-rocking, as a ‘Uh-hu’ conversational feedback), or many cultures (showing a vertical palm for /Stop!/). Emblems are used singly much more than in clusters, although multiple emblems are possible if, for instance, the verbal channel is occupied while we are on the telephone and signal to someone: ‘Hi/, /come in/, /sit down/, /read this/, I’ll be with you in /two minutes/’; or when, without interrupting a conversation at a bar, one orders another round with a circular hand gesture. Unlike the verbal channel, where two or more words cannot be mutually superimposed, this is possible kinesically, which attests to a practical economy value (e.g. simultaneously pointing at one’s heart and making a dubious and also commiserative facial gesture meaning that apparently someone’s heart is not too good); however, whether it is kinesic (a beckoning gesture) or paralinguistic (‘Mmmm!’ for ‘Delicious!’), an emblematic expression usually avoids a periphrastic construction out of expressive economy. On the other hand, a single emblematic gesture can denote something totally unacceptable in words. These last thoughts link with the lexicality and grammaticality of gestures within the structure language-paralanguage-kinesics, discussed in Chapter 4.4, for instance: as subject (/I/, touching one’s chest), as its verb (/ran/, running motion), verb and predicate (/I’m up to here!/, forefinger along forehead), verb and circumstantial complement (/Let’s go, but slowly/, head-tilt followed by downward hand movement), conjunction (/but/, raised forefinger). There are also true phrasal emblems, as when a nod toward a poorly dressed stranger who walks into a reception and approaches the food table is followed by a shoulder shrug, a commiserative smile and a ‘stop’ hand gesture, all together signifying ‘Oh, well, let him, poor fellow, he’s hungry!’, either alone or repeated by its verbal equivalent, sometimes this compound emblem being verbalized afterward, as in: I spoke to the elderly Heteymy…but knitting the shoulders and turning up his palms he answered gravely, “What can I do? […]” (Levenston 1987: 99)

Finally, although emblems can replace words as pure emblems, they can also coincide with or immediately follow them: “[…] I don’t know what I’m going to say to him,” she [Inge] said, shaking her head in solemn reproach (Wilson, ASA, II, II) Mauricio le hacía a Aniano ademanes de calma con las dos manos en el aire y le siseaba para que se aplacase:/ -Chsss…, cálmese — le decía — ; tranquilícese, hombre (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 67)

However, as with other nonverbal categories, the blending of semantically identical verbal and kinesic emblems is so typical of the more gesticulating cultures and of

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

extrovert speakers that what could be taken as nonverbal redundancy is actually complementary information, as was indicated in Chapter 2.10. 6.2.2 Interactive mode and encoding channels Emblems — and this may apply also to the other categories — are typically used in both interaction and noninteraction (e.g. during inner speech, in a soliloquy, as an hallucination) and in instances of reduced interaction (discussed in Chapter 8.9, Volume II) in which verbal communication is impeded by excessive distance, ambience noise, etc. The encoding of emblems can be: a.Paralinguistic, actually as ‘alternants’ (Chapter 4.7): beckoning utterances like the informal Spanish bilabial stop + apico-alveolar fricative ‘¡Pst!’ or the Japanese feminine sort of prolonged moan for feedback while on the telephone: [Popeye, about to be hanged] “Pssst!” he said, the sound cutting sharp into the drone of the minister’s voice; “pssssst!” […] Fix my hair, Jack,’ he said (Faulkner, S, XXXI)

b.Kinesic, as are the majority, with the face (e.g. surprised raised brows + wide-open eyes) and mainly with the hands (e.g. the V-sign for ‘Victory,’ the splayed fingers of one hand as the worst Greek insult, biting one’s bent forefinger to denote anger in Niger), touching one’s nose with thumb while extending the other fingers in the socalled Shanghai gesture, the shoulders (e.g. a negation shrug) or the whole body (e.g. /I’m beat!/, with an eyelids-shoulders-trunk ‘dropping-dead’ gesture of fatigue), some of them having been handed down from antiquity (e.g. the optional, Bible-based Roman Catholic triple light beating of one’s breast with a fist, as part of a prayer of contrition in the Mass, is seen in the tax collector’s gesture in Luke 18:13): ‘I am almost as far off as ever.’/ ‘How so?’/ Jude slapped his pocket./ ‘Just what we thought (Hardy, JO, II) with a brief wave of his hand Colonel Abel dismissed the servant who was removing the coffee cups (Woolf, Y, ‘1880’) Half the audience waved to mother and blew her kisses […] On the arm of Cecil [B. de Mille] she came down the aisle nodding right and left (de Mille, DP, XIV)

Naturally, given the possible semantic blend in a nonverbal facial expression, an emblem can carry more than one meaning: a human head […] smiled affably […] in a manner that was at once waggish, conciliatory, and expressive of approbation (Dickens, MC, VII)

c.Kinesic-paralinguistic, like the distance greeting in certain areas of New Guinea: a twist of a raised hand + eye contact + bilabial ‘Ps!’ + head-toss (i.e. chin pointing

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toward the addressee); the Russian compound expression meaning ‘Let’s have a drink: /tongue click + finger-snap on cheek + wink/: ‘Ugh!’ grunted one of the savages, and pointed eastward with his hand (Grey, LT, XVII)

d.proxemic, for instance, quickly drawing closer to someone to indicate confidentiality, that ‘We are together,’ etc: Madame de Chancelle continued, leaning confidentially forward […] (Wharton, R, XIX) Narai [a Sawi man] looked through the window and pointed with his chin to a young pig (Richardson, PC, XV)

e.as an uncontrollable chemical reaction like tears as the only emitted message signifying sadness, or emotional sweat denoting anxiety, during a silence or even simultaneously to speech: –¿Hija de usted? [the sick girl]/ Respondieron unos ojos llenos de lágrimas (Espina, EM, XIX) There were tears of gratefulness in her eyes (Dreiser, JG, VII)

f.as a dermal reaction: She [seeing his look] flushed slightly, and then, conscious of an embarrassment new and strange to her, blushed rosy red Grey, LT, IV)

g.as a thermal reaction, as when a body temperature raise serves as a specific message: Her cheek grew burning hot against my neck, and her arms trembled and tightened round me/ ‘Don’t tell him about […] (Collins, WW, 204)

h.as objectual emblems, when a gesture is, for instance an object-adaptor (one of the other categories), that is, manipulating an object, as when opening a window in a Finnish home to intimate that a visitor is overstaying; or a more strictly gestural handling of the object: Mr. Job Trotter […] turned his glass upside down […] Sam […] ordered the pewter vessel to be refilled (Dickens, PP, XVI)

6.2.3 Of all the nonverbal categories, kinesic emblems and emblematic realizations of any other category (i.e. having reached a shared emblematic status) typically cause most intercultural communicative problems, as was seen in Chapter 1.10. Since examples are given as kinesics in Chapter 5, Volume II, and throughout the three volumes, a few more will suffice: the raised thumb for ‘Well done!’ ‘Good!’ in may cultures, but ‘Go to hell!’ in Turkey; slightly pulling one’s lower eyelid in Spain and Latin America to signify ‘Look,’ ‘I can see you!, ‘You don’t fool me,’ but rejection or mild insult in Japan (Hasada 1997); showing the inner side of index and middle fingers for ‘victory,’ which

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

once former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher reversed in public when that version had already become an obscene emblem.77 Sometimes, however, we display an emblem and also verbalize it afterward (more often than before it), for instance: the Italian questioning bunched fingers of one hand (hand-purse) at waist or chest height with a short double up-and-down movement (cf. Ricci Bitti 1992), which sometimes we show at a distance while mumbling ‘Che vuoi?’ or ‘E allora?,’ just as biting the lateral edge of one’s forefinger can be immediately followed by ‘Che rabbia!’

6.3

Speech markers:78 The movements of our speaking

6.3.1 Speech markers (particularly kinesic) are conscious or unconscious behaviors which punctuate and emphasize the acoustic and grammatical succession of words and phrases, according to their location and relevance in the speech stream, and coincide with written punctuation symbols (grammatical and attitudinal themselves). Their functions are mainly grammatical (syntactical and morphological), although the total meaning of a word or combination of words depend on their paralinguistic and kinesic coactivities and any other cooccurrent behaviors (once more showing the mutual coherence of verbal and nonverbal channels). But it must be emphasized that, from the point of view of live speech, these markers constitute beyond doubt one of the most important topics related to our speaking. They truly constitute the visual essence of each language, its subtlest and most difficult components to identify, define and describe in the study of speech, and certainly what almost always continues to give away as ‘foreigner’ anyone who learned a language as an adult; in other words, a visible ‘accent’ harder to overcome than the audible one. And precisely because of their subtlety, they are also the most ignored — as they unjustly escape the traditional linguistic and philological curriculums dealing with each mother tongue — and, along with the category of ‘identifiers,’ the hardest to learn when trying to acquire nonverbal fluency. 6.3.2 Kinesic speech markers Varying greatly according to culture, contextual situation, and even more the speaker’s personality, we all tend to follow the flow of our speech with movement of face, limbs and trunk: his right arm [Stephen’s], with a rugged propriety and force of action, very earnestly emphasizing what he said: not least so when it always paused, a little bent but not withdrawn, as he paused (Dickens, HT, XI)

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But, in ways that we can relatively easily observe, we follow certain fixed, even predicted patterns coinciding with the various grammatical categories. A.Pronominal and adjectival markers. To begin with, the personal ones can appear in interaction as ‘deictics’ (identified later as such), that is, what Jespersen (1933: 156– 159) called “pronouns of pointing.” Some speakers use gaze, head and hand pronominal markers to address an interlocutor, as is masterfully illustrated by Dickens’ Mr. Jaggers, whose forefinger has a twofold function: ‘Come!’ said the stranger [Mr. Jaggers], biting his forefinger at him […] He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a bullying interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr. Wopsole — as if it were to mark him out--before biting it again […] Now, I’ll try you again.’ Throwing his finger at him again […] his left hand in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right […] said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his finger at me […] he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me while he spoke […] he was throwing his finger at both of us (Dickens, GE, XVIII) He shook his big stupid finger in my face. “Holden […] I’m warning you, now […]” (Salinger, CR, VI)

But pronominal gestures for ‘I,’ ‘me’ and ‘mine’ can vary cross-culturally: while a Spaniard uses more the index finger or the palm of the hand against the chest, the North American, utilizes also the thumb with closed fist, as well as the vertical lateral edges of both hands against the chest, all (and the ones that follow) with attitudinal variants in their parakinesic qualifiers of intensity, speed and duration. As for pointing at others, North Americans do it with one or two hands, with nodding (which includes gaze, even for an absent referent), with a head-tilt, or with a head-and-trunk orientation shift toward the referent; in Spain one points more with the chin, although not everybody regards it as too polite. Head-pointing may be accompanied by thumb-pointing, or gaze-pointing for one interlocutor, but when they are more, gaze contact (not necessarily, but typically so) may be maintained with the main addressee while the head points at someone else. Pronominal markers, no matter how subtle they may be (e.g. a slight gaze shift), are virtually always present as part of the verbal-paralinguistic-kinesic compound. The cultural difference among languages can be illustrated with a typical North American example in which John, Tom and Mary are conversing, and Tom addresses John: ‘You should take /her [slight head-tilt towards her without breaking eye contact with John]/ to the movies because /she’ll [head and gaze towards Mary]/ love /that movie [nodding towards absent movie]/’. This example serves also to illustrate another function of the same markers, that of stress markers, since ‘her’ (Mary) and ‘that’ (‘movie’) can also carry the two primary stresses, which would be marked with the same predicative pronoun and the same demonstrative adjective. In the first of the following examples the nod indicates that Corey gave that information:

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

“[…] They are out of town.”/ “Yes, so I understand,” said Lapham, with a nod toward the son. “I believe Mr. Corey, here, told Mrs. lapham” (Howells, RSL, XI) ‘I wonder what he thinks of it?’ […] ‘Now, what do you say, Mr. Bossiney? […]’ (Galsworthy, MP, I, III)

Among other pronominal or adjectival markers we use in conversation are: demonstrative pronouns, even pointing with the finger at absent referents: ‘/Those two colleges [pointing successively] are the best in the East/’ ‘¿/How did you like his home [head-tilt]/?’; personal inclusive pronouns: ‘We could /inclusive sweeping hand movement/ all contribute, right?’; identity pronouns: ‘Two years later I went back and the same /short up-and-down hand movement/ man was there!’; reciprocal pronouns: ‘Yes, we’ve been writing /reciprocal finger movement including absent second party/ to each other’; pronouns of difference (Jespersen 1933: 179–180): ‘If he takes one glass, he’ll take another and another /repeating a hand-circling movement away from one’s abdomen/’; pronouns of indifference (anybody, neither, any, etc. [Jespersen 1933: 181–183]): ‘Either /pointing at both referents in succession/ of them will do’; totality pronouns or adjectives (all-, both-, every-, each-, no-, etc. [(Jespersen 1933: 184–187]): ‘[…] These girls,’ and she waved an inclusion of all shop and factory girls, ‘don’t get anything’ (Dreiser SC, VI)

possessive pronouns or adjectives: ‘You take their /inclusive pointing gesture/ bags and we’ll take ours /inclusive pointing gesture/, okay?’; reflexive pronouns (myself, etc.), performed like personal pronouns, but often more emphatically. As for a pluralization movement, what determines it is not the plural pronoun or adjective but the spatial relationship described: ‘Several in the room spoke’ can be expressed with a hand-sweep gesture at the same time, but ‘There are several people in that car’ cannot. Each of those pronominal or adjectival markers can at the same time act as a stress marker, sometimes as an emblem if we do not want or cannot use its verbal form (e.g. when speaking to a deaf person). B.Noun, adjectival, prepositional, and conjunctional markers. Although Birdwhistell (1970) did not identify certain types of markers, in some of the categories that follow (e.g. ‘pictographs’) we find that there are nouns appearing under most ‘illustrators,’ adjectives as ‘identifiers’ of quality or quantity, many adverbs and adverbial constructions as identifiers of manner (‘However’ being an emphatically marked one, usually with a hand flourish or just a raised hand) and as ‘time markers,’ ‘space markers,’ etc., as well as prepositional markers (mainly ‘but’) and conjunctional markers (mainly

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‘and’), all of them accented with facial and hand gestures (along with paralinguistic co-features). They typically coincide with equally typical stress, pitch, volume and length features, enhancing their syntactical value and, naturally, functioning as syntactical speech markers, the main feature for a paralinguistic or kinesic act to qualify as speech marker: ‘[…] But listen,’ said she, smilingly putting up her finger to check my impatient reply (A. Brontë, TWF, XLV) ‘And now,’ said Bob Sawyer, rubbing his hands, ‘we’ll have a jolly night (Dickens, PP, XLVIII)

6.3.3 Paralinguistic-kinesic stress markers In the sentence ‘My wife doesn’t think he did it, but I do’ there is a secondary stress on wife and primary stress on he and I, characterized by their higher pitch and loudness, slightly tenser articulation and longer syllabic duration. Those features by themselves are true markers that enhance the fact that ‘my wife’ (not everybody, nor the two of us) thinks that way, that she thinks that he (among other possible suspects) did it, and that (unlike her) I myself think he did. The same words can be uttered in a rather neutral voice devoid of markers, and one could also (e.g. in a depressive state) strip them of any kinesic accompaniment. However, under normal circumstances there would be in the above example some conspicuous kinesic activity coinciding with phonetic stresses on the same syllables, ‘wife,’ ‘he’ and ‘I,’ looking toward her (if she is present) and, for instance, with brow raising on ‘I.’ Gerald raised his eyebrows. “I was not for one minute suggesting that Canon Portway had any knowledge of the fraud, if fraud it was […]” (Wilson, ASA, II, II)

6.3.4 Rhythmic markers We can use this label for markers which, while still indicating stress, follow the rhythm of discourse, sometimes if some object is being manipulated, like the ones identified below as kinesic-objectual: S. Behrman emphasized each word of his reply with the tap of one forefinger on the counter before him (Norris, O, II, II) Her words were stressed so that they seemed to rise and fall. She emphasized the rhythm still further by tapping with her fingers on Sally’s bare arm (Woolf, Y, 1907)

6.3.5 Paralinguistic and kinesic punctuation markers Paralinguistic and kinesic markers punctuate the verbal sentence as clearly as we punctuate a written one. A normal-speed or frame-by-frame analysis of a videotaped

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

conversation reveals the precise correlation of these markers with what would be punctuation symbols, after all invented in an attempt to represent or evoke the reality of speech. The functions of our written marks are syntactical ([,]. [:], [( )], etc.), quantitative ([…], [−-], etc.) and qualitative ([“ “], [¡ !], [___], [italics], etc., also possible in whispering), all with their corresponding kinesic manifestations, and thus with very specific nonverbal functions in writing.79 One example is, for instance, the typical English emphasis, accompanied by a variable facial expression, in: ‘I wonder what he thinks of it?’ […] ‘Now, what do you say, Mr. Bossiney? […]’ (Galsworthy, MP, I, III)

But there are many others we represent visually as we write, all true speech markers, as writers themselves tell us: ‘An’t she lively?’ whispered Mr Jonas to the elder sister, with his favourite elbow emphasis (Dickens, MC, XI) Decíalo subrayando en el aire con su enérgico dedo las palabras (Galdós, T, XXXIII) sus ojos no eran mas que un modo de puntuación de las palabras […] ortografía (Alas, R, XIII) his voice [Lapham’s] rose, and he hammered his armchair with the thick of his hand for emphasis (Howells, RSL, XIV)

In addition, we must remember that, since paralanguage includes momentary speech pauses, they serve also as speech markers, as the following example eloquently illustrates: I — certainly — did — NOT,’ said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly renouncing the idea was of that intense kind that he could only give adequate expression to it by putting a long interval between each word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might have dislocated his neck (Dickens, BH, VI).

6.3.6 Kinesic markers of paralanguage Just as our kinesic repertoire adapts automatically to the linguistic-paralinguistic structures of discourse, there are kinesic markers of the paralinguistic phenomena outlined in Chapter 4 (e.g. for pitch changes, syllable drawling or clipping, voice types, kinds of laughter), as in ‘Weeell + /eyebrow flash of surprise/’: her eyes [Daisy’s] flashed around her as in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated — God, I’m sophisticated’ (Fitzgerald, GG, I)

In reality, any perceptible paralinguistic feature (and the verbal segment with which it normally blends) is always accompanied by a kinesic qualifier, even if it does not visibly overpower the other two, as Agee (like many others) illustrates by italizing certain words:

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when he had said hello to some much older girls, one of them cried out in the strange, sticky voice he had heard grown women use, ‘Ooh, just look at the darling little boy! (Agee, DF, II)

6.3.7 Kinesic-objectual markers We must not forget the eloquence of kinesic markers for which we sometimes manipulate certain objects during a conversation, as when we emphasize (or truly punctuate) words with hand gestures we extend with a pen, cigarette, pipe, or a cocktail glass while standing at a social gathering (even with glass and cigarette in the same hand), all with the social and personal connotations those ‘object-adaptors’ (another category) may have. ‘Must sometimes be quaffed in blood, colonel’ […] And when he said ‘blood,’ he gave the great pair of scissors a sharp snap, as if they said blood too and were quite of his opinion (Dickens, MC, XVI) “Well, there’s something about him.” She had lit a cigarette, and was waving the extinguished match at me for emphasis (Mailer, BS, X)

6.3.8 Proxemic, chemical-visual, and dermal markers Certain proxemic shifts (after all, the result of kinesic behaviors) act also as markers, even as punctuators, as when we lean toward one’s interlocutor to unconsciously coincide with the more relevant stresses and words, or lean back to coincide with the end of a phrase and its final junction and low-pitch ending. In my frequent cultural switching between Canada and Spain I have always been fascinated by the abundance of all sorts of markers in, for instance, a group of standing men chatting in a Spanish bar or in the street: reciprocal forward and backward proxemic shifts, postural changes coinciding with syntactical and semantic (perhaps emotional) peak points in their speech, etc. Jane impulsively stepped forward. ‘Oh! Elder Tull!’ she cried. ‘You won’t do that!’ (Grey, RPS, II)

But we also observe that tears, even more when they are being controlled, can mark words with functions that are more semantic than syntactical, triggered by emotional reactions (i.e. ‘externalizers,’ seen below). Sometimes, precisely the key word (or nonverbal element) carrying the paralinguistic-kinesic qualifier (particularly of an emotional nature) is what provokes those tears immediately before or after they are spoken: “Oh,” she [Jennie] exclaimed, clasping her hands and stretching her arms out toward him. There were tears of gratefulness in her eyes (Dreiser, JG, VII)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

As for dermal reactions, blushing and, for instance, skin papillary erection (goose flesh) can have the same functions, as does trembling in: Gerald flushed and his heavy jowl trembled slightly. “I don’t think you mean to be impertinent, Theo,” he said, “but you are” (Wilson, ASA, I, II)

In summation, there is at times no clear borderline between the nonverbal behaviors acting as markers and those that primarily identify the semantic and attitudinal elements, since, for instance, the marker of a parenthetical feature, or an interrogation, contains a semantic change as well. But if we decide that the term ‘marker’ should be applied only to phonetic and grammatical differentiations in speech, then whatever accompanies the linguistic structure without adhering to those requirements would fall under other nonverbal categories. Markers can refer exclusively to paralanguage if there is no verbal language, but only to paralinguistic ‘alternants’ (e.g. clicks, hisses, grunts, throat-clearings); which would merit serious research on normal or pathological behavior as cultural and socioeconomic identifiers and, for instance, as an important aspect of the craft of theater and film acting in its relationship with their audience.

6.4

Space markers: Pointing at what is present or absent Space markers, and the next category, time markers, represent the direct reference to the two basic dimensions of human life, space and time (often indicated with similar gestures), which together with sound and movement dominate our experience of the world and social life. Space markers — the term borrowed from Ekman (1977) — illustrate size, area, distance and location (but not shape, as ‘pictographs’ do). Illustrators of size or area are always kinesic — although at times we may emit, for instance, an audible fricative with puffed-up cheeks, which can even replace gesture to comment on someone’s obesity — and may refer to a person, a house, a building site, etc.: “All this,” and he waved his hand round the elegant room, “is so much paltry distraction” (Wilson, ASA, I, I)

Gestures for such characteristics are often used also to refer to personal and social qualities like fame and wealth: It’s a wonderful house, Frank,” he […] made gestures to try to describe its limitless size and wealth, “with great gardens ablaze with all the colours of the rainbow” (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

Cross-cultural differences are very interesting, particularly because of their relationship with etiquette norms, as when a Spanish lower-status speaker adds ‘Perdone la manera de señalar,’ or ‘Aunque esté mal señalar’ to statements like ‘Oh, yes, I have a scar this

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long,’ ‘They used to bake bread-loafs this big around, etc. In Europe or North America one refers to a person’s height with a palm-down horizontal hand; in Colombia the hand is perpendicular to the ground, as the former gesture denotes only animals; in Mexico, the palm-down gesture indicates an object, the second one is used for animals, and a person is indicated with a fist and its thumb sticking up; while Salvadoreans use a fingers-up vertical palm for a person. Distance markers (as for time), especially far distance, are kinesic (‘Very far,’ with a forward raised arm movement) or paralinguistic (a prolonged whistle with or without manual gesture, the latter very common in Latin countries). Distance (i.e. space) and time are often indicated with a similar gesture: He [a Coahuila chief) made one of his slow, impressive gestures--a wave of his hand, indicating great distance and time; and it meant that Adam was to go (Grey, WW, XI)

Those for location do not point as deictics do, but only identify someone or something in space (present, absent or imagined): in a picture I once took of one of Cela’s characters (in Viaje a La Alcarria) and his wife, she, lowering herself onto a low stool as I snapped my camera, is telling me: “¡/Aquí mismico/ se sentó aquel señor!” (‘That gentleman sat right here!): “[…] That,” she said, pointing southwards with her parasol, “is where I should live […]” (Wilson, ASA, II, II)

6.5

Time markers: Past, present, future

6.5.1 Time markers — including Birdwhistell’s (1970) ‘manner markers,’ among them temporal adverbs — refer to different points in the past, the present or the future and to the repetition and duration of events (not to be confused with the occurrence and rhythm of an event, illustrated by ‘event tracers’) and comprise not only adverbs of time and adverbial constructions like ‘tomorrow’ and ‘next year,’ but colloquial expressions like ‘ages,’ ‘Oh, who knows when it happened!,’ accompanied by typical time markers. Temporal references can be: to distant past, actually indicated with rather ample forward or backward movements and with typical congruent drawling (‘A lo-o-ong time ago!’) or simultaneously to or followed by level-register whistling: Cuando fuera, que yo no lo sé, en los tiempos antiguos; allá… — señalaba hacia lejos con la mano (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 98)

to immediate past, generally with short-range forward pointing movements and accelerated paralinguistic tempo (thus similar to close location), as in ‘But he just left!’ ‘Five minutes ago!’, ‘They were here just now! to present, with on-the-spot hand movements (sometimes reinforced with another

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

gesture) that can also express spatial immediacy (e.g. ‘Right here’), even when that present stretches before or after the real ‘now’ (e.g. ‘This year’): “[…] look at me, — look at me, — look me right in the face, — straight, now!” said he, stamping his foot at every pause (Beecher Stowe, UTC, XXXI).

to immediate future, with short-range forward hand movements and with forward halfcircle hand movements, but always indicating temporal advancement (specific or indefinite, as in ‘Right now,’ ‘In no time,’ ‘Very soon,’ ‘One of these days’); to distant future, with gestures similar to those for distant past, but also the semicircular one, as in ‘Next time,’ ‘Many years from now,’ ‘Oooh, God knows when!’ Time and distance identify each other in our own attitude when remembering distant past: gazing abstractedly out of the grated windows before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth: ‘it seems but yesterday […]’ (Dickens, PP, XLII)

6.5.2 Markers of recurrence and duration correspond to adverbial expressions and colloquialisms that express periodicity (e.g. ‘Now and then,’ with a short finger or hand halfcircular forward movement), repetition (e.g. ‘He would tell me e-e-every day,’ ‘All the time,’ ‘He hit and hit and hit,’ all with repeated movements of varying range determined by the verbal expression), rapidity (‘He left like a shot,’ with short movements, often accompanied by whistling o hissing paralinguistic ‘alternants’), slowness (‘Oh, he’s sooo slow!’ with slower and wider-range movements and paralinguistic drawling): si yo pago religiosamente mi cuota un mes detrás de otro — se golpeaba con el puño la palma de la otra mano (Caballero Bonald, DDS, XII).

6.6

Deictics: Pointing at people, things and concepts Deictics are movements, sometimes combined with verbal or paralinguistic utterances, which indicate the spatial location of a person, object or place, whether or not they are present, and of an event in time, signalling even toward abstract concepts. We should differentiate them by the channel engaged.

6.6.1 Kinesic deictics, performed above all with the hand or different head movements (‘There he is’), the forefinger (‘That’s the one!’) or the thumb (‘He’s coming right behind’): Frank pointed a fat little hand towards a chair. “Sit down, ducks” (Wilson, ASA, II, I) ‘All these people.’ With a jerk of his head he indicated the other diners (Huxley, PCP, X)

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Exceptionally an elbow movement could act as a deictic: ‘[…] about that man.’/ ‘Ah! What man?’/ He jerked his elbow to south-east — the direction of the Quiet Woman (Hardy, RN, I, X)

As was said above, Anglo-Saxon speakers typically point at people or things with a nod and with the eyes: ‘Truly I’m old […]. I’m older than her,’ nodding at his wife (Dickens, BH, XXI) “Where’s Joseph?” he asked of the plane driver./ He nodded his head to a tall hump shouldered boy (Dreiser, G, II, XX) I watched him [Herman Teppis] walk away, nodding his head to the people who swarmed to greet him (Mailer, DP, VIII)

The average Spaniard, however (but depending also on personal sensitiveness), does it with a slight upward chin movement (e.g. ‘How much is that fridge, please?’): –Ahí tienes — señalaba al baile con su afilada barbilla — ya me quitaron la pareja que traía hoy (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 212)

This typical (though not precisely polite) Spanish chin-pointing greeting can be also a pronominal deictic with which one identifies the addressee, and (as in the second example) an interrogative deictic equivalent to the Italian hand purse mentioned earlier: ¡Daniel! ¡Dani! […]/ Se volvía Daniel y levantaba la barbilla, como si preguntase (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 32) las saludó sin moverse, con gesto del mentón (Martín Gaite, EV, I, I)

However, while the average Anglo-Saxon speaker just nods, it is not uncommon to see that pronominal deictic as an attitudinal gesture, as is found among the until recently stone-age Sawi of Irian Jaya (formerly Netherlands New Guinea): Narai [a Sawi man] looked through the window and pointed with his chin to a young pig (Richardson, PC, XV) The old artist was laughing bitterly and thrusting his chin in her direction, obviously commenting on her (Doctorow, R, VII)

Independently of culture or social status, the chin deictic is also very common when our hands are occupied: [Fr. Apolinar] apuntándole con el gesto unos libracos y unos papelotes que había sobre una mesa, por tener ocupadas las manos en quitarse teja y manteo (Pereda, S, XV) Se señaló con la barbilla a la cintura del bañador [while carrying something], donde tenía prendidos tres billetes de a duro (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 106)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

Sometimes the head movement is more lateral, as if done with the temple, often combining head and thumb: Without taking his eyes from Athanase’s face, he nodded sideways. ‘Those people there — my parishioners — they are watching us […]’ (MacLennan, TS, XXIII) señalando con la sien hacia puerta, por donde el otro acababa de marcharse (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 117) –¿De qué me habla?/ — ¿De qué va a ser, hija mía? — contestó el carnicero, y señalaba con el pulgar y la sien hacia el jardín (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 120)

We also see a brow-and-lip gesture combination, perhaps without moving the head, but with an inevitably slight muscular chin movement, similar in the following example to the ‘pointed lip gesture’ among the Cuna Indians of San Blas, Panama (Sherzer 1973): ‘She?’ Joe looked at me, making the motion with his lips and eyebrows, ‘She?’ (Dickens GE, VII)

And we can point with only an eyebrow (or eyebrows) raise, often precisely to conceal the deictic, naturally including a frontal or sideways glance (even the latter alone): I caught him with his eye askance on me, and his finger pointed to his forehead […] he whispered — ‘a monomania […]’ (A. Brontë, TWF, XLVII) Ya se iba a guardar, distraído, la petaca […] [Carmelo] le dio en la manga y señalaba levantando las cejas hacia el hombre de los zapatos blancos (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 58)

Sometimes the head movement is combined with gaze and lips: ‘The deceased, you know,’ says Mr Snagsby, twitching his head and right eyebrow towards the staircase (Dickens, BH, XXXII) Juan Morales vio alejarse al señor Lobo. ‘Menos mal,’ le dijo a Higinio con la frente [i.e. as with the chin], los ojos y la boca (López Pacheco, CE, II, IV)

The thumb is often used with present (but perhaps not even looking) or absent referents, sometimes accompanied by a wink: and then he added, with a knowing wink, and a jerk of the thumb towards the interior of the chaise — ’I say — she’s very well’ (Dickens PP, IX) “[…] here’s one who’s double-crossin’ you” […] And without ever glancing at Joan he jerked a thumb, in significant gesture, at her (Grey, BL, XVI)

As for pointing at people with a forefinger, it is impolite in most societies, but permissible for admonishing, accusing or threatening: in a bullying interrogative manner […] he threw his forefinger at Mr. Wopsole — as if it were to mark him out (Dickens, GE, XVIII)

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Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned (Huxley, PC, V) He pointed an accusing finger. “A mean, dirty swine. That’s what you are […]” (Huxley, EG, XXXVII)

Indicating an object or place can also be offensive if it is done authoritatively; but it is regarded as much milder if the whole hand is used, as when asking someone to sit down, even without much of a change in tone of voice: ‘Sit down!’ said Mr. Jordan, irritably pointing Mrs. Morel to horse-hair chair (Lawrence, SL, V)

6.6.2 Kinesic-contactual deictics There are also contact deictics which refer to: a.the interlocutor, touching his hand, forearm, shoulder or knee. Head-tilting to point at a present or absent referent is at times accompanied by nudging or jabbing the other person with the elbow or a finger, as in: ‘[…] Why don’t you’ — he whispered this, and nudged him in the side with his elbow (Dickens, MC, XXVII)

b.to an object we manipulate: Manola. ¡Aquí estamos! (repiquetea sobre el botijo) […] Agua bien fresquita (Buero Vallejo, HE, II) ‘I am almost as far off as ever.’/ ‘How so?’/ Jude slapped his pocket (Hardy, JO, II, VI)

6.6.3 Kinesic-paralinguistic deictics are more common among Latin speakers, as with chinpointing, to which Venezuelans add closed lips and a slightly glottalized and nasalized mid-central vowel. 6.6.4 Kinesic-objectual deictics, using conversational props such as a letter-opener, eyeglasses, a pipe, particularly with an attitude of conscious superiority (but never on the part of a subordinate with his superior), or toasting to a person, object or idea: “Pretty gay down here,” he said, indicating all this with a turn of his whip as he left it behind him (Howells, RSL, VI) “Anyway,” she said, raising her glass, “here’s all success to the History (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

An interesting variant of the kinesic-objectual deictic is the indirect personal deictic, as in: ‘This man,’ she said, tapping the ugly little brown volume,’ says the world’s nothing but thought, Maggie’ (Woolf, Y, 1907)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

6.6.5 There are two particularly interesting kinds of deictics. One (mentioned several times above) comprises, first, those which point toward unseen absent referents that are at least physically accessible, as in: Liddy […] whispered the remainder of the sentence slowly into her ear (Bathsheba’s], inclining her head as she spoke in the direction of the room where Fanny lay [in her coffin] (Hardy, FMC, XLIII) “Oh, meanwhile you just have to wait. You see how things are.” She nodded hear head towards an inside room where Mrs. Channing was lying down with a slight headache (Dreiser, G, I, XXII)

But other times they are not only absent but removed in time, and these temporal references may relate to past or future events (with head-tilting and the thumb gesture, or one of them) or to something that is happening, as when we point at the floor saying, ‘This [/here/] is the best party I ever attended in this town!’ These temporal references are extremely common in conversation, as in ‘What did you think of that girl the other day?’. In fact, we sometimes notice how we make our interlocutor’s gaze turn toward that unseen referent. The gesture can be so subtle that, even with hands on a table or clasping a knee, one of them will point without leaving the other: ‘The man who wrote this article,’ he observes […], nodding at the fire as if he were nodding down at the man from a Mount (Dickens, BH, XXIX)

6.7

Pictographs: Drawing with gestures This category and the following three are the most purely imitative, revealing a high degree of iconicity in our personal interactions. Pictographs (Ekman and Friesen 1969) are movements, mostly manual, that, accompanying speech mostly, trace in the air or on a surface the shape, contour or volume of a bidimensional or tridimensional referent: the so-called hour-glass figure to refer to an attractive woman in many cultures,80 the typical /spiral staircase/ gesture, or tracing an imaginary map or itinerary with a finger, etc.81 Naturally, the gesture by itself, with no words, constitutes an emblem by definition, but the verbal reference it accompanies is not necessarily a lexical description parallel to the kinesic one, for it is precisely an unconscious economy principle that often makes the speaker mention the referent (e.g. lamp) and simultaneously draw with the hand or hands the figure it represents: ‘You know, one of those lamps, aa-all /a very elaborate chandelier/ and a /richly carved/ desk. And you should see his secretary [whistling]+/hour-glass figure/!’; but it can be due also to verbal deficiency (betrayed by the pause preceding the gesture or the accompanying paralinguistic hesitation alternant), as with ‘Aaah-’ for want of the correct word, ‘chandelier’; or simply to mental laziness. Naturally, syllabic drawling, can serve precisely, even

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when using the referent’s correct name, to emphasize and evoke its image more vividly (‘They just bought a huuuge sofa with biiig rouuund arms’). But, as for the hour-glass gesture denoting a woman’s body, the pictograph can be used just to emphasize the characteristics of the referent, as when adding whistling or any other alternant to the visual description: His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips (Joyce, U, 234)

We should remember that, as happens often with gestures, we usually initiate a pictograph immediately before mentioning the referent, which shows once more the frequent anticipatory nature of kinesic behaviors, as discussed in Chapter 5, Volume II. As for the possibility of ‘paralinguistic pictographs,’ any nonverbal utterance (like the one in Joyce’s example) is only an accompaniment, that is, a qualifier, lacking the visual iconic value directly related to the referent.

6.8

Echoics: Imitating what sounds

6.8.1 Beyond the pictographic visual imitations, I have identified as echoics the iconic references or audible models produced in contact with objects or with our own body and as oral paralinguistic utterances.82 There are two kinds of oral echoics: a.onomatopoeias, established written representations like the cat’s ‘meowing’ or the ‘gurgling’ in the drain pipe, the least iconic (despite their morphological flexibility as nouns and verbs), as proved, for instance, by the illogical cross-cultural differences in imitating animals (e.g. Spanish ‘quí-qui-ri-quí’ and English ‘ka-ka-doodle-do’),83 and the unnecessary limitations in their written representations; b.the generally unwritten forms, paralinguistic echoics within alternants (Chapter 4, Volumen II): imitations of animals (the pigeon’s ‘cooing’), nature (the brook’s ‘bubbling’), mechanical artifacts (the engine’s ‘whirring’), etc.: Ga Ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Black Liz is our hen/…/ Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook (Joyce, U, 315) The train crossed a nullah. ‘Pomper, pomper, pomper,’ was the sound that the wheels made as they trundled over the bridge moving very slowly (Forster, PI, XIV)

But my vocal imitation of the lion’s ‘roaring’ would be much more faithful to its model than this written onomatopoeia with which I just referred to it. If these sounds are accompanied by gesture (e.g. /the turning of the whirring airplane’s propellor/), then

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

they belong to the category of ‘kinephonographs,’ although often the kinesic part does not resemble its model: [Inge, imitating an owl] “Ee-wik, ee-wik, ee-wik […] Not the big kind that goes WooWoo-Woo. The little owl” (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

But there are such thing as kinesic echoics, if we imitate a horse’s galloping by rapping on a table, or the Spanish guitarist imitating the rataplan of a religious procession’s drum by knocking on his instrument’s wood; and also kinesic-paralinguistic echoics, if we do the horse’s galloping while emitting a ‘tu-ku-tuk, tu-ku-tuk’; both identified below as kinephonographs: En la guerra […] Con una ametralladora, pa-pa — pa-pa-pa… (Aldecoa, FS, 100)

6.8.2 On the other hand, there are movements that, interestingly enough, accompany many echoics without imitating any real movement (because of our tendency to imagine many sounds visibly), either because no movement accompanies the acoustic model (e.g. a radio station monotonously repeating its signature tune, which we still ‘imitate’ with a repetitive gesture), or because we cannot see the movement. They are instances, therefore, of ‘false iconicity,’ or rather, pseudokinetographs, as we fail to truly imitate a real but invisible movement, and they must be clearly differentiated both from kineticparalinguistic constructs (based simply on a moving performance) and from the pure echoic ones. In fact, they reveal the human tendency to relate sound to movement (and vice versa) when there is no such relationship, depending very much on our own personality and cultural expressiveness.

6.9

Kinetographs: Imitating what moves Kinetographs, one of the categories established by Ekman and Friesen (1972: 360) as “movements which depict a bodily action or some non-human physical action,” are different because they have only kinesic iconicity and are accompanied by a vocal sound that does not really imitate anything, being at most pseudoechoics: how someone was running, a boat rocked, an eagle soared, or two boxers hit each other. In reality, any combination of paralanguage and kinesics without iconicity belongs in categories like ‘externalizers’ or ‘identifiers.’ However, we must not hastily deny any iconicity, for there can be other iconic signs of, for instance, a cultural nature, like the greeting between to men of the Caucasus: tapping each other’s hips, a vestige of their old costume of checking for arms. Likewise, hidden or very subtle iconicity in a psychiatric patient can provide important clues about attitude or unsuspected feelings that the client is actually performing, as in the “quasicourting” behaviors studied by Scheflen (1965), Mahl’s (1968) interpretations or Ekman and Friesen’s (1974) nonverbal

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“leakage.” We could, in fact, elaborate cultural kinetographic inventories covering kinetic references to different activities (sports, folklore, crafts, etc.): Echa./ Fernando dio una palmada e hizo el gesto de que el otro le lanzara la botella (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 129)

Finally, just as we speak of pseudoechoics, we also should acknowledge pseudokinetographs, actually metaphoric kinetographs, which they simply give visual form to a verbal expression: Mr. Job Trotter […] made a motion with his arm, as if he were working an imaginary pump-handle: thereby intimating that he considered himself as undergoing the process of being pumped (Dickens, PP, XVI)

6.10

Kinephonographs: Imitating movement and sound Ekman and Friesen (1969) did not seem to identify imitations of a model made up of both kinetic and sound activities. The imitation of the horse’s galloping by rapping our fingers on a table, a mere kinesic echoic, becomes part of a kinephonograph if its echoic iconicity is complemented by running our ‘galloping’ hand across the table, thus evoking the running of the horse by means of a true kinetograph, actually a double iconicity which should be identified as a kinephonograph. Kinephonographs are formed: (a) by sound and movement produced by the same type of activity, as when we imitate the beating of drumsticks or a tam-tam by hitting a surface with one or two hands; (b) by sound in one activity and movement in another, as with the paralinguistic imitation of the drum sound and the kinesic one of the drumsticks, or the vocal imitation of a steam locomotive and the kinesic one of the wheel mechanism; (c) by sound in two activities and movement in another, like the horse’s paralinguistickinesic galloping by hitting a surface with special-effect hoofs: El Cuba imitó el repique de los tambores a paso lento. Se acompañaba con las manos, golpeando en el aire a compás (Caballero Bonald, DDS, II, IV)

As was said for kinetographs, it is very interesting to observe the phenomenon of iconicity across cultures because peoples who are more expressive kinesically, like Latins, Arabs or Mediterraneans in general, tend to use paralinguistic imitations in situations in which, for instance, we see English speakers utilize with great precision a legitimate onomatopoeic verb or noun from the particularly rich repertoire of their native tongue (Poyatos 1988d). When once at the beginning of my life in North America, I tried to explain to mechanics what happened to my car by imitating the sound it made, they would just say: “You mean it whirs?, or “It clatters?”).84

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

6.11

Ideographs: Giving visual form to thoughts According to Ekman and Friesen (1969: 68, after Efron’s definition [1941]), ideographs are movements “which sketch a path or direction of thought, tracing the itinerary of a logical journey,” imagining certain situations, as in: Helen sighed as her reverie fled, and getting up, obeyed the monitor (E. Brontë, WH, VI)

Actually, they can be movements, or static postures, accompanied by a paralinguistic utterance, or viceversa (i.e. paralanguage dominating). They do not illustrate what is being said, but function by themselves and not necessarily as emblems, unless they have no ambiguity and refer iconically to what is evoked. We all use this category, and can remember eloquent ideographs in the hands and faces of actors like Olivier and, in a more flambuoyant fashion, de Sicca and Mastroiani, their unworded or hardly worded recollections or anticipations of a very pleasant experience, a great deed, a very difficult situation that unfolds fearful complications, or a beautiful woman. Sometimes ideographs may contain iconicty (quite valuable, as mentioned above, in certain clinical instances), as when a woman’s spinning on her heels while tracing her romantic thoughts about her lover are clearly evocative of dancing: “Bless my dear eyes!” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated windows before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth: “it seems but yesterday that […]” (Dickens, PP, XLII) ‘What did they talk about?’ I asked her [Ántonia]. / She sighed and shook her head. ‘Oh, I don’t know! About music, and the woods, and about God, and when they were young’ (Cather, MA, XIV) ‘Do you remember the lake?’ she said [remembering her past], in an abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said ‘lake’ […] her look, passing through all that time and that emotion […] settled on him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away […] she wiped her eyes (Woolf, MD, 31) “I’ve seen so many — so many!” [dead men in the desert]/ Dismukes paused again while his broad breast heaved with a sigh (Grey, WW, VIII) The grizzled freighters, the long-haired scouts, the sturdy pioneers all had a keen and kindly eye for the youngsters [in the caravan], and some of them shook their heads gravely (Grey, FC, II) [Annixter, thinking of a wonderful future with Hilma as his wife] from the deep rugged recesses of his being, something rose, expanding. He opened his arms wide. An immense happiness overpowered him (Norris, O, II, II) She [Fräulein Hedwig] told all this [about the man she loved] to Philip with pretty sighs and becoming blushes (Maugham, OHB, XXIII)

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6.12

Event tracers: How things happened While an ideograph traces the itinerary of a thought, an event tracer, usually a longer behavior, is a kinesic-paralinguistic act which follows the occurrence of an event being described, that is, following “the rhythm or pacing of an event” (Ekman 1977:49, using the term “rhythmic”). Unlike, therefore, an ideograph or externalizer, the referent is also described with words (e.g. ‘Well, the meal was fine, but then the speeches went on and on, for almost two hours!’). Its iconicity appears only when the event tracer blends, as usually happens, with another category, for instance: ‘The floor show was very elaborate, with these gorgeous girls /face-and-hand gesture/ dancing /emblematic kinetograph/ all over the place and around us /space markers/, then the guys came in /kinetograph/, then the whole orchestra in the background /space marker/, and then more dancing /kinetograph/, all verbalized descriptions accompanied by congruent paralinguistic voice qualifiers.

6.13

Identifiers: Giving visual form to concepts

6.13.1 Identifiers — the second of the three essential categories in speech along with speech markers and externalizers — are more or less conspicuous kinesic behaviors (always complemented by paralinguistic qualifiers) with which, personally and culturally, one literally gives bodily form, above all with face and hands, to abstract concepts (/impossible/, /absurd/, /a certain something/), physical and moral qualities we attach to people and animals (/soft/, /tough/, /cautious/, /disgusting/) and to qualities of objectual and environmental referents (/dirty/, /smooth/, /soft (music)/, /murky (day)/, /crystal clear/): [Denis, admiring the scenery] Curves, curves; he repeated the words slowly [..] Curves, no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle (Huxley, CY, I)

Although a paralinguistic identifier generally coincides with a kinesic one, it can be independent, as when expressing physical or moral ‘strength’ with tense articulation and glottalization, or ‘soft’ with drawling and equally soft articulation (in fact, an armless person can express those qualities with paralanguage only). On the other hand, some identifiers can be seen as speech markers if they seem to punctuate the words they illustrate, as when saying: ‘It’s so /unnerving/ to /face/ that /barrier between the two of /us/ that in the end you are just /exhausted/!’ We could perhaps trace the origin of some emblems in their recurrent use as identifiers, for instance: the /fist/ we show to denote ‘strength,’ the hand-rocking gesture for /so-so/ or /wishy-washy/; but what is the innate or inherited psycho-kinetic mechanism whereby the thoughts of ‘strength’ and ‘wishy-washy’ are given their visual bodily expression in the first place?

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

6.13.2 Sometimes the determining factor can be precisely the cultural iconicity, as when a Spaniard imitates the bullfighter’s dangereous and horrid act of driving his sword into the bull, thus signifying someone’s unsafe and reckless attitude. On the other hand, identifiers are a good example of what can be termed primary iconicity, when it is a direct association (/barrier/, /soft/, /exhausted/), or derived iconocity, if it is arbitrarily established by usage simply because speakers imitate a model which finally acquires a truly emblematic status. The latter is what happens with certain identifying behaviors initiated by actors and other public figures, such as the high-brow gesture displayed in movies of the 1930s and imitated then by young people as a gesture of sophistication, which we then see as both identifier and emblem. Another interesting aspect is that, since identifiers do not have the concrete (and shared) meaning emblems have, they do not require the latter’s rigid kinesic articulation and therefore depend much on the speaker’s expressive style. Besides, they are susceptible of much individual inventiveness and stylistic variants; when we say that someone is very ‘refined,’ ‘gentlemanly,’ or ‘ladylike,’ we are actually referring to the person’s nonverbal behaviors and very specifically to speech markers, identifiers and externalizers, important parts of the structure language-paralanguage-kinesics. Finally, identifiers lend themselves also to interpersonal borrowing, which can be said in general of any other categories, only much more so those more deeply rooted in the person.

6.14

Externalizers: Our reactions made visual

6.14.1 Externalizers are reactions to other people’s past, present, anticipated or imagined reality, to what we or others have said, are saying or will say, silence, do or not do, to past, present, anticipated or imagined events, to our own somatic phenomena, to animal and environmental agents, to esthetic experiences and spiritual experiences. Externalizers, speech markers and identifiers, are therefore the three most characteristic categories of each cultural and personal style, which should incite researchers — beginning with the linguists — to identify and analyze in depth what exactly it is to ‘communicate’ in British or North American English, in French, Castilian, Andalusian or Mexican Spanish, etc., that is, in each own native language and culture. 6.14.2 Any systematic study, whether ethnological, sociolinguistic, clinical or even literary, should classify externalizers as suggested in Fig. 6.2, ‘Semiotic-communicative processes of externalizers.’ This involves: their origin (or first referent of the external manifestation); this referent elicits a stimulus which then triggers a reaction of a specific nature or modality; this reaction is manifested in a person as the externalizer proper through one or more encoding sign systems, susceptible in turn to be perceived by a receiver in one or more of his decoding sensory channels.85

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REFERENT

ORIGIN

STIMULUS

REACTION MODALITY

Self-generated

EXTERNALIZER

RECEIVER

ENCODING SIGN SYSTEM

DECODING CHANNEL

Paralanguage Sensory

Auditory

Human Kinesics Animal Proxemics Objectual

Physiological

Visual Chemical reaction

Environmental Events Emotional

Thermal reaction

Dermal

Literary Dermal reaction

Musical Mental Spiritual

Kinesthetic Objectual

Figure 6.2.Semiotic-communicative processes of externalizers

A.Self-generated. Some externalizers originate within our own organism without an apparent external agent, although sometimes we can trace their genesis to external causes (thus we could identify them also as any of the referents shown in the first column), for instance: ambience temperature > bladder disfunction > tensing of facial muscle tonus during an interaction (all triggered perhaps by the anxiety caused by a situation). Besides this kinesic example (of physiological origin and coding), a selfgenerated externalizer can also manifest itself through paralanguage (e.g. the higher pitch due to the muscular contraction caused by physical or psychological pain), proxemics (e.g. cowering in a corner due to depression, or sitting on the edge of a chair out of social tension), a chemical reaction (e.g. body odors revealing lack of self-care, the smell of impending death, reported by some of my student nurses), a dermal reaction (e.g. pallor, blanching, reddening, blushing), a thermal reaction (e.g. fever, sexual arousal), and an objectual cause (e.g., body-soiled clothes betraying depression [cf. Kahn 1978], use of wigs signifying hair loss due to cancer, excessive makeup revealing a mental disorder). On the other hand, our mental activity (e.g. memories, the thought of a satisfied desire) elicits also many of these behaviors: I saw his anguish as, suddenly smiting his forehead, he turned abruptly to the window, and, looking upward at the placid sky, murmured passionately, ‘O God, that I might die!’ (A. Brontë, TWF, XXXVIII)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

wringing my hands in silent rage and anguish (A. Brontë, TWF, XL) I knew by the contraction of her brow, the tight compression of her lips, and wringing of her hands, that meantime a violent conflict between reason and passion was silently passing within (A. Brontë, TWF, XLV) Il raconta comment il avait falsifiè un bilan. Son visage [..], prit de ce fait une expression tout à fait remarquable, transfiguré et comme spiritualisé, par la pensèe qui’l avait dupé son prochain (Montherlant, C, III) He frowned to himself; this past of his was becoming importunate! (Huxley, EG, III)

As any other category, an externalizer can include what below is identified as objetadaptor: She was silent. Her pale lips quivered, and her fingers trembled with agitation, as she nervously entwined them in the hair chain to which was appended her small gold watch (A. Brontë, TWF, XLV)

B.Human. The referent can be someone else, either in direct interaction (both sensorially and mentally, since sensations, like a glance or a word, are evaluated and intellectualized), or in indirect interaction, not less efficacious, and also eliciting in turn sensations and thoughts, as can happen with a letter, or the odor of a deceased person’s clothes. In either case, its stimulus, be it verbal (e.g. a scornful word someone says or did say) or nonverbal (e.g. ‘that embrace,’ lacrimation), causes in our organism an initial reaction or activity which can be: sensorial (e.g. the embrace prompted by the other person’s emotional facial expression), physiological (e.g. a man’s pupil dilation before a scantily clad woman), affective (e.g. love caused by the reading of a letter), or mental (e.g. trying to remember the name of someone we see). That reaction, then, is in turn encoded (manifested) through one or more of the channels or sign systems, which produces the externalizer proper, that is: verbal language (e.g. expressing love), paralanguage (e.g. a pleasurable exhalation), kinesics (e.g. a gesture of despair), a proxemic shift (e.g. stepping away from someone), a chemical reaction (e.g. joyful tears, emotional sweat during an interview), a dermal reaction (e.g. blushing triggered by what a person says or does, or, we believe, thinks; or even by that person’s own blushing), a thermal reaction (e.g. a rise in a couple’s body temperature while dancing close together), or an objectual act (e.g. a girl engraving her sweetheart’s name on a tree trunk). Therefore, if this happens (not necessarily) in the presence of another person (not precisely the externalizer’s origin), the decoding final phase of perception of the externalizer will be as sound, visual image, smell, dermal contact or kinesthetic sensation: [after being recriminated by his wife] He bit his lip and bent his eyes upon the ground in silence for a while (A. Brontë, TWF, XXXVII)

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Mr Marvell [still tormented by the Invisible Man’s company] […] looking very weary, nervous, and uncomfortable, and inflating his cheeks at frequent intervals (Wells, IM, XIV) [when Hartright speaks to Mrs. Catherick about Sir Percival] Her colour was rising, and her hands were at work again smoothing her gown (Collins, WW, 509) [At a meeting] Lyman paled under his dark skin at the direct attack […] He strove to speak, but caught his breath, stammering (Norris, O, II, IV) She [Eleanor] felt her sister-in-law [who is watching her lawyer husband acting at a trial] stiffen with nervousness and clasp her little bag tightly (Woolf, Y, 1891) The man looked at Gowan. His jaw dropped into an expression of imbecile glee. What teeth he had were stained and ragged (Faulkner, S, VI) [When she is seen by the butcher with the hook she was going to steal] Hot in her cheeks, her eyes, her forehead, came a rush of guilty blood! She tried to laugh (Huxley, EG, V) what made it more maddening was the fact that the young man [whose name he cannot remember] was so good-looking, carried himself so well […] “I shan’t know what to call him,” he said to himself; and his right cheek began to twitch, as though some living creature had been confined beneath the skin (Huxley, EG, III) [after waking up] He lay for a few minutes, shaking his head free from the wild, hodge-podge dream (Hailey, H, “Thursday,” 1) “France is finished. Do you understand me?”/ Madame Houdet’s rouged cheeks trembled a little, her lipsticked old mouth twitched. “Jamais, Yves, jamais,” she said (Wilson, ASA, II, II).

Sometimes the reaction is so intense that it is simultaneously channelled through different systems: The first sentence of the words I had addressed to her made her pause in her occupation […] The second sentence literally petrified her. The cloth she had been holding dropped from her hands — her lips fell apart — all the little colour that there was naturally in her face left it in an instant (Collins, WW, 126)

C.Animal. Human externalizers triggered by animal referents can be quite similar to the last ones, since animals are susceptible of producing sensory, physiological or psychological reactions like fearful sweat, repugnance, affection, etc.: she [Helen] picked up the little [sick] cat, and […] caressed (with sickening reluctance!) the dank bedraggled fur. The tears came into her eyes, overflowed, ran down her cheeks./ “It’s too awful […],” she repeated in a breaking voice (Huxley, EG, XXIV)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

D.Objectual. As referents, the objects that surround us can provoke all sorts of reactions, such as the feeling of intimacy emphasized by the ticking of a clock, the startling reaction to the ringing of a telephone, the reflex ingressive interdental fricative elicited by a pricking object, or the emotions generated by looking through a family photo album or at a concentration camp picture or a painting; and they can also be chemical reactions (tears triggered by an onion, sweat caused by warm clothes, etc.), and even ordinary mental reactions like the thoughts elicited by any of those objects: The solitude, the fire-light, the harmony of soft hangings and old dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security (Wharton, R, XXXV) Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of the door-bell, and she rose to her feet (Wharton, R, XXXIII)

E.Environmental. Environmental referents, from a breathtaking landscape, a thunderstorm, the architectural surroundings or the bustle of a city to the many visual, tactile and kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory sensations — through spaces, volumes, textures, colors and light — can trigger all types of reactions (fear, mental associations, claustrophobia, a paralinguistic ‘Aaah!’ of awe, etc.), not infrequently to certain humanizing qualities of their own, particularly sounds. The tree shrieked again. Morel liked it./ ‘It’s music,’ he said. ‘It sends me to sleep,’/ […] To Paul it became almost a demoniacal noise (Lawrence, SL, IV) “Surprise Valley!” he cried, in wondering recognition./ Fay Larkin waved her arms as if they were wings to carry her swiftly downward, and her plaintive cry fitted the wildness of her manner and the lonely heights where she leaned (Grey, RT, XVI) A mournful sighing wind breathed through them, with a steady accompaniment of low murmur of tumbling stream, in itself a lonely sound (Grey, LWT, I)

Specifically, the light effects on a speaker’s face can show new dimensions of that person: She took one [cigarette] with an unsteady hand, and putting it to her lips, leaned forward to draw her light from his. In the indistinctness [of twilight] the little red gleam lit up the lower part of her face, and he saw her mouth tremble into a smile (Wharton, HM, I, VI)

F.Events. What is happening, has happened or is going to happen (even if it never does) are sensibly (or so imagined) and intelligibly perceived referents in their physical, spatial and temporal dimensions. They can elicit sensible reactions (e.g. the familiar tears at a wedding), physiological malfunctions (e.g. neuralgia from social anxiety, micturition in a stressful situation), affective responses (e.g. satisfaction at one’s own party, grief at a funeral), mental reactions (e.g. associations, memories) and random behaviors (e.g. biting the lower lip when entering a public place):

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A long pause succeeded. The old man, with increased restlessness, changed his posture several times (Dickens, MC, III) Bathsheba tried to preserve an absolute neutral countenance, and all the motion she made was that of closing lips which had previously been a little parted (Hardy, FMC, XIX) [When Helen wants to try again to steal something from the butcher, who has seen her] A shudder ran through her. But she frowned, she set her teeth. She was determined to go through with it (Huxley, EG, V)

G.Literary. The experience of literary reading (or listening to it) involves the appreciation of style and that multisystemic metamorphoses whereby we recreate through a visual text the writer’s experiences during his or her original creation (as studied in Volume III). This can elicit reactions resulting in paralanguage, kinesics, tears, etc.: Upon perusing this [in a book], she turned scarlet and bit her lip (A. Brontë, TWF, XXXIV)

As well, this subcategory should include any reaction caused by an epistolary text: [reading a letter] “I went to look for you at the hotel,” he read slowly, frowning over the small and hurried script (Huxley, EG, XXI)

H.Musical. Listening to, playing or conducting music can elicit different reactions: La hora, el tiempo, la soledad, la voz y la destreza del que cantaba, causó admiración y contento en los oyentes, los cuales estuvieron quedos (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXVII) Young Toolley conducted with the usual inimitable grace, bending in swan-like undulations from the loins and tracing luscious arabesques on the air with his waving arms, as though he were dancing to the music (Huxley, PCP, II)

I.Spiritual. Spiritual referents constitute the ultimate in the scale of referent-externalizer relationship, a human being’s most intimate experience and, in its purest forms, the least mediated of all, save for the possible secondary effect of the surrounding environment, of other persons present or of certain events. It can represent for a ‘semiolinguist’ the utmost investigation of sign processes, for those manifestations are profusely documented, not only in biographies and autobiographies of persons in the different Christian churches (besides the mystics of past centuries), but among many Christians today who experience the supernatural phenomena described in the New Testament (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:1–11): as I entered the chapel one day, I saw an image [..] Christ, all lacerated […] I was all agitated […] for it represented what He went through for us […] my heart seemed to split, and fell prostrated […] with much shedding of tears (Teresa of Ávila, V, IX [my trans.]).86

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

6.14.3 One must not forget that each externalizer can in turn trigger other externalizers, that is, to one primary externalizer succeeds a secondary one, and a tertiary one is not infrequent, precisely because of our being increasingly conscious of their affective nature, as happens with a first blushing reaction which triggers a still more intense one, and this one a new verbal or nonverbal activity of accumulated embarrassment: ‘I want you […] to stay here a little, till that shocking colour is somewhat abated, and your eyes have recovered something of their natural expression […].’/ Of course, such a remark had no effect in reducing the ‘shocking colour’; on the contrary, I felt my face glow with redoubled fires, kindled by a complication of emotions, of which indignant, swelling anger was the chief (A. Brontë, TWF, XVII) ‘[…] be careful coming down those stairs. They are terribly slippery.’/ Illidge blushed. ‘Not at all,’ he muttered and blushed still more deeply — a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair — as he realized the imbecility of what he had said (Huxley, PCP, IV) She flushed slightly, and then, conscious of an embarrassment new and strange to her, blushed rosy red (Grey, LT, IV)

But this reaction can be also an interpersonal one, for instance, blushing at seeing someone else blush: It was the flush that came to her husband’s face that brought a responding flush to Marie Hélène’s sallow neck (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

6.14.4 Random behaviors These behaviors, an ideal interdisciplinary topic, offer special incentive for the researcher in different fields. They respond to hidden states and past, present or anticipated motives, and (although only socially observable but not interactively) our cointeractors perceive them much better than we do ourselves as normal or pathological behaviors. They are channelled mainly through: a.
kinesics, for instance: the male politician who upon descending from his automobile puts his hand in and out of his jacket pocket, touches his tie or his shirt cuff; lip pursing, touching the nose, an earlobe (as former U.S. President Reagan admitted having done all his life) or an eyebrow, light scratching, stroking one’s chair arm, the shop attendant tapping on the counter, fidgeting with cutlery, fixing the crease of the trousers, doodling wit a pen, a male’s stroking of his bare chest at the beach, etc., and those that may betray certain temporary or a long-term pathological condition: Aaron [a little boy, when asked to sing] replied by rubbing his forehead against his mother’s shoulder […] after a few signs of coyness, consisting chiefly in rubbing the backs of his hands over his eyes, and then peeping between them at Master Marner […] he began (Eliot, SM, X)

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Mr. Pickwick took two or three turns up and down the room; and rubbing his chin with his left hand as he did so, appeared lost in thought (Dickens, PP, LVI) ‘Now, sir,’ observed Martin, biting his lip,’ this is a large town […]’ (Dickens, MC, XIII) [Sophy] mused for a moment, tapping her lip with the pen (Wharton, R, IV) “Ivar,” she [Alexandra] said suddenly, beginning to trace the pattern on the oilcloth with her forefinger […] (Cather, P, I, IV) [little Phil] sat bent over his paper, the tip of his tongue between his teeth, his face intent and serious; drawing, drawing (Huxley, PCP, XIII) Dolly Stokesay, came down the stairs […] dragging her tired, worn-out little body [..] She held a hot-water bottle in one hand, letting it bump against the banisters in listless depression as she descended (Wilson, ASA, I, IV) [Elvira to Gerald, of whose son she is mistress] “I suppose you’d better tell me now what’s your attitude to Robin and me,” she remarked, picking at the torn quick of her thumb (Wilson, ASA, II, I) He stood there, reading it [the composition Holden had written for him], and sort of stroking his bare chest and stomach […] He was always stroking his stomach and his chest. He was mad about himself (Salinger, CR, VI)

b.paralanguage: sighs, throat-clearings from social anxiety or when passing others in a deserted building or street, in shared washrooms, the first notes of a song the shop attendant keeps singing as he taps the counter, lingual clicks, etc.: Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air) (Woolf, MD, 36)

Often paralanguage and kinesics are joined in a casual, involuntary combination: The same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her fingers began to play with a log tortoise-shell paper-knife (Wilde, PDG, IV)

c. proxemics: short advances and retreats while conversing, or leaning forward or backwards while standing (but not as speech markers), moving to-and-fro, etc: For a quarter of an hour he [Dorian] walked up and down the room biting his lip, and thinking (Wilde, PDG, XIII)

These mostly unconscious acts can be easily observed, particularly where social anxiety runs high, according to personality and one’s interactive fluency quotient. Listening to a colleague from the audience, I noticed how at intervals he (seated behind a long table shared with two other speakers) rearranged his sheets of paper by holding them vertically and tapping them once against the table, how he recurrently scratched lightly

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

one side of the neck with a finger, took that finger to an ear and then how he stuck the same finger inside his shirt collar when someone asked him a critical (or not easy to answer) question, adjusting his eyeglasses once in a while.87 6.14.4.1 Naturally, the more psychologically realistic type of literature contains numerous examples of these behaviors88: Paróse Sancho Panza a rascar la cabeza, para traer a la memoria la carta, y ya se ponía sobre un pie, y ya sobre otro; unas veces miraba al suelo, otras al cielo, y al cabo de haberse roido la mitad de la yema de un dedo […] (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXVI) Los que jugando a los bolos, cuando acaso se les tuerce la bola, tuercen el cuerpo juntamente, pareciéndoles que, así como ellos lo hacen, lo hará ella (Alemán, GA, II, III, 1)89 ‘I know what you mean, Ralph,’ said she [Milly], nervously playing with her watchguard and tracing the figure on the rug with the point of her tiny foot (A. Brontë, TWF, XXXII) said Sam, with a touch of the hat, which always preceded his entering into conversation with his master (Dickens, PP, XXII), Quickly becoming depressed again, he sighed; looked into the crown of his hat, as if for comfort; put it on without finding any; and slowly departed (Dickens, MC, XIX) Mr George looks distrustfully from the painted ceiling to the ground, from the ground to [three persons in succession], and […] to the painted ceiling again; often in his perplexity changing the leg on which he rests (Dickens, BH, XXVII) His attentive face [Sir Percival] relaxed a little. But I saw one of his feet, softly, quietly, incessantly beating on the carpet under the table, and I felt that he was secretly as anxious as ever (Collins, WW, 190) “But it would seem a little bit ridiculous to you if I married Carl?”/ Emil fidgeted. The issue seemed to him too far-fetched to warrant discussion (Cather, P, II, XI) Jennie paled, put her thumb to her lip and stood irresolute, not knowing how to meet the situation […] You belong to me,” he said […] When can I see you?”/ “Oh, you mustn’t,” she said, her fingers going nervously to her lips. “I can’t see you — I — (Dreiser, JG, XVI) Gabriel laughed rather nervously and patted his tie reassuringly (Joyce, D, ‘The Dead’) Just as happens […] when one person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored […] does not like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some iron scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but saying nothing (Woolf, MD, 31)

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Under such stimulation, Mady’s face did strange things. The tip of her nose moved, and her brows, which needed no help from cosmetics, rose with nervous eagerness, repeatedly, as if she were trying to clear her eyesight (Bellow, H, 90) “[…] You will remember that you disappeared without a trace”/ McLeod looked at his knuckle. “I had come to the conclusion […]” (Mailer, BS, XXIV)

However, if we consider all those acts, we must admit, first, that they can be either conscious or unconscious, as in this other instance (in which we can see ourselves): ‘I know what you mean, Ralph,’ said she [Milly], nervously playing with her watchguard and tracing the figure on the rug with the point of her tiny foot (A. Brontë, TWF, XXXII)

Secondly, that it may not be casual in a given person, but recurrent (therefore even foreseeable in his or her repertoire) in a specific situation, as in these two other examples: I was burning with anger; but I suppressed all outward manifestations of it, and only bit my lip [which one?] and pretended to arrange my work (A. Brontë, TWF, XXVII) Eitel touched the bald spot on his head. “I don’t know if I really ought to talk about him, Collie, but — Eitel sighed as if to surrender to the attractions of conversation (Mailer, DP, XVI)

6.14.5 As for the iconicity of externalizers, if we agree with Sebeok (1976: 1442) regarding “multisensory iconic representations [no doubt insufficiently studied] that pervade human and other animal existence in everyday life,” we find that the activity represented by each of the somatic channels can be socially measured by the degree of the physical or chemical quality involved, that is, its intensity, as well as by its duration. In other words, if we do not limit the concept of iconicity to visual resemblance, we can speak of the iconic relationship of the degree of flushing to the embarrassment it represents, of the intensity of a woman’s perfume to her readiness for flirting, or of the tension in a person’s embrace during a wake to the pain he or she feels, etc.

6.15

Self-adaptors: Contacting ourselves

6.15.1 I have identified as self-adaptors those movements or stationary positions in which one or more parts of the body come in contact with itself, of varying length and preceded and followed by onset and outset movements. We can distinguish among them the three kinesic categories of gestures, manners and postures. Except for contacts with oneself that are anatomically impossible,90 their functions are: a.to adopt universal, culture-specific or personal postures in order to be seated, standing, kneeling, squatting (deep squat with arms around knees, cowboy squat, etc.), reclined

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

or lying, cross-legged, arms akimbo, hands behind one’s back while walking, etc. Postural habits vary mainly with age (e.g. the infant takes a foot to the mouth, while an adult rests his head on his hand when worried), sex (e.g. knees together and hands on the lap is the prescribed sitting posture for the Japanese female), culture (the Japanese sitting cross-legged on a cushion), status (e.g. the Anglo-Saxon top male superior, but not his subordinate, sitting with hands clasped behind his head), occupation (e.g. the priest’s clasped hands against the abdomen), clothing (e.g. hands in jeans’ back pockets), and situational context (e.g. the social gathering cross-armed stance with a drink in the hand): Other [Navajo] Indians […] joined the circle, and sitting before the fire clasped their knees and talked (Grey, HD, III) The preacher […] joined gently the fingers of each hand, forming a frail cage by the union of their tips (Joyce, PAYM, III)

b.to facilitate or attend to some somatic needs, rubbing the hands from cold (in North America also slapping oneself on the sides with crisscrossing arms), wiping tears (children with their knuckles), children’s thumb-sucking, etc.: ‘A good lad!’ cried the father, breathing on his cold hands, and feebly chafing them against each other (Dickens, MC, XVIII) Morel came down, ruffled and yawning, from his afternoon sleep. He scratched his grizzled head, he plodded in his stocking feet (Lawrence, SL, XII) He touched the tip of his nose tenderly and waggled it around to stop an itch (Steinbeck, GW, XXI) Bill blew his breath into one large fist, then the other (Malamud, T, 76) Evelyn lay back on the pillows rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hands (Doctorow, R, VIII)

c.to conceal some somatic needs, while sneezing, yawning, coughing, spitting, etc., which develops ontogenetically and culturally and according to social norms: [The German Captain] sneezed three times inwardly, one forefinger pressed firmly to his upper lip as he had been taught to do in childhood, to avoid sneezing in church (Porter, SF, III)

d.to perform some body-adaptor activities, with food, drink, masticatories, etc. (e.g. licking one’s fingers, wiping one’s lips before and after drinking at the table, holding a glass or cup with one or, as expected of Japanese women, both hands, eating in a regressive child-like way), subnutritional products (e.g. taking snuff, manipulating chewing gum from the mouth), jewelry (e.g. turning one’s ring with the thumb of the same hand), all serving as identifiers of age and socioeducational status:

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she said, giving her hat a little pat on one side as she looked in the looking-glass […] She buttoned up the row of leather buttons on her taylor-made suit and gave herself a little pat here and there, as if she were making ready […] She laid her white gloves in a business-like way on the table (Woolf, Y, 1910) He [Josef] adjusted his flat silver watch and replaced it in his waistcoat pocket, smoothing the creases over the curve of his belly (Greene, ST, III, I) [the small-town rustic woman] Come un trozo de patata sin separar la cuchara de la boca y sorbe el caldo (López Pacheco, CE, I, I)

e.to perform some objectual activities, like writing, reading, etc., and handling those objects. Her mouth [an elderly lady’s while writing] was pursed up to almost a youthful shape as she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the lip accompanied every downstroke (Hardy, HE, I) the prefect […] was speaking earnestly, in a soft querulous voice […] As he spoke he wrinkled a little his freckled brow, and bit, between his phrases, at a tiny bone pencil (Joyce, PAYM, V) Don Marcial chupaba la puntita de su pequeño lápiz copiativo y apuntaba en el mármol (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 208) Se mojaba el pulgar con la lengua, al pasar cada hoja (Sánchez Ferlosio, J, 266)

f.to facilitate or block sensorial reception or emission, as with a cupped hand against one ear to hear better, forming a visor with one hand over the eyes to see better, etc. se puso uno que estaba a mi lado sus manos en las narices, y apartándose dijo: ‘Por resucitar está este Lázaro, según hiede,’ y con esto todos se apartaron tapándose las narices (Quevedo, B, I, V) James put his hand behind his ear./ ‘What?’ he said. ‘I’m getting very deaf […]’ (Galsworthy, MP, I, VI)

g.to groom and cleanse the body, while washing, rubbing, cleaning one’s ear with the little finger, picking one’s nose or blowing it between thumb and forefinger (seen among low status people in Canada, India, Morocco and Spain), dislodging food from teeth or gums with a fingernail or a toothpick, wiping the mouth corners with thumb and forefinger, or licking one’s fingers at the table instead of using a napkin, etc. Mr F.’s Aunt [after eating a piece of toast] moistened her ten fingers in slow succession at her lips, and wiped then in exactly the same order on the white handkerchief (Dickens, LD, II, IX) He [Cranly] produced his match and began to clean the crevice between his teeth (Joyce, PAYM, V)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

the man blew his nose into the palm of his hand and wiped his hand in his trousers (Steinbeck, GW, XVI) An overalled man took off his black hat and combed back his long black hair with his fingers (Steinbeck, GW, XX)

h.to preen oneself (while alone or as conscious social preening) in innate or learned, conscious or unconscious ways of rearranging one’s hair, adjusting a tie, cuff or skirt, striking various parts of the body with rather rhythmic movements that may accompany speech and even qualify one’s performance for the observer, all serving as socioeducational identifiers (e.g. a naturally or socially refined woman’s way of delicately pushing the hair from her forehead with the middle and ring fingers): Eliza smoothed her dress over her knees (Joyce, D, “The Sisters”) She [Helen Wedwidge] pulled off her hat and with a beautiful impatient movement of the hand shook back the ruddy-brown curls of her hair. “Hideously hot!” (Huxley, EG, I)

i.reacting to physical pain, holding the part that hurts, often accompanied by paralinguistic emissions (e.g. the reflex exclamation ‘¡Ay!’ in Spanish, but ‘Ouch!’ in English, both from unexpected pain): The […] pain […] made him draw a long breath through his clenched teeth (Crane, RBC, XII)

j.protecting oneself from physical harm, covering up one’s face, with attitudes socially regarded proper or improper of each sex, but more common among women and children and in less aggressive men: Lennie covered his face with his huge paws and bleated with terror [when they start hitting him] (Steinbeck, MM, III)

k.to cause oneself physical pain, as in frustration, or as done by many autistic children, or many ascetics in past periods: Cuando Sancho vio que no hallaba el libro […] se echó entrambos puños a las barbas, y se arrancó la mitad de ellas, y […] se dio media docena de puñadas en el rostro y en las narices (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXVI)

l.to display emotional states and reactions, as when clapping the hands from joy, pulling at one’s hair in despair (documented in bereavement scenes in ancient Egyptian and Greek paintings and witnessed cross-culturally today), wringing one’s hands, biting one’s nails, cuticles or knuckles, clutching one’s head with both hands at seeing something; the Eipo women of New Guinea, who, when surprised, grasp their breasts from below with both hands, lift them “and sometimes squeeze milk” (EiblEibesfeldt 1979a: 27; reported by him for other places too) :

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Oh! that I’m sure we shall! [enjoy the trip] cried Mercy, clapping her hands (Dickens, MC, VI) ‘[…] but mercy on us!’ Here he rumpled his hair impatiently with his hand (Dickens, MC, VI) The old man crossed his arms upon his breast; and, drawing his head and shoulders into a heap, literally hugged himself for joy (Dickens, OT, XIX) ‘Oh dear!’ cried Mr Pecksniff, rubbing his hair up very stiff upon his head, and staring wildly at his daughters. ‘This is becoming tremendous! (Dickens, MC, X) Tom was greatly pleased […] Therefore he laughed too and rubbed his hands (Dickens, MC, VI) He found Mrs. Shimerda sitting by the [sick] horse with her lantern, groaning and wringing her hands (Cather, MA, I, XVIII) He took off his cap and looked at it with some admiration, then wiped his forehead with it and put it on rakishly and pulled at the visor (Steinbeck, GW, IV), Nathan especially was in exuberant mood. He kept slapping his thigh and shaking his head as if he could not believe in so much good fortune (Markandaya, NS, XVII) He paced. He stood at the window. He made a fist of his right hand and several times smacked the palm of his left (Doctorow, R, XXXVIII)

m.to conceal or repress those very emotional states and reactions, as dictated by crossculturally and socioeducationally-conditioned display rules: covering the mouth or face while laughing, crying or blushing, covering the eyes to avoid seeing something, etc. Lucy began to laugh again, uncontrollably. She covered her face with her hands (Huxley, PCP, XI)

n.to engage in some conscious or unconscious mental activities, as when the average socioeducationally lower Spanish male is seen holding his temples with thumb and forefinger while looking down in an effort to remember something, the other hand sometimes on the hip: Sancho […] inclinó la cabeza sobre el pecho, y poniéndose el índice de la mano derecha sobre las cejas y las narices, estuvo como pensativo un pequeño espacio (Cervantes, DQ, II, XLV) ‘I forget what this here word is,’ said Sam, scratching his head with the pen, in vain attempt to remember (Dickens, PP, XXXIII) I must go along, Herzog reflected. He rubbed his brows with thumb and forefinger. ‘Three-fifty? (Bellow, H, 258)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

o.to perform some physical fitness activities: touching one’s toes while standing, clasping the wrist with a downward push while trying to flex the arm, etc. p.to perform certain folk, legal, etiquette, protocolarian, religious or superstitious acts, such as making the sign of the cross, arms akimbo while dancing, joining hands or intertwining fingers in prayer, touching both cheeks with the back of the hands and forearms crossed while making two or three curtsies in a Hindu shrine, touching one’s chest after shaking hands among Muslim men, kissing one’s own hand in salutation to a superior in antiquity and until the nineteenth century in some Western cultures: ‘So it is,’ cried Tigg, kissing his hand in honour of the sex (Dickens, MC, XXVII) “Miss Agnes, ever yours! I wish you good-bye, Master Copperfield […]/ With those words he [Uriah] retired, kissing his great hand” (Dickens, DC, XXXV) That was the fervent prayer of Kalo’s heart as he invoked the, gods of mercy with folded palms (Bhattacharya, HWRT, I)

q.to carry out a conversational or nonconversational interactive encounter, in which we observe cultural, socioeducational, personal and even occupational differences; like most other categories, they function as emblems (e.g. the Indian’s ‘namaste’ greeting by joining vertical palms at chest height), speech markers (e.g. marking stresses by hitting the palm with the fist), time markers (e.g. ‘Right now!’ by hitting palm with forefinger), etc.: Tom triumphed very much in this discovery, and rubbed his hands with great satisfaction (Dickens, MC, XXXI) ‘I shall be eternally delighted,’ answered Tigg [to Dr. Jobling], kissing his [own] hand and smiling sweetly (Dickens, MC, XXVII) He [the dean] rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty./ — Can you solve that question now? he asked (Joyce, PAYM, V) Kalo greeted the visitor, folding his palms together (Bhattacharya, HWRT, II)

r.performing random behaviors like biting the lower lip or touching the nose in public, toying with one’s hair, twisting or stroking one’s moustache, rubbing both hands together: Y [Trifaldín el de la Barba Blanca] tosió luego y manoseóse la barba de arriba abajo con entrambas manos, y con mucho sosiego estuvo atendiendo la respuesta del duque (Cervantes, DQ, II, XXXVI) ‘Well, let me see,’ observed the head of the bellhops, scratching his head dubiously (Dreiser, AT, I, IV) The cop pursed his large lips as he waited for the answer, brushing the small bristles of his mustache upward with his fingernail (Bellow, H, 345)

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6.15.2 Various aspects of self-adaptors merit interdisciplinary attention. First, their ethology, since it is possible to distinguish between innate and culturally-conditioned behaviors, and also recognize the cultural filtering through which many biologically determined acts have evolved in different societies; those are the “innate motor habits” and subsequently the display of the “releasing patterns,” studied by EiblEibesfeldt (1979a, 1988), for instance, hiding the mouth behind the hand and biting the fingers or nails as part of a coyness behavior pattern by a Southwest Africa Zimba girl when he told her she was beautiful and he liked her (Eible-Eibesfeldt 1979a: 23). Cross-cultural differences such as the North American’s interweaving hands upon the occipital area while conversing informally, or stretching by raising the arms vertically with clasped hands, both considered quite rude in many other cultures. Age, as when children rub their eyes with the fists when sleepy or about to cry, and, as observed in cultural blocks as different as North America and Africa, their clasped-hands-on-thehead stance with one foot forward. Sex, like women wiping moisture from the mouth corners with the ring finger or ring finger and thumb, sitting on a chair with legs crossed at the ankles, etc., and men sliding thumb and index down the nose before making certain statements or arriving at a decision, or as a random behavior; any deviations from biologically or socially determined modes being labelled ‘mannish’ or ‘effeminate’, quite ineffectual in situations where the ‘right’ style is expected (e.g. of stewardesses, in courtship, in a job interview). The socioeducational level, reflected, for instance, in the less sensitive Spanish male’s scratching of the genital zone in public (imitated by some adolescents as a manly behavior), or in feminine preening behaviors (of arm, leg, hair): –Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flyn said, putting his hand in his pocket to scratch his groin (Joyce, U, 172) [at the tavern] El muchacho del mono azul […] Se rascaba ahora entre las ingles, levantando una pierna (Caballero Bonald, DDS, I, IV)

The display rules, such as, in many cultures, the lower-class woman with one arm across the abdomen and the hand of the other propping her face. And, naturally, what can be personal characteristics in anyone.

6.16

Alter-adaptors: Contacting others

6.16.1 Alter-adaptors are intended or unintended movements and positions in which we come in bodily contact with others, always interactive by nature, of direct tactile and kinesthetic perception. Gaze must also be included, since it constitutes a truly interpersonal contact (cf. expressions like ‘she fixed her eyes on him’: He [Phillip] kept his eyes fixed on Mr. Perkins’ shining eyes (Maugham, OHB ,XVII)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

Like self-adaptors, they are part of the language-paralanguage-kinesics structure and complement other somatic systems, besides being able to relate to other extrasomatic systems (e.g. a man-woman embrace, related to their words and paralanguage and perhaps tears, perfume and environmental features). On the other hand, the semiotic intensity of an encounter can be augmented by nonconversational alter-adaptors that can reflect precisely the ineffability of what one wants to say but can be expressed only by means of contact messages, which can reach a high degree of iconicity because of their measurable characteristics. 6.16.2 From a semiotic-interactive point of view, the messages contained in an alter-adaptor behavior like the embrace just mentioned, or a kiss, can be experienced in four significantly different ways that affect interaction: a.as a single emitter, the person who initiates (and perhaps had anticipated) the behavior, elicited by other behaviors and/or mental activities (perhaps also psychophysiological reactions) of one or both participants: he [Alfred] yielded to the impulse […] he kissed the tremulous lips […] she [Betty] struck him across the cheek (Grey, BZ, V)

b.as a single receiver, the person who, as in the above example, is the object of the behavior, who may not have anticipated it and will be only recipient (until he or she becomes emitter of similar dynamic messages), thus revealing neither acceptance nor rejection of it; naturally, if the two persons exchange different types of behaviors which nevertheless carry the same meaning in a similar degree, we could also refer to that exchange as instances of ‘single emitter’ o ‘single receiver’ of a specific type of signs, for instance, if a man kisses a woman’s hand while she shakes his hand warmly; c.as mutual emitters of the simultaneous or successively encoding of similar signs, their emission being decoded both sensorially and intelligibly and experienced as such, that is, independently as receivers, until the behavior is experienced: Without speech, they [Hilma and Annixter] stood there for a long minute, holding each other close (Norris, O, II, II)

d.if mutual emitters, as in the previous example, also mutual receivers of that same behavior, simultaneously encoded and decoded in its full signification, a total interaction situation we might regard as symmetrical exchange, since only one central behavior is developed, even though the mental and physical complementary behaviors may not necessarily be the same in both persons. There is a possible and more subtle intermediate state illustrated in this example, which would qualify as tacit reciprocity in the single-receiver situation, nearest to an open mutual emission: Gerald put his hand on hers; she did not return the pressure but she did not move her hand away (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

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6.16.3 The functions of alter-adaptors are: a.to initiate or terminate social encounters, in itself a vast area of synchronic and diachronic (cf. Wildeblood 1965) research,91 as greeting patterns vary greatly socioanthropologically, beginning with eye contact and all kinds of salutations — or their avoidance (cf. Givens 1978) — and welcoming behaviors, such as: greeting children (their head not being touched in Thailand, for it is the body’ highest part), the Black hand-slap, the solidarity thumb-link, the kiss (and, to this day, its absence in certain cultures),92 the extremely varied universal handshake (e.g. among Ghanaian young men: sliding the hand out of each other and snapping the fingers; stationary for even minutes into the conversation between Indian or New Guinean men), all revealing cultural levels and meaningful social norms (cf. Schiffrin 1981): Beséle la mano, la rodilla sentada en el suelo. Dióme su bendición [his master the ambassador] (Alemán, GA, I, VIII) ‘[…] Martin, my dear boy, I am delighted to welcome you […] Mr Pecksniff fairly took him to his arms, and patted him several times upon his back with his right hand the while (Dickens, MC, V) She let her eyes shine into his with a look that made up for the handclasp he would have claimed if they had been alone] (Wharton, HM, I, VIII) he bent down respectfully to touch his mother-in-law’s feet [as he arrives] (Banerji, PP, 47) La niña ya está hecha una moza […] — dijo el maestro al tiempo que daba una palmadita en la cara de la niña (López Salinas, M)

b.to explore another person’s anatomy, through topographic exploration (e.g. in clinical palpation) or scanning: the infant does it as part of its development, and so do many blind people. c.as bond-seeking behaviors, whether sincerely, to deceive or simply to ingratiate oneself and attain a relationship not enjoyed as yet, using qualifiers that contain an intended visual-tactile iconicity associated with a specific type of relationship (e.g. back-slapping); actually, we can sometimes use them with persons who are perhaps of a status lower than ours, but above us in certain circumstances (e.g. a security man or woman, a caretaker, a nurse): ‘And how,’ said Mr. Peksniff [..], taking Mr. Pinch in a friendly manner by the elbow, ‘how has our friend here used you, Martin?’ (Dickens, MC, V) He patted Anthony upon the hand as one might comfort a child, and drawing the old man’s arm still further through his own […] (Dickens, MC, XVIII) She [Guenevire] placed a hand confidently on mine. “Look, I got a taste for some root beer. Be a good guy, and go out to the store and get me a bottle […]” (Mailer, BS, VI)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

d.to maintain affiliation and intimacy, as in the many culturally-conditioned ways of touching, even to confirm a certain relationship and sometimes to exhibit it before others: two good male friends in Ghana may go arm-in-arm down the street (or handin-hand in many other Black African cultures, and, as seen in Morocco, even by the little finger), as do occasionally father and son in cultures like Spain and Hungary, women of many cultures, whether relatives or good friends (in Southern Europe, Egypt, Morocco, etc.), and married couples (more hand-in-hand in North America); but rarely friends, unless they are talking confidentially or trying to drive a point home, although it was at a time common practice in more non-touching cultures: [Tom Pinch y Martin Chuzzlewit, after seeing the Pecksniffs off] turned […] and moved off arm-in-arm (Dickens, MC, VI) They both [two men] returned his greeting laughingly, and walked home arm-in-arm (Dickens, MC, VII) [After father and son bury their dog] returned to the house arm-in-arm (Galsworhty, IC, II, XI)

e.to perform basic functions in mother/father/caretaker-infant/child interaction, initiated in the unborn child’s uterine experiences and later its tactile-kinesthetic exploration of the mother’s face and body, along with her caressing, kissing, patting, rubbing, wiping, grooming, nursing, mouth-to-mouth feeding in some cultures, etc.; along with verbal and paralinguistic sounds (cooing, crooning, clicking, etc.) and activities like hairruffling, slapping, vigorous wrist-holding and shaking, etc, though varying dramatically between touching and non-touching cultures from childhood on (cf. Montague 1971; Burgoon et al. 1989; Knapp and Hall 1992; Jourard 1966, and its replication in Barnlund 1975): And, folding him [a child] in her arms, she swayed slightly from side to side, with love, her face half lifted, her eyes half closed, her voice drenched with love (Lawrence, SL, VII)

f.scalating a sexual relationship, a series of contact behaviors engaging different body parts, yet no necessarily in the order proposed by Morris (1972: 73–79), as it is a process subject to a host of cultural, socioeducational, moral, age, personality and circumstantial factors; man-woman mouth-kissing, for instance, is not seen at this writing in the streets of India (nor in films until not too long ago) or China (whose government punishes it and regards it as unhealthy, only hand-holding being seen in public [cf. National Geographic Magazine, July 1980]), but, since norms change, I saw it in Bratislava in 1979, precisely where Mary Key (1975: 98) had seen it in 1968, when some passers-by spat in disgust; g.for aggression, punishment and self-defence, anthropologically basic behaviors subject to age, sex and social norms, for instance: ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ ways of attacking, spitting as attack or punishment, etc.93; for instance, slapping is more humiliating

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between men (its sound worse than the physical sensation), but used more against and between women and children; kicking (apart from ritualized forms mentioned below) is more common also among women (and against men) and children, but a man repeatedly kicking another in the shins is not really seen as too manly; my own ‘conservative’ schoolteacher would twist my ear brutally, hit my skull with his knuckles, and even wrap a rubber band around them and rub them up the back of my neck against the hair. the police […] drag the men to prison, they drag them and spit on them and would have beaten them (Rao, K, XIII)

h.to soothe, heal and nurse for physical and psychological well-being, from the African medicine man’s spitting on his patient to the contacts practiced in some group therapies (cf. Argyle 1975: 297–298) to the ones Jesus used (using signs from the popular medicine of the time) to heal miraculously: He put his fingers into he man’s ears and, spitting, touched his tongue (Mark 7:33, NAB), He patted Anthony upon the hand as one might comfort a child, and drawing the old man’s arm still further through his own […] (Dickens, MC, XVIII);

i.to groom and condition the body, displayed among primates and other mammals, from delousing (which I have still seen in India and Morocco [cf. Leach 1972: 331]) to the different practices in washing, combing, massaging, and other forms of professional physical contact; j.to handle and condition body-adaptors in others, a way to provide and maintain an intimate proxemics, as practiced by butlers and maids, taylors and dressmakers, bullfighter’s and boxer’s attendants, bootblacks, etc. k.to express affection and nonsexual love, markedly differentiated between contact and noncontact cultures: normally, mothers and children (e.g. my students) do not touch, even after a long separation, in Japan, Hong-Kong, Malaysia, Singapoor and Black African cultures, and the Japanese family is characterized by absolute lack of touching after infancy94; in Ghana, where in general children touching their parents or others is discouraged in the believe that it may later lead to insubordination and damage the family’s image, it is also regarded as insolent (particularly in front of visitors) for children to touch the elderly; while in all Hispanic and Southern European cultures (as well as others like Hungary) father and son kiss on both cheeks: Il [his nephew] approcha son visage de celui du veillard et posa carrément ses lèvres à la lisière de la barbe hirsute. La bouche de M. de Coëtquidan esquissa, dans la vide, un vague, très vague baiser sans bruit (Montherlant, C, I);

l.to comfort and reassure a worried or afflicted person and seeking that comfort, in situations of disaster, bereavement, etc., or just deep concern, as in the culturally ritualized setting of a wake or funeral,95 where one sees different kinds of handshakes,

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

tense embracing and gentle, silent back-clapping and stroking, holding the bereaved with one arm over the shoulders, etc. “I mean it, sir. Please don’t worry about me.” I sort of put my hand on his shoulder. “Okay?” I said (Salinger, CR, II)

m.to display feelings and emotions, whether positive or negative, quite differentiated cross-culturally: [after hearing the news] If I had a hat in my hand, nothing but respect would have prevented me from throwing that hat up to the ceiling (Collins, M, ‘First Period,’ III)

n.performing certain folk, legal, protocolarian, religious or superstitious acts, such as: embracing or kissing (on the cheeks in France or in Arab countries, on the mouth in Russia between good male friends); the acceptance of a challenge between two Ghanaian men by one spitting on his palm and the other slapping it with his; the laying-on of hands as practiced by Jesus and his disciples, and today in all Christian churches, to pray for people’s physical emotional and spiritual needs (cf. Sanford 1972; MacNutt 1974, 1981; Shlemon 1976, 1981; Reed 1995; the sharing of the peace of Christ during the Mass (a handshake in western cultures, sliding one’s hand between the two of another in the Maronite rite); the kiss (often in the mouth) the Medieval vassal gave his lord to establish their relationship; the man’s leading of a lady by the arm in different situations96; the holding of the deceased’s hand at a funeral among the Kotzobue Eskimos of Alaska, the propping of a bullfighter or soccer player by his buttocks while being carried on his fans’ shoulders; the mutual holding in many folk dances: the ‘kiss of peace’ [in a Chaldean church in Bagdad] was given by the priest to the acolytes […] he touched the hands of the boys, who came running […] to touch the hands that were everywhere stretched out toward them (Morton, TLB, II) La Justa le tocó la joroba [al Conejo], pues sabido es que esto da la buena suerte (Baroja, B, III, VII)

o.in children’s and adults’ games and sports, another interesting topic for cross-cultural research: leapfrog, American football, soccer, hockey, etc.: [in Chicago, early 1900s] After six o’clock […] The sidewalks were filled with children clamouring at “tag” [running after the others until touching, or tagging, one of them] (Norris, P, V)

p.in children’s and adults’ informal games, observed in primates (van Lawick-Goodall 1971) and other mammals, as in mock wrestling, children’s rough-and-tumble (Blurton Jones 1972: 280), etc.: q.in children’s and adults’ playful grabbing of each other, often in what is called horseplay:

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He [a schoolmate] came over to me and gave me these two playful as hell slaps on both cheeks — which is something that can be very annoying […] and started leaning over me and taking these playful as hell socks at my shoulder […] He gave me another one of those playful little socks (Salinger, CR, III, VI)

r.to assist others in performing a specialized task, as between two trapeze artists, in certain sports, teaching how to handle different artifacts, etc.; s.conducting momentary interpersonal social tasks which may or may not require minimal contact, as between cashier and customer, helping a blind person across a street, frisking a suspect, a political candidate’s ‘baby-kissing,’ helping someone down from or onto a vehicle or mounting or dismounting a horse: Stephen took Elfride’s slight foot upon his hand [helping her to mount her horse]: ‘One, two, three, and up!’ she said (Hardy, PBE, VII)

t.in situations of forced or inevitable contact, as happens when bumping into someone, in a crowded bus, sidewalk (cf. Collett and Marsh 1974; Ashcraft and Scheflen 1976: 27–28) or elevator (Goffman 1963: 137–138), all subject to intercultural differences and even misinterpretations due to different proxemic concepts, and also managed differently (e.g. non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners in the United States or Canada regard as totally unexpected and excessive the ‘Excuse me’ or ‘Pardon me’ from someone who is passing close-by but not even likely to touch us); naturally, members of highly-touching cultures feel much more comfortable than those from nontouching cultures in places like Old Delhi’s Urdu Bazaar or Calcutta’s Howrah Bridge, in the Istanbul Grand Bazaar or a Moroccan medina, in Budapest’s Váci Street or in the streets around Rome’s Piazza d’Espagna on a Saturday evening. u.contacting animals, according to its function and our relationship with them, which reveals personal and cultural attitudes, from true affection and care to sheer indifference and physical and verbal abuse and cruelty: trickles of blood on the side of the mare […] on the very wound the bright spurs [Gerald’s] came down, pressing relentlessly (Lawrence, WL, IX)

v.as part of the mechanism of conversation, alter-adaptors can serve as speech markers (e.g. ‘Buy it, don’t hesitate,’ touching the listener’s shoulder), identifiers (e.g. ‘You are in good shape, aren’t you?’ touching his biceps), etc., and as general conversational regulators, even handling an object: ‘Rather a good job to begin with. Eh, Mark?’ whispered Martin, nudging him with his elbow (Dickens, MC, XXI) –No se apure usted — le decía la viuda, tocándole familiarmente la rodilla con su abanico (Galdós, FJ, II, IV, VII) Colonel Zane laughed as he slapped his friend on the shoulder (Grey, LT, II)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

He [Mr. Barbecue-Smith] leaned forward and jabbed Denis with his finger. “That’s my secret,” he said, “and that’s how you could write too, if you tried — without effort (Huxley, CY, VI)

w.distance-contact through objects (apart from the direct object-mediated contacts mentioned) must be specifically regarded as alter-adaptor behaviors, since the objects in question act as intentional body extensions from the person initiating the behavior, whether during a snow-ball fight, a soccer game or throwing something at someone: They no longer vituperated each other. The revolvers spoke for them (Norris, O, I, VI)

6.16.4 Three more aspects of alter-adaptors should be mentioned: (a) how to more intensity in the structure language-paralanguage-kinesics corresponds a greater interpersonal contact cross-culturally, and viceversa; (b) that alter-adaptors artfully blended with words and paralanguage in selfish ways can be a powerful instrument of deception in everyday interactions; (c) how they contribute to the evoking of tactile and kinesthetic memories of persons, which can in turn trigger future attitudes toward them; (d) that a positive feminist complaint as to man-woman relationships (cf. Henley 1977) is the unjust tendency among higher-up males (mainly in the superior-subordinate roles) to initiate conversational touching which would not be expected from her; (e) that the investigation of cross-cultural differences and attitudes should contribute to overcome certain barriers when contact behaviors are positively motivated97; and (f) the many cross-cultural differences that merit systematic study, particularly at a time when sameness through international borrowings tends to gradually obliterate many desirable cultural characteristics. His mother kissed him affectionately […]; his father gave him his customary greeting, a hearty handshake (Dreiser, JG, XXXIV)

6.17

Body-adaptors: The intimates of our body

6.17.1 I have identified as body-adaptors, first, the objects and substances most intimately attached to the body, aimed at protecting, nurturing, satisfying, modifying its appearance and assisting it in different ways (socially seen as part of our bodies and thus as personal identifiers), as well as the interactive or noninteractive movements and positions conditioned by them. Given the intimate nature of those objects and substances, their sensorial perception is fivefold: a.visual, so important as regards food and drink (due to their esthetic as well as anticipatory aspect), clothing (because of our esthetic preferences and our chromatic associations with a person, according to his or her image and our attitude toward it), even pseudonutritional products like tobacco (through cigarettes, pipes, etc.):

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A string of silver ornaments and turquoise-and-white beads encircled her neck [the Navajo girl Glen Naspa], and it moved gently up and down with the heaving of her full bosom (Grey, RT, I)

b.tactile and kinesthetic, upon establishing contact with body-adaptors and to appreciate their dimensions, form and texture, according to our personal sensitivity and preferences (e.g. our own clothes, the smoothness of someone else’s silk); c.olfactory, not just as regards food, drink and pseudonutritional products, but clothes and accessories like fur and leather and the associations they may trigger): little accessories that meant so much — the smell of […] good tobacco, of fragrant coffee (Norris, P, VI) ‘A very nice wine,’ he said at last, passing it before his nose (Galsworthy, MP, II, III) savory odor of hot coffee hung in the air (Grey, MF, VII)

d.gustatory, specifically with food and drinks, an essential part of their total sensory perception: exclaimed the undertaker, as he emptied his glass and smacked his lips (Dickens, MC, XIX) Se mojó los labios, dando un sorbito y paladeando la pastosa frialdad de la solera (Caballero Bonald, DDS, I, VII)

e.auditory, especially fabric and other materials of which clothes, footwear and jewelry are made, but also while eating and drinking (e.g. crunching, slurping): I heard a sudden whisking of petticoats on the stairs behind me […] there was Penelope flying down after me like mad (Collins, M, ‘First Period,’ XI) Clinking spurs attested to the slow steps of a rider (Grey, MR, II) John could hear his slippers [Frank’s] slopping along the passage (Wilson, ASA, II, II). and holding her hand, [I] pulled her behind me, her heels clicking, her skirt rustling in the promising tap-and-whisper of a girl trying to run in an evening gown (Mailer, DP, IX)

6.17.2 Besides the sensory perception of body-adaptors, there is an important fact we are not always aware of: during their association with the body, or at other times, they undergo a static as well as dynamic semiotic-communicative realization. They are actually four semiotic stages, of much relevance in social interaction, in which processes of action and reaction, though not directly, are not lacking: a.as static objects and substances, such as a dress, a perfume or an armchair or sofa (all susceptible of conditioning specific postures) just by themselves, their physical and chemical qualities translated into sensible signs and messages; and yet, those signs are

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

so intimately associated in our mind to their bodily realization that they may evoke, through that static state (and through different sinesthesial associations generated by their visual, tactile and olfactory perception), behaviors like the movements of a dress when worn, the facial expression and glance associated to a perfume, or the posture and postural shifts that we know are conditioned by a chair, sometimes even poignantly bringing to mind a deceased person; b.the synesthesial assumption of signs when, for instance, a man shopping for a dress looks at it in a window and (particularly on a very realistic mannequin) appreciates its shape and fitting (imagining its moulding the target woman’s figure), color, visual aspect of its texture (‘smooth’ as her complexion or with a ‘rough’ appearance that may precisely suggest its contrast with her body); all triggering synesthesial associations about consistency, postures, gait, even language and paralanguage, that contribute to his final decision (the kind of hidden message in ads that so affects the consumer); as for a chair or a sofa, their form and upholstery texture will also have a bearing on the purchaser’s decision; c.the direct perception of the sensible signs, that is, when — following the same example — the man, attracted by the signs he perceived in the previous stage, handles the dress and tactually appreciates the texture of the material, which increases the synesthesial associations with the woman through this direct perception; should he be shopping for a perfume, his preferred fragrance would trigger the desired personal associations, as it possesses an eloquent temporal dimension, bringing to mind cherished past experiences; in the case of the chair or sofa, their texture and their apparent adaptation to one’s body play also important functions: d.the last and definitive stage is, therefore, the body-adaptor’s kinesic and multisensory realization, when that garment becomes dynamic as the woman wears it with her body’s gestures, manners and postures and her speaking face’s language and paralanguage (besides the body’s other communicative manifestations), eliciting in turn new images (synesthesial, tactile, kinesthetic, etc.); so too when the perfume is perceived along with language and any nonverbal signs and messages; and when the qualities of the chair or sofa are confirmed in their tactile-kinesthetic experiences of shape, volume and texture: [Janet Pardoe] drew her fur coat up above her ears […] Myatt could follow through the fur the curve of her concealed body and compare it to Coral’s thin nakedness (Greene, ST, IV, III)

Beyond these stages is, of course, the recreative, reconstructive experience of the worn dress or perfume, which brings back in our memory the multisensory perception of the person, even in very specific situations: [his wife Jinny’s, now gone from him] Airy dresses, so flimsy and empty now, yet, as he fitted them on hangers, recalling her swiftness and grace […] a sweater, straight and

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prim, the curve of her breasts gone from it […] The nightgown […] Round the shoulders were tiny wrinkles from her sleeping. It seemed to him still warm from her body (Lewis, CT, XLVII)

Clothes, while extremely important in interpersonal relations and as possible interaction regulators (in image-formation, as status identifiers, affecting self-image and even mood, sexual attitudes, etc.), must be considered also in the deeper intrapersonal interaction (i.e self-interaction). While hidden to cointeractors, our own clothes are felt by oureselves through tactual and kinesthetic shifts; their texture and tightness mainly are responsible for conscious or unconscious intimate feelings (including autoeroticism), etc., and, like perfume and cosmetics, are certainly chosen consciously or unconsciously by the wearer according to mood, social intentions (seeking an image, attraction, youthful feeling, maturity, seduction, status, etc.). I pulled the old peak of my huntig hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes […] I pulled the peak around to the back again, and relaxed (Salinger, CR, III)

6.17.3 Another aspect of body-adaptors that deserves a deeper treatment is their twofold temporal and spatial dimension, not only because, as with other sensible activities, we can perceive them in a spatial relationship and store them in our memory, but because, specifically those of olfactory and gustatory perception, can also travel through time. So do chemical messages as olfactory and gustatory memories, while those of tactile perception are remembered proportionally to the duration and intensity of the original experience (their iconicity, therefore, experienced and measured according to the evocations elicited by their sensory intensity and their intentional use). Besides, in the case of clothes and perfume, that iconicity and capacity to remain in our memory are even greater when they involve persons with whom we maintained a very close relationship, whether positive or negative, or who are perhaps dead, and then natural or synthetic olfactory molecules can still remain in their clothes and will trigger all sorts of direct and synesthesial as well as mental associations. 6.17.4 As for the functions of body-adaptors and the behaviors generated by those objects and substances, the following should be identified: a.to facilitate the oral ingestion of nutritional products (possibly producing paralinguistic sounds, like slurping): different ways of eating bread (a little bit at a time or biting from a larger piece), handling cutlery or chopsticks, using the fingers correctly or in correctly in many cultures (Moslems only with the right hand, never with the impure one), drinking from the Spanish popular country wineskin (never touching it with the lips), a ‘feminine’ way of holding a cup of coffee (e.g., elbows on the table and fingers of both hands delicately around it, both hands specifically prescribed for the Japanese woman), drinking from large or small containers (e.g. the disposable tiny clay cups used at Calcutta’s tea-stalls which I noticed along street curbs), etc.:

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

Sirvió Manuel la sopa, la tomaron todos los huespedes, sorbiéndola con un desagradable resoplido (Baroja, B, I, III) My uncle, chewing his roast beef with an air of disapproval, looked sullenly at his plate (Maugham, CA, V);

b.to use masticatories and facilitate the ingestion and other acts associated with pseudonutritional products, such as chewing gum, the betel of India and adjacent cultures (actually used from West Africa to Oceania), western tobacco, African kola, and their associated behaviors (e.g. in Accra, Ghanaian watchmen from the north leave on walls the telling semicircular mark of their spittle that shows the trajectory of the movement): Blanchard shot a stream of tobacco juice from the corner of his mouth and hit a stone with a loud smack (MacLennan, TS, I, X)

c.to smoke or inhale tobacco and narcotics like Western tobacco and snuff, opium and other narcotics, all determining socially differentiated behaviors and even using culture-specific artifacts to both carry and consume them (cigarette holders and cases, the old clay pipes, India’s hookah pipe, water pipes, the South American mate containers, etc.): said the beadle, as he thrust his thumb and forefinger into the […] snuff-box (Dickens, OT, IV) MacNelly paused a moment in his rapid talk, chewed his cigar (Grey, LSR, XIV) Ignatius Gallagher puffed thoughtfully at his cigar (Joyce D, ‘A Little Cloud,’ 88) Popeye inhaled […] exhaled, the [cigarette] smoke jetting downward in two thin spurts (Faulkner, S, VI) Marion sat down and tapped a cigarette carefully on his platinum case. ‘I saw Dorothea yesterday (Mailer, DP, VI)

d.to cloth the body, exhibiting, enhancing, modifying or concealing its natural appearance for social, occupational, folkloric or ceremonial use, with infant’s swaddling and underwear, all sorts of outer garments, headgear, footwear, belts, gloves, etc., conditioned through the centuries and, in much shorter time spans, by cultural, economic and religious factors which in turn determine kinesic behaviors, particularly posture, gait and certain social manners (cf. Wildeblood 1965), in addition to specific sounds of the material itself: the Greek chitton and the Roman toga, the Japanese kimono and India’s sari and dhoti, the Eskimo anorak, the Arab haik, veil and turban, the Medieval and Renaissance men’s codpiece (cf. Vicary 1989), women’s crinoline (hard to fit through doors and on chairs) and long dresses, the large flannel piece worn by the Vezo of Madagascar and the elaborate way of putting it on (Koechlin 1992: 66–67, 71),

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etc., almost all profusely described and documented in literature, painting and films; in fact, how people put on and take off a coat, how they don a scarf or slip on a glove, tip off a hat, etc., are unconscious or very conscious social acts:98 Pickwick, with one hand gracefully concealed behind his coat tails, and the other waving in air, to assist his glowing declamation (Dickens, PP, I) Darrow noticed that, in recognition of the solemnity of the occasion, she pinched a lace handkerchief between her thumb and forefinger (Wharton, R, XIX) someone mounted the stairs in a swishing garment. The feet went on past the door and mounted another stair and ceased (Faulkner, S, XVIII)

e.to complement and adorn the body and enhance or conceal its appearance by means of accessories (and associated behaviors) like jewelry, watches and ornaments such as the old walking stick carried by young and old men, handkerchiefs, handbags and small purses, fans, feathers, combs, bones, women’s and men’s earrings, charms, religious medals, the old tiny ‘beauty spots’ painted on women’s faces, the vermilion mark on the Hindu married woman’s forehead, the ashes covering the sadhu’s (Hindu ‘holy man’) whole body, African (e.g. the Surma of Ethiopia) and Amazonian deforming lipdisks, the equally deforming South Africa Ndebele’s traditional stacked brass and copper neck-rings (similar to Burma’s) worn by married women (and on legs by unmarried ones), the festival copper leg-bands worn by central Africa’s Bororo’en women, and all sorts of cosmetics, body paint, etc.: I [a man] whipped out a white pocket-handkerchief and wafted it, with a French grace, past my nose, bowing at the same time./ “Quel carmant jeune homme!” murmured Madame Pelet in a low voice (C. Brontë, P, VIII) the ladies waved their handkerchiefs, and the gentlemen their hats (Dickens, MC, XXXV) swinging his big stick humming to himself […] with superb, smiling patronage (Collins, WW, 587)

f.to enhance, modify or conceal the body’s appearance with directly attached artificial extensions like wigs, fingernails and eyelashes, hair pieces, the phallic extensions worn on some occasions by the native males of Irian Jaya’ Swart Valley in former Netherlands New Guinea, shoulder paddings, brassieres, etc.; g.to aid, complement or disguise the body’s sensory and motor functions, by means of baby pacifiers, walkers and harnesses, dentures, eyepatches, prescription glasses and sunglasses, monocles, opera glasses, hearing aids, canes and adult’s walkers: ‘By Jove, I believe that’s the Dorsets back!’ Stepney exclaimed; and Lord Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: ‘It’s the Sabrina
–yes’ (Wharton, HM, II, I) rubbing the two red marks that they [pince-nez glasses] always leave on the side of the nose (Howells, RSL, V)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

h.to suppress or add to the body’s natural olfactory qualities by means of perfumes, deodorants and antiperspirants, shaving lotions and colognes, who consciously or unconsciously serve as sex attractants, much like animal pheromones and other chemical messages, and as veritable ‘olfactory signatures,’ blending in interaction with language, paralanguage and kinesics in a whole communicative complex; i.to protect the body from external harm, from the old armors and suit of mail and shields to present-day workers’ helmets, apiarists’ masks, firefighters’ suits, bulletproof vests, safety belts and various types of sports helmets and paddings; j.to clean and groom the body by means of water and objects and substances like soap, sponges, toothbrushes (or India’s popular twig from the neem-tree, for its properties), napkins, toothpicks (carried in the mouth by some), handkerchiefs and paper tissues, bathroom tissue (and surrogates like newspapers, stones and leaves): The mariner produced a toothpick, and (saving his regard) was engrossed thereby for some minutes (Wells, IM, XIV) His big clean cotton napkin snapped like a flag as he unfurled it and tucked it under his collar (Porter, SF, II)

k.to heal the body and sooth physical discomfort, by means of bandages and patches, slings, casts, aerosol masks and inhalers, etc., and those used due to congenital or traumatic loss or malfunction of limbs, such as artificial hands, arms, feet and legs, crutches, canes, walkers, wheelchairs, etc.: she took her crutch, and beat it furiously three times on the ground. ‘He’s a murderer! he’s a murderer! he’s a murderer! (Collins, M, ‘First Period,’ XXIII)

l.for torture, punishment and self-chastisement, done with whips and instruments for torture and self-inflicted harm, the Medieval chastity belts, sackcloth, the ashes thrown over the head in Old Testament times: When the news reached the king of Niniveh […] he laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes (Jonah 3:6, NAB)

m.for child-rearing tasks, the Kirghiz baby’s small lamb-skin porridge sack hanging within reach from the cradle, slings and back-bags for carrying infants, the belts attached to babies’ ankles by the Burmese mother to keep them within hearing, flattening the child’s head by pressing it between wooden boards (as still practiced among certain African tribes), etc.; n.to express emotions by manipulating body-adaptors and conditioning their use: When he saw her, he rent his garments and said, ‘Alas, daughter […], you have […] brought calamity upon me (Judges 11:35) It was a street for a medievalist to revel in, toss up his hat and shout hurrah in (Hardy, L, Book the Sixth, I)

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[Mrs. Gerhardt] had now unfastened her apron, and was nervously turning it in her lap (Dreiser, JG, IV)

o.to symbolize the person’s status, as with authority: police batches, scepters, crowns, shafts, the pope’s tiara (a triple crown identifying him as pope, bishop and king), etc.; religious status (monks’ and nun’s habits, the saffron-color robe of Buddhist monks); uniforms, sashes, bands and swords of the military, betrothal and marriage rings, etc.: D. Nazario […] terciándose el manteo […][donning the already disappeared Catholic priest’s cloak over the shoulder] (Galdós, N, II, V)

p.to perform folkloric, legal, protocolarian, religious and superstitious practices, as with priests’ and pastors’ vestments, the ‘medicine bag’ carried around the neck by Canadian Maliseet and Micmac Indians, and their sacred pipe (whose strong tobacco is not inhaled as it is with a pleasure pipe), used also by other North American Indians, etc.: for his sacred service as my priest. These are the vestments they shall make: a breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a brocaded tunic, a miter and a sash (Exodus 28:4, NAB) it used to be the custom in Israel that, to make binding a contract of redemption or exchange, one party would take off his sandal and give it to the other (Ruth 4:7, NAB) letting fall their heavy robes from their shoulders, they [Indians] took their seats […] in a semicircle before us. The pipe was now to be lighted and passed round from one to another (Parkman, OT, IX)

q.to play conversational or nonconversational interactive functions, as when gesturing with a fan or a pair of eyeglasses, or the still practiced language of the veil among Sahara’s Tuareg men (Hawad-Claudot 1992): [at the laying of the first stone] the ladies waved their handkerchiefs, and the gentlemen their hats (Dickens, MC, XXXV) and many a kiss did Mr. Snodgrass waft in the air, in acknowledgement of something very like a lady’s handkerchief, which was waved from one of the upper windows (Dickens, PP, XI) Mrs. Markham was so overcome by this generous speech that […] kissing the sticks of her fan, and then tapping his hand [the Doctor’s] with it […] (Dickens, DC, XIX)

r.to perform interactive or noninteractive unconscious random acts, such as fidgeting with hems, ruffles, creases, buttons, rings, watches, bracelets, a woman’s sliding of a medal between parted lips, a man’s hitching up his pants from the waist, rubbing a pipe while in the mouth, etc.: a fine old gentleman!’ repeated Jonas, giving the crown of his hat an angry knock (Dickens, MC, XI)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

Carmichael stood before Bo, sombrero in hand, rolling it round and round, manifestly bursting with words he could not speak (Grey, MF, XIV) –New York World, the editor said, excitedly pushing back his straw hat (Joyce, U, 136) .

[getting up] He brushed up his hair with his fingers and he pulled down his overalls at the crotch (Steinbeck, GW, XXII) Gabriel laughed rather nervously and patted his tie reassuringly (Joyce, D, ‘The Dead,’ 196)

6.17.5 Body-adaptors can function as other categories as well, revealing personality, culture and affective states, for instance: the traditional Anglo-Saxon English professor’s tweed jacket and pipe (and the resulting tobacco fragrance in his office), the latter a conspicuous conversational prop; externalizers can be eloquently nonverbalized (even voluntarily) by the handling of a pipe, the slow drawing of a glove or the angry turning up of an overcoat collar; the dress, jewelry and perfume of a woman can condition not only her audiovisual speech but her interlocutor’s as well, thus acting as interactive regulators: he [against England, as a follower of Ghandi] had given up his boots and hat and suit and had taken to dhoti [the fabric and garment resembling an oversized Western diaper] and khadi [native Indian cotton] (Rao, K, 5)

Like alter-adaptors, body-adaptors, particularly clothes and cosmetics, can be successful deceptors, as they can conceal undesirable imperfections and enhance some anatomical features. As for their cross-cultural dimension, a comparative study would yield a wealth of information, beginning, for instance, with factors determining nonverbal behaviors in primitive cultures (e.g. the bracelets and necklaces of Amazonian Brazil’s naked Wasúsu women, or the bamboo lengths the Mindanao’s Paleolithic-like Tasadays use for drinking water) as well as in advanced ones (e.g. the spoon and fork and the eastern chopsticks, India’s coexisting sari and blue jeans).

6.18

Object-adaptors: Contacting objects

6.18.1 As object-adaptors I have identified a number of cultural artifacts and organic or inorganic objects and substances of the natural, modified and built environments, and their resulting movements and positions. They include the ground we stand on (as when we kneel or lie down), nor precisely as the inevitable substratum but as an objective, since they involve an intended and particularly significant and functional contact (tactually and kinesthetically felt by the person). Further, since they are bodily contacts, we should also include (which I failed to acknowledge earlier) the contacts

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through our regard, smell and taste with some of those objects and substances, objectadaptors themselves, in which we find the semiotic realizations noted for bodyadaptors. Their functions are: a.to rest or lean the body (i) on body-oriented furniture and structures like the Roman triclinium, present-day Arab cushions, India’s wood-and-rope charpoy, the ordinary chair or rocking-chair (conditioning different postures), beds, the bar stool, stadium bleaches, public benches, Spain’s almost disappeared stone bench attached to the main door of many village homes, office desks, store counters, stairs, and railings: Young Thomas […] sitting astride of a chair before the fire, with his arms on the back, and his sulky face on his arms (Dickens, HT, VIII) ‘Sit down!’ said Mr. Jordan, irritably pointing Mrs. Morel to a horse-hair chair. She sat on the edge in un uncertain fashion (Lawrence, SL, V) Spandrell […] letting his chair fall back on its four legs, leaned forward across the table […] planted his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands (Huxley, PCP, VIII)

(ii) on non-body-oriented structures like floors and walls, ledges, sills, steps, curbs and fences: she heard his footsteps clacking along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on the cinder path (Joyce, D, ‘Eveline,’ 46) colored families [in Georgetown] crowded on their doorsteps (Dos Passos, 42P, ‘Janey,’ 153)

(iii) on natural objects like rocks, slopes, beach sand, grass and trees: thud of boots on hard ground (Grey, RT, XV)

b.performing household and occupational tasks, with universal or culture-specific objects: India’s stickless brooms (which make the person squat while sweeping), cooking utensils (western frying-pan, Indian brass pots, Chinese wok), farming artifacts that can condition ontogenetic musculature development, handling styles and even body deterioration (e.g. sickles, ploughs, hoes), water-carrying containers (carried against the hip or balancing on the head and without hands), fountain pens, typewriters and computers, etc.: we put the water jugs on our hips, and we rushed back home (Rao, K, 162)

c.in self-adaptor tasks using combs, toothbrushes, physical fitness artifacts, etc.: She sat down again, her face flushed deeply, and her hands twisted and twined together in her lap (Collins, WW, 273) Quickly becoming depressed again, he sighed; looked into the crown of his hat, as if for comfort; put it on without finding any; and slowly departed (Dickens, MC, XIX)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

McLeod, making every effort to recover composure, knit a crease in his trouser, the long fingers running forward and back in restless pressure upon the cloth (Mailer, BS, XXI) McLeod looked up at me. “You heard it all?” he asked./ I nodded, and he plucked some lint from his trouser leg. “I finally made a decision,” he stated (Mailer, BS, XXXI)

d.in alter-adaptor tasks, involving personal or professional grooming, medical practice, fighting (e.g. in fencing, flogging, the teacher’s ruler), torture, etc.: ‘Oh! Elder Tull!’ she [Jane] cried. ‘You won’t do that!’ [having Venters whipped] (Grey, RPS, I)

e.as conversational props such as eyeglasses, a pen, a pipe or a toothpick, which act also as speech markers, some of which we can consciously twirl, flick, or doodle, pound, rap or tap with: My Lady’s figure begins to be expressive of some attention. She has ceased to toss the screen, and holds it as if she were listening (Dickens, BH, XXIX) Don Basilio solía llevar en la boca un palillo de dientes, y tomándolo entre los dedos lo mostraba, accionando con él, como si formara parte del argumento (Galdós FJ, III, III) Hollingsworth tapped his pencil […] “Where do you want to begin?”/ Hollingsworth tapped his pencil again. He might have been establishing order (Mailer, BS, XX)

f.in communication tasks involving writing utensils (some susceptible of reflecting through space and time the person’s state, as with a pencil, typewriter or Chinese brush), telegraph or flag signals, batons, etc.: Betteredge gave his imperfectly-pointed pencil a preliminary lick with his tongue (Collins, M, ‘Fourth Narrative’) I write with a heavy hand and a quill pen scraping and scratching noisily over the paper (Collins, WW, ‘The Second Epoch,’ VIII)

g.to express thoughts, feelings and emotions, by slamming a door, flinging or kicking something in a rage, stamping on the floor, etc., sometimes as a substitute for words: I could have groaned aloud at the bitter thoughts awakened […] But I only clenched my hands, and stamped my foot upon the rug (A. Brontë, TWF, XLV) ‘Not so much!’ she [Charity] repeated, clenching her hand and stamping her foot (Dickens, MC, XXIV) I heard a double-knock at the street-door — a soft, fluttering, considerate little knock (Collins, M, ‘Second Period,’ V) in the heat of my anger […] I banged the door after me (Collins, WW, 204–205) Alexandra rapped impatiently on her desk with her knuckles. “Listen, Lou. Don’t talk wild (Cather, P, II, X)

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“But I’m goin’ to make you talk this time!” cried Dryfoos, striking the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist (Howells, HNF, V, IV) He was invisible now behind his paper, which he turned with a vicious crackle (Galsworthy, MP, I, II, II)

h.in athletic, sport of physique-building activities, as handling a bicycle, skating board, vaults, discs, etc.: un ciclista que descansaba sin bajarse de la bicicleta, con un pie apoyado en el suelo y el muslo de la pierna contraria en la barra del cuadro (Aldecoa, YS, III)

i.as folkloric, legal, protocolarian, religious or superstitious acts like kneeling on one or two knees, the Chinese prostrate ‘kowtow’ (touching the ground with forehead and hands), India’s touching one’s forehead with the gift one receives, the ancient Romans’ touching a slave with a rod to claim property (Hibbits 1992: 929–930), rapping on a table to keep order at a meeting, etc.: “Order, order, gentlemen,” cried Magnus, remembering the duties of his office and rapping his knuckles on the table (Norris, O, II, IV) [at a Hindu temple] He pressed his head to the marble floor, stretching himself fulllength in a ceremonial pronam (Bhattacharya, HHRT, XXIII)

j.to symbolize the person’s status, such as the Zulu bride’s knife indicating virginity, military and civilian medals, the judge’s gavel, etc.; k.in children’s and adults’ games and pastimes, as when shuffling cards or serving in tennis, putting down dominoes (in Spain, typically slapping them loudly on the players’ table, particularly on the traditional café marble-top one), flying a kite (an ancient Chinese pastime with the spring winds), etc.: a lady with a parasol, taking a walk with a military-looking child who was trundling a hoop (Dickens, DC, III)

l.playing music with different instruments that condition specific postures and even idiosyncratic facial expressions: [Miss Fairlie] Sometimes her fingers touched the notes with a lingering fondness […] sometimes faltered and failed her, or hurried over the instrument mechanically (Collins, WW, 146)

m.in animal-oriented tasks like training, taming, riding, leading, etc., by means of whips and crops, reins, threshing-boards, ploughs, or the lion tamer’s chair, often accompanied by paralinguistic sounds: the other shampoo’d Mr. Winkle with a heavy clothes-brush, indulging, during the operation, in that hissing sound which hostlers are wont to produce when engaged in rubbing down a horse (Dickens, PP, V)

Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

Reining in […], he shifted a leg over the pommel, always a sign of friendly intent (Grey, LWT, XII)

n.as interactive or noninteractive random acts like fidgeting with cutlery or crumbs at the table, flickering flint, a salesperson’s drumming on a counter, kicking a stone or empty can, or rapping along a fence or touching the wall, as we walk in the street: Los que yendo por la calle, por debajo de la capa sacaren la mano y fueren tocando con ella por las paredes (Alemán, GA, II, III, I) ‘Yes,’ said Mr Pecksniff, tapping his left hand with a letter which he held in his right (Dickens, MC, VI) The little man gave a double knock on the lid of his snuff-box, opened it, took a great pinch, shut it up again (Dickens, PP, XLVII) He [Count Fosco] with a light jaunty step, swinging his big stick, humming to himself (Collins, WW, 587) [reading a letter] ‘I went to look for you at the hotel,’ he read slowly, frowning over the small and hurried script (Huxley, EG, XXI) He [Hollingsworth] drummed his fingers on the desk, debating what I had said. “Perhaps, perhaps” (Mailer, BS, XIXI)

6.18.2 From a communication point of view, not dissociated from language, object-adaptors need much study, (a) because they must be included in the sort of kinesic atlas (always related to speech) suggested in Chapter 5, Volume II; (b) because while we still find in less advanced cultures certain rudimentary artifacts, there are others in modern societies that continue to condition behaviors as eloquent iconic vestiges of preindustrial periods, such as the plough, the potter’s wheel, the public cigarette-lighting wick hanging from Calcutta’s power posters or curb railings, the bells rung by Hindu temple worshippers, or the Chinese spittoon set on the floor between dignitaries (gradually disappearing from foreign view in the press) by the ubiquitous small table with a tea set; (c) for their many conversational and even grammatical functions, as when a Spanish woman who is using a fan (still popular in the south during the warmer season past the younger years) closes it abruptly after saying something like ‘Well, let him do it!’ eloquently replacing a verbal ‘I don’t care!’; (d) because handling some of them produces meaningful sounds: I had heard him ordering drink and chinking money, and making himself agreeable (Dickens, BH, LVII) Paul would wake up […] aware of […] the bang, bang of his father’s fist on the table (Lawrence, SL, IV) the whirl of a lawnmower from a yard somewhere (McCullers, MW, II, II)

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e. because, as with the other categories, they are significantly represented within literary anthropology, discussed in Volume III. 6.18.3 A still deeper aspect of our contact with all those objects is that the way we handle them often serve to manifest, in a way not necessarily intentional, our state of mind and emotions: Paul snapped at the laces of his boots angrily (Lawrence, SL, VII, 160) Elvira stubbed out her cigarette angrily on a plate (Wilson, ASA, II, I) As the woman departed, he [Frank] resumed his scrubbing, but without the same angry violence (Wilson, ASA, II, II)

6.19

Conclusion This model of the nonverbal categories, expanding over my previous treatments of it (and quite largely over Ekman and Friesen’s [1969]), seems to be a rather indispensable tool for the orderly observation and data collection in any systematic study of interpersonal communication and of our interaction with the built, modified or natural environments. In addition, it contains more inter- and multidisciplinary applications than any other topics included in the three volumes, as it affords an orderly study of interactive and noninteractive aspects of nonverbal communication, suggested by the list of research topics offered below. The semiotic approach of the nonverbal categories and the functional taxonomy proposed serve, in the first place, to dissect — as a complement to the cultureme model presented in Chapter I — the components of a culture in any ethnoanthropological or literary analysis and also to seek the deeper levels of our interaction within that unavoidable cultural background, which must be considered when reading the model for the study of interaction itself in Chapter 8, Volume II. Furthermore, the identification of nonverbal categories allows a detailed inventory and analysis of behavior in clinical cases and of the changes observed after treatment.

6.20

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.An audiovisual inventory of speech-markers in a given language. 2.An audiovisual inventory of identifiers, ideographs and event tracers in a given language. 3.The semiotic levels of body-adaptors in publicity.



Nonverbal categories as personal and sociocultural identifiers

4.An audiovisual inventory of alter-adaptors in a given culture. 5.The evolution of furniture in relation to postures. 6.The ontogenetic development of the nonverbal categories. 7.The pathology of nonverbal categories: presence and absence of interactive behaviors. 8.Social stratification of nonverbal categories. 9.Gender differences and anomalies in the nonverbal repertoires. 10.Social stratification of conscious and unconscious random behaviors. 11.Nonverbal categories in a culture’s literature. 12.Naturalness and nonverbal categories in the theater. 13.Speech markers and random behaviors in the cinema: anatomy of naturalness. 14.Speech markers and random behaviors in the theater: anatomy of naturalness. 15.A comparative study of nonverbal categories: England and India. 16.A comparative study of nonverbal categories: England and the United States. 17.A comparative study of nonverbal categories: England and Australia. 18.A comparative study of nonverbal categories: North-South, East-West in North America. 19.Nonverbal categories in childhood. 20.Dress and behavior. 21.Attitude and behavior toward people according to their clothes. 22.Attitude and behavior in and out of a uniform. 23.Perception and attitude toward people in uniform and out of it. 24.A family’s inventory of nonverbal categories.

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Chapter 7

The structure of conversation The anatomy of our verbal-nonverbal exchanges [Sir Percival] Grace and ease of movement, untiring animation of manners, ready, pliant, conversational powers — all these are unquestionable merits (Collins, WW, 210) Conversation seemed to have no self-sustaining power, and went on in the shape of disjointed remarks (Hardy, PBE, XXVII) Eitel paused significantly (Mailer, DP, XVI)

7.1

The study of conversation: The configuration of the encounter and its interpersonal relationships

7.1.1

Without pretending to review what has been done thus far, I must acknowledge — for they opened my eyes to some realities not fully explored — the pioneering studies, mainly by American psychologists and psychiatrists in the 1970s, that tried to identify certain interactional units and structures.99 There had been previous influential structural studies through a ‘natural history’ approach to interactive encounters, mainly by Scheflen, who was concerned with territorial behaviors as well (1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976) and Kendon (1967, 1970, 1972b, 1973, 1977, 1980; Kendon and Farber 1973). They acknowledged all verbal and visual behaviors and established certain recurrent patterns among the participants — as well as in the relationships and mutual influence of all of them — and also profited from studies by Condon and Ogston (1966, 1967) on the correlation between body movement and speech, that is, our ‘interactional synchrony.’100 Nevertheless (despite later work on conversation),101 I always felt the lack of a comprehensive model that would contain not only those behaviors that were being analyzed again and again, but all that actually happened, or could happen, in the course of a conversation, and I realized that its structure depended largely on nonverbal elements. Thus, gratefully adopting the basic conversational units defined by Duncan (1972) as ‘turns’ (i.e. speaker’s state and auditor’s state),102 and applying my own interest in language and nonverbal communication, I strived to fathom much further the true nature of conversation, which I understood as:

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a series of spontaneous verbal and nonverbal exchanges between at least two participants (who observe but also break certain rules) in an irregular flow of speaker-actor’s and auditor-viewer’s turns, and of some permissible simultaneous activities, acoustic and visual pauses and negative and positive behaviors.

For study purposes, however, the term conversation is broadened here to include not only a one-to-one or many-to-many exchange (an ordinary conversation between two or more persons), but also a one-to-many encounter (as in a classroom o political campaign speech or a congress or parliament address). 7.1.2 On the other hand, my interest in the theater showed me interesting differences between what was known as natural conversation, that is, spontaneous, and what I defined as contrived conversation, without any spontaneity of thought (and only partly of execution), since its participants can be in some way controlled or instructed and thus conscious of their roles, as the product of previously memorized repertoires for the multiple recreation of fictional characters.103 I would not want, however, to limit the term ‘natural’ to the conversation developed by members of the same culture, since otherwise they are always exposed to all sorts of communication flaws due to their lack of verbal-nonverbal fluency. It may not be ‘normal,’ but it will be ‘natural,’ since both interactants make an effort to communicate, putting into play an advanced process of selection, substitution and/or duplication or triplication of codes (not interpreted as redundant). And, as for spontaneity of its signs, the encoded messages and those that never reach the decoding end of the exchange, it is not less of a conversation than if it were carried out between or with participants in the various types of reduced interaction studied in Chapter 8, Volume II. 7.1.3

Previous to any serious study of conversation, one should ascertain the physical characteristics of the interactive encounter in question, as to the establishment of an adequate distance separating the participants (we sometimes readjust furniture to achieve it, and, if necessary, invite people to ‘pull up a chair’ or ‘get closer’), since failure to do so can result in recognized or unrecognized discomfort (cf. Sommer 1962, 1969: 66–68, on “the distance for comfortable conversation”) its configuration, which can be defined by the proxemic relationship and mutual orientation among the participants.104 It is convenient to distinguish, as did Kendon (1970, 1973), between focused interaction (an ordinary type of conversation, the topic of this chapter) and unfocused interaction (e.g. a barber and a client who reads a magazine, certain waitingroom interactions), another interesting topic. Then, already within a conversation, we find certain obvious interactional axes that can keep changing and alternating, as established by the orientation and gaze between speaker and auditor or auditors (as suggested by Fig. 7.3). From the beginning of the encounter and throughout, the axial and nonaxial participants (cf. Kendon 1973) define themselves,

The structure of conversation

a.because the speaker excludes some of them at times by not orienting himself toward them and looking at them: She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation (Howells, HNFL, III, VII)

b.or because they exclude themselves partially (by not paying much attention, as evinced by gaze and head or body orientation) or totally (e.g. listening or speaking to another participant, even making him his listener, looking somewhere although posture and orientation may still identify a previous listener status): “And what will you have, Kay, it’s your birthday. You choose what you like.” Gerald looked at his leggy daughter with affection. But Kay looked at her mother (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

It is also possible to momentarily keep a simultaneous double axis, one just visual and the other verbal, with two interactants, as in: he went on, and once again he seemed to wink at Gerald as he addressed Lionel Stokesay (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

As for postures, studied above all by Scheflen (1964, 1972), postural congruence or incongruence between speaker and auditor or auditors reveals different attitudes characteristic of their personal relationship, mutual interest or disinterest (e.g. generally, an upper crossed leg pointing away from the cointeractant does not indicate a permanent or circumstantial close relationship), auditor’s attention or inattention, etc. A very interesting phenomenon is that of mirroring behaviors, particularly when the behavior that consciously or unconsciously serves as a model is the one of the higher-status participant (e.g. crossing or uncrossing the legs, or leaning on the chair’s arm when the other person does it), for which reason that person should try to elicit the change in situations in which it may obviously be a true physiological necessity.105 Only the above basic observations (to which the reader can add others from the available serious literature)106 should suggest how fascinating it can be to study the various types of conversational encounters, from an informal gathering to professional and business meetings, in which the way the different participant can gain, maintain or lose their roles may depend on their conversational strategies. 7.1.4 What follows, then, is a concise — but rather exhaustive in its taxonomy — study of the conversational behaviors that define the structure of an encounter, offered as a rather interdisciplinary model for the study of language and of the interactive systems. The scheme in Fig. 7.1, ‘The Behavioral Structure of Conversation,’ attempts to show at a glance the functions of language and nonverbal systems in the six basic types of

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behaviors I have differentiated. I arrived at this model over the years by enlarging much upon Duncan’s classification, but with gratitude for his inspiring work. These basic types (manifested mainly through verbal language, paralanguage and kinesics, but possibly through proxemics or other bodily signs) constitute: (a) the essential rules the speaker must observe; (b) the essential rules the listener must observe, including the acts that establish them in their respective roles and those aimed at abolishing them; (c) the speaker’s activities during his turn, beyond the basic ones; (d) the ones displayed by the listener or listeners; (e) the simultaneous, and even identical, behaviors of both speaker and listener or listeners; and (f) the various forms and functions of intended or unintended acoustic and visual pauses produced during the encounter.107 7.1.5

Three preliminary observations. First, independently of the many regulatory or disrupting behaviors which can make an ordinary conversation the extremely complex event it is, anyone can observe that the back-and-forth succession of interventions by two or more interlocutors — as rendered, for instance, in a novel — appears to carry on without the observance of any rules or preparatory behaviors: one talks, another talks, the former talks again, and so on, in a typical smoothly-flowing, even snappy type of exchange and without interruptions or problems. The truth is that many times those rules are not needed simply because every experienced participant — not so a child — knows that he or she can speak if the current speaker ends a very short or longer statement with an intonation contour which is: falling (‘You don’t want to come’), rising and exclamative (‘You don’t want to come!), or rising and interrogative (‘You don’t want to come?’); but not when it is level, indicating an intention to add something to it (‘You don’t want to come — ’). In other words, there are fewer true interruptions than one might expect. What happens very frequently, however (yet so briefly and unobtrusively that it does not bother anyone), is what below is identified as ‘overlapping behavior,’ that is, the next speaker’s intervention beginning just before the previous one closes his. And this does not mean that each succeeding speech must necessarily be related to the previous one, although we see below how the first speaker does end with falling intonation: It seems to me in very poor taste to write at all,” said Lilian, “after the way she has behaved.”/ But Madame Houdet did not hear this […] “It is a very elegant house […]” (Wilson, ASA, I, III);

Second, given the lexicality of nonverbal systems, we must bear in mind that the flow of a conversation is not interrupted by some nonverbal interventions of its participants, as with the momentary silence and the gesture in:

The structure of conversation

231

VERBAL AND NONVERBAL CONVERSATIONAL SPEAKER Initial-turn asking Initial-turn granting INITIAL-TURN Initial-turn offering BEHAVIORS Spontaneous initialturn taking Failed spontaneous initial-turn taking

BEHAVIORS AUDITOR Initial-turn asking Initial-turn offering Initial-turn granting Spontaneous initialturn opening Failed spontaneous initial-turn opening

Turn opening Turn granting Turn closing

Turn asking: requesting, claiming demanding

Turn offering Turn yielding Turn relinquishing Turn holding Turn-asking suppression

BASIC TURN-CHANGE BEHAVIORS SECONDARY TURN-CHANGE BEHAVIORS

Turn-offer acknowledgment Absent turn asking Failed turn asking COINCIDING BEHAVIORS Absent turn opening Simul./Multiple turns Turn suppressing Simultaneous turn asking SPEAKER’S SECONDARY Simul./Mult. turn opening SPEAKER-DIRECTED BEHAVIORS Simul./Mult. conclusions BEHAVIORS Counterfeedback Simul./Mult. Feedback Feedback seeking Simul./Mult. turn yield Louder-voice request Turn preopening Simul./Mult. turn Clarification request Turn preclosing relinquishing Information request Turn resumption Simul./Mult. interruption Offered information Self-correction Simultaneous silences Correction Self-checking Overlapping behaviors Verbatim repetition Restatement ACOUSTIC AND/OR VISUAL PAUSES OR BREAKS Simultaneous conclusion Absent participation Self-overlapping Sentence completion Absent turn asking/taking Feedback Unsolicited information Turn offering Feedback seeking Interruption Preopening Counterfeedback Overriding interference Turn opening Word searching Prompting signals Preturn ending Thought searching Intermediate turn Turn ending Memory searching Absent intermedi. turn Turn yield/relinquish On remembering Failed intermedi. turn Prestatement Thinking Poststatement Mental repetition INTERLISTENER Transition Realization BEHAVIORS Prequestion Interpolation Interlistener feedback Question starter Somatic function Speaker-based feedback Midquestion External task Turn offering Postquestion Manipulation Turn asking Preresponse External interference Speaker-directed asking Hesitation Listener’s interruption Turn granting Emphasis Verbal deficiency Turn supressing Ellipsis Speech anomaly Prompting signals Self-control Topic absence Kinesic illustration Emotional

Figure 7.1.The behavioral structure of conversation

‘I can’t sleep. I keep thinking of things’/ ‘What things?’/ He did not answer./ ‘The lady at the Great House?’/ ‘No’ […]/ ‘The ghosts of the Two Brothers?’/ He shook his head./ ‘Not about Grace again?’/ ‘Yes. ‘Tis she’ (Hardy, W, III) “Did you pay a bushel of potatoes for him?” I asked, but Atticus shook his head at me” (Lee, KM, I, III)

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“Mr. Radley,” said Jem./ Mr. Radley turned around./ “Mr. Radley, ah — did you put cement in that hole in that tree down yonder?” (Lee, KM, I, VII)

Third, two other types of behaviors could be added to each of those shown on the table, since quite frequently any of them consists actually, in the encounter’s continuous flow, not only of a central behavior that defines it, but of a nonverbal pre-behavior that anticipates it: He saw Webley opening his mouth to speak and made haste to anticipate what he imagined was going to be his objection (Huxley, PCP, V);

and then of a nonverbal post-behavior or residual act: ‘Why not?’ asked his wife, her blue eyes still pleasantly smiling (Maugham, CA, V)

In other words, the listener, for instance, does not become speaker passing abruptly from listening to taking or even asking for his new turn, but through a mediating preparatory phase, a ‘pre-asking,’ during which he may moisten or part his lips, shift posture slightly, make an eyebrow or gaze movement, show a change in muscular tone, etc.; likewise, the closing of the speaker’s turn does not occur instantaneously either, but through some muscular relaxation, the still visible lingering smile that accompanied what he said or laughed, or a new postural change; nor does the listener who has laughed at the speaker’s words or gesture as feedback usually conclude that laughter abruptly, but through a smile. From the most practical point of view of the analysis of conversation and nonverbal interpersonal behavior, both are interesting, but we must realize that the first one, the pre-behavior, is the truly relevant one. Let us think, for instance, of a business meeting at which important things are at stake, and of how decisive it can be that we detect that behavior. To what extent could it be crucial that we get ahead of another participant at a given moment if we can grasp his ‘intention’ (especially if it is visible) to either intervene (to start speaking, get a word in edgewise and perhaps attain what we may want for ourselves) or to stop talking? If the latter, we may want to get ahead of another potential next speaker, thus preventing someone else from appropriating the conversational behavior that should follow as a rule. If we then learn to observe those very flitting acts (almost always as ‘microkinesics’), to not let anything escape us which occurs on the strictly personal level of the encounter, we will no doubt be at an advantage, without necessarily manipulating others. Nor does it mean that we should act this way all the time, for it can also become too obvious, since it involves an interactive mechanism that requires a certain degree of subtlety. On the other hand, we also know that sometimes what we, for instance, perceive first as the response to a speaker’s intervention it is not that pre-behavior, but the behavior proper, which will reiterate what the gesture already would have told us had we perceived it, as when the facial expression is quite far from being a simple nonverbal preamble:

The structure of conversation

Her frank, fearless face answered for her before she spoke./ ‘Do you think I would remain an instant in the company of any man whom I suspected of such baseness as that?’ she asked angrily (Collins, WW, 162)

In summation, these observations and what follows attempt to foster a greater sensitiveness toward the extremely intricate and fascinating phenomenon of conversation, in which we are all daily participants, but know rather superficially. Not only do we fail to identify and value each of its components as ordinary conversationalists or interactants, but even the existing studies fail to attain the necessary depth. This latter failure is due to lack of a truly realistic approach, that is, acknowledging all the nonverbal systems susceptible of becoming structural and strategic components of conversation. This is presented in this chapter as a model for the researcher in more extensive studies of conversation within any discipline, from the world of business to the analysis of conversation in the novel, the theater or the cinema.

7.2

Speaker’s and auditor’s initial behaviors These behaviors appear duplicated in Fig. 7.1, since at this initial point two or more candidates may be intermittently holding both speaker’s and auditor’s status before the configuration of that gathering is defined. Initial-turn asking (‘asking’ identified below as three possibilities: request, claim or demand) by one or more candidates — one of whom (usually due to status or gender) will succeed in becoming first speaker — perhaps while still taking places, pulling up chairs, removing coats, etc. Lg: ‘Well, If I may suggest…,’ ‘Shall we…?’ Pg: Prespeech click ‘Tz’ + pharyngeal ingression, throat-clearing. K: Orienting oneself toward and gazing at potential listener or listeners, as if looking for an audience, smiling, lipparting + pharyngeal ingression. Px: Approaching or leaning toward potential listener. Initial-turn offering, as an alternative to asking, by one of the participants willing to become listener, thus granting the first speaker a more legitimate status. Lg: ‘Go ahead,’ ‘Tell us about…,’ ‘What’s new?’ K: Smiling while pointing with horizontal palm-up hand gesture. Px: Leaning back, while looking at the potential speaker, ready to listen: “’Tell us a story’” (Grey, SB, IV). Initial-turn granting, as response to the asking, by the other or any of the other speakers, the logical next behavior (unless any of the next two occur). Lg/Pg: ‘Yes, go ahead…,’ ‘Mm!,’ ‘Tz + Sure!’ K: Pointing with horizontal palm-up hand gesture, nodding. Spontaneous initial-turn opening is, however, a most common occurrence displayed by one or more participants, in the latter instance only one becoming the accepted speaker, the other attempts resulting in ‘failed spontaneous initial-turn opening.’ Lg: ‘Well…’ or any other verbal opener, or direct development of a topic, statement, question, or comment. Pg: ‘Tz’ + prespeech ingression, before verbal intervention. K:

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According to the first intended verbal message, (e.g. ‘/No, no/.’ Px: Perhaps approaching the intended auditor. K: Orientation toward intended listener or listeners, holding the listener’s arm, straightening, leaning on table, nodding. Failed spontaneous initial-turn opening, when aborted verbal and nonverbal interventions have interrupted each other and soon come to a halt; or, typically, loosen strength and tail away into a listener’s state while a single speaker emerges.

7.3

Basic speaker-auditor turn-change behaviors Apart from those spontaneous behaviors through which quite frequently a conversation can be established in any informal setting, there are however a few prescribed and expected behaviors basic for the normal flow of a conversational exchange between speaker and listener to be initiated and maintained, namely: someone expresses the wish to speak, another agrees with it, and then the former speaks and later ends. One more activity — studied in detail under ‘listener’s speaker-directed behaviors’ — is indispensable: the speaker’s addressee must somehow acknowledge that address from beginning to end. The participants, however, apart from these key constitutive activities, can choose from among many other behaviors, which in fact most of the times make an ordinary conversation the extremely intricate and at times problematic social phenomenon it is. Returning to the basic speaker’s and auditor’s behaviors, what has been usually called ‘turn taking’ should actually be understood and used as a generic term designating a whole series of speaker’s and auditor’s behaviors, or rather structural activities, within these turn-change behaviors, which are identified below. Thus, while ‘taking’ seems to be understood by many as the new speaker’s straightforward beginning of his turn, ‘to start talking,’ more detailed observation reveals rather a gradual process in which we can distinguish several speaker and auditor behaviors as possible stages, a first activity being, for instance, ‘turn offering’ by the current speaker and the last ‘turn opening’ (varying between formal and informal situations), for instance: offering-asking-granting-preopening-yielding-opening offering-asking-preopening-yielding-opening offering-asking-yielding-opening offering-preopening-yielding-opening offering-asking-yielding-opening offering-opening (by turn suppression) offering-opening (by turn suppression) asking-granting-preopening-yielding-opening asking-granting-opening (by turn suppression) asking-granting-opening (by turn suppression)

The structure of conversation

asking-opening (by turn suppression) asking-granting-opening asking-opening (by turn suppression) granting-opening opening (by turn suppression) opening

A.Listener There are three basic ways for a listener to take the floor, (to which should follow the current speaker’s ‘turn granting’), of which only the first is actually the expected or desired one. Turn requesting,108 the more frequent and acceptable way of asking for the floor once the conversation is underway, takes place, (a) when a listener wants or thinks he must speak, even without the speaker having completed his turn; (b) when a listener feels that the speaker has spoken long enough; (c) when the speaker verbally or nonverbally offers the new turn to anyone or indicates that he is willing to yield it; (d) when he displays a ‘turn preclosing’ behavior announcing the end of his intervention; (e) when other co-listeners invite or urge him to speak; or (f) when the listener, or even someone outside the gathering proper, feels the need to interrupt the conversation. It can be addressed to the speaker or, failing that (because of speaker’s ‘turn holding’ or ‘turn suppressing’), to other listeners, seeking their support. Lg: ’Well — ,’ ‘Pardon me — .’ Pg: ‘Uuuh — ,’ throat-clearing, prespeech click ‘Tz’ + ingression. K: Eyebrow raising or lowering (depending on opening words) and/or raising a hand, leaning forward when seated, lip-moistening, slight out-in tongue movement. Px: Shifting from personal to intimate distance and/or reorientation toward the speaker. “I’m so sorry to interrupt,” said Mrs. Derrick, as she came up. “I hope Mr. Annixter will excuse me, but […] (Norris, O, I, V)

Turn claiming, rather than merely requesting it, is used, (a) when a listener considers it his right; (b) because the speaker’s turn has gone beyond what seems to be the limit; (c) because it responds to an agreed order; or (d) if other co-listeners invite or urge one of them to it. Lg: ‘Wait a minute.’ ‘Yes, but….! Pg: Forceful prespeech click + ingression, throat-clearing. K: Forceful eyebrow raising, frowning or lowering (depending on opening words) and/or raising a hand, forceful leaning forward when seated, rapid lipmoistening. Px: Rapid shifting from personal to intimate distance and/or forceful reorientation toward the speaker. Turn demanding, the listener, without necessarily observing any of the conversational rules, boldly and perhaps even forcefully and aggressively, signifies his intention to have the present speaker’s turn terminated, as we see at a very heated professional or nonprofessional meeting and at governmental sessions and political gatherings and demonstrations. Lg: ‘Listen!!’ ‘Listen everybody!! ‘Don’t listen to him!! Pg: Tense breathing. K: Very tense eyebrow raising, frowning or lowering (depending on opening

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words) and/or raising a hand or fist, tensely getting up when seated. Px: Tensely advancing toward the speaker. “Well, hold on,” exclaimed Annixter, out of order and ignoring the Governor’s reproof (Norris, O, II, IV)

B.Speaker Once a previous listener has attained the floor three behaviors must be observed. Turn opening, can follow, (a) one’s own preopening; (b) the speaker’s granting, relinquishing or yielding; (c) immediately after having been claimed (a disguised but unacceptable form of suppression); unless (c) the listener just claims it and takes it successively without any mediating speaker’s yielding. Lg: ‘Well…,’ ‘Bueno, pues…. Pg: ‘Tz + prespeech ingression, throat-clearing, both varying in intensity and recurrence according to psychological variables. K: Postural shift, reorientation, and even blushing and different hesitation behaviors. Mr. Pecksniff […] with a prefatory hem, began as follows: […] (Dickens, MC, III) “And what have you been delving into recently?” […]/ Mr Bevis chuckled and began to describe his researches into Modern American slang (Huxley, EG, XXV) [while talking about a woman] Munshin held out a heavy palm as if to draw our attention. “Take the way I met her […] (Mailer, DP, VII).

Turn granting, while still the speaker, is an expected and very brief (almost never verbal) signal before yielding our turn, to acknowledge (which some do not) the listener’s asking, so that we may finish our turn while reserving it for the asker (perhaps selecting one among several petitioners); to which should rather soon follow (perhaps to allow a listener from a group to ask a question or make a comment) our turn yielding, not the listener’s appropriating it by just taking it after the granting signal. Lg: ‘Yes.’ Pg: ‘Mmm.’ K: Smiling, a slight /Yes, wait/, nodding. Turn closing, expressed with concluding words but possibly also nonverbally only, especially kinesically, before and after speech ceases. Lg: ‘And that was all,’ ‘Thank you,’ ‘This is all I have to say,’ ‘All right?’ Pg: ‘Tz’ + pharyngeal ingression-egression. K: Out-in tongue movement,’ leaning back or stepping back if standing, lip-moistening, busying oneself with a cigarette or drink, staring at the addressee, etc. Actually, both opening and closing of the turn must be studied as well with respect to the different topics initiated and finished in the course of a conversation and to the encounter itself; for instance, the conversation preopening that takes place while people pull up chairs, even rearrange furniture, etc., and what Schegloff and Sacks (1973) called ‘opening up closings.’ Osterman ceased definitely to speak, leaning forward across the table, his eyes fixed on Magnum’s face (Norris, O, I, II)

The structure of conversation

[Elvira, talking about John’s article] She leaned back in her chair, her breasts swelling with indignation. That’s the part I like, Gerald thought [her breasts?]./ “Don’t let’s say any more about it” (Wilson, ASA, II, I) [after Professor Pforzheim closes his intervention at a heated discussion] He sat down, with folded arms, his head buried in his waistcoat (Wilson, ASA, I, II).

It should be added here, with respect to the interactive effect of the speaker’s intervention, that the real closing can sometimes be something (e.g. a door-slam) we should not interpret merely as the kind of post-behavior identified earlier: Lyman […] was shaking with fury [after an aggressive tirade at a meeting] […]./ “Ruffians,” he shouted from the threshold, “ruffians, bullies […].”/ He went out slamming the door (Norris, O, II, IV)

We have thus far identified an encounter’s initial behaviors and the ones that are basic to its successful continuation. The remaining majority are the ones that truly characterize a conversation as personally, socially and culturally differentiated event — despite some obviously universal features — and that define its participants are either good or bad conversationalists, that is, possessing or lacking the desired conversational fluency in different degrees.

7.4

Secondary turn-change bevahiors These activities are also acts between speaker and listener for the exchange of their respective turns, but, unlike the ones in the previous group, they do not have any primary functions. A.Speaker Turn offering by the speaker (or as one of the interlistener behaviors seen later) can be done, for instance, through a question, thus avoiding the asking and providing direct turn taking. Lg: ‘Yes,’ ‘Tell me…,’ ‘What d’you think?’ Pg: ‘Mmmh?,’ modifying the last words + pause. K: Fixed eye contact, eyebrow raising. Px: Reorientation toward future speaker. “Now, I call that interesting — curious […] How did you happen to think of it, Governor?” (Norris, O, II, V)

Turn yielding, previous to the next speaker’s turn taking, as can be the offering of the turn by itself. Lg: ‘Yes,’ ‘Go ahead,’ a self-interrupted sentence, raising (interrogative)/falling terminal juncture. Pg: ‘Uh-hu!,’ ‘Mm!’ K: /Yes/, eyebrow raising, offering turn with palm-up extended hand and/or smiling, postural relaxation. Px: Stepping back if standing, changing orientation, relaxing the interactional axis with listener. Turn relinquishing is different from the rule of turn yielding (after it has been

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claimed), and even from a clear turn closing, for the speaker simply ceases to speak, instead of properly closing his turn; then any of the listeners can take the floor without any preambles, offer it to someone else or claim it normally as long as someone else has already claimed it: “You think they’ll acquit him that fast?” asked Jem./ Atticus opened his mouth to answer, but shut it and left us (Lee, KM, XXI)

Turn holding, often a speaker’s counterrule when his listener has already claimed the new turn or is about to, or when the speaker has intentionally prolonged his too long, seeing the listener’s intention or precisely to avoid a pause that would allow it. Lg: ‘On the other hand…,’ or simply continuing to talk. Pg: Pharyngeal ingression (i.e. of air to be used to speak more), lingual click, acceleration of tempo to neutralize the listener’s turn claiming (or even preopening) and thus avoid his own turn yielding. K: Acceleration of gesture, leaning forward. Px: Getting closer to listener if possible and even holding his arm or hand. I attempted to speak. Betteredge held up his hand, in token that he had not done yet (Collins, M, ‘Fourth Narrative’) The Squire had delivered his speech in a coughing and interrupted manner, but with no pause long enough for Godfrey to make it a pretext for taking up the word again. He felt his father meant to ward off any request for money (Eliot, SM, IX) On the other, he’s generous, he’s honest, he’s probably a man […]. And that — No, wait now! You don’t know what I’m going to say! (Lewis, B, VIII) as Gerald was about to speak, he [Professor Stokesay] held up his finger for attention. “But wait a bit! […]” (Wilson, ASA, I, IV) Before Gerald could speak, she [Elvira] went on (Wilson, ASA, II, I) He [McLeod] delivered a long speech or more precisely a lecture, hurrying himself just perceptibly if he thought Hollingsworth about to ask a question (Mailer, BS, XX) […] I wouldn’t have an easy time deciding.” He held a finger to his nose as though to stop me because he wanted to say more. “Sergius, I […]” (Mailer, DP, XVII)

This holding of the turn can be a particularly manipulative technique to increase the listener’s anxiety: [when Hartright speaks to Mrs. Catherick about Sir Percival] Her colour was rising, and her hands were at work again smoothing her gown. I pressed the point farther and farther home, I went on without allowing her a moment of delay (Collins, WW, 509)

Turn-asking suppression (Duncan 1973) is the second counterrule to consider as an important element in conversation, differing from turn holding in that it can be displayed by the speaker or by any of the listeners who have not claimed the turn. Lg:

The structure of conversation

Speaker: ‘Wait,’ ‘Well…,’ ‘Yeees, but…’; Listener: ‘Let her finish.’ Pg: ‘Aaah.’ K: Speaker: Overpowering postural shift and gesticulation, /Wait/, holding the listener’s arms; Listener: K: /Wait/, holding the claimer’s arm. Px: the speaker’s invading of the listener’s intimate space. “Yves has got to behave himself this time he is here. No! don’t interrupt me (Wilson, ASA, I, III).

B.Listener Turn-offer acknowledgement, previous to possible reopening and opening), is a common and almost always just kinesic signal as a response to the speaker’s turn offering, naturally adding articulateness to the exchange. K: More steady eye contact, a thankful nod, lip-moistening, postural shift, blowing out smoke. Having now identified the speaker’s reopening and opening and the listener’s acknowledgement, here is an example in which the new speaker, after a listener’s turn offer, quite effectively displays all three in succession: “Tell us a story” […]./ “So […], you want a story?” […][acknowledgement]. He took a long and audible pull at his black pipe, and sent forth slowly a cloud of white smoke. Deliberately poking the fire with a stick, as if stirring into life dead embers of the past, he sucked again at his pipe, and emitting a great puff of smoke […]. From out that white cloud came his drawling voice [reopening]./ “Ye’ve seen thet big curly birch over thar — […] [opening] (Grey, SB, IV)

Absent turn asking is not infrequent when the speaker feels that his listener should or could claim the turn but (perhaps, among other reasons, because he/she is an auditor rather than true listener) does not, so the speaker makes a pause and then resumes his turn. Pg: Brief pause, inhaling. K: Looking at the auditor while inhaling, sometimes with parted lips, as if saying, ‘Well?’ Failed turn asking, on the other hand, is caused by the speaker who holds his turn beyond what is regarded as the limit of his intervention, often without paying any attention to the listener’ possible asking signals; typical of the domineering person and also of lack of social or interactive fluency. Pg: Throat-clearing, inhaling. K: Parted lips, lip-moistening, looking at colisteners, shoulder or hand shrug. Absent turn opening, after having been claimed and even preopened, or when it has been granted in order to obtain a response or reaction from the listener (i.e. feedback), but he does not do it, thus causing an unexpected interruption or gap, after which the speaker resorts to ‘turn resumption’ (unless another listener takes the turn): She [Kay] stopped and waited for Gerald’s comment, but as none came, she went on (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

But this happens also when we were just going to initiate a turn and, having shown our intention (e.g. opening the mouth, inhaling), we change our mind:

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Anthony opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. In front of Gattick and with Mary obstinately determined to be […], how could he say what he really felt? (Huxley, EG, XXX) “You think they’ll acquit him that fast?” asked Jem./ Atticus opened his mouth to answer, but shut it and left us (Lee, KM, XXI).

Turn suppressing, an unacceptable listener’s counterrule for taking the turn. Lg: ‘Yes, but…,’ followed by verbal invasion, unpreambled talking. Pg: Overpowering voice loudness, accelerated tempo. K: Postural shift, overpowering gesticulation, getting up, showing inattention. Px: Closing in on the listener. This usually happens, (a) by the listener taking the words from the speaker’s mouth: “Yes, he was here,” said Harris, “and — -” But Annixter took the words out of his mouth./ “He says there’s some talk of the railroad selling us their sections this winter” (Norris, O, I, III)

b. by actually taking the floor through a true interruption: “Why, Mr. Annixter — -” began Delaney./ “And don’t talk to me” […] “Don’t you say a word to me even to apologize [..]” (Norris, O, I, II) ‘It’s very kind of you, but — ’/ My uncle was going to refuse, but Driffield interrupted him./ ‘I’ll see he doesn’t get up to any […] (Maugham, CA, VI)

c. by cutting the speaker with turn-claiming words and then continuing to speak without any speaker response; d. by simply averting his gaze (or showing total lack of attention by just fixing it in midair, thus breaking the required axial contact and being an auditor, but not a true listener: “I don’t think…” She stopped, for professor Stokesay was no longer listening” (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

7.5

Listener-to-speaker behaviors I: Feedback

7.5.1

The matter of feedback, as on public occasions, constitutes a very interesting crosscultural research topic, as one should include even spitting on hearing about a shameful act or a despicable person, which I have observed in Turkey. In an ordinary conversation or in other types of encounters (a performance, a political speech, a sports event, etc.), since the listener or listeners remain free to use different communication channels while the speaker is occupied with the main activity, there are a whole series of behaviors they can display addressed either to the speaker or to other listeners. Among those directed to the speaker the most important one, though insufficiently studied thus far, is feedback,109 actually a whole series of activities travelling over the various somatic channels and the only permissible and in fact desirable kind of activity

The structure of conversation

simultaneous to the speaker’s. Their principal characteristic is that, in the case of language, paralanguage and kinesics, they must be intermittent, since they serve to prove that the listeners are actually listening, that they agree or disagree, like it or dislike it, but that they react in some way. Nobody can take utter silence and/or stillness for too long, for it causes anxiety, and if the speaker-listener relationship allows it, the former will sooner or later demand from the other: ‘What?’ ‘Well, say something!’ ‘Well, don’t just stand there!’ and that is why it happens while talking on the phone, lacking any visual feedback (‘re you there?’). Feedback, in other words, act as sort of running commentary to what the speaker is saying and doing, that is why the success or failure of the conversation depend much on it and it is part of our conversational fluency. Lg: ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Of course,’ ‘Sure,’ ‘I see,’ ‘Okay,’ ‘Right. Pg: Laughter with different meanings, ‘Mm,’ ‘Psch!, ‘Tz,’ narial ingression. K: Intermittent or continuous smiling, all kinds of emblematic gestures and externalizers and, typically, mirroring some of the speaker’s kinesics, particularly positive or negative externalizers, such as head-rocking in India. Px: as part of kinesics, stepping forward or backward, reorienting (e.g. while saying ‘Oh, come on!’). On the other hand, feedback can be almost imperceptible and thus much sensitiveness as a conversationalist helps in appreciating these reactions: (When he reached this point an interest in his ingenious arguments was revealed in spite of herself by the mobile bosom of Miss Paula Power[…].) (Hardy, L, Book the First, VII).

Besides the basic reactions of attention, interest and approval, the speaker can elicit many others (actually externalizers, defined in Chapter 6.14). Any of the auditor’s or real listener’s conscious or unconscious reactions can respond not only to the speaker’s simultaneous verbal or nonverbal behaviors, but to previous ones, or even as an advanced reaction to what he has not yet expressed verbally (which he may never do); in other words, by virtue of a series of mental reactions or associations elicited either a priori or, mostly, a posteriori: [reacting to what Harran is saying] Annixter struck the table with his fist in exasperation (Norris, O, I, III)

Fig. 7.2, ‘Forms and functions of feedback,’ suggests the variety of reasons why we display feedback and the channels through which we can manifest it.110

7.5.2 To at least call attention to feedback behaviors and promote their in-depth study, a few should be mentioned, with a caveat: that any of them can be feigned by the skilful interactant. Attention-inattention, the first indispensable reaction any speaker seeks in a conversation, even more in business, diplomacy, before an audience, in class, etc., although, depending on the situation, not all forms are acceptable. Lg: For attention,

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FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF FEEDBACK Attention Inattention

Interest Approval Disinterest Disapproval

Language Paralanguage Silence Kinesics Stillness Objectual Chemical Dermal Thermal

Other Behaviors Pleasure Displeasure Surprise Anger Fear Doubt Embarrassment Dissimulation Expectation Irony Unbelief etc.

Figure 7.2.Forms and functions of feedback

‘Of course,’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ ‘Sure!’; for inattention, an unconvincing ‘Yeah’ or ‘Sure.’ Pg: For attention, ‘Uhu!,’Hum!’, a closed-lip ‘Mm!’, congruent laughter; for inattention, a dull ‘Mm’ or ‘Mm?’, an empty laughter. Silence: For attention, filled with an open regard directed either to the speaker or somewhere else (the latter perhaps qualified by smiling, headshaking, etc.); for inattention, an empty, inexpressive gaze fixation or distracted fixation or scanning. K: For attention, intermittent eye contact, a piercing fixed gaze, smiling headnods, eyebrow raising, leaning forward, leaning back but with an ‘interesting’ look; for inattention, fidgeting distractedly. Stillness: For attention, if accompanied by congruent verbal or paralinguistic reactions; for inattention, with false fixation. Px: For attention, drawing closer, congruent facial expression, reorienting oneself toward speaker; for inattention, leaning back, crossing arms and breaking eye contact too often (not just the two former). In the following example the first negative feedback of simply not listening becomes the positive one of speech as an additional feedback reaction to the speakers’ sudden silence: Mr Pinch was just then looking thoughtfully at the bars [of the fireplace]. But on his companion pausing in this place [while talking], he started, and said ‘Oh! of course,’ and composed himself to listen again. (Dickens, MC, VI)

Interest-disinterest, also sought by the speaker and similar to the attention-inattention signals. Lg, Pg: For interest, ‘Oh, yeah?,’ ‘Uh-hu!,’ ‘Is that so?’; for disinterest, the same ones, but rather indifferently. K: For interest, more frequent head-nodding than for attention and more rapid blinking and longer eye contact, postural shift at the onset of the speaker’s turn or at its peak points; for disinterest, restless or very static movements, propping face on hand and gaze lost in mid-air. [Papitos] los escuchaba [Maxi’s stories] con embeleso, abierta la boca de par en par y los ojos clavados en el narrador (Galdós, FJ, II, VI) “So you’re leaving us, eh?” he said/ “Yes, sir. I guess I am.”/ He [while Holden tells him about his academic failure] started going into this nodding routine (Salinger, CR, II)

The structure of conversation

Approval-disapproval, independently of the two previous attitudes. Lg: for approval, ‘Great!,’ ‘Why, of course!,’ ‘Absolutely!,’ ‘Yes, seree!; for disapproval, ‘No, sir!,’ ‘Of course not.’ Pg: For approval, ‘A-ha!,’ ‘Mm!,’ whistling in public; for disapproval, ‘Tz,’ ‘Tz-tz,’ ‘Uh-uh!’; in public, ‘Boooh!’ in North America, whistling in Spain. K: For approval at a public lecture, applauding, but also banging on table in Germany, which in Finland denotes enthusiastic approval, and stamping on floor in France; for disapproval, frowning and other negative gestures, and stamping on floor in Spain. The others, absorbed, attentive [while Cadarquist speaks], approved, nodding their heads in silence (Norris, O, II, I) [At a meeting] There was a concerted outburst at the words. All the men in the room were on their feet, gesticulating and vociferating (Norris, O, II, IV) After Magnum had spoken, there was a prolonged silence (Norris, O, I, II) [When Elvira speaks] Gerald frowned. He disliked pretty girls who showed hysteria (Wilson, ASA, I, III).

7.5.3 What was said above about pre- and post-behaviors should be applied particularly to feedback. While a feedback behavior like laughter, for instance, can start abruptly, it is usually anticipated by smiling, or smiling and postural shift (and, for interactional purposes, the feedback starts there, since the speaker can perceive it and even be influenced by it), after which comes the laughter as the central behavior. And as for post-behavior, the listener who has laughed tends to maintain a residual smile that gradually tails away but which, until it disappears, continues to define the reaction that made him laugh; in other words, not only prolonging it in his mind, but exhibiting it in front of the other listeners and of the speaker who elicited it, which, as with the prebehavior, can very well influence that person favorably while speaking. Quite different would be, for instance, a gesture and posture shift of disapproval or boredom, after having given that reaction verbally or nonverbally.

7.6

Listener-to-Speaker behaviors II: Listener’s secondary activities Request for louder voice, almost always permissible, except during a performance. Lg: Louder!’ K: Pushing an ear forward with a cupped hand. James put his hand behind his ear./ ‘What?’ he said. ‘I’m getting very deaf […]’ (Galsworthy, MP, I, VI)

Request for clarification, permissible in most small groups, but usually not from an audience, unless so desired by the speaker. Lg: ‘I beg your pardon?,’ ‘What’s that?,’ ‘Richard who?’ Pg: ‘Mm?,’ ‘Uh?’ K: Frowning or raising eyebrows (often indicating

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negative and positive attitude, respectively) while gazing and/or talking to speaker. Px: Leaning toward speaker with eyebrow raising or frowning.’ Request for information, always verbal and clearly different from the previous one, must be a brief question, without adding any comments, for they would be an unjustified interruption and even turn taking. Offered information, a permissible form of interrupting the speaker, provided it is justified and also brief, unless it is an intermediate turn allowed by the speaker (e.g. at a meeting or seminar). Correction, provided it is brief (e.g. when the speaker refers to someone by the wrong name), but susceptible of being an intermediate turn if the speaker so allows. Verbatim repetition, that is, the listener’s exact repetition of the speaker’s final statement or question, as in an echo, perhaps with a different paralanguage which indicates his attitude (approval, amusement, adulation, mockery, etc.); a behavior I personally have observed countless times as a reaction by the uneducated rural listener toward an educated or uneducated speaker and by different people toward their superior. Restatement, which Duncan (1973: 39) identified as the “brief restatement” by which “the auditor restates in a few words an immediately preceding thought expressed by the speaker.” Simultaneous conclusion, some listeners’ uncontrollable habit of saying (identically or almost identically), as in a duo, the speaker’s last word and even a sentence or more, which he predicted and just could not keep to himself. Sentence completion (Yngve 1970; Duncan 1973), which earlier (Poyatos 1980a) I identified as ‘simultaneous conclusion.’ This one does not constitute simultaneous speech, but only the end (not necessarily correctly) of a sentence begun by the speaker but not finished (whether or not he hesitates), since the auditor does it, even if the speaker continues to talk as if he had not been interrupted (for it is not a real interruption). “You certainly are not drunk,” she replied. “You’re just — ”/ “Crazy,” interrupted Ruby./ They laughed (Grey, UPT, XX) “It’s almost like — ”/ “ — somebody knew you were comin’ back for ‘em.”/ “Like somebody was readin’ my mind…” (Lee, KM, I, VII).

Unsolicited information, quite a different kind of completion (and possibly longer), as it adds information which the speaker may or may have not thought of, or intended to say, quite typical of the indiscreet or gossipy person. “After she’d been in Auschwitz and had come back to find the lawyer had tricked her of all her money…”/ “He committed suicide” (Wilson, ASA, I, III)

Interruptions by the listener (besides the pauses by external interference seen below), verbally or nonverbally, tend to be, from a strictly communication point of view, those

The structure of conversation

illegitimate behaviors that break the flow of discourse, at times not necessarily with words but perhaps just a flitting gesture. We can observe four types: a.the only legitimized interruption, when one must do it: “I’m so sorry to interrupt […] but […] (Norris, O, I, V)

b.brief interruptions, as with a single-word comment, which the speaker may not notice or may decide to ignore, or alarming comments that force him to halt, or hesitate, and may even elicit comments by other listeners: [While Rose is speaking at a gathering] Theo […] said, “Shame!” […]. Rose noticed no interruptions (Wilson, ASA, II)

c.when the listener’s intervention lasts enough to become a new turn (though brief) or, at any rate, a true suppression of the speaker’s turn: [During Rose’s speech, Professor Pforzheim] Before Professor Pforzheim could answer, Arthur Clun was on his feet. “Mr Chairman, I really must protest. The Association […]” (Wilson, ASA, I, II)

d.when a series of gestures or a prolonged and incongruent posture, not precisely meant as feedback, but just as disruptive and perhaps even offensive, provoke the interruption; e.with the same result, the cumulative effect of specific feedback to the speaker in the form of, for instance, a more or less intermittent audible or silent laughter, an intended manipulative chuckling, in a very calculated way sometimes, but not too obvious. Overriding interference, the continued or intermittent behavior illustrated by the above last example, may not necessarily interrupt the speaker’s flow, but is nevertheless a familiar and unwanted listener’s reprovable behavior, whether coming from a single listener or an audience. during the whole dialogue, Jonas had been rocking on his chair, with his hands in his pockets, and his head thrown cunningly on one side. He looked at Mr Pecksniff now with such shrewd meaning twinkling in his eyes, that Mr. Pecksniff stopped, and asked him what he was going to say (Dickens, MC, XLIV)

Prompting signals are also listener’s speaker-oriented acts aimed at monitoring or controlling his performance by instructing him verbally, paralinguistically or kinesically, (a) to say or do something he forgot which his cointeractants expect him to (e.g. to introduce or mention someone), or (b) to prevent him from saying or doing something which he is perhaps about to say or do (e.g. in front of someone). They are almost never verbal. Pg: Throat-clearing to attract his attention, coughing or humming or whistling some notes to muffle or camouflage his words or distract him from doing something. K: Reorienting toward the speaker and staring at him intently, perhaps winking, or with wide-open eyes, nudging him with the elbow, inconspicuously

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pointing at someone with finger, head or just gaze, holding his arm, stirring on one’s seat to distract him, touching him with the knee under the table. ‘All regular, sir; perfectly.’ Dodson coughed and looked at Fogg, who said ‘Perfectly,’ also. And then they both looked at Mr. Pickwick [agreeing with him (Dickens, PP, XX) [when Mariam tries to speak] She stopped me by a warning pressure of her hand (Collins, WW, 191) he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining foot and the smile that encircled the room (Wharton, HM, I, XIV).

Intermediate turn, resulting from ‘offered information’ or ‘correction’ (seen above), or because the speaker shows interest in what the listener seems apt to say, can be legitimate only if the speaker approves it through turn-offering or turn-granting. Absent intermediate turn is of course possible if the listener changes his mind about saying something. Lg: ‘No, nothing,’ ‘It’s all right, you answered my question already.’ Failed intermediate turn, on the other hand, occurs if the speaker aborts it right after his listener starts it, as a poor educator can do in class or at a heated meeting. Lg: ‘Uh — not now,’ ‘Aah you know nothing!’, ‘No, I don’t mean that.’ Pg: ‘Uh-uh!’ K: /No/, or when another listener or listeners impede it (e.g. at a heated meeting). K: /Sit down!/, /Naah!’ dismissal gesture.

7.7

Speaker’s secondary behaviors A speaker who is already acting as such, may or may not display certain behaviors that serve to comment on his or her listeners’ behaviors, and to gradually announce the conclusion of his turn or his intention to resume it when it temporarily ceased. Speaker’s counterfeedback is a series of signals to react to the listener’s or listeners’ feedback, which should be part of any study of conversation or public speech. Many of those shown in Fig. 7.2 would be included in this category (approval, satisfaction, disgust, anger, fear, doubt, embarrassment). In addition, some of the listeners’ counterfeedback behaviors can elicit other very specific ones on the part of the speaker, for instance: brief laughs o a rising ‘Mm!’ to support the listener’s reaction of interest or approval; smiles and all kinds of facial and manual gestures as reactions to one listener’s or an audience’s verbal or nonverbal feedback; which in turn may elicit new or repeated listener reactions, as when the professional comedian joins in his audience’s laughter and then prolongs it (a professional technique), or responds to it with a silent, direct look, which brings forth a new laugh to reinforce his (perhaps undeserved) success. Feedback elicited by the listener’s or audience’s aggressive feedback, for instance, may reveal more aggressiveness still, or perhaps fear, which will in turn trigger new reactions from the listeners, and so on. In any case, the speaker’s counter-

The structure of conversation

feedback forms a whole series of mainly nonverbal activities of great importance in the professional repertoire of comedians, public speakers, presiders at any event, etc. Feedback seeking (besides the ‘feedback pause,’ identified later) is directly related to the speaker’s counterfeedbak, since he displays it verbally or nonverbally when he needs to know what his listener or listeners think about what he is saying (whether it is positive or negative, if they understand or not, etc.) or when he seeks their approval, and he can do it by interrupting his own words. It is a series of communicative acts that can even be displayed unconsciously. Lg: ‘¿’nd’stand?’, ‘Okay?’, ‘Right?’, ‘Got it?’; Pg: ‘Uh?,’ ‘Mm?.’ the intonational curve can qualify a statement with a feedback-request tone, as in: ‘We went to that little restaurant behind the station? (equivalent to ‘You know which restaurant I mean’ [written with ‘?’ too]). K: Subtle questioning gestures. Turn preopening (not always present) can be verbal and/or nonverbal, either a listener’s intermediate step between his having been granted the turn and his opening, or without any preamble. In any case, the true opening can always be aborted by the same person or impeded by another. Pg: Audible ingression. Lg: Up to a rather long statement, much like a title to a paragraph or story. K: Postural shift, movement acceleration (e.g. drawing at a pipe, putting down a cup after drinking), manipulating something, eye contact. the magistrate, with a preparatory cough, drew himself up in his chair, and was proceeding to commence his address. […] with another preparatory cough, he proceeded […] to pronounce his decision (Dickens, PP, XXV) She [Eliza] had a curious trick of pursing her lips reflectively before she spoke (Wolfe, LHA, I) [When Edgar closes his turn] Elvira stubbed out her cigarette angrily on a plate. “I think all that’s rather awful really” (Wilson, ASA, II, I) [After being asked to “tell the story”] “There’s a lot for you to learn in it,” McLeod observed. [after a long sentence still another preopener] He drew smoke from his cigarette and began to talk (Mailer, BS, XX)

Turn preclosing, not always present, indicates the proximity of the closing, after having yielded it or as a preyielding signal. Lg: ‘So…’ Pg: ‘Final syllabic clipping, emphatic drawling, prolonged conclusive pharyngeal ingression, accelerating the speech tempo. K: Postural shift, eye contact with the next speaker or with other listeners too, preparing to smoke or drink. Turn resumption, the continuation of the speaker’s state after having been momentarily disrupted through actual interruption, and just by permissible listener’s behaviors (turn asking, -preopening, etc.); because of the listener’s failure to take the turn he requested, claimed or demanded; or after seeking listener’s feedback. Lg: ‘However…,’ ‘Well, as I was saying…’ ‘On the other hand…,’ umpreambled continuation of even he interrupted (by self or others) sentence.

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She [Kay] stopped and waited for Gerald’s comment, but as none came, she went on (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

Self-correction, immediately after becoming tongue-tied, having mispronounced a word (both typically causing a true kinesic stammering simultaneously to the interruptioncorrection sequence, which proves the perfect language-paralanguage-kinesic cohesion), or having used or just initiated the wrong or unintended word or thought, which causes equally typical verbal and paralinguistic faltering (‘Uuh…,’ etc.). “He can say things — things that might be unp — might be disagreeable to you: say them publicly […]” (Wharton, AI, XII).

Self-checking, avoiding to verbalize one’s thoughts, always manifested nonverbally, mostly through gesture: It was evidently on the tip of her tongue to retort on me with the unbridled insolence of former times. She checked herself (Collins, M, ‘Second Period,’ VII).

7.8

Interlistener behaviors Common to these verbal or paralinguistic behaviors is their low-key quality, therefore being usually whispered; the kinesic ones are never too conspicuous either, although a glance or a narrow-range gesture can be very tense, or unless, for instance, people at a news conference express their protest and strong disagreement. I have observed eight such behaviors. Interlistener feedback, not addressed to or referred to the speaker but to fellow listeners, to control and comment on their own behaviors, usually inconspicuously during a performance, ceremony or lecture, unless angrily or tensely expressed. Lg: ‘Right,’ ‘Oh, no!’ ‘Quiet!’ Pg: Approving ‘¡Mm!,’ disapproving ‘Tz!,’ laughing at listeners’ laughter. K: Eye-contact and smiling/nodding/headshake, rolling the eyes in disapproval (e.g. at listeners’ questions), interruptions or talking to each other, or sharing mutual approving nodding. “[…] I often said it to him,” he [Sir Edgard chuckled grimly./ Theo Roberts whispered to Jaspers, “I’d like to have heard that” (Wilson, ASA, I, II), “Oh, they are my friends […] Wait!” she [Inge] called into the street […]./ Gerald saw the one man wink at the other (Wilson, ASA, I, IV).

Interlistener speaker-based feedback, about him but addressed to one or more of the colisteners, which he may or may not perceive. Lg: Usually in a soft or whispered voice, particularly during a performance or lecture, unless they are strongly negative: ‘Good, uh?’, ‘Terrible!’, ‘What?!’, ‘Oh, come on!’ Pg: Approving ‘¡Mm!’, disapproving ‘Tz-tz’ or ‘Uh-uh,’ solidarity or ingratiating or adulatory laughter. K: Approving nodding with

The structure of conversation

or without eye contact with others, commiserative headshaking, eye rolling, tense disapproving head-shaking, etc., and other emblems showing our watch to another listener to indicate the speaker’s excessive talking, and different emblems (e.g. drooping gesture of boredom). Stillness: while intently staring at another, Interlistener turn offering, one way of becoming speaker without having asked for the turn, when the other listeners feel that the speaker has spoken long enough, or inappropriately, or want their colistener to intervene. Lg: ‘Why don’t you tell him?’ K: /You/, /Go ahead/, forceful lateral nodding deictic + knit eyebrows (‘Show him!’). When Walter shook his head a third time someone whispered, “Go on and tell her, Scout” (Lee, KM, I, II)

Interlistener turn asking, if perhaps the speaker is unduly holding his turn or has suppressed the speaker-directed asking, is mostly nonverbal. Pg: ‘Tz’ + eye contact with other listener or listeners. K: Straightening, looking at the listeners, parting lips + pharyngeal ingression, eyebrow raising, or frowning when prompted by disagreement. Interlistener speaker-directed turn asking, that is, by one or more listeners on behalf of one of them. Lg: ‘John can tell you,’ ‘John knows.’ K: Pointing at John, nodding toward him. Interlistener turn granting, after asking the other listeners, or perhaps if asking the speaker on behalf of the colistener has failed. Lg: ‘Yes,’ ‘Go ahead,’ ‘Alright, you tell us.’ K: Nodding at future speaker. Interlistener turn suppressing, after one of them asked for it, usually because they do not want him to speak or want the speaker to continue. Usually in a soft voice. Lg: ‘Wait,’ ‘Quiet.’ Pg: ‘Sss,’ ‘Tz’ + pharyngeal ingression. K: Adding a /Wait/ hand gesture to the paralinguistic behavior, /No/, /Quiet/, /Wait/. “Mr. Chairman,” she said, “I don’t know whether a mere visitor has any right…”/ But her question remained unspoken […]./ “I fear we have no more time for questions […] (Wilson, ASA, I, II)

Interlistener prompting signals, similar to those used for the speaker, addressed to one or more colisteners to monitor each other’s behaviors (calling attention to something, urging to applaud, to leave, to ask for the turn, etc.) Pg: Throat-clearing + eye contact, clicks, audible ingression. K: Different emblems.

7.9

Coinciding activities: Simultaneous behaviors and crossed conversations A conversation does not occur in an unrealistically fluent and smooth succession of behaviors, save in the majority of novels or dramaturgic texts or perhaps a very formal and controlled gathering, for there are in every culture certain situations in the course of an encounter in which at least two participants become engaged in the same activity

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at the same type. We must differentiate, however, between simultaneous activities, of the same or different type, and the coincidence of truly identical activities, which can be called symmetrical, leaving the term ‘multiple’ to refer to the co-occurrence of two or more participants. Simultaneous turns (Duncan 1973) constitute a very peculiar situation that deserves much investigation from a linguistic, sociopsychological and cross-cultural point of view. It is unquestionably a cause for intercultural clash between, for instance the average Anglo-Saxon and Latin or Arab speakers, but not between the latter two, who have the same tendency to simultaneous floor-holding behaviors. This is characterized by syntactical disorder and word repetition, when speaker B does not necessarily address speaker A, but speaker A’s listener or listeners, until they stop paying attention to their interlocutor, who then gives up and relinquishes the turn. Although in general this situation is not acceptable and cannot be maintained for too long, it can be managed very differently, depending on the participants’ culture or cultures. In the Anglo-Saxon world one tries to avoid simultaneous talking as soon as it starts by apologizing for the intrusion (‘Sorry,’ ‘No, go ahead’), speaker A perhaps accepting the intrusion (‘Go ahead,’ ‘That’s all right,’ smiling) and speaker B again justifying his behavior (‘No, I was just going to say — ’), in which case the simultaneous speeches last no more than seconds. However, I have observed the Anglo-Saxon speakers’ confusion when forced to pay attention to a Spanish, Brazilian or Lebanese couple narrating a trip, husband and wife each following their own course with constant repetitions, simultaneous conclusions, mutual corrections, etc.; and, of course, establishing independent interactive and visual axes that generate much uneasy amusement or real anxiety, their listeners smiling in embarrassment and even making gestures of confusion and of not being able to follow both speakers at the same time, as in Act II of Shaw’s Pygmalion:111 DOOLITTLE HIGGINS PICKERING

exclaiming simultaneously

Bly me! it’s Eliza! What’s that? This! By Jove!

Multiple turns, on the other hand, are very common in groups where simultaneous behaviors also happen, but they can be very different according to whether they manage to establish parallel multiple turns (i.e. with interactive axes of voice and gaze) or crisscrossed conversations, during which their voices, gestures and gazes cross and seem to stumble and bump into each other. Fig. 7.3, ‘Simultaneous and multiple turns,’ tries to identify (S as speakers, L as listeners) only some of those situations. Although varying according to culture and socioeducational background, they are quite common, for instance, across one or more tables in a typical informal party, cafeteria gathering or wedding banquet. Multiple turns develop in which speakers usually address only listeners (since it is easier to disrupt their more passive activity than the speaker’s); and also multiple crisscrossed conversations in which listeners

The structure of conversation

unduly appropriate other speaker’s listeners in such a way that the axes are not formed between a speaker and his listener or listeners but between him and another speaker’s rightful listener or listeners; these listeners have to make a real effort to pay attention to both speakers (out of courtesy or sheer curiosity not to miss anything), until often the more domineering person prevails. The reader can imagine other combinations, weigh their interactive consequences and relate those situations to the intercultural problems they may cause, as well as to the different situations in their own daily experience. The tragic thing about Spanish gatherings is that twenty persons are talking at the same time and nobody can hear. You have to communicate, at the top of your voice, with someone who is at the other end of the sofa, with three crisscrossed conversations. Horrible. (Vallejo-Nájera y Olaizola, PE, IX; trans. mine)

Simultaneous turn asking may occur without hardly causing any simultaneous turns. Two or more interactant seeking acknowledgement of their asking may gaze at each other while, for instance, audibly inhaling and/or clicking the tongue (‘Tz’), until one of them manages to overpower the other listeners, or listeners and speaker together; which results in an illegitimate taking of the turn or an abrupt interruption, unless the speaker has already decided to which one he wants to grant the turn. Simultaneous turn opening, through simultaneous or multiple interruptions, or when the speaker yields his turn to a listener, but two or more others open their turns. Simultaneous/multiple conclusions, according to the definition given above, when one or more listeners say the speaker’s last words along with him, often giving each other a knowing look. Simultaneous/multiple turn yielding, similar to the previous situation, except that the turn is yielded by all the speakers when someone asks for it or one of them overpowers the others. Simultaneous/multiple turn relinquishing, possibly originated within simultaneous or multiple floor holding when two or more conversationalists suddenly try to control their rule-breaking behaviors at the same time and come to a halt, causing one of the interactive pauses, which they quickly try to solve with the usual verbal and nonverbal yielding signals. Simultaneous/multiple interruptions are possible if the speaker has two or more auditors. Sometimes one of the interruptors prolongs his intervention into what is actually a brief simultaneous turn, which, if maintained beyond a single statement, may become a new turn that has been taken through interruption and suppression because the lawful speaker may yield his turn. Simultaneous silences take place when all the speakers suddenly came to a halt simply because they have said what they wanted to say, not because they were yielding or relinquishing their turns. Much more could be said regarding simultaneous and multiple activities during a

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Figure 7.3.Simultaneous and multiple turns

conversation. One could group together, for instance, symmetrical interventions like multiple silences, the identical prompting signals of several listeners, or many of the feedback behaviors. Naturally, symmetrical behaviors can occur between speaker and listener or between two listeners. Another important form of simultaneous activities is the phenomenon of overlapping behaviors, seen as a cultural characteristic in direct proportion to the familiarity or emotional freightage of the encounter and, naturally, the participants’ personalities. Quite typically and with a frequency generally not perceived, they happen,

The structure of conversation

a.when the next speaker starts his turn (perhaps only to reply to a question) before the first speaker has totally finished speaking: “What on earth are the children…”/ Inge answered his unfinished question. “I have told them that Dollie’s drunk,” she said (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

b.when, as the beginning of the listener’s future turn, he, without asking, starts making short remarks that break up the speaker’s discourse and coincide with his words: “I am sorry, but I shall have to protest — -”/ […]:/ “Go to the devil!”/ “It is as much to your interest as to ours that the safety of the public — -”/ “You heard what I said. Go to the devil!”/ “That all may show obstinacy, Mr. Annixter, but- — ”/ […]./ “You,” he vociferated, “I’ll tell you what you are. You’re a — a — a pip!/ “may show obstinacy,” pursued Mr. Behrman, bent upon finishing the phrase, “but it don’t show common sense” (Norris, O, I, II)

But the new speaker’s verbal behavior may also overlap the former’s nonverbal behavior (not necessarily his words), for which one has to be sensitive enough to predict what he does not want the other to say: “I propose to work for a commission.” The Colonel was beginning to shake his head again, but Corey hurried on.”I […]” (Howells, RSL, VI) Don’t deny it! Don’t deny it!” — this apropos of a protesting movement on the part of Eugene’s head — ”I know all!” (Dreiser, G, II, XXVIII).

7.10

Acoustic and visual pauses or breaks112

7.10.1 Although interactive pauses are treated more in depth when studying silence in Chapter 7 of Volume II, it should be mentioned here that, as with silence, studies of conversation have not acknowledged the functional relevance of the different conversational silences, nor their positive or negative aspects in different contexts. Which is not surprising if we think of the traditional dissociation of what has already been analyzed on these pages as the triple language-paralanguage-kinesics structure and the mutual cohesion of its three components. Only in these three basic communicative cosystems we easily find in any conversation that perfect mutual compensation that totally invalidates the notion of ‘gap’ or ‘vacuum’ many see as soon as the participants stop talking: She paused with a slight falter of embarrassment, and Trenor, turning abruptly, fixed on her a look of growing intelligence (Wharton, HM, I, VII)

There are several aspects of conversational pauses that need to be studied in depth, namely:

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a.The possible coincidence of silence and stillness; b.the coincidence of the acoustic pause’s onset with the slowdown of movement, and then how both resume at its offset; c.the co-structuration of a paralinguistic-kinesic pause with the immediately preceding, simultaneous and succeeding activities; d.the intensity of pauses (determined by their duration and the co-structuration just mentioned); e.how a pause, which is not at all a semiotic vacuum, can be filled with activities others than sound and movement (tears, blushing, emotional sweat, etc.); f.how a pause can be only paralinguistic or kinesic, one of the systems still operating while the other one ceases to, but still communicates either by its very absence or precisely through the meaningful characteristics of silence, stillness, or both; and g.the conversational functions of each occurrence of a single (silence) or twofold (silence and stillness) pause. 7.10.2 Outlined here are only the essential pauses in order to identify the more typical situations. Some have a conscious interactive function, but others are uncontrolled and happen when some interactive activity fails, which allows us to distinguish attitudinal pauses from uncontrolled ones. Absent-participation pause is the first type of pause to be identified, since it is not produced, like many others, by the failure of some of the conversational norms, or as part of the exchange mechanism between speaker and auditor, not even as a reaction to any of the interventions. It is caused simply by total lack of participation, that is, because nobody tries to say anything, some having perhaps changed from listeners to mere withdrawn auditors. They are the pauses that, depending on their duration (one of the qualifiers of silence), cause those typical situations that are so tense during a conversation: Miss Fairlie seemed to feel the oppression of the long pauses in the conversation, and looked appealingly to her sister to fill them up (Collins, WW, 93).

It will be seen, when focusing on silence in Chapter 7 of Volume II, that the tolerance for interactive silences — precisely because they are unquestionably parts of the interaction — when they are not caused by tension but by lack of a topic, are managed much worse in the West than in the Orient. In England, in the middle of one of these silences, someone may traditionally say, ‘An angel is passing!’ and in North America, ‘Don’t let everybody talk at once!’ And the truth is that, apart from those situations of social anxiety, social inexperience, shyness, etc., we also observe cultural differences, most characteristically when I compare the same kind of gathering, for instance, among the average type students in my University and their

The structure of conversation

counterparts in Spain, the latter being more loquacious, particularly if they still do not know each other, while among middle-class Canadian students the prolonged absence of words create real tension. Absent-turn-asking pause, which also happens if the speaker closes his turn or has to continue after noticing that his listener does not ask for the turn (out of shyness, confusion, disinterest, etc.), even changing the topic. It is more paralinguistic than kinesic, since movements can go on during the interruption of discourse. Absent-turn taking, either as a result of simultaneous yielding, with mutual eye contact and verbal behaviors (‘Well — ’), paralanguage (‘Tz,’ throat-clearing, inhalation, etc.) and kinesic (postural shift, reorientation), or because the speaker does not take the turn after having been yielded to him. Turn-offering pause, often between the speaker’s offering of the turn and the new listener’s turn, as an unexpected offering, for instance, may have caused confusion, embarrassment, an effort to express one’s thoughts, etc. Lg: ‘Well, I — .’ Pg: ‘Uh — .’ Turn-preopening pause, once the speaker knows he has the floor or tries to speak which can be prolonged most elaborately with multiple acts: [Dorotea] después de haberse puesto bien en la silla y prevenídose con toser y hacer otros ademanes, con mucho donaire comenzó a decir […] (Cervantes, DQ, I, XXX) [the judge, 1986] cleared his throat, took a sip of water, broke the nib of a guill against the desk, and, folding his bony hands before him, began (Galsworthy, MP, III, IV)

Turn postpreopening, after that possible verbal, kinesic or paralinguistic prestatement: [After a rather long verbal preopening statement] He drew smoke from his cigarette and began to talk (Mailer, BS, XX)

Turn-opening, after a possible preopening statement (‘Well — ,’ ‘Tz’ + ingression, postural shift, momentary stillness) and the true beginning of the speaker’s turn. Pre-turn-ending, sometimes anticipating (thus allowing an eager potential speaker know) the actual closing (‘ — so we left that same day — and that was it,’ said with falling intonation), after which someone may ask for the turn, just take the floor, ask a question, etc. Turn-ending, indicated by a postspeech tongue click ‘Tz,’ pharyngeal ingression, the visually perceived ingression, /That’s all!/ followed by stillness, postural shift, etc. Turn-yielding or relinquishing, a silence caused when the speaker yields the floor to a future speaker who does not take it immediately, or by his unexpected relinquishing. Pre-statement, very carefully utilized by the expert speaker when preceding important words as an emphatic preparation with a possible expectancy effect on the listener or listeners, may be combined with gesture or even the manipulation of an object: When Dr. Mortimer had finished reading […] he pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and stared across at Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle, HB, II)

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Osterman paused for a moment, allowing precisely the right number of seconds to elapse (Norris, O, I, III) I always think,” he [Dr. Winskill] removed his tortoise-shell spectacles, leaned forward and stared at Gerald with weak, swimming eyes,” […] (Wilson, ASA, I, IV) “Why are you coming again?”/ Helen looked at him [Anthony] for a few seconds without speaking, then shook her head. “I’m not coming again,” she said at last (Huxley, EG, XII) “I love you, darling,” he would say out of a silence and kiss her (Mailer, DP, XVI)

Post-statement pause, depending on its interactive relevance, which may be the silent equivalent to repeating what has just been said verbally, thus utilized precisely to increase its effect upon the listener113: “Yes suh. I felt right sorry for her [..]”/ “You [a Negro in court in a US Southern town] felt sorry for her, you felt sorry for her?” Mr. Gilmer seemed ready to rise to the ceiling./ […] paused a long time to let it sink in (Lee, KM, XIX)

Transitional pause (apart from syntactical breaks), may happen between different topics (or just turns). Although it may also be due to psychological variables, it seems to happen differently according to the socioeducational status of the interlocutors. Lg: ‘Well — ’ ‘So — ’ Pg
: Different types of laughter, tongue clicks, audible ingression, throat-clearings. K
: Postural shift, slapping one’s knees, hand-rubbing, hair-preening, adjusting the trousers’ crease, busying oneself with a drink, a pipe or cigarette, flicking imaginary lint, fidgeting with a necklace, the wedding ring or the wristwatch strap. Px
: Slow spatial shift. Others
: Blushing caused by the previous topic, etc. Sometimes a transition pause between topics, or passing from speaker’s to listener’s state, or vice versa, can be provoked by something external to the encounter, as when in a restaurant the waiter approaches the table: The arrival of the second bottle seemed a signal for her [Elvira] to relax. She lit a cigarette, turned sideways in her chair and crossed her legs (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

Pre-question pause, because the question is being formulated by someone, perhaps hesitatingly or calculating its consequences: [Elvira says something, but he wants to say something else] There was a moment’s silence, then Gerald said: “I suppose you’re full of engagements this evening” (Wilson, ASA, II, I)

Question-starter pause, which often occurs between the introduction to the question and the question proper: –Dis-moi, Gertrude…t’a-t-il dit qu’il t’aimait? (Gide, SP, 98)

Mid-question pause, between different parts of a descriptive (i.e. multiple) question:

The structure of conversation

‘You know that man I tell you about?…That man Enrico Malatesta […]? (Dos Passos, MT, I, II)

Post-question pause, on the part of the questioner, waiting for the answer: ‘Now, what does our young friend say?’ […] ‘Take time, take time! I pause for her reply. But take time!’ (Dickens, BH, III)

Pre-response pause, between the question and its reply, while the other person gets ready for it (not out of hesitancy): “What makes you think that?”/ Mark drew up a chair and sat down before answering (Huxley, EG, XXVI) [After being asked a question] John frowned, took out his pipe and sucked as he lit it. “That’s the sort of pointless question […]” (Wilson, ASA, I, III)

There is a form of time-stalling — a pause device in itself — when, for instance, the addresee repeats the question to give himself time: “[…] What have you got to do with it?”/ “What have I got to do with it?” March toyed with the delay the question gave him (Howells, HNF, I, II)

Hesitation pause, due to a break in one’s train of thought, not daring say anything, or out of insecurity, or caused by the listener or listeners’ disturbing feedback. It is manifested differently according to sex, personality and other factors. Lg
: May be preceded by short or curtailed words like ‘And, uuh — ,’ ‘Well — the thing is — ,’ ‘Er — yes — yes,’ ‘Would you — .’ Pg
: Stammering, broken speech, clearing the throat, coughing, sniffling, usually keeping still. K
: Breaking eye contact during the pause, touching the nose or the lower lip with the forefinger, staring vaguely at the floor or ceiling, touching the eyebrows with thumb and forefinger, tensely crossed arms and looking down. ‘I could not accommodate myself to his ways very often — not out of the least reference to myself, you understand, but because — ’ he stammered here, and was rather at a loss (Dickens, MC, VI) ‘I thought,’ pursued the landlady, with a most engaging hesitation, ‘that you had been — fond of — of the Dragon?’ (Dickens, MC, VII) I thought my visitor was — your friend — your husband — Mrs. Fowley, as I suppose you call yourself? (Hardy, JO, V, II) the hesitation which silenced her before she had completed her question (Collins, WW, 204) ‘Er — yes!’ (Lawrence, SL, XIII) ‘[…] Do you want it?/’ ‘Yes — yes, I do. But…’ Herzog hesitated (Bellow, H, 261)

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As with any of the other speaker’s behaviors, the listener can always take advantage of it to cut in and open his own turn with no preambles, or to prompt the speaker: I thought all — all middle-aged people liked my father and mother./ He had been about to call me old […] so I made a face when I saw him hesitating, which drove him into “middle-aged” (Butler, WAF, LXVI)

Emphasis pause, generally repeated between words and even syllables: ‘I — certainly — did — NOT,’ said Coavinses, whose doggedness in utterly renouncing the idea was of that intense kind that he could only give adequate expression to it by putting a long interval between each word, and accompanying the last with a jerk that might have dislocated his neck (Dickens, BH, VI)

Elliptical pause, an interruption that can occur for two reasons: a.because words that are unnecessary to be understood beyond doubt are never said: ‘Did she see anything in the boy — -?”/ ‘That wasn’t right? She never told me.’ (James, TS, II) She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, I suppose if you really want to kill yourself…” She left the sentence unfinished (Huxley, EG, XXXIV)

b.because, despite the obvious intention to add something, the exact words cannot be deduced: […] I thought that perhaps you too…” He left the sentence unfinished […] It occurred to me that you… Again he left the sentence unfinished and looked inquiringly at Anthony (Huxley, EG, XXXI) But, darling, I’m sorry. I didn’t imagine…[…] You can’t… (Huxley, EG, XXXIV)

It must be pointed out that the omission of words constituting the ellipsis can be filled with an unambiguous emblematic gesture of the same meaning: I — I’d like to, Sid. Thank you (Then an apprehensive look comes over her face) Only not if you come back — you know! (O’Neill, W, I, i)

Self-control pause, interrupting one’s speech suddenly to avoid saying something, often the voice gradually losing strength: ‘It’s laying there, watching Cash Whittle on that damn…’ Jewel says. He says it savagely, but he does not say the word (Faulkner, AILD, 17) ‘I-’ Then she stopped, and I said,/’Know what?’/’Nothing,’ she said (Faulkner, AILD, 132) “Of course, I’ve read Frazer and Dr. Margaret Murray about the witches…”/ She stopped, alarmed at the sudden change in her hostess’s expression (Wilson, ASA, I)

The structure of conversation

“Quite candidly, the ole chap made an infernal nuisance of himself with all that…” His voice tailed away as he realised that “pro-German nonsense” would not be exactly polite to his guest (Wilson, ASA, I, I)

Kinesic illustration pause, in the course of a grammatical sentence o between two sentences: Le metí mano, y… ¡ras!, le trinqué la oreja (Galdós, FJ, II, V, VI)

Self-overlapping pause, triggered by interrupting the expression of a thought in order to verbalize another (or ‘rephrase it’) one that replaces it or modifies it: ‘No, no — How can we tell that it isn’t all a false report? It’s highly im -’/ ‘Oh, I’m sure it isn’t (A. Brontë, TWF, XIV) ‘Wasn’t that Snagsby talking to you, Tony?’/ ‘Yes, and he — yes, it was Snagsby,’ said Mr Weevle, altering the construction of his sentence (Dickens, BH, XXXII).

Feedback pause, that is, a silent reaction under the effect of what has been said or done by the speaker: “[…] it is hopeless to expect people who are accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about our little republican distinctions […].” Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one spoke. “Yes — it seems […]” (Wharton, AI, X) His ominous reasoning had a silencing effect upon his hearers (Grey, DF, I)

That silence that follows often carries an obvious message as eloquent as any verbal reaction, as when we know very well that the speaker is right: I want not to be. I want to be — what — ”/ “What the De Stancys were, and are,” he said insidiously; and her silenced bearing told him that he had hit the nail (Hardy, L, Book the First, XIV)

Feedback-seeking pause, mainly kinesic: gazing at an interlocutor or at an audience, lips parted, smiling or frowning and shaking the head (‘I can’t believe it!); an out-in tonguetip gesture; or the most showy pause, particularly as part of the professional repertoire of the Anglo-Saxon male comedian before his audience: arms akimbo or loosely flexed and hanging, or open as in a come-on (‘Laugh!’) gesture. This pause is related to the carrying function of silence and stillness (Chapter 7.7, Volume II), during which the comedian gives his or her audience time to mentally ‘play back’ the verbally and nonverbally offered joke, thus easily eliciting another laugh (even if he and his audience know it was a poor joke), which professionals can bring forth several times. Counterfeedback pause, a form of counterfeedback consisting only in the speaker’s self-interruption, looking at the person who gave him the feedback, intentionally looking away, or looking at the rest of the listeners or audience. Word-searching pause, when one does not seem to find the correct word. Pg
:

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‘Mmmm…,’ ‘What d’you say — ?’ K
: breaking eye contact with our interlocutor (as if to retreat into our own privacy for better concentration), looking at the ceiling or floor, frowning, etc. Je voudrais savoir si je ne…comment dites-vous cela?…si je ne… (Gide, SP, 59)

Thought-searching pause, when we find it hard to express something. Lg
: ‘Well, I dooon’t know how to explain it.’ Pg
: ‘Tz,’ ‘Mmmm….’ K
: Parting and distending lips, breaking eye contact, frowning, looking down, closing the eyes. Memory-searching pause, trying to remember names, dates, events, etc. Lg
: ‘Yeah, what’s his name?!’ or similar expressions that, if repeated, may make the cointeractant say, ‘Never mind.’ Pg
: ‘Mmmm…,’ ‘Tz, mmm…,’ alone or alternating with verbal formulas. K
: Virtually always breaking eye contact, tenser muscle tone, grabbing one’s chin, squinting, crossing arms and looking down, one hand on a hip and the other holding the temples with thumb and forefinger. ‘O. K. Now when we go in to see the boss, what you gonna do?’/’I…I…’ Lennie thought. His face grew tight with thought (Steinbeck, MM, I)

On-remembering pause, when we suddenly remembering something, interrupting our train of thought, and even the listener may ask, ‘What!?’ Thinking pause, during which it is almost inevitable to also interrupt eye contact with our interlocutor. Pg
: ‘Mmmmm…’ K
: Frowning, crossing arms, grabbing or scratching the chin, slowly scratching or rubbing the back of the neck, scratching the top of the head, slowly stroking the beard, fidgeting with something, lighting a cigarette to give oneself time to think, etc.: A long pause succeeded […] Mr Pecksniff toyed abstractedly with his eye-glass, and kept his eyes shut, that he might ruminate the better (Dickens, MC, III) ‘And so,’ he said, when he had gazed at his friend for some time in silent pleasure, ‘so you really are a gentleman at last, John. Well, to be sure!’ (Dickens, MC, XII) ‘She is worthy of the sacrifices I have made,’ said Martin, folding his arms, and looking at the ashes in the stove, as if in resumption of some former thoughts (Dickens, MC, XIV) The old man, with his chin resting on his hand, paced the room twice or thrice before he added:/ ‘You have left him this morning?’ (Dickens, MC, LII) Her answer silenced me for the moment. It set me trying to trace the explanation of her conduct (Collins, M, ‘Second Narrative,’ I) [After having been made a proposition] around the table no one stirred or spoke. They looked steadily at Magnum, who, for the moment, kept his glance fixed thoughtfully upon the table before him (Norris, O, I, III)

The structure of conversation

… how nice it’s gonna be, in California. Never cold. An’ fruit ever’place […] I wonder — that is, if we all get jobs an’ all work — maybe […] (Steinbeck, GW, X) “And what about your story?” […]”/ “You shall hear,” said Anthony and was silent for a little, lighting a cigarette, while he thought of what he was about to say and the way he meant to say it (Huxley, EG, XXVII) There was a very uncomfortable silence as they both reflected that she had gone too far (Wilson, ASA, II, I) […] I wouldn’t have an easy time deciding.” He held a finger to his nose as though to stop me because he wanted to say more. “Sergius, I […]” (Mailer, DP, XVII)

This kind of silence can be quite strategically facilitated in situations where critical decisions must be made, when the speaker after whose speech that silence ensued calculatingly allows the other person to think of what was said: [trying to arrive at a business deal] There was a silence which Warren Trent did not disturb. He could sense the other man thinking, calculating. He had not the least doubt that his proposal was being considered seriously (Hailey, H, “Wednesday,” 7)

Mental-repeat pause, generally what oneself or a cointeractant has said, having caused an interruption in our speech. ‘I didn’t know you were here or I’d have come earlier, honest.’/’Would you indeed?…Now that’s very nice’ (Dos Passos, MT, I, II)

Realization pause, when something now or recently has dawned on us, we have ‘put two and two together’ and come to a conclusion: ‘Now, Marty, I believe — — ’ he said, and shook his head./ ‘What?’/ ‘That you’ve done the work yourself! (Hardy, W, IV)

Interpolative pause, to insert a thought or clarify something in the context of what is being said: ‘[…] Have you no one — I mean a lady, of course — whom you could consult?’ (Collins, M, ‘Second Narrative,’ I) Mr. Kilkenny — you know, from the high school? He thought I […] (Steinbeck, EE, XLIII, I) to have to limp around on one short leg for the balance of your life — if you walk at all again (Faulkner, ALD, 190)

Somatic-function pause, a silence that allows the speaker to carry out or cope with usually brief bodily activities, such as: physiological needs (nose-blowing, scratching, spitting, postural shift, stretching), hand-rubbing, hair-preening; reflexes like sneezing, coughing, yawning, belching, (handled differently cross-culturally); even to uncontrollably express physical discomfort and pain, as when hurting. As with external-task

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pauses, below, some can be truly random behaviors, but also have intentional interactive functions, either negative (e.g. manipulating the other person by stalling for time) or positive (giving an emotionally affected auditor time to react, or relieving the tension caused by the encounter). He leaned eagerly nearer to me across the table that divided us. ‘Are you willing to try a bold experiment?’ (Collins, M, ‘Third Narrative,’ X) ¿Tienes dolores?/ — Hor… rrorosos… (Galdós, Tr, XXIX) “I figured out that would be your reaction,” he [Munshin] said, and he leaned forward in his chair. What would you say Charley, if I tell you that I think you owe me something?” (Mailer, DP, XVI)

External-task pause, which can play very important interactive functions, even though at first sight it is produced only to carry out activities like puffing at a pipe or blowing out smoke, pick up a cup, drink and put it down, swallow food, change eyeglasses, take out a pen (in some situations staring at it as though it was something new to us), pull up a chair to interact more intimately, draw away from or approach a table or desk, etc. However, we must remember that such activities can be carried out: a.for their primary objective, that is, because they correspond to the situation at hand or are deemed necessary (e.g. to drink one’s coffee while it is hot): […] Of course you know,’ he added, after a moment’s pause, as he drew his chair towards the fire again (Dickens, MC, VI) Mr. Bounderby stayed her [Mrs. Sparsit, who had offered to leave the room], by holding a mouthful of chop in suspension before swallowing it, and putting out his left hand. Then, withdrawing his hand and swallowing his mouthful of chop, he said […] (Dickens, HT, XI) –Ecoutez, ma chère cousine, j’ai lá…íl s’interrompit pour montrer […] (Balzac, EG, 161) ‘Very well,’ said Hallward; and he went over and laid down his cup on the tray. ‘It is rather late […]’ (Wilde, PDG, II) Trenor drained the glass he had filled for himself and paused to set it down before he answered (Wharton, HM, I, XIII) Anthony relit his pipe before answering. “Well, why shouldn’t one make the best of both worlds?” he asked, as he threw the spent match into the grate (Huxley, EG, X) He paused to savour his brandy (Wilson, ASA, II, I) Elvira drained her glass and cried, “Oh dear!” What a nuisance! […]” (Wilson, ASA, II, I) [Dollie, in the middle of her speech] She picked up a sandwich and began to eat where she stood. “Anyway […] (Wilson, ASA, I, IV)

The structure of conversation

McLeod went on […] “A young man[…]. Or” — and he puffed at his cigarette — ”it’s possible that somebody like you […]” (Mailer, BS, III) “Do you think we choose our mates?” And, moodily, he [Eitel] sipped on his drink. “I wonder if […]” (Mailer, DP, VII) “is she right, Marion?” he said lightly./ Faye inhaled on his cigarette and then flipped it into the fireplace. “Sure, I hate you,” he said (Mailer, DP, XV) “[…] all the time I knew I was going to give them what they wanted.” He Eitel] took a careful swallow of his drink. “If I had something to […]” (Mailer, DP, XXII)

b.with another motive in mind, like filling a pause during which one does not know what to say, or finds it hard to speak: Here ensued a pause, filled up by the producing and lighting of a cigar (C. Brontë, JE, XV) He stood by the window, making much of clipping and lighting a cigar, and he did not look at her while he grumbled (Lewis, D, XXXV)

c.using the pause to think of something, thus combining it with the thinking pause seen above: “One has to work, doesn’t one?” He sipped his beer reflectively. “Sometime I’d like to take over my experience with you […]” (Mailer, BS, V)

d.for a purely stylistic reason, the speaker being conscious of its interactive effect: After a pause of suspense, in which his denunciation had time to sink in, Anderson resumed: […] (Grey, DW, IV)

e.to give our cointeractor time to think, unless it is precisely a manipulative technique, as in: So he had recourse to the usual means of gaining time for such cases made and provided; he said “ahem,” and coughed several times, took out his pocket-handkerchief, and began to wipe his glasses (Beecher Stowe, UTC, IX)

For someone sufficiently sensitive to their interactive effects, each of those acts — like the somatic-function ones — can be calculated (not necessarily as manipulation), measured most consciously and possess a twofold function; that is why, independently of its apparent functions, this type of pause can be used wisely, for instance, by a psychiatrist, a personnel interviewer, a social worker, etc., often affording the other person the opportunity to ‘withdraw in his or her intimacy,’ as was mentioned earlier, to find the answer to a personal question, or to a comment, relieve the anxiety created, etc., or to ignore any reaction by the other person that could be embarrassing. Manipulative pause, here understood not only as the one used to influence someone negatively, but the one with which generally we calculatingly take advantage

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of a circumstance for our own or someone else’s benefit, that is, quite different from the positive functions identified above. However, we know that their positive or negative effect depend above all of the time they occur; for instance, I can draw the window curtain in my office, not because the light bothers me, but because I have perceived a slight change in the muscular tone of the female student I am talking to and know she is going to blush, or is trying to suppress her tears, knowing that looking at her would cause increase her anxiety; in like manner, if someone emotionally tense asks me something expecting an immediate answer, but I, very slowly and without breaking eye contact with him, slowly pick up my coffee and take it to the mouth, sip slowly and put it down slowly, I will have increased the anxiety: Yves slowly lit a cigarette, and then, puffing a cloud of smoke into Gerald’s face in a carefully insolent manner [he said] (Wilson, ASA, II, II) “What do you mean […]?” (Wilson, ASA, II, II) McQueen took his time answering: a deliberately measured pause, to break the natural flow of feeling between himself and Athanase (MacLennan, S, XXVII)

External-interference pause, that is, when, whether or not we break eye contact with our interlocutor, we cause a communicative gap because someone or something (e.g. someone approaching, noise, the doorbell, traffic) distracts our attention (different from the voluntary transitional pause, for which we take advantage of any incident): ‘[…] You go to parties to-’/ Here the dance music crashed out […] Lady Pargiter stopped in the middle of her sentence. She sighed […]/ ‘What’s that they are playing?’ she murmured (Woolf, Y, 1907) “And as for Jacko…”/ A sudden rattling of the door-handle made them all start (Huxley, EG, XV) But once again there was interruption. “Can I come in?” (Wilson, ASA, I, III)

Listener’s interruption pause, whether verbal or nonverbal, caused by our interlocutor: ‘[…] Don’t let me think that the person who put you in the Asylum might have had some excuse-’/ The next words died away in my lips […] She sprang up on her knees (Collins, WW, 127)

Verbal-deficiency pause, an often abrupt disruption when one does not know the right word, but also preceded by drawling of the last word uttered and perhaps turned into the word-searching pause identified above. “I’m so familiar perhaps with these ideas, live with them so much, that…” her voice tailed away […]. Well […], I could give you so many examples (Wilson, ASA, I, II)

Speech-anomaly pause, caused by stuttering or any other anomaly:

The structure of conversation

C’es bien di…di…différent, si Çaâââ ne coû… ou… ou… ou.. oûte pas…par…pas plus cher, dit Grandet (Balzac, EG, 135)

Topic-absence pause, which one can dissimulate engaging one’s regard on something: Roy was silent for a moment. He looked in the bottom of his cup, but whether to see if there were any more coffee or to find something to say, I did not know (Maugham, CA, II)

Emotional pause, when we are strongly affected by an emotion (surprise, anger, joy, embarrassment, joy, etc.), after which break we may react verbally or nonverbally and manifest it in two ways: a.momentarily prevented from speaking, before or after saying something, or interrupting it, but exhibiting reactions like flushing, crying, swallowing, wringing the hands, biting one’s fingernails, gritting one’s teeth or tightening the fists: Sir Percival [surprised] drew back a step, and stared at her in dead silence (Collins, WW, 316) The count […] turned upon the doctor with such an expression of indignation and contempt in his face, that the words failed in Mr Dawson’s lips, and he stood for a moment, pale with anger and alarm — pale and perfectly speechless (Collins, WW, 391) My face, I suppose, betrayed the astonishment I felt at this. She coloured up for a moment, and then proceeded to explain herself (Collins, M, ‘Second Period,’ VII) She paused with a slight falter of embarrassment, and Trenor, turning abruptly, fixed on her a look of growing intelligence (Wharton, HM, I, VII) “Why — I — I — I love her,” he [Annixter] cried (Norris, O, II, II) ‘Elder, I — I repent my words,’ Jane faltered […] obedience […] humility, as well as agony of feat, spoke in her voice (Grey, RPS, I) “So you remember me?”/ “Remember — you?” faltered Milly. “I--I — -” [of course] (Grey, TH, VI) “But I shall never speak to you again.”/ For a few seconds they looked at one another in silence. Anthony had gone very pale. Close-lipped and crookedly […], her eyes [Mary’s] were bright with malicious laughter (Huxley, EG, XXX) ‘George…I ain’t got mine. I musta lost it’ He looked down in despair (Steinbeck, MM, I) Rose was unable to continue for a moment, and then, pulling her fur coat around her, she leaned forward and, smiling through her tears, she said (Wilson, ASA, I, II) [having shown her ignorance] Clarissa poured herself out a cup of cold tea and drank on her confusion. “I’ve always been awful about dates” (Wilson, ASA, I, I)

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b.sometimes we are rendered so utterly speechless, unable to verbalize even a simple response, that we may react only kinesically: ‘[…] Shall we walk on?’/ The suppressed misery in his face, silenced me. I answered his question by a sign. We walked on (Collins, M, ‘Second narrative,’ IX)

c.momentarily and virtually paralyzed, gripped by an incapability to even react kinesically or paralinguistically: The little girl [Ruthie, after Ma snaps her cheek with her finger] went rigid for a moment, and then dissolved into sniffling, quiet crying (Steinbeck, GW, XXVI)

7.11

Conversational fluency, ontogenetic development, reduced interaction, chronemics, and naturalness

7.11.1 When in English we say that a person is not only ‘a great conversationalist’ but ‘very articulate,’ we are actually recognizing that he or she possesses a high degree of conversational fluency, which actually includes several characteristics, some of which are suggested in this example: [Sir Percival had] Grace and ease of movement, untiring animation of manners, ready, pliant, conversational powers — all these are unquestionable merits, and all these he certainly possesses (Collins, WW, 210)

In reality, that fluency is not necessarily due to the speaker’s liveliness of discourse, argumentative capacity or intellectual qualities, but in great measure sometimes to his or her nonverbal repertoires. This kind of conversationalist can be very successful in society or in an intimate encounter, even when abounding in banalities, thanks to factors like the ones identified in this example: and albeit he [Huntingdom] made some clever remarks, and some excessively droll ones, I do not think the whole would appear anything very particular, if written here, without the adventitious aids of look, and tone, and gesture, and that ineffable but indefinite charm, which cast a halo over all he did and said, and which would have made it a delight to look in his face, and hear the music of his voice, if he had been talking positive nonsense (A. Brontë, TWF, XVII)

If we consider the unsuspected variety of communicative acts that can take place in any type of conversation, we realize that not all of us possess the kind of conversational fluency one needs to have in each situation. Which once more proves the need to revise the concept of fluency and, beyond what was said in Chapter 1, to realize that such fluency cannot exist in a conversation that lacks a proper balance among the participants’ communicative activities. Only this assertion suggests a few thoughts worth being investigated which here are merely identified as a guide:

The structure of conversation

a.that members of higher socioeconomic and socioeducational groups, generally equipped with a greater ability to adapt to the communicative styles of those of lower levels, acquire more fluency since childhood, or as they develop in the proper milieu, and that part of that fluency consists in their ability to adjust to the conversational repertoires of the others; b.that the technique involved in the structure and mechanism of conversation is something we acquire through learning and therefore must be included within development studies; c.that a especial type of adaptation is required in people subject to the various forms of reduced interaction (e.g. blindness, deafness, lack of limbs, paralysis). Thus, in the latter two cases, one can verify, based on this model, which of all those conversational acts are exhibited as the child matures and socializes, and what rules are observed or contravened, which are the types of feedback or pauses that operate when conversing with or among the blind, the deaf or the Down-syndrome person.114 7.11.2 We must also acknowledge a chronemics of conversation, regarding: a.the cross-cultural differences in the duration of, for instance, ordinary social visits, conversational events after all; as experienced by my American sociology student Janet Murphy, who worked with Alaska’s Kotzebue eskimos (and married one), visiting cannot be rushed, for much of the time is spent in silent sharing of each other’s presence […] not judged by the activity but by the amount of time spent just being with the person

b.in the response latency among different cultural groups when a question has been asked or a decision must be taken at a gathering, for, as Janet wrote: I often mistook no reply for feedback for some misunderstanding of what I said. I soon learned that no reply often conveyed a specific message.

This response latency is also well known among the traditional American Indians: [After having been asked a question] The hunter puffed his pipe and like an [American] Indian seemed to let the question take deep root (Grey, SB, XV)

c.the misunderstood true nature of conversational silences and pauses as part of cultural chronemics. As my psychology student Wendy Nixon wrote about New Brunswick’s Micmac and Maliseet Indians (and I confirmed it personally), referring to what here has been called turn preopening: non-Natives […] do not recognize the preparation silence of the Native person about to speak even when they have claimed the turn. Thus […] will interrupt before the Native has commented or answered a question.

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d.the awareness of the influence that the duration of the speaker turns of each conversationalist can have on the listener or listeners and on the development and even success of the encounter; e.the specific uses of time as conversational tactics employed for different positive or negative aims, as with the turn-holding illustrated earlier with this same example: [Hartright speaking to Mrs. Catherick about Sir Percival] Her colour was rising, and her hands were at work again smoothing her gown. I pressed the point farther and farther home, I went on without allowing her a moment of delay (Collins, WW, 509).

7.11.3 Also other cross-cultural aspects of conversation, such as: a.the cross-cultural attitude toward interruption, for, as Wendy Nixon wrote: When a Native speaks with a non-Native s/he finds that the conversation is generally monopolized by the non-Native with frequent interruption while the Native is speaking.

b.the intervention of children in adults’ conversations, betraying different childrearing characteristics; traditionally, young North-American children are allowed to participate at an adults’ gathering and conversation more than, for instance, in Spain and, as my anthropology student Yaw Adjei wrote of Ghana: “Even if the kid is allowed participation in the conversation at all, it does not last long”; actually, even an AngloSaxon parent may typically say to the child after a while, ‘You run along now!’ 7.11.4 Finally, we must also ponder what exactly we mean when we identify someone as ‘very natural’ during a conversation and what it is that lends that naturalness we so appreciate in a person, against the lack of it or affectation that can only create uneasiness in us and even rob us of our own naturalness. The psychiatrist Tournier (quoted more briefly in Chapter 4.2.5) refers to our attitude when confronted with a sick person which presupposes a spiritual and not only social approach; but, in doing so, he also offers us, observers and students of nonverbal communication and conversation, rich thoughts regarding this aspect of social interaction: It is impossible completely to avoid all affectation when faced with a sick person, whether it be the harshness of incomprehension, sentimental commiseration, calculated optimism, worried pessimism, veiled irritation, or helplessness. And the trouble is that every failure to act naturally brings into being an element of neurosis, which in its turn compromises the treatment and inhibits spontaneity […] My own experience is that in following Christ one can learn to act naturally once more. He pointed this out himself when he said that in order to enter the kingdom of God one had to become like a child. It is characteristic of the child that he is natural. He can be natural even with people who are not acting naturally, and whom he thus helps to be natural again (Tournier 1983: 53)

The structure of conversation

7.12

Conclusion The preceding pages have shown — without much bibliographical digression in an already widely but quite unevenly treated area — a structural model of conversation which can be regarded as virtually exhaustive or, at any rate, covering many aspects not acknowledged thus far. Such a model should prove quite useful for data collecting, observation and analysis of any type of conversational encounter and for identifying the many acts constituting the fascinatingly complex phenomenon of everyday conversation. All those who, from a communicational point of view, live fully integrated in a society maintain conversations daily, generally with different types of people, who converse differently too and in different circumstances, but perhaps never develop the conversational fluency they need, despite their mastery of their own language. When we identify the many interrelated parts that contribute to the functioning of the mechanism of a conversation, we can understand much better where we or others tend to fail. Having gone that far, we can try to correct our lack of fluency and become more efficient conversationalists and also function better in our interactions with any type of interlocutors. In addition, a model like this allows us to apply it to any area where people must interview people, in the acting of both theater and film professionals, in law practitioners and in business, without excluding what it means to converse around a formal dinner table — while actually eating, at that — or with an invisible partner over the telephone.

7.13

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.
The physical configuration of the conversational encounter: situations and participants. 2.
Turn-change behaviors: social and situational stratification. 3.
Feedback behaviors: social and situational stratification. 4.
Acoustic and visual pauses: their nature and applications. 5.
Ontogenetic development of conversational behaviors: precociousness and anomalies. 6.
The mechanism of conversation in reduced interactions: limitations and possibilities. 7.
Pathology of conversation. 8.
The mechanism of the informal gathering. 9.
The structure of conversation in the novel: possibilities and limitations. 10.
A comparative study of conversational behaviors in the theater and the cinema. 11.
Focused and unfocused interactions throughout the day. 12.
The telephonic conversation: fluency, rules and limitations.

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13.
The conversational structures in interpreted-mediated encounters. 14.
The structure of conversation in psychotherapy. 15.
Conversational structures in formal and protocolarian encounters. 16.
Conversational problems of and with cerebral palsy persons. 17.
Conversational problems of and with blind interlocutor. 18.
Conversational problems of and with deaf interlocutors. 19.
Conversational problems of and with paralyzed interlocutors. 20.
Cross-cultural differences in the duration and management of social visits. 21.
Conversational silences cross-culturally: differences and problems. 22.
Positive and manipulative tactics in conversation. 23.
Social and cross-cultural attitudes toward children’s participation in adults’ conversations. 24.
Conversational problems in interaction with foreign speakers.



Chapter 8

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

‘Well?’ returns the old man, shrilly and sharply (Dickens, BH, XXI)

8.1

The total communicative approach to simultaneous and consecutive interpretation115 Having identified, as has been done in Chapter 2, all the somatic systems of communication, one becomes more sensitized to its complex functioning during oral translation, realizing not only how messages are often completed with nonverbal signs, but how many times that is the only way they are transmitted. We have seen also the expressive limitations of words and the syntactical and even lexical functions of paralanguage and kinesics in the flow of speech. Thus, a realistic and exhaustive treatment of the significance of the nonverbal elements in the task of the simultaneous or consecutive interpreter, as well as of the problems concomitant to that area, would begin by identifying all the elements that are exchanged directly between the two speakers through the interpreter. In fact, the whole theory and praxis of interpretation should be based on such an approach. It can be asserted that this approach is based on the definition of interpretation as: the relaying from a speaker-actor to a listener-viewer (or audience) of verbal and nonverbal messages indistinctively through verbal and nonverbal ones, as dictated by the synonymous, antonymous or absent verbal or nonverbal signs with respect to each other’s communication systems. Through the years, I have pondered various issues and problems that I realized appeared in any formal or informal live translation between at least two participants. As I immersed myself in the complex interdisciplinary field of nonverbal communication, acknowledging the reality of speech as at least a triple audiovisual reality made up of verbal language, paralanguage and kinesics, the specific activity of the professional interpreter unfolded in its many intricacies and problems. In addition, my opportunities to speak to colleagues and students at schools of translation and interpretation have always been, first, a great incentive to keep thinking of the problems I knew those excellent professionals and students would inevitably encounter; also occasions to foster a greater attention to mainly paralanguage and kinesics as they occur in the simultaneous or consecutive interpretation

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situation. But I also tried to call their attention to other realities, namely: the accompanying somatic and extrasomatic coactivities that could occur along with speech; the physical copresence of the persons involved; the equally real presence of at least two cultures, if not many more, at any given time, that is, the source speaker’s, the target listener’s, the interpreter’s, and perhaps many more when there is an audience (e.g. a U. N. session); and the physical environment itself. The present discussion, therefore, attempts to summarize as clearly as possible, through several theoretical and practical models, each of the aspects to which all those involved in the interpretation situation are so intimately related to.

8.2

The verbal and nonverbal components in the interpretation situation: Basic systems The discussion of any type of communication, whether written or oral, must have its foundation in an exhaustive identification of its components from among the various sign-conveying verbal and nonverbal systems that are possible in each situation. Then, in both consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, after considering in what instances participants are in copresence or visually or acoustically absent from each other, we must establish which of those components are available to the speaker, which are perceived by the listener(s), which by the listener(s) through the interpreter, in what ways the interpreter perceives them from both source speaker and target listener(s), and how he transmits them between the two. The table in Fig. 8.1, ‘Consecutive and simultaneous interpretation: Sspeaker’s, Listener’s and Interpreter’s Sign Perception and Emission,’ attempts to show at a glance the basic communicative sign systems. Much theoretical and methodological research could derive from this model. Hopefully, the reader will realize how much investigation can be generated by this type of model, which for economy’s sake is only outlined here. To the left are shown the various sign systems available to the participants, that is, audible or visual, namely: a.Within audible systems, one should consider both sound and the absence of it, in other words: verbal language and paralanguage; but also those quasiparalinguistic sounds emitted through audible kinesics (finger-snapping, an impatient rapping on a table), which should not be shunned as marginal, for they may very well carry the main message or most of it, or qualify it, in a given situation. Neither should we neglect silences and (in the next group) stills, since they may also at times express what has not been, and will not be, said in words. b.Within visible systems is, of course, mainly kinesics, that is, gestures, manners and postures, closely associated with proxemics (e.g. leaning forward in an attempt to

Figure 8.1. Consecutive and simultaneous interpretation: Speaker’s, listeners and interpreter’s sign perception and emission

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‘reach’ the other person better, stepping back when standing after a verbal refusal or as a silent one). c.But two specific types of visual signs can be also relevant in the communication interchange which may qualify words in different ways, or even impede them: a dermal reaction like blushing, and a chemical reaction like tear-shedding, a mild manifestation of which would be glistening eyes. Naturally, such dermal and chemical emotional reactions will qualify speech (e.g. quavery o tremulous voice, gulping) and even kinesics (e.g. rapid blinking, visible heaving, gaze aversion, postural change, nervous fidgeting or preening). While it is true that in most interpretation situations activities such as proxemic shifts, tear-shedding and blushing are absent, one must acknowledge their potential presence in other possible contexts, such as when interacting with people in distress or in any types of critical situations, and in what later will be discussed as ‘reduced interaction’ (e.g. involving one or more blind interactants). At the top of the table appear the various interpersonal situations and relationships that constitute consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. Consecutive interpretation. Three basic situations will be acknowledged: (a) Speaker, Listener and Interpreter can hear and see each other at close range (e.g. a business or diplomatic encounter, in which the interpreter is located between the two; (b) the Speaker is seen and heard by an audience of Listeners who listen to the Interpreter (e.g. a public lecture, speech or sermon, during which the interpreter sits or stands by the speaker); or (c) Speaker and Listener(s) can be heard and seen by other Listeners, who may just listen to a visually absent Interpreter (e.g. TV panel or talk show). Simultaneous interpretation. The two most typical situations are: (a) the Speaker can be heard and seen by an audience of Listeners who listen to a visually absent interpreter (e.g. the one-to-many relationship at a conference where the listeners use earphones to hear their respective languages and paralanguage); (b) the Speaker is seen by the Listener(s), who listen(s) to an visually absent Interpreter (e.g. a TV foreign speaker’s language-paralanguage-kinesics and the interpreter’s language and paralanguage). As for the situation in which only the interpreter’s voice is perceived (e.g. a speech or interview in a radio broadcast), it will not be discussed here, since the source speaker is neither heard nor seen, although the interpreter’s challenge is not small, for his or her voice is the only perceived medium through which all other sign systems are funnelled. The second row in the table indicates, (a) the participants: S, Speaker; L, Listener; and I, Interpreter; (b) their perceiving and emitting capabilities: in combination with the symbols [+] or [−] in each column for each system, the arrows pointing toward either Speaker or Listener, [S¨], [ÆL], denote the verbal or nonverbal signs they may [+] or may not [−] perceive from their cointeractant (e.g. paralanguage [+], kinesics [−]); in combination with the symbols [+] or [−] in each column for each system, the arrow pointing away from the Interpreter, [IÆ], indicates whether or not he conveys

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

a given type of signs; also referred to the Interpreter, the question mark [?] indicates when it is doubtful (but perhaps desirable) that he should convey the Speaker’s signs, while [own] indicates the tendency to accompany his target language with his own native paralanguage and kinesics; or, as is so often the case when he is visually absent, with very low-key paralanguage and naturally no kinesics (for the listeners, at least). The fourth column under each form of interpretation suggests (in combination with the symbols [+], [−] or [?] for each system) that the Interpreter may or may not perceive, and may or may not try to convey, the Listener’s feedback behaviors and the Speaker’s own counterfeedback ones, [ÆIÆ]; but he may also choose to convey their nonverbal feedback verbally, [verb].

8.3

The fate of nonverbal systems in interpretation Having identified the different sign systems that can be intentionally or unintentionally present in the various interpretation situations, a textbook or manual on nonverbal communication in interpretation — which could be developed from this discussion — would have to identify (following Fig. 1): first, within each system (i.e. paralanguage, kinesics, etc.), how it is perceived between speaker and listener or listeners (e.g. an audience), and then the way in which the interpreter could or should deal with each of its features in each of the typical situations, first within consecutive interpretation, then within simultaneous interpretation. For space sake, only a few examples are offered in order to review some of the possible alternatives and problems involving each system, outside of verbal language.116

8.3.1 Paralanguage It is obvious that sometimes the sensitive interpreter needs to skilfully switch codes instead of just translating words. Within primary qualities, with extreme drawling and clipping a simple verbal hesitating ‘Yeees’ or a sharp ‘Nope’ may have to be paraphrased in Spanish as ‘Síii, quizá,’ and ‘Claro que no,’ or ‘Ni hablar,’ respectively. Within qualifiers, the interpreter must decide whether the specific voice type through which the speaker says something needs to be rendered verbally along with those words (e.g. the falsetto in a surprised or incredulous ‘What?!,’ or a strongly disdainful muttered negative reply to a proposal). Within differentiators, a half-seriously, halfjokingly laughed statement, a deeply sighed ‘Yes,’ or sneezing by or in front of an Arab Muslim (which requires certain ritualized verbal expressions by both sneezer and witnesses, most probably unknown to the non-Muslim speaker). Within alternants, truly quasilexical and meaningful utterances, the interpreter cannot always just shun them as marginal, or only ‘emotional’ and dispensable ‘accompaniments’ to words, for they may even carry most of the message or be the only message, for instance: a sigh

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that, perhaps because of lack of sufficient context, may express either longing or resignation; a commiserative tongue-click ‘Tz,’ a ‘Uh-uh!’ of negation, an affirmative ‘Uh-hu!,’ a very hesitant ‘Well, uuuuh, no!,’ a gasp of admiration as a wordless response, a ‘Whew!’ of relief, a surprised ‘Umph!,’ a doubtful ‘Pshaw!,’ a contemptuous grunted ‘Hunh,’ a disgusted ‘Ugh!,’ an ‘Aaaaaaay!’ while imagining a pleasurable situation, a reference to a dubious character as ‘He’s a little eeuh,’ to continuous drinking as ‘He was glug, glug,’ or to the slowness of a train as ‘Oh, that train, chuck-achuck, chuck-a-chuck-.’ The interpreter must have tried to make this rich repertoire of quasilexical utterances part of his or her bilingualism, and on occasions verbalize some of them, easily misunderstood, or not decoded at all, by the listener or audience, as with the courteous Japanese ‘Eeeeh’ and ‘Nnnnn’ of feedback (neither approval nor disapproval, as most westerners take them for). 8.3.2 Audible kinesics, or phonokinesics If an Anglophone says ‘We can have that solved + /finger-snapping/,’ the audible gesture would have to be rendered in Spanish as ‘En un periquete’ or ‘Enseguida’; if someone slaps his thigh meaning ‘That’s it!,’ we would probably translate it as ‘¡Eso es!’ or ‘¿Exactamente!’ But what to do if a client reacted with this particular fingersnapping? Hopefully, most interpreters would just use ‘more emphatic’ words: He snapped his fingers in her face, “go on and do your worst. I will get Suzanne in the long run” (Dreiser, G, III, XIV)

8.3.3 Silence and stillness117 Both interactive silence and stillness (the latter as visual behavior), as cessation of the basic activities of sound and movement, pose very unique communicational problems for the interpreter. Most silences and stills contain an eloquent facial expression or motionless manual gesture, and obviously that is what must be translated when nothing else follows verbally. Sometimes it may be an understood ellipsis, as in ‘You have no…’ (maybe even indicating a child’s height with the hand), when we know that the speaker means ‘no children,’ which obviously should be conveyed verbally. Other times what is contained in the silence may be the second part of a familiar saying in the source language, but not necessarily in the listener’s, as with ‘When in Rome…,’ without saying ‘do as the Romans do.’ Still others it can be a verbal ellipsis filled with a kinesic replacement, as when answering to ‘And why don’t you tell us about it?’ with ‘Well, because…/it wouldn’t be appropriate in front of this audience/.’ In other words, very rarely does a brief conversational silence communicate nothing, therefore the interpreter may need to verbalize it, and that decision rests on his or her professional competence. Naturally, in a radio broadcast, where the speaker is not visible, an

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

emotional silence should be verbally identified by the interpreter, for the radio listeners must be given the reason for that silence. In other words, we could affirm, as a basic norm, that the interpreter, rather than turning a silence into words the speaker did not say, must discern between the silence that wants to express something and the one that wants to conceal it. 8.3.4 Kinesics Any gesture, manner or posture can contain a message beyond or instead of words, and we may need to translate it verbally, independently of whether its meaning is the same or different in the two cultures. Since kinesics is the most obvious interactive system, and many examples are given throughout the three volumes (specifically in Chapter 6), and Chapter 5 of Volume II is devoted to it, only passing mentioned is made here. Notwithstanding, one observation should be made here regarding written speech, which affects also paralanguage and much more kinesics: the difference that the simultaneous interpreter (isolated or invisible in his or her booth) finds between the spontaneous or well prepared speaker and the more or less skilful one who is reading the written text of a speech or lecture. A sensitive professional interpreter like Edna Weale expresses her frustration (Weale 1997: 298–299) when she refers to the spontaneous speaker who “has to improvise and think about how he is going to convey his message. He is actually creating his speech as he goes along,” and then to the one who is reading from a prepared text: ”It is extremely fatiguing and frustrating to interpret this type of speech, even if one has the text at hand.” In the read speech, she adds, many of the gestures “mean absolutely nothing and add nothing to the text”; therefore, “one can only translate ‘orally’ the speech word for word, making it very difficult to capture the essence of the message.” 8.3.5 Chemical reactions These reactions have been identified mostly (in the context of interpretation) as tearshedding or shining eyes. While they may speak for themselves if we see the speaker — with certain intercultural differences in the display rules of certain emotions118–, it would be quite different on a radio broadcast, where the interpreter would be facing two basic choices: (a) to briefly identify the speaker’s emotions verbally, thus fitting them into the context of the conversation within the silences during which they occur; or (b) to verbalize them, in the third or even first person, with the words that the person would normally use to do so. 8.3.6 Dermal reactions Of all the dermal reactions normally observable during a face-to-face interaction, blushing is actually the only one which is conspicuous enough to sometimes convert

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to words, as was said of emotions in general. When we are dealing with two different cultures, we cannot always take for granted that blushing is necessarily betraying embarrassment. The interpreter, however, may have to decide whether verbally identifying embarrassment or certain other emotions is ethically permissible in each given situation. In fact, it could be an invasion of the person’s most intimate privacy, and extreme sensitiveness must be exercised as a sine qua non quality of the good interpreter.

8.4

The fate of the basic structure language-paralanguage-kinesics in interpretation It is true that listener or audience looks above all for the verbal message, that their ideas and reactions keep taking shape as a response to what they hear the speaker ‘say.’ It is also true that the triple structure language-paralanguage-kinesics is what we know as essentially constituting our speaking, originated in its perfect internal cohesion as the speaker’s discourse, audibly and visibly present for the listener. However, it is not less true that that structure reaches the listener totally distorted, even worse, mutilated, after being filtered through the interpreter’s transforming process. What that listener is truly perceiving is: a.a speaker that, without the listener’s headphones, is emitting unintelligible words accompanied by some voice inflexions (primary qualities), voice type changes (qualifiers) and word-like utterances (alternants), and gestures that sometimes suggest certain ideas and attitudes; b.but with those headphones on, unless we close our eyes, we hear a verbal language and a paralanguage that we understand perfectly well, but which are in as much disynchrony with respect to the gestures as a poor dubbing would be in a film; c.and it is not only that disynchrony, after all, more or less minimal according to he translator’s skills, but the fact that it is a person that moves before our eyes and another that sounds to our ears; and, as if that were not enough, d.if the speaker is a man and the interpreter a woman, or vice versa, paralanguage and above all kinesics will be even farther away from the original, for the listener will hear a man with a woman’s voice or a woman with a male’s voice. That the ‘message’ will be transmitted nobody would deny, but the listeners would prefer not to have to receive it through a ‘bisexual’ method119; e.if the interpreter is a consecutive one who is beside the speaker, that ‘deception’ is before our very eyes and it depends on the interpreter’s style and on the degree in which he or she identifies with the speaker and with the topic itself.120 Again, as Weale corroborates (Weale 1997), the relationship between interpreter and listener — whom we could very well call ‘headphoned listener’ — is quite personal and intimate; an

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

intimacy that increases proportionally to the distance from the speaker (e.g. at a large U. N. assembly). Lastly, we can affirm that, given the internal coherence between the three basic components of speech, many of the interpreters who are not seen by their audience because they are in their booths, establish that coherence in their own discourse. This means that they resort not only to the paralanguage their audience will be able to perceive, but even to gestures (as we all do while conversing on the telephone) that visibly accompany the words, particularly when relaying something complex to their listeners, as Sergio Viaggio, another top interpreter, tells us (Viaggio 1997: 290): I, for one, invariably resort to all manner of gestures and bodily contortions when it comes to explaining to my audience a difficult passage that, in fact, I am merely explaining to myself; and I have noticed that many colleagues do exactly the same.

8.5

Interpretation in the total context of personal and environmental interaction In the ordinary interpretation situation, the systems just outlined are the ones we may ordinarily encounter. However, the interpretation situation, like every other aspect of communication, should not be dissociated from the rest of the complex grid of surrounding sign systems that may operate during an exchange and, at deeper conscious or unconscious levels, affect our performance, both as speaker and listener and as mediating interpreters. Although it is impossible to even identify all the sign systems or clusters of systems that may be present in an interaction, it would seem appropriate at this point to at least refer the reader to the model proposed in Chapter 8 of Volume II (amply illustrated with realistic literary examples), since it presents quite exhaustively the various forms of personal and environmental interaction. By just glancing at its schematic representation in Fig. 8.2, ‘Components of interpersonal and environmental interaction,’ one realizes that interpretation does not necessarily take place in an aseptic setting in which only what is strictly necessary seems to happen, with no other conditioning or distracting elements. At times, precisely some of those elements can become true components of that interaction, and not even necessarily by their presence but by their very absence (e.g. something which has not been said when it was expected). To avoid a lengthy discussion, some of those potential components of an interactive encounter appear enhanced in the table so that the reader may just ponder how they can affect the interaction. Since interpretation may occur in settings and circumstances other than the customary ones we all tend to imagine as more ‘professional,’ trying to apply this model strictly to interpretation, it will be seen, for instance: a.that tears, or tearful speech, or a speaker’s ‘blushed speech,’ may oblige the interpreter to verbally qualify his own verbal translation to convey what those reactions truly express;

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L Behavioral

Basic triple structure

LANGUAGE PARALANGUAGE KINESICS visual audiovisual Proxemics and touch

Activities Other body social perception Nonsounds clinical perception behavioral Chemical: tears, body odor, sweat Dermal: blushing, blanching Thermal: temperature rises & falls

Personal sensible bodily components

Silence Stillness

Behavioral Nonactivities

Nonbehavioral

Bodyadaptors Personal sensible bodyrelated components

Static or behavioral manifestations Objectadaptors

Shape, size, consistency, weight Color: skin, hair, eyes Facial features Static Dinamic Food, drink, tobacco, masticatories Clothes, jewelry, glasses, pipe Cosmetics, perfume, shaving lotion Pipe, lint, crumbs Anatomical furniture, table

Environmental elements: grass, sand, water, dust Personal Activities Real or imagined mental activities intelligible components NonAge, personality, mood, emotional state activities Culture, status, religious & moral values E

X

T

E

R

N

A

L

Behaviorconditioned

door, phone, footsteps, traffic TV, radio, music, smells

Contextual or Mechanic Clock, machinery, computer, train Sensible interfering objectual & activities Environmental Rain, wind, water, animals environmental Environment heat, cold, furniture, lamps, rugs components Contextual or objectual Decorative objects, books, souvenirs interfering nonactivities Built or architecture: spaces, texture, natural color, lighting, temperature environment terrain, landscaping, flora, fauna

Figure 8.2.Components of personal and environmental interaction

b.that perhaps any of those reactions could occur as the listener’s wordless feedback, which may likewise require the intermediary’s verbalization; c.that the speaker may be conversing while handling or puffing at a cigar or pipe, possibly using them as eloquent conversational props and perhaps causing occasional pauses (as would flicking imaginary lint);

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

d.that any of those reactions may possibly occur as listener’s wordless feedback, which may have required an intermediate verbalization; e.that real or imagined positive or negative thoughts which the speaker believes the listener to be thinking may definitely affect his performance; f.that the repeated ringing of a telephone, traffic noise, excessive heat or cold during an interview can affect the speaker’s delivery; and, to mention one more, g.that interior decoration which reflects a much higher status than that of one of the participants may easily affect his or her performance.

8.6

The relationships between verbal and nonverbal in interpretation Chapter 2.9 very specifically identified (with examples equally applicable to the interpretation situation) the possible relationships between nonverbal systems and words, that is, accompanying or alternating with them. After referring the reader to that section, the following relationships can be succinctly applied to interpretation by simply imagining the following situations and limiting the discussion to the more common systems, paralanguage and kinesics. a.As additional information, if the gesture or the paralanguage that precedes, accompanies or follows a verbal statement expresses something besides what the words say, as when, for instance, a Spanish speaker says ‘Bueno, ustedes pagan lo suyo…,’ with level terminal intonation, shoulder shrugging meaning ‘as you are supposed to’ and a hand gesture signifying ‘and don’t worry about what they do’; or if a speaker’s paralanguage qualifies that same verbal statement with very low register and almost creaky voice, emphatically signifying that ‘well, you people just do what is right,’ in which case the interpreter would have to provide paralinguistic qualifiers, and if seen by his listeners, kinesic qualifiers of identical function as those of the speaker. b.Supporting what is being said verbally, simultaneously to words, as with accompanying gestures and paralanguage, depending of course on the intensity of that support; not because it may add new information, as in the previous case, but simply because the interpreter knows that the gesture or the paralanguage is clearly indicating a reinforcing attitude with respect to words. At times it is important to convey that attitude, either with paralinguistic or kinesic ability equivalent to a nonverbal translation (when dealing with different signs) or with some additional words. c.Repeating what has been said verbally, if, for instance, a conference delegate says, ‘And that puts an end to our negotiations,’ following immediately with a gesture of termination which simply repeats the verbal statement (as long as he does not conspicuously qualify his gesture with so-called parakinesic qualifiers that may by themselves convey an added attitude of, for instance, marked emphasis); or as in this

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Spanish verbal-kinesic statement: “a ésa no le doy ni esto./ Y metiéndose la uña del pulgar entre los dientes, tiraba con fuerza, produciendo un chasquido” (Blasco Ibañez, AT, V), a mostly verbal-kinesic combination which an interpreter might come across. In such a case, of course, the gesture is such a visible emblem that, besides translating the words, they would be better rendered if the kinesic idiom were to be translated as well with a possible equivalent in the target culture; or, failing that, perhaps showing the listener at least a thumb and forefinger tensely pressed together. d.Emphasizing what is being said verbally, as when an English speaker may just utter a verbal ‘Yes’ with rather neutral or ambiguous paralanguage, but showing at the same time an enthusiastic face, which might even not have the same meaning in both cultures. In that instance, should the Spanish interpreter say something like ‘¡Ya lo creo!,’ ‘¡Claro que sí!? And if a North American utters that simple ‘Yes’ accompanied by a simultaneous oblique head-nod, or even also a closed-fist sweeping motion at chest height, his Spanish listener, lacking a specific equivalent for this typical gesture, should at least hear an unambiguous ‘¡Ya lo creo que sí!’ e.De-emphasizing what is being said verbally, when, inversely, the speaker may verbally affirm something or express approval, but with a paralanguage (not necessarily common to both cultures) that is clearly weakening it (perhaps only for the interpreter) with obvious lack of enthusiasm or interest, neither as frank affirmation nor as approval or acquiescence. Should not the interpreter truthfully convey the speaker’s message with the appropriate verbal-nonverbal construct? f.Contradicting what is being said verbally. The speaker says ‘Yes, we might strike a deal with them,’ but her paralanguage and her looking away as she slightly shrugs her shoulders smilingly does not even confirm the expressed possibility, but rather contradicts it; or, being Japanese, her smile may even contradict the words we take as an affirmation, due to her cultural rule of politeness, often so disconcerting to westerners (cf. Hasada 1997). Would the interpreter simply translate word for word, or would he introduce a negative verbal element (if he is visible) and/or an equally negative gesture? And what to do with a slightly drawled and low-pitched English ‘Of course,’ averting the gaze as if uninterested? Even other qualifiers could be added, such as lip puckering, ‘innocent’ or ‘understanding’ eyebrow raising, or ‘commiserative’ frowning. g.Trying to dissimulate with gesture or paralanguage what one’s words actually mean to say, as in: ¿Te burlas de mi ciencia?/ — Al contrario; me divierte: sabes más que Merlín — prorrumpe Teresina conturbada, poniendo en la expresión [to discourage her suitor] una chispa de forzoso desden, para cortar las alas del certero discurso (Espina, AM, VIII)

h.Or perhaps the speaker is hastening to ‘erase’ or mask verbally a gesture that perhaps he has not been able to avoid, even if his interlocutor has already perceived it.

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

i.What normally does not occur while interpreting at official settings, we can certainly see in an interaction without any protocol (as I have witnessed in encounters between Canadians and Latin American, Chinese or Vietnamese refugees): that with a specific paralanguage, gesture or both, one must try to disqualify another nonverbal behavior to make it look what is not. Sometimes there is no mediating interpreter, but others there is, as when, for instance, the Canadian wishes to be affectionate and just clasps the Chinese man’s hands and half-embraces his wife. As those social physical contacts are virtually nonexistent in those Oriental cultures, an interpreter has to rapidly weigh the situation and perhaps add in Vietnamese or Cantonese, even laughingly, while that is taking place, a verbal comment like: ‘They are very demonstrative here, aren’t they?,’ thus dispelling any erroneous perception. However, I myself behaved precisely like that with a Vietnamese family of mostly young women and always after that I was greeted by them with big smiles and most friendly words. j.If, as an economy device, the speaker uses a gesture or paralanguage to consciously or unconsciously save on words, there is no doubt that in the majority of cases the translator, if visible to the recipient, will have to provide the target-language equivalent gesture, or at least the unsaid word or words, particularly if the source-language gesture or paralanguage is not the same in the other one (e.g. the speaker makes a ‘Soso’ hand gesture simultaneously to his saying that he likes something), without assuming the listener’s or audience’s correct decoding; and if he is not visible, he can always convey it verbally.121 k.Finally, it may be that, out of verbal deficiency, the speaker is at a loss for a word, but perhaps tries to use an ‘identifier’ (e.g. a face-and-hand depiction of /energetic/ to define a person), or a ‘pictograph’ (e.g. a manual description of a /drilling/ action. Would the interpreter come to his aid by supplying the missing word instead of letting him show his verbal deficiency? Actually, realizing that the participants are at the mercy of the translator, and striving to not let their individual or collective recipient realize the flow, the interpreter can easily solve the problem by providing the (unknown or not remembered) correct word; certainly better than making a pause, looking at the speaker or saying nothing, which would make the deficiency more obvious (a not impossible manipulative device, on the other hand). We as interpreters, when present with our client, can always, quite subtly, let him know that we are helping him out, in order to inspire self-confidence in him; for, if he is not aware of our support, his deficiency may cause him anxiety. There are times when the speaker tries to use a verbal periphrasis which, instead or translating, we simply replace (perhaps both verbally and nonverbally) with what he should have said.

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8.7

Chronemics of interpretation Everybody knows that the speaker and his or her translator can never reach true synchrony. This, in fact, allows us to at least briefly establish, obvious as it may be, the characteristics of the chronemics of interpretation in its two modalities, consecutive and simultaneous. We should keep in mind what has been said about the relationship of nonverbal to verbal language and about the different realizations of language, paralanguage and kinesics within the basic triple structure, as identified in Chapter 4.10. In consecutive interpretation, typically with the interpreter audiovisually present, the listener or audience ‘see’ how the speaker ‘moves’ what he is saying (when it is not yet understood) and later hear, through the interpreter, what he ‘said’ when he ‘was moving’ like that. The consequences are obvious: (a) assumptions about what the speaker was saying were inevitably made by the listener because he was moving as he talked (hearing his voice on the radio one would hardly try to guess), therefore the interpreter’s translation confirms or contradicts those assumptions; (b) at best, there is a message delay in both the interpreter’s translation and the listener’s reception and comprehension of the original visual signs; consequently, (c) the listener receives from the interpreter similar or dissimilar kinesics, or virtually none at all, while he is learning what the speaker said. In simultaneous interpretation, typically with a visually absent interpreter in a booth, the listeners-viewers in an audience see the speaker’s kinesics (or any other visible signs, as long as distance allows), but the delay for their comprehension is minimal because the speaker’s kinesics, ‘how he moves what he says,’ is immediately followed by the interpreter’s relay of ‘what’ he said and (hopefully) of ‘how’ he said it. Nevertheless, even that minimal disynchrony still prevents the listener-viewer from appreciating the true flavor of many verbal-nonverbal constructs. On the other hand, a characteristic of our conversational kinesics (as explained in Chapter 5.6 of Volume II) is that the ‘How we move what we say’ quite often begins before the words it accompanies, which contributes to a better synchronization.

8.8

Silence and stillness in the interpretation situation One should very briefly insist on the fact that many times those silences that keep occurring in the course of an interaction are complementary and not redundant with respect to the message being transmitted, since they add information that help us to better decode that message. Although silence and stillness are treated in Chapter 7 of volume II, and conversational pauses in the previous chapter, it seems fitting to, just in passing, consider the three basic functions of silence, that is, (a) when it signifies in itself, without reference to anything else, and the interpreter sometimes will have to translate it verbally,

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

particularly when it entails a marked cultural difference; (b) when it can happen as ‘zero sign’ if one of the interlocutors in the exchange mediated by the translator refuses to answer verbally, for instance, to an initial greeting or to a question or comment, in which case the interpreter will need to rapidly decide to fill that gap where evidently something is missing; and (c) when the silence can act as carrier of the last words said and make their effect increase in the listener; which the interpreter needs to recognize, for it could play that function precisely when it might not be desirable to give the listener or audience that opportunity, thus he would have to fill that space verbally in order to avoid that negative ‘amplification’ of the preceding message; or it may be that that silence has precisely that negative aim in a specific situation.

8.9

The exchange of nonverbal visual behaviors in interpretation Having already defined all the possible communicative sign systems that may appear in interpretation, as well as the potential problems they may pose for the interpreter, it would remain to refer the reader, whether interpreter or researcher in the field, to two more useful models. Such models afford a systematic functional classification, without which this attempt at suggesting a manual of nonverbal communication in interpretation would not be complete. One is the model showing the types of behaviors, mainly visual, that constitute our speaker’s repertoire (Chapter 6); the other, the model of the types of behaviors that make up the structure of any conversational exchange (Chapter 7).For the first model, only those nonverbal categories that may be important in the speaker-interpreter-listener relationship should be identified at this point. Emblems. Mostly nonambiguous gestures that can be replaced by a word or phrase, of which (besides today’s intercultural borrowings) each culture possesses a wide repertoire: ‘/Okay/,’ ‘/So-so/,’ ‘/Yes/,’ ‘/No/,’ ‘/Come/,’ ‘/Victory/,’ etc. Not only should the interpreter be familiar with the repertoire of both source and target languages, but also fully aware of the typical false cognates that lead to false decoding.122 Emblems that accompany their verbal equivalents (e.g. ‘No’ ‘/No/’) are of course dispensable and need not be conveyed to the listener. However, a wordless headshake for negation must be turned into a verbal ‘No’ (even a verbally qualified ‘No’ if the gesture’s parakinesic qualifiers so require); and if a Greek, Turkish or Bulgarian speaker tosses his head up slightly (the Greek with dimmed eyes, the Bulgarian with slight lip pouting), we obviously must translate it as ‘No’ (lest the gesture’s final downward phase be misinterpreted as ‘Yes’); similarly, if a Spaniard shows only the bunched fingers of one hand pointing upwards when speaking of people in some place, we need to translate it as ‘crowded,’ although in a different context it could denote emphasis, or ‘the essence’ of something. As a veritable visual vocabulary, emblems are much more translatable than other categories if the interpreter is perfectly familiar with them in both languages through a high degree of bicultural fluency.

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Speech markers undoubtedly fall outside the interpreter’s reach. We know that they are much too intimately fused with verbal language and constitute the subtlest and most elusive component of our speaking and our most native distinctive element or ‘visual accent.’ They differentiate languages and cultures to the point where perhaps only a totally bilingual interpreter would be capable of mastering and control both systems enough to utilize them. However, some of them, like those used for emphasis, modify the verbal message, and so the interpreter will have to decide whether or not to verbally or paralinguistically (probably not kinesically) convey that emphasis to the listener or audience, as with: “You should be putting it back where it came from. On the land.” Lord Edward shook an admonitory finger and frowned. “On the land, I tell you” (Huxley, PCP, V)

Space markers (illustrators of size, distance and spatial location), time markers (references to past, present or future), and deictics (pointing at present or absent referents, including events) can also show marked cross-culturally: I’m looking out this morning for something new and suitable,’ he said, nodding towards the city (Dickens, MC, V)

Pictographs, which, as we know, can be used even out of verbal deficiency, may certainly have to be verbalized by the interpreter. As for verbal (onomatopoeic) or paralinguistic echoics, kinephonographs and kinetographs and pseudokinetographs, the speaker may be using in his delivery phonic and visual imitations that refer to objects, animals or situations typical only of his culture, and for which the interpreter’s target culture may or may not possess any equivalents. When the interpreter encounters an ideograph, it can happen that, for instance, the Italian speaker, having or not having the appropriate words to express all that he feels about a situation experienced in the past, simply uses that typical upward gesture of the eyes as a hand sort of initiates at head height an spiral movement in the air, obliging the interpreter to say something like ‘Aaah, what a wonderful experience…!’ or ‘That was something…superb!’ Event tracers, however, can be translated eloquently with paralanguage, for instance, referring to the excessive duration of a meeting, or how repetitive, or slow, a movie is; without repeating the speaker’s gestures, the interpreter can also express himself with descriptive word drawling (e.g. ‘It went o-o-o-o-o-onnn and o-o-onnn’). As for identifiers, the interpreter can always face the difficulties posed by the different cultural, personal and even socioeducational styles for giving visual form (always accompanied of paralinguistic features) to abstract concepts, physical and moral qualities and material characteristics: […] these things are not new. In the life of the Church…” He waved his hand to suggest a limitless range (Wilson, AA, I, II)

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

In addition, the specific paralinguistic and kinesic qualifiers can make it necessary to add an extra word or two or, being visually accessible, use similar or culturally equivalent voice and gesture, for instance: ‘¡Absurdo!’, ‘Era una persona muy…muy fría, y muy reservada también,’ ‘Well, she is the pioneer type of woman, you know? Uhm! Tough!,’ ‘Ah, you have to be ve-ery shrewd,’ ‘It is certainly an oppressive atmosphere’). Externalizers, however, the most complex of all categories, offer a great challenge, as they do not illustrate words, but react to what is being, has been or will be said or done by the speaker or his listener (e.g. a listener’s feedback reaction which has impacted the speaker, or what the latter expects as a reaction), or just thought, by oneself or someone else (e.g. laughter with which the speaker expresses incredulity toward what he feels the audience is thinking), to past, present, future, anticipated or imagined events (e.g. being overwhelmed by sad memories or a possible impending event), and to esthetic and spiritual experiences. These reactions can at times be so conspicuous, yet not precisely clear, that the interpreter must decide whether or not to translate them verbally. Besides, the speaker may react not only kinesically, but with a complex multiple expression and no words, quite a challenge, as when confronted with something like this not impossible compound expression: No physiognomist that ever dwelt on earth could have construed Tom’s face when he heard these words. Wonder was in it, and a mild look of reproach, but certainly no fear or guilt, although a host of strong emotions struggled to display themselves (Dickens, MC, XXXI)

Externalizers, with or without concomitant or adjacent words, can certainly test the abilities of the most experienced interpreter. Four examples — again, not impossible at all — will suffice for the reader to ponder how he or she would handle each situation: She forbore to utter this feeling [anger]. The reticence of her tongue only made the loquacity of her face the more noticeable (Hardy, FMC, XI) “[…] And, you hear me,” he [Annixter] concluded, with a menacing outthrust of his lower jaw (Norris, O, I, II) “Well, then, I’ll not,’ said George, with an obstinate jerk of his head (Dreiser, JG, III) Gerhardt stood there motionless another minute or so, his jaw fallen and a strange helplessness upon him (Dreiser, JG, VI) “You should be putting it back where it came from. On the land,” she nodded her head angrily, and said, “All right. You can have it” (Mailer, BS, II)

To make it even more of a challenge, externalizers include those social random behaviors we all exhibit in personal and cultural ways. Naturally, these fall outside the interpreter’s responsibility, despite their obvious semantic content and the fact that they do occur in certain situations (e.g. the lip-biting or deep breathing betraying a delegate’s anxiety at

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a political conference). Nevertheless, the interpreter’s sensitivity to these sort of microbehaviors will undoubtedly contribute to fully understand his state and its possible consequences for the exchange. They may be due to irritation, fatigue, anxiety, impatience, annoyance, etc., and the interpreter may perhaps be able to help the speaker, sometimes by camouflaging a certain feeling with his own tone of voice as he translates (not so much in the copresence situation of consecutive translation, but from the interpreter’s booth, depending on how he can perceive the speaker).123 He [Hollingsworth] drummed his fingers on the desk, debating what I had said. “Perhaps, perhaps” (Mailer, BS, XIX)

Finally, there are also externalizers that appear in the course of a public speech or an exchange as any of the categories called ‘adaptors’ (i.e. involving various types of contact): self-adaptors, as when the listener rubs his chin skeptically without saying anything else, which the interpreter will feel obliged to render verbally, unless it is an emblem common to both cultures; alter-adaptors, as in greetings and leave-takings, where interlocutors might easily hesitate, as I remember U.S President Carter did once by offering Egypt’s President Sadat a handshake when the latter was already initiating an embrace, very much like trying to communicate with their respective languages. It would also be quite appropriate for the interculturally fluent interpreter to instruct his client about certain body-adaptors before a traditional Arab or Indian meal (e.g. eating with fingers or with utensils) or socializing in India (e.g. the possible presence of men chewing betel); perhaps also about some unexpected object-adaptors, as when former Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Krouschev began to strike the table with his shoe at a United Nations meeting. We see, therefore, that the degree in which our speaker uses these nonverbal categories as part of his or her repertoire defines the degree of personal articulateness or fluency in interaction, a degree which should ideally approach no extremes, but strike a balance between verbal and nonverbal activity. On the other hand, the interpreter must decide, always on an improvised basis, which of those behaviors should or should not be translated into the target verbal or nonverbal lexicon. What is obvious is that the interpreter must literally ‘keep an eye’ on the speaker’s total delivery, lest he should miss something that has been expressed kinesically only.

8.10

The structure of conversation in interpretation As for the characteristics of the type of conversational exchange we normally encounter in the context of interpretation, reading the previous chapter can simplify the present discussion of only the more relevant points. What must be emphasized is that the main features in this type of exchange are, (a) that it differs radically from the ordinary ‘free’ encounter, since it is limited by the interpreter’s presence and task; and

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

(b) that, as a rule, it is composed of a triad: Speaker, single or collective Listener, and Interpreter. To speak only of a dyad would not be accurate, since the interpreter, as a third participant, acts as a filter between the other two and, in fact, can even modify and substitute some signs for others, even systems (e.g. verbalize a gesture). As well, we must once more keep in mind a fact mentioned when discussing the chronemics of interpretation: that very often the kinesic expression is initiated before the verbal one, therefore the listener has seen it before the words are uttered, when the interpreter has not yet translated those words; a phenomenon which, using words by Viaggio (1997), must accelerate, the interpreter’s “comprehension” and “processing” when preparing the ‘production.” We should therefore see in which ways some of conversational mechanisms — represented in Fig. 7.1 — can be affected by the more frequent mode of consecutive interpretation, considering that the mere presence of the translator renders unnecessary, or unfeasible, certain otherwise obliged rules of conversation. Within the initial behaviors, initial-turn asking, or simply the spontaneous turn opening or even any spontaneous simultaneous turn opening, produced by one or both interlocutors, can be a first segment for the interpreter, who will perhaps have to impose an order through his own tactics and not always by means of a real translation; besides, the encounter is often initiated by the interpreter’s initial-turn offering addressed to both participants. Within the turn-change behaviors, we may find, for instance, a listener’s turn asking while the interpreter translates the speaker’s speech: ‘Well, to that I’d like to say that…,’ ‘Sí, claro, pero…,’ /throat-clearing + audible pharyngeal ingression, a /stop/ hand gesture, etc. The interpreter cannot just ignore such obvious signals, but will need to simultaneously, and without interrupting the speaker, signal to the listener to wait (which is seen by the speaker), allowing the speaker to complete the thought he is expressing and then grant the turn to the asker. We can also find in the interpretation situation a turn pre-opening, which will probably have to be translated if it is verbal, either because of its communicative content or because, given its length, the listener may feel he is not being duly translated (e.g. ‘Bueno, pues si me toca a mí hablar, diré que…’); while some preambles are clearly superfluous, others truly communicate, as with an accelerated ‘No, yo sólo quería corregir lo de la fecha,’ instead of just ‘Bueno, una cosa.’ Within the secondary turn-change behaviors, what to do about the speaker’s turn holding (‘However…!’, ‘On the other hand’) when he should already close it and so we all expect?; or about an absent turn opening, when our listener had already asked for the floor but changes his mind, causing an interruption? Within the listener’s or listeners’ speaker-directed behaviors, the only ones we find in the interpretation situation are feedback, ‘clarification request,’ ‘correction,’ and ‘interruption.’ With regard to listener’s feedback (which should be intermittent for the speaker to continually be informed about positive or negative reactions from his

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listener), we must realize that, with the interpreter as intermediary, the listener produces two kinds of feedback: (a) the one that may elicit translation, that is (delayed, as all other translated behaviors; and (b) the one elicited by the visual (kinesic) and paralinguistic signs directly perceived by the speaker. This means that the interpreter confronts two feedbacks: one which is synchronized with the speaker (when he as interpreter has not yet responded to the eliciting signs), and another one, as his translation, inevitably in disynchrony. That is why the latter (verbal or nonverbal), which corresponds to what he conveys, may very well be a repetition of the former when corroborating for the listener the meaning previously perceived from the speaker; for instance, with a gesture the speaker already expressed his contradiction, negation, surprise or approval, and the listener-viewer has already reacted, maybe even verbally, by interrupting; and then, if the interpreter sees the need to convey that feedback as an interpolated comment because of its decisive relevance, he will do it as a second version. On the other hand, the listener needs also enough conversational and interactive fluency, since his feedback messages contribute to regulate his exchange with the speaker and in turn influence his behavior. This constitutes a communicative and interactive continuum, certain behavioral segments influencing the ones that follow (of each of the participants) and at the same time being influenced by the preceding ones. The readers may take a look at Fig. 7.2 in Chapter 7, ‘Forms and functions of feedback,’ and the corresponding paragraphs, trying to imagine those and other functions and perhaps their own experience of them as interpreters, for they will, for instance, recognize how frequently they are seeing nonverbal feedback when they have not even translated the speaker yet. It is important also to consider the possible one-to-many relationship, that is, when the interpreter finds himself not only between two interlocutors, but between one speaker and an audience. In such a situation, he will have to evaluate different types of feedback and filter, among many other things, only truly relevant reactions, providing for the speaker who elicits them an honest and at the same time probably very quick translation, especially when it is verbal; this helps the speaker in his own delivery, since feedback — much more if he cannot decode it directly — may determine a necessary new turn in his own speech. By contrast, in simultaneous interpretation, typical of a political meeting or academic conference, the speaker is beyond the reach of his interpreter’s possible help, alone in an agitated and ununderstood sea, while the interpreter, immersed in his task, will need an extraordinary ability to grasp that reaction and not any other, and include it as soon as possible (never truly simultaneously) in his translation for his listeners. This situation can become even more problematic if nonverbal messages are interculturally identical in form but different in meaning (much like false cognates), as happens with an audience’s whistles: approval among Anglophones, but disapproval for Spaniards, unless a Spanish audience reacts with whistles and ‘¡Booooh!’ at the same time.

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

The only other behaviors possible within this category are request for clarification or request for additional information, through the interpreter, by means of whom two more behaviors, offered information and correction, do not constitute interruption. Nevertheless, the two forms of interruption of the speaker’s discourse (not the interpreter’s, for interrupting him him does not amount to transgressions in the speaker-listener’s exchange) are: (a) if the listener intervenes, having understood what the speaker expressed verbally and nonverbally; and (b) if he is visibly showing a nonverbal attitude (generally kinesic, but possibly paralinguistic) of inattention or discourtesy, an intermittent laughter or an ironical or skeptic gesture. Within the speaker’s secondary behaviors, there are only two that are important in interpretation: counterfeedback, directly from speaker to listener in response to the latter’s feedback, which must be translated if it is verbal, and if it is not it needs translation only if it is a kinesic false cognate or a gesture or paralinguistic emission unknown in the speaker’s culture; and feedback seeking, which the speaker needs — sometimes as he observes in his listener a quizzical look, a gesture of surprise or just an enigmatic passivity — and emits interrupting himself (thus without waiting for the interpreter’s translation, although the latter may refer to it later) or after he closes his turn, in which case the interpreter must convey it. Within the interlistener behaviors, which two or more listeners can exchange among themselves (e.g. at a conference session or press conference), there are: interlistener feedback, as a reaction of one or more listeners to what one or more other listeners say or do, and speaker-based feedback, that is, referring to the speaker, both quite relevant as regulators of the exchange, which the speaker may interpret correctly or incorrectly when they are gestures. Within acoustic or visual pauses, that is, paralinguistic or kinesic, there are some which, due to their functions, the interpreter must not ignore, namely: absent participation, not impossible in any of the two or more interlocutors if after the last intervention nobody shows any intention to speak, in which case the experienced interpreter would quickly provide a verbal link that can join them in the resumption of their exchange; as he does if there is a pause due to absent turn opening, when the person who is supposed to take the floor does not. Another responsibility on the interpreter’s part is the elliptical pause, whose absent words the speaker thinks are understood, but sometimes are not (perhaps because it belongs only in his language); thus the interpreter needs to judge the situation as he goes along and, if he knows that his translation must not include the ellipsis, simply fill it with the words the speaker did not say, or the right ones in the target language. When the speaker makes a pause while searching for a word and does not find it, it is obvious that any good interpreter will provide it as quickly and discreetly as possible in order to conceal the gap, and then will translate the completed phrase. However, it is when the speaker halts in order to search for an idea that does not quite come to mind that the interpreter needs a truly solid background, perhaps in a very specialized field; or, following his speaker’s train

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of thought, he may find what may sound more coherent in the context of the conversation and rapidly suggest it to the speaker, who will confirm it (probably with gratitude). After that the interpreter will translate, always without giving away the speaker’s flaw, with words like ‘It is…how can I say?,’ always assuming that the interpreter is there to help in every way without ever showing any partiality by helping one interlocutor more than the other (unfortunately a not infrequent lack of professionalism). Something similar happens with the pause to remember (‘memory-searching pause’), as long as the interpreter knows that date, name, etc. In each of these instances, the interpreter must act with such fluency as to camouflage his speaker’s lack of it. But if the speaker simply stops speaking in order to think, he cannot interfere, nor feel responsible — within certain limitations — if that silence should cause everybody’s anxiety. As for the pause caused by the speaker’s verbal deficiency, because he does not know the right word, the interpreter will behave as when he does not remember it, that is, providing that word, since not doing it would be tantamount to manipulation. And finally, when the speaker is overwhelmed by a strong feeling that results in an emotional pause, the interpreter should treat it with sensitiveness and respect, sometimes identifying, if it is not obvious, why the pause occurred. On the other hand, the reader should again be aware of the discussions of silences in Chapter 7, as well as in Chapter 7 of Volume II, for part of the interpreter’s intercultural — that is, bicultural — fluency will reflect on his knowledge of the communicative value of interpersonal silences and in how he handles them (e.g. when dealing with North American Indians’ longer conversational pauses).

8.11

Reduced interaction situations and the interpreter’s responsibility

8.11.1 Thus far we have discussed conversational interaction taking for granted that the participants are fully-equipped individuals who have at their disposal all bodily channels of emission and reception. In fact, interaction studies in general have traditionally ignored anything else. But the reality of interaction is not always so, and interpreters (or anyone else) must be trained for, and sensitized to, their possible intermediary role between persons who may lack one or more of those communication channels. I have defined reduced interaction as the exchange during which emission and/or perception of external bodily behaviors (including language) is impeded in one or more channels by some somatic anomaly, physical agents or as agreed between the communicants. Although this multi-faceted topic is dealt with in Chapter 8.10 of Volume II, it must be outlined here applying it specifically to the type of situations encountered in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation, and only with respect to the three components of speech, language-paralanguage-kinesics, and their ten possible realizations (see Chapter 4.10). Figure 8.4 in Volume II, ‘Nonverbal communication in reduced interaction,’ shows these limitations which the interpreter or the

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

general reader should ponder, for anyone may occasionally have to assume the nonprofessional task of translating for someone. The curtailment of communication in any of the two main modalities, that is, audible (language and paralanguage) and visual (kinesics, blushing), can have a profound effect, not only in terms of the encoding-decoding processes and problems they entail, but as regards the relationships between persons and the efficacy of their interactions. It should follow, therefore, that the interpreter should know how to cope with each type of limitation, since the possible consequences of that situation must be carefully weighed to be prepared for the additional task of solving with perfect ‘interpretative fluency’ any of the problems and limitations that invariably crop up in reduced interaction. 8.11.2 Blindness If the blind listener cannot perceive the kinesics of the speaker who is addressing him, nor the interpreter’s, he will depend exclusively on the other two speech cosystems, verbal language and paralanguage, yet missing their communicative blending with gestures; for, even if he does not understand his interlocutor’s words, most of his gestures, manners and postures will help him (even in their preceding the interpreter’s translation) in decoding his messages and in evaluating and appreciating his personality and attitude, particularly in more personal encounters, but also in larger groups. Naturally, neither will he perceive other visual signs like the tears in repressed weeping, blushing (which he may have caused), or the emotional sweat elicited by the anxiety created by the encounter. And when he becomes the speaker himself, he misses all the visual feedback his listener is giving him intermittently (as he himself was doing while listening). Were he able to perceive it, it could have affected his own attitude and speech, as would happen while hearing and seeing smiled speech revealing the speaker’s attitude toward him or the topic itself. In other words, all that grid of exchanges, of actions and reactions that are only visual, just do not exist for the interlocutor who cannot see the other person. His or her very appearance and facial features, through which they are speaking to him, simply do not count.124 While it is true that there is not much that interpreters can do to compensate that absence, should they not feel responsible for completing their translation with very brief verbal comments (when it is possible and appropriate)? They can convey to the blind listener, for instance, certain kinesic qualifiers of the speaker or those unseen ‘lexical’ gestures like emblems, identifiers or externalizers, particularly when used by themselves. And let us not disregard how eloquently blushing, emotional sweat, tear-shedding, or simply glistening eyes, can communicate; even if we do not advocate their indiscriminate verbal interpretation, there are times when the blind interactant should be made aware of their occurrence and relevant meaning.

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8.11.3 Deafness The deaf listener misses not only the speaker’s words, but his paralanguage, which may be supporting or contradicting those words; for, in a small group with consecutive translation, even though he cannot understand what his interlocutor is expressing verbally, that paralanguage (particularly when heard close by) is unquestionably accompanying the translated words, and some independent emissions — as are all paralinguistic alternants, which the interpreter will almost never repeat (e.g. a commiserative lingual click ‘Tz,’ a nervous or hesitating throat-clearing, an skeptical ‘Umf!’); let alone the voice itself, with its individuating, personal timbre and fundamental qualities, which the deaf listener would have liked or disliked as a complement to his opinion and total image of the interlocutor. 8.11.4 Lack of arm(s), hand(s), finger(s) As speakers, we can never ‘complete’ the audiovisual or acoustic-kinetic structure of our spoken discourse if we lack one or two arms or hands, even some fingers (as will be see in Volume II), since our kinesics would be mutilated; and, along with it, our interactive behaviors, being unable to use emblems (with or without words), express certain concepts, indicate size, communicate through a warm handshake or an embrace with its intended parakinesic qualities, which we will have to try and verbalize. In fact, there is very little an interpreter can do, not being able to translate any of those spontaneous acts and its specific qualities that only the person who originates them can communicate. It seemed fitting to conclude the topic of interpretation by discussing reduced interaction. When it would seem that all the main aspects of interpretation had been at least outlined in the previous sections, the sudden awareness of those reduced interaction situations would make one realize two things: first, that the efforts to study in depth the problems of reduced interaction — and try to develop a special interactive fluency with persons suffering from each of those limitations — have been minimal; and second, that interpreters must train themselves to acquire that specific fluency to become better instruments of social and affective communication. Careful pondering of all the issues that at least have been identified and outlined would yield much fruitful thought and applications, and thus complete the integrative approach to live translation and to its challenges and problems.

8.12

Conclusion The readers, particularly those involved in the practice of interpretation, will hopefully recognize that this theoretical, and at the same time, practical model constitutes an

Nonverbal communication in interpretation

indispensable complement to the deeper understanding of the reality of their task in its various modalities. Having approached the topic, as others in these volumes, in a progressive and systematic fashion, the intricate presence and interrelationships of the different components of the interpreter’s and his or her interlocutors’ situation will have become quite evident. It will be evident as well that, depending on the characteristics of that situation, that reality goes even far beyond the triple structure languageparalanguage-kinesics, always a fundamental and unavoidable basis. Therefore, because of the relationships between the verbal and the nonverbal, we must ponder what happens to those signs and messages in the course of an interpretation session; not only because, given the intercultural differences — even space (proxemics) and time (chronemics) factors — they can just get lost in the exchange, but because it is often the interpreter that fails, not acknowledging their true functions and not verbalizing them for lack of interpretative fluency; a fluency that must include the interactions with persons whose sensory communicative capacity is limited.

8.13

Topics for interdisciplinary research 1.Kinesic false cognates in interpretation. 2.The listener’s possible misunderstandings in paralanguage during interpretation. 3.Silences in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation. 4.Intercultural problems in interpretation. 5.Feminine and masculine voice for the masculine and feminine speaker, respectively: problems of emission and perception. 6.Visibility problems and nonverbal communication in the interpreter’s booth. 7.Speaker’s and listener’s random behaviors during interpretation. 8.Interpretation in critical and conflictive situations. 9.Chronemics of consecutive interpretation. 10.The interpreter’s role and the relationships between words and nonverbal systems. 11.The interpreter’s privileges and liberties and its limits. 12.Conversational rules in interpretation. 13.Turn changes in simultaneous interpretation. 14.Feedback in simultaneous interpretation. 15.Feedback and counterfeedback in consecutive interpretation. 16.The audiences’ behaviors in simultaneous interpretation. 17.The interpreter’s problems and responsibilities with regard to interactive pauses in consecutive and simultaneous interpretation.

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18.Interpretation between the blind and the sighted. 19.The interpreter’s bilingualism and biculturalism. 20.An interpreter’s intercultural manual of nonverbal communication. 21.The interpreter’s nonverbal training. 22.Classroom teaching of nonverbal communication to the interpreter: problems and limitations. 23.The clients’ nonverbal repertoires: positive and negative aspects. 24.The problems between East and West in interpretation. 25.Cooperative and uncooperative clients in consecutive interpretation: positive and negative aspects.



Appendix

1997–1998 outlines of the three (independent but mutually complementary) 3-hour-aweek courses on Nonverbal Communication, taught by F. Poyatos (with slight variations) between 1978 and 1998 in the University of New Brunswick Departments of Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology. nthropology Nonverbal communication I: Interdisciplinary theory 1.
Introductory lecture 1. Nonverbal Communication Studies today. This course: topics, textbooks, exams, course project. 2.
Introductory lecture 2. The applications of NVC Studies in Anthropology, Sociology, Linguistics, Psychology, Education, Nursing, the Arts, Literature, Theater, Semiotics, etc. 3.
Culture as communication: Sensible and intelligible systems. Somatic, objectual and environmental sign systems and their intelligible background. 4.
Analysis of a culture through its culturemes. The theory and model of culturemes. Systematic and progressive analysis of a culture and its people. 5.
The interbodily and body-environment sensory channels 1. Direct perception and synesthesial perception. Visual, audible, olfactory, gustatory, dermal, and kinesthetic receptors. The main human systems: sound and movement. 6.
The interbodily and body-environment sensory channels 2. Chemical messages in humans as compared with animals: from pheromones to cosmetics. Thermal messages. 7.
The interbodily and body-environment sensory channels 3. Dermal messages. Direct and synesthesial perception of shape, size, texture, consistency and strength, weight of another body and the environment. Contextual and situational hierarchy of sensory channels. 8.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 1. Kinesic and paralinguistic emblems. The anthropology and sociology of hand emblems and their co-behaviors.

298 Appendix

9.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 2. Speech markers: body accompaniments for pronouns, adverbs, stress, punctuation, etc. Markers of paralanguage. 10.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 3. Illustrators of space and time: space and time markers. Deictics. 11.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 4. The imitative discourse illustrators; pictographs, echoics, kinetographs and kinephonographs. 12.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 5. Ideographs and event tracers. Identifiers: conversational illustrations of abstractions and physical referents. VIDEO 13.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 6. Externalizers: our reactions to self, others, events, esthetic, and spiritual experiences, and the environment. 14.
Categories of interactive and noninteractive nonverbal behaviors 7. Self-adaptors and alter-adaptors: forms and functions of physical contact with ourselves and others. Extrasomatic systems: body-adaptors and object-adaptors. VIDEO 15.
The anatomical-communicative possibilities of the human body for the production of sound and movement 1. Types of visual and audible movements. Anatomical distribution. The body’s repertoire of kinetic actions. 16.
Mid-term exam 17.
The anatomical-communicative possibilities of the human body for the production of sound and movement 2. Visual-audible ways of contacting ourselves and others, and of handling food, drinks, clothes, and objects. 18.
The basic triple structure of human communication. Language, paralanguage and kinesics contrasted. The limitations of words and the grammaticality and lexicality of the three co-systems in discourse. The concepts of usage and redundancy. 19.
Paralanguage 1: Primary qualities. The identifying features of a person’s voice: timbre, loudness, resonance, tempo, pitch qualities, intonation range, syllabic length, rhythm. 20.
Paralanguage 2: Qualifiers. Our biological, attitudinal and situational conditioning of voice types: breathing, respiratory, laryngeal, pharyngeal, velopharyngeal, lingual, labial, mandibular, articulatory, and tension controls. 21.
Paralanguage 3: Differentiators 1. The anthropology and sociology of laughter and crying cross-culturally. 22.
Paralanguage 3: Differentiators 2. The anthropology and sociology of shouting, sighing, panting, coughing, and throat-clearing cross-culturally.

Appendix

23.
Paralanguage 4: Differentiators 3. The anthropology and sociology of yawning, belching, spitting, hiccuping, and sneezing cross-culturally. 24.
Paralanguage 5: Alternants 1. The lexicality and functions of tongue clicks, uhhu’s, m-mm’s, moans, hisses, silences, etc. Problems of representation and labelling. Alternants cross-culturally. The challenge of comic books’ soundgraphs. 25.
Video-illustration of paralanguage in real life. 26.
Kinesics 1: The language of body movements and positions. Phylogeny ontogeny, and cultural aspects of gestures, manners and postures. 27.
Kinesics 2: Gestures. Universal and culture-specific displays. Interactive and noninteractive facial gestures. Interdisciplinary research. 28.
Kinesics 3: Manners. Free and bound manners. Culture, gender, age, and socioeducational levels. Gait. Posture-forming, body-adaptor, alter-adaptor, and object-adaptor manners. 29.
Kinesics 4: Postures. The anthropology and sociology of posture: forms and functions. Interpersonal attitudes and personality. Cultural evolution and conditioning factors. 30.
Kinesics 5: Video-illustration of kinesics in real life. 31.
Kinesics 6: Cross-cultural similarities and problems. Invited informants from five cultures. 32.
Gaze behavior as a research area. Animal and human gaze behavior. Crosscultural differences in social gaze behavior. Applications in the social and behavioral sciences, nursing, business, etc. 33.
The behaviors of space and time: Proxemics and chronemics. Far, public, social, personal, intimate, and objectual distances. The concept and structuration of time. Intercultural and intersubcultural problems. 34.
The co-structuration of somatic and extrasomatic systems. The mutual conditioning of bodily systems, body- and object-adaptors, and environmental systems. Effects on social interaction. 35.
Literary anthropology. The use of national narrative literatures and theater as a research tool anthropology, sociology, psychology and other disciplines. Interdisciplinary cross-fertilization. 36.
Intercultural and intracultural communication and our interaction with the environment. Encoding and decoding situations and problems in the intercultural and intersubcultural event. Nonverbal acculturation. Emitting and perceiving verbalnonverbal fluency. Sensory involvement with the environment cross-culturally: visual, audible, olfactory, kinesthetic and tactile. Intercultural implications. 37.
Brief students’ presentations on course projects.

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300 Appendix

FINAL EXAM ociology Nonverbal communication II: Interdisciplinary applications 1. Introductory lecture: Nonverbal Communication Studies today. Characteristics of this course; topics, textbook, exams, course project. 2.
The total conditioning background of human behavior. Biological, physiological, psychological, socioeducational, and environmental variables. 3.
Paralanguage 1: Forms and social functions of crying in a cross-cultural perspective. Paralinguistic-kinesic forms. Positive and negative functions in social interaction. 4.
Paralanguage 2: Silence in society: forms and functions. Interactive and noninteractive, positive and negative silences. 5.
Nonverbal communication cross-culturally. Potential intercultural problems in various areas of nonverbal communication. Canada and other countries. 6.
Kinesics historically and cross-culturally. Religious, moral and social background of medieval and renaissance gestures. Modern interactive gestures cross-culturally. 7.
Manners 1: Greeting behaviors cross-culturally. First encounters, acquaintances, friends, relatives. Short/long absence. Age, gender, social differences, culture. 8.
Manners, 2: Social etiquette. Good and bad manners cross-culturally. Lower-class etiquette research and practice. The language of the veil among the Tuaregs. 9.
Human territoriality. Territoriality, personal space and privacy: cross-cultural perspective. Invasion of privacy: physical, visual, acoustic, olfactory. 10.
Behavior in public places. Travel conveyances. Elevators, Libraries. Bars. Churches. Pedestrian behaviors. Cross-cultural differences. 11.
Gestures cross-culturally (beyond anthropology course). Invited informants from five cultures. 12.
Verbal-nonverbal communication in shared quarters. Student research: a reformatory. Roommates in university residences. Coed residences. Hospitals and homes for the elderly. 13.
Touching and being touched. The development and problems of tactile experiences cross-culturally. Intercultural aspects. Student research on touching. 14.
Clothes as communication: social attitudes toward dress. Clothes and kinesic behavior. Interaction with self and others through clothes. Student research. 15.
A person’s objectual environment. Exterior environment. Interiors: object and their characteristics. Living rooms as social identifiers. University male/female students’ rooms.

Appendix

16.
The sensory interaction of people and their cultural environment. Visual acoustic, olfactory, kinesthetic and tactile involvement cross-culturally. 17.
Chronemics: The behavior of time. Conceptualization of time. Time and environment. Social, interactive, and professional time. Time in the helping professions. Time cross-culturally. 18.
Mid-term exam 19. Nonverbal aspects of the nurse-patient relationship 1: The nurse. Appearance and implications. Paralanguage. Kinesics. Gaze. Proxemics. Touch. Time. Other issues. 20.
Nonverbal aspects of the nurse-patient relationship 2: The patient. Types. Appearance. Response to problems. The patient’s personalized and institutionalized environment. The visitors’ behaviors. 21.
Nonverbal communication in education, 1. The environment: classroom style, seating arrangement and associated behaviors: from elementary school to university. 22.
Nonverbal communication in education, 2. The nonverbal appearance and behaviors of teacher and student. Problems in the multicultural classroom. 23.
Children’s books illustrations as nonverbal communication. Positive/negative aspects. Realistic vs. expressionistic style. Reality vs. fantasy. SLIDES 24.
Nonverbal communication in foreign language learning. Native vs. foreignlanguage acquisition. Classroom vs. real life. Methodology for the teaching of NVC skills. Material, presentation, grading, visual and audiovisual illustration. Drilling. 25.
Nonverbal communication in business 1. The business person: Static and dynamic bodily characteristics. Culture. The environment: outside office and office. Dynamics of business meetings: location, time, seating arrangements, interaction, manipulation. 26.
Nonverbal communication in business, 2. The interview: setting, the interviewer’s style and structuration of the encounter. The interviewee’s positive and negative nonverbal behaviors. Student research. 27.
Nonverbal systems in magazine advertising, 1. Historical survey. Models, setting, language, kinesics. Synesthesia. Primary, supporting, and hidden messages. SLIDES 28.
Nonverbal systems in magazine advertising 2. Manipulation: the consumer and beyond. Types of ads: romanticism, hedonism, narcissism, perversion, etc. SLIDES 29.
Nonverbal systems in magazine advertising 3. Cross-cultural comparisons. SLIDES 30.
Nonverbal communication in tv advertising. Still vs. live paralanguage and kinesics. The cultural commercial. Exploitation and manipulation. VIDEO 31.
Nonverbal communication in photography. Socio-anthropological and personal documentation. Photojournalism: testimony and manipulation. SLIDES

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32.
Nonverbal communication in painting, 1: Primitive conceptual expressionism and christian pictographic style. SLIDES 33.
Nonverbal communication in painting, 2: Social and psychological realism. SLIDES 34.
Nonverbal communication in literature, 1: The Bible and the greek and roman classics. Nonverbal communication in the Bible. The classical authors: drama, painting and sculpture. 35.
Nonverbal communication in literature, 2: The novel I. The characters’ nonverbal repertoires. Stylistic and technical functions. Sociocultural documentation. 36.
Nonverbal communication in the theatre. Stage directions. The nonverbal playwright-director/actor-audience relationship. Stageable and unstageable systems. 37.
Presentations of students’ projects.

FINAL EXAM sychology Psychology of nonverbal communication 1.
Introductory lecture: Interdisciplinary studies in nonverbal communication and psychology. Research, meetings. This course: topics, textbooks, exams. Course projects. 2.
The unstudied deeper levels of interaction 1. Interaction components: personalextrapersonal, behavioral-nonbehavioral, sensible-intelligible. 3.
The unstudied deeper levels of interaction 2. Direct and synesthesial sensory perception and intellectual evaluation. 4.
The unstudied deeper levels of interaction 3. Free/bound, momentary/permanent interaction components. Their qualifying features: location, intensity, duration. 5.
The unstudied deeper levels of interaction 4. Mutual co-structuration of components with preceding/ simultaneous/ succeeding ones; their internal (inter-/intrapersonal) and external relationships. 6.
The unstudied deeper levels of interaction 5. Interpersonal and environmental encoding-decoding interaction processes. Problems, implications, applications. 7.
Theoretical issues in nonverbal communication studies. Interaction, language, gesture and facial expression. 8.
The realistic audio-visual approach to speech. Interactive verbal, paralinguistic and kinesic aspects of anatomical and acoustic features.

Appendix

9.
Paralanguage 1: Review of paralinguistic features. The sociopsychological aspects of voice modifications and word-like sounds. 10.
Paralanguage 2: Sociopsychological aspects of differentiators. The interactive functions of laughter, crying, shouting, coughing, sighing, etc. 11.
Paralanguage 3: Video-illustration of natural situations. 12.
The ethology of social interaction. Inner motor patterns and ontogenetic development. Universality of interaction patterns. Lexicalization of gestures. 13.
Gestures and cross-cultural psychology. The case of Israel. Other aspects. 14.
Gestures across cultures: Visiting informants from five cultures 15.
Structural work on social and clinical kinesics, 1. Speech-and-body motion research: self synchrony and speaker-listener synchrony. 16.
Structural work on social and clinical kinesics, 2. Scheflen’s ‘quasicourtship behavior’ and its social-interactive implications. 17.
Kinesics 1: Gestures, manners and postures. Research principles: personal kinesic configuration, parakinesics. Hidden, multiple, phonic and objectual gestures. Microkinesics. Touching people and things. 17.
Kinesics 2: The face and its static and dynamic signs in interaction. Types and forms of permanent, changing, dynamic, and artificial facial signs. Gaze as kinesics. 18.
Kinesics 3: Kinesics inventories. Methodology for the preparation of cultural inventories. VIDEO 19.
Mid-term exam 20.
The face and hands in interaction. Relevance of language markers and identifiers of abstractions and sensible qualities. VIDEO: PAUL EKMAN 21.
Silence and stillness as message-conveying systems. Co-structuration with adjacent interaction components. Intercultural problems. Japan and the West. 22.
Gaze behavior: sociopsychological aspects. Macular and peripheral vision. Fixation, personal and environmental scanning, pupil reactions, gaze-breaking, etc. 23.
Sociopsychological aspects of interviewing. Counselling and other helping professions.Interrogation. Business. Others. 24.
Proxemics: Living spaces and behavior, 1. Fixed/semifixed, sociofugal/sociopetal features. Intercultural space and time problems. 25.
Proxemics: Living spaces and behavior, 2. Proxemics in social and clinical institutions: hospitals, nursing homes. Sommer’s Saskatchewan experiment. 26.
Touching: The sociopsychology of intimacy. The processes of active and passive touch. Aspects of touch in the helping professions. Cross-cultural differences.

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304 Appendix

27.
Developmental nonverbal communication: New perspectives. Verbal-nonverbal development. The development of audible-visual speech. Research on kinesics. 28.
Interactive random and unconscious behaviors. Encoding-decoding. Cultural, social and sociopsychological aspects. 29.
Communication problems cross-culturally: Invited informants from five cultures. 30.
Reduced interaction, 1: Types, channels, interaction problems. The three speech, activities in reduced interaction situations. Deafness. Anosmia and ageusia. 31.
Reduced interaction, 2: Types, channels, interaction problems. Lack of body parts. Paralysis. 32.
Reduced interaction, 3: Blindness. Blind guest invited. 33.
The structure of conversation, 1: Listener’s speaker-directed, inter-listener and speaker-state behaviors. Forms of feedback, requests for clarification/volume, repetitions, restatements, interruptions, prompting signals. Feedback, turn-offer, -claiming, -granting, -suppressing, prompting signals. 34.
The structure of conversation, 2: Listener’s speaker-directed, inter-listener and speaker-state behaviors. Forms of feedback, requests for clarification/volume, repetitions, restatements, interruptions, prompting signals. Feedback, turn-offer, -claiming, -granting, -suppressing, prompting signals. 35.
The structure of conversation: 3: coinciding behaviors. Simultaneous symmetrical and multiple acts. Turns, claims, taking,conclusions, relinquishing, yielding, silences. Overlapping behaviors. 36.
The structure of conversation, 4: Acoustic and visual pauses. Absent turn-claim, -turn-taking, -offering, opening, pre-ending, -ending, relinquishing/yielding, transitional, hesitation, feedback-seeking, task-performance, somatic-function, transitional, hesitation, feedback-seeking, task-performance, somatic-function, memory-, wordsearch, manipulative, external interference, etc. 37.
The psychology of photography as nonverbal communication. Spatial and temporal dimensions of people’s photos. The analysis of our family photo albums. 38.
Presentations of students’ projects. FINAL EXAM Mid-term exams: 25%; final exams: 35%; course projects: 40% (minimum 20 pp.) (see Poyatos 1992c, on some of the areas and topics covered by University of New Brunswick students in these courses)



Notes Chapter 1 1. The conference, on “The Mutual Interaction of People and Their Built Environment,” was organized for the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (Chicago, 1973) by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee anthropologist-urban architect Amos Rapoport and anthropologist James Silverbeg. One can read a further discussion of the concept by Sahnny Johnson (1982), who followed my definition (Poyatos 1976a), “in line with the tradition that treats language as itself a behavior, an interpretation…which underlies a great deal of the verbal versus nonverbal theory (Malinowski 1923; Sapir 1929; Kluchohn 1949; Pike 1967).” 2. At a small 1982 international conference of linguists in Tokyo one of my colleagues pointed out the nonexistence of this word, whereupon I tried, with no further comments from the audience, to justify my use of it as equivalent to the more anthropological ‘artifactual.’ 3. This table, because of its usefulness, appears also (as in Poyatos 1983a) in Volume III, Chapter 7, devoted to literary anthropology. 4. This model was first discussed at the pre-congress conference mentioned above, whose venue was, so appropriately, the beautiful “Wingspread” home built by Frank Lloyd Wright in Racine, Wisconsin, a superb example of people-environment interaction. Perfectly calculated by its architect for their dwellers’ sensory participation, he made them so conscious of a succession of rough (brick) and highly polished (wood) surfaces, causing us to keep an intimate interpersonal proxemics along narrow corridors and also allowing us to conduct in the living-room a perfectly personal interaction while keeping aware, by virtue of a center-room fireplace, of other people and things; and, through peripheral vision, of the ample windows overlooking the garden, as well as of the loft above. The cultureme model was deemed by Rapoport “probably the most useful [attempt] to apply structural anthropological and ethnoscientific methods to the built environment” (Rapoport 1976: 258–259), included in his volume (Poyatos 1976d) and in McCormack and S. Wurm’s from their session on “Language and Man” (Poyatos 1976e). I also discussed it at the 1975 conference of the International Communication Association (Chicago). 5. Our interaction with the environment, relevant enough to constitute a separate chapter, will be seen from different angles throughout the three volumes, not only in its discussion but in many literary examples, dealing, for instance, with sound and movement and silence and stillness (Volume II, Chapter 7), when analyzing interaction (Volume II, Chapter 8) and when studying nonverbal communication in literature in Volume III. 6. For instance: Almaney and Alwan 1982; Asante et al. 1989; Barnlund 1975; Barnlund and Araki 1985;, Broome 1996; Collett 1971; Condon 1994; Condon and Fathi 1975; Dunund 1985; Ingholm (1991); Hakamata (2000); Hall 1966, 1976, 1984, 1988; Hall and Foote Whyte 1960; Hall and Reed Hall 1989; Morrison, Bordon and Conaway 1994; Nydell 1997; Pastner 1978; Ramsey and Birk 1983; Ramsey et al. 1988; Samovar and Porter 1997; Samovar et al. 1998; Samuda and Wolfgang 1985; Smith 1966; Sweeny et al. 1980; Training Management Corporation 1997; Wenzhong and Grove 1990; Wolfgang 1979a, 1979b, 1984a, 1984b, 1995. There is also a growth in courses and programs

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on intercultural communication (e.g. Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication, in Portland, Oregon; Intercultural Studies, University of British Columbia; the Intercultural Communication Institute of Kanda University of International Studies, in Chiba, Japan [with its journal International Communication Studies], etc.); and in new journals aimed at increasing the efficacy of professionals working in sensitive fields exposed to multicultural diversity, such as the new American Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work and the forthcoming Journal of Multicultural Ministry, besides others already established, such as, for decades now, the International Journal of Intercultural Relations; in addition to numerous videotapes devoted to the knowledge of different cultures (e.g. those published by Big World Inc., Boulder, Colorado, USA), as well as traveller’s guides like the one for cross-cultural communication by von Raffler-Engel (2000) and her excellent and enlightening book (which certainly promotes much-needed intercultural understanding) on the perception of the unborn cross-culturally (Raffler-Engel 1994), in addition to the outstanding videotapes produced by U. of California, Santa Cruz, Dan Archer on cross-cultural communication (1997), and gestures (1991). 7. The psychologist Aaron Wolfgang, formerly of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, asked me to elaborate on this topic (Poyatos 1984a) for the second international conference he organized, as he was very concerned with the intercultural problems faced in Canada. I had first developed this concept (used in Johnson’s [1982] project on nonverbal communication in language teaching, for which I served as consultant at Indiana University in 1976 and 1977) in earlier writings (1974 [in Spanish], 1976a). 8. Discussed in Chapter 5, Volume II, when dealing with foreign-language acquisition. 9. Chapter 3 of my book on pastoral care (Poyatos 1999) outlines the most important aspects of personal and environmental nonverbal communication in a hospital. 10. The following experience with Mari illustrates this moral rule. Despite her prettiness, she loathed being photographed (something I did not know), but she let me do her portrait on two occasions. Perhaps her cultural background — difficult for me to always keep in mind (cf. Clancy 1986) — dictating real aversion to oppose another person’s opinion or refuse a petition, might have forced her to ‘omoiyari me’ (it is also a verb) as a good friend and above all as a student toward her professor. She herself defined ‘omoiyari’ in a course project as “the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling […] to show […] affection and care. It is done very naturally, since both sides do omoiyari each other. Unnatural way of omoiyari is used as an obligation.” 11. Throughout the three volumes kinesic expressions are enclosed in slashes like this: / — — /. 12. This same gesture is a sexual insult in Venezuela, ‘Okay’ in North America and England, and a language marker for emphasis in Spanish. 13. The topic of interaction components is developed in Volume II, Chapter 8. 14. For space sake, only a few topics can be suggested in each chapter. Many more would be found to be in need of study in many disciplines. An account of course projects among my nonverbal communication students until the early 1990s would give the reader an idea of the vast array of possible applications (Poyatos 1992c), which continued to grow since then. 15. The development of topics 9 through 16 would contribute to a better understanding of the problems to which foreigners are exposed in our own culture within the vast realm of the nonverbal. This, which unfortunately has never been studied seriously and systematically, can start with students’ course projects by interviewing foreign fellow students and perhaps their families as well. Of special interest are the intercultural problems of foreign children and their teachers in the classroom (see Wolfgang 1979b).

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Chapter 2 16. As with the whole discussion, the schemes in Figs. 1 and 2, repeatedly published without acknowledging our interaction with the environment (e.g. Poyatos 1983a, 1994a) show now a whole new approach to this topic. 17. It does not include, however, what Sebeok (1974: 213) calls “endosemiotics” to speak of cybernetic activities within the body, although those mechanisms which operate within an organism may, of course, determine the ones sensorially apprehended in the external world (e.g. the expression of pain and fear triggered by internal physical sensations). 18. What we commonly call touch is actually a series of five dermal senses each with specialized nerves through wihch we perceive touch proper, pressure, pain, heat, and cold. 19. In the 1960s, physician Harry Wiener studied these phenomena (Wiener 1966), discussing our olfactory inferiority, at least consciously, in comparison with the acuity of certain animal species, such as dogs (which smell our fear, hatred or good disposition toward them), mosquitoes (for which some human volatile substances secreted in sweat may or may not act as attractants, just as strogens from menstruating women attracts them), male monkeys and he goats (sexually excited in the presence of menstruating women), etc. Humans possess a great number of unclassified and consciously unidentified olfactory glands of unquestionable interactive effects, just as we know that our sweat glands produce more sweat in response to emotion (e.g. palmar sweat, which allows us to measure emotional state, against purely thermal or physiological sweat). And let us not forget the existence of ‘prodigies of smell’ (e.g. Freud’s “rat man,” who as a child could recognize everyone by his or her scent, the blind girl working in a laundry, who could recognize the smells of her customers’ clothes; or Hellen Keller, blind and deafmute, who could identify friends and visitors by their personal odor). As for “olfactory hallucination,” I myself experience it sometimes, particularly during periods when I have been suffering from anosmia (loss of olfaction). As for our general olfactory perception, particularly of our environment, it is regulated by three phenomena: acuity (personal perceptual capability), discrimination (capacity for identification) and olfactory fatigue (as when working in a bad-smelling place, which we fail to perceive after a while). One of my first nonverbal communication students, Ann Merrythew, interviewed other hospital nurses for her paper “What the Nurse’s Nose Should Know,” and reported on their description of more than fifty odors given by as many medical disorders or offending substances to which they were exposed. Two intriguing phenomena reported were the smell of fever and of impending death. Some of the problems hampering a wider use of professional olfactory discrimination, she wrote, were: infrequency of some odors, inadequate labels, unavailability of the source in some areas (e.g. freshly-moved clover, associated with liver failure), the professional’s own condition (e.g. poor acuity), unawareness due to prolonged exposure to an odor, and the patient’s use of perfume, breath lozenges, etc. Crosscultural differences in the perception of certain odors are also interesting (e.g. durian, the fruit which the Malaysian government banned from hotels for its offensive smell for westerners). Undoubtedly, as Thorpe (1974: 67) writes, Chesterton was right when he jocoularly wrote : “They haven’t got no noses/ The fallen sons of Eve,/ Things aren’t what they supposes. For goodness only knowses/ The noselessness of man.” Anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1966) studied the relationship between interpersonal space and visual, auditory, olfactory and dermal perception. Smell in particular has continued to elicit research as to the positive or negative interpretation (and associations) of different odors (e.g. Stoddart 1990; Goody 1993, on flowers; Classen et al 1994, a historical and cross-cultural approach). 20. Once I copied the following advice from an etiquette book whose reference I did not keep: “When a gentleman offers a lady his chair he should engage her in conversation for a few moments, thus giving the seat time to cool,” clearly suggesting the intimacy involved in interpersonal thermal perception, as happens with the perception of personal body or artificial odors (e.g. sweat, perfume,

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etc., which increases in direct proportion to body remperature). But there is also one form of ‘intrapersonal’ interaction when we perceive our own body heat in that pen we take from the pocket, in the camera we carry against the chest, in the steering-wheel of our car, etc. 21. The reader is asked to link these comments on light with those in Chapter 3.1.3, related to the perception of facial features. 22. Here are excluded some parts from the last version (Poyatos 1980a: 220–221, 1983a: 71). Some authors (e.g Harper et al. 1978: 3) have mentioned that first version, prepared (but not presented) for a seminar on epistemology of communication (1st International Congress of Human Communication, Barcelona, November 1973) and, at the suggestion of Umberto Eco, co-participant in the seminar, presented soon after at the 1974 1st Congress of the International Association of Semiotic Studies, which he organized in Milan (Poyatos 1979). After I presented my earlier version at the 1973 research conference on “The Organization of Behavior in Face-to-face Interaction” (as a pre-congress conference of the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences), organized by the Psychology Departament of the University of Chicago (Poyatos 1975b), I gratefully heeded the encouraging comments of the then already influential Albert Scheflen (of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Bronx State Hospital), with whom I also shared the Wisconsin pre-congress conference mentioned in Chapter I, note 1. Al Scheflen (who died in 1979) confirmed my conviction about the need to plunge into the totality of the multisystemic reality of our interaction with both people and the environment when he referred to my “sophisticated paper. The minimal do require a lot of work of us all […] but anything less — as you so ably point out — is Aristotelean bunk and it will not do” (letter of December 4, 1973). A few terms not yet introduced are found in the subject index. 23. This anatomical table, ‘Areas and Points of External Bodily Articulations,’ indispensable for any study requiring a working classification of kinesic behaviors in general (in Spanish in Poyatos 1994b, Chapter 5), appears in Volumen II, Chapter V. 24. Hence the weight given throughout this work to silence an stillness, specifically in Volumen II, Chapter VII. 25. The reader is encouraged to ponder the specific articulatory and interactive aspects of gaze, discussed in Chapter 5.10.2, Volume II. 26. The deeper levels of interaction are studied in Volume II, Chapter 8. 27. Although the interactive processes and their problems are treated in Volume II, Chapter 8 (including the co-structuration and qualifiers of interaction components), this is an attempt to at least identify the most basic semiotic facts in speech production with respect to the surrounding activities. Many of the coding and decoding problems have been dealt with when studying intercultural communication in the previous chapter. 28. To appreciate this complexity, see, for instance, the analysis by Hasada (1997) of Japanese smiling (always preferred to laughter, especially as a feminine behavior) as a means to maintain harmony in interpersonal relationships and to mask negative feelings; all of which is most eloquently illustrated in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 film “Tokyo Stories.” 29. This specific disclaimer, not always consciously exhibited, would never be necessary, for instance, in Italy, Spain or France. 30. These qualifiers are discussed in Vol. II, Chapter 5. Chapter 3 31. See Chapter 2 of Paralanguage for a complete description of the phonatory organs in their anatomy and muscular physiology (see Fig. 2.1), in the articulations they generate (Fig. 2.2) and in

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the voice types they produce (e.g. whispering, falsetto). We should keep in mind that words and independent paralinguistic utterances are actually visual-audible manifestations. 32. Equally audiovisual ‘quasiparalinguistic sounds’ (produced or generated by body movements or, at any rate, intimately integrated in interaction, both semantically and attitudinally) are treated as kinesics in Chapter 6, Vol. II. 33. These features should be seen in their total anatomical-kinetic context, as it appears in the anatomical chart (from Poyatos 1988d) shown as Fig. 5.1, Chapter 5, Volume II. Although any discussion of the area of physiognomy (so respected from antiquity until the nineteenth century) would belong here, it would not really add to the readers’ pondering of the reality of facial features discussed throughout the three volumes. Moreover, there is a specific literature in that field, such as the excellent history of it by anthropologist Caro Baroja (1987), and studies applied to specific areas like gestures in art and life (Schmitt 1990, 1992), in the novel (e.g. Tytler 1982; see Chapter VII, on nineteenth-century European novel), etc. 34. The distinction between permanant, changing and dynamic features responds basically to a discussion by Ekman (1978) — who refers to “static,” “slow” and “rapid” signs, mentioning “artificial” ones only in passing — with some needed amplifications and adding ‘artificial features’ for their relevance in the visual production of speech and their interactive consequences and implications. Ekman refers to the information offered by the face in terms of, for instance: beauty, whose canons have evolved historically, just as they vary ethnically (e.g. the ‘classical straight nose’), sexual attractiveness and, with judgements even more susceptible to error, the degree of intelligence, refinement, maturity, etc. When concentrating on kinesics in Chapter 5 of Volume II, as well as when discussing the presentation of the characters in narrative literature and the theater within Volume III, the reader is referred to this discussion so that gestural production (always filtered through the speaker’s ‘cultural style’) can be approached in the most realistic way possible. 35. As we see, if nonverbal communication in general can serve to conceal the truth, artificial changes perform this function in a particularly effective way and have caused in modern times the appearance of industries devoted to this type of deception which manipulate the natural qualities of the body and, either by emphasizing them, minimizing them or hiding them, achieve certain goals in personal interaction. 36. Gaze is treated as kinesics in Volume II, Chapter 5. 37. These comments on light should be linked to those in Chapter 2.3, on light and its conscious or unconscious perception as an agent in interaction. 38. This intends to be a less especialized abridgement of Chapter 2 in Paralanguage (Poyatos 1993a), which lacked the discussion of the face and its features, included here. 39. Belching is discussed as a paralinguistic ‘differentiator’ in Volume II, Chapter 3. 40. Discussed as a paralinguistic ‘qualifier’ in Volume II, Chapter 2.3. 41. See the muscles identified in Chapter 2 and Figs. 2.1 D and Fig 2.3 (‘The kinesic possibilities of the lips, cheeks and mandible’) of Paralanguage (Poyatos 1993a). 42. Included in Paralanguage, adding those defined by Catford and the paralinguistic ones to those identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). 43. An American television model advertising a perfume said, “I think of you!” sensually showing the apex of the tongue between her teeth for ‘think’ and pursing her lips as in a kiss for ‘you,’ without breaking eye contact with the viewer; something impossible to dub into Spanish because of the very different articulations for the translation ‘¡Pienso en ti!’

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44. Chapter 2 of Paralanguage presents all the linguistic and paralinguistic articulations of the tongue, utilizing, besides the IPA symbols, the ones in Catford’s more realistic classification (Catford 1968, 1977), some identified by Pike (1943), and quite a few more that must be acknowledged if we wish to identify the paralinguistic repertoires of the different cultures or, in some clinical applications. 45. In Chapter 2 of Paralanguage. 46. Unlike the western gesture of sticking one’s tongue at someone, it is a greeting gesture in Tibet. 47. We could put in three columns the emotions, the nose gestures and the corresponding linguisticparalinguistic expressions. 48. In fact, the explanation given by Abercrombie (1967: 94–95) for the Liverpool accent displayed by many speakers who have no adenoidal condition but have learned it from the many who have it (also cited in Laver 1980: 88–89) 49. See a more detailed discussion in Chapter 2 of Paralanguage. Chapter 4 50. After presenting this topic at the 1970 conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Philadelphia, the session chairman, Prof. Mahmud Okby, wrote to me suggesting that I speak the following year on “the basic triple structure of human communication behavior,” which alarmed me greatly as I wondered what exactly that was, which obviously ‘I ignored’; not daring to ask him, I searched for the term in several books, until one day I came across it as the topic in my own paper of the year before! Since then I have discussed that concept as an obliged introduction in virtually any study on interpersonal communication (e.g. Poyatos 1976a, 1983a, 1984b, 1992e) and have seen a great many references to it as well as many applications. This chapter, subject to space limitations, reviews the various aspects of this triple structure, and the reader must relate it to the previous chapters and to the topics that follow in this volume and the next two. 51. Balázs (1979: 298) writes that “we saw conversations between the facial expressions of two human beings who understood the movements of each other’s faces better than each other’s words and could perceive shades of meaning too subtle to be conveyed in words.” ‘Microkinesics’ is discussed more in detail in Volume III, Chapter 4, as an element of numerous possibilities in both the theater and the cinema. 52. Since naturalness in everyday conversation, and on the stage or before a camera, consists mainly in our control of the language-paralanguage-kinesics structure, Tournier (1983: 53) speaks for the simplicity of a child as is praised in the Gospel: “My own experience is that in following Christ one can learn to act naturally once more […] like a child […] He can be natural even with people who are not acting naturally, and whom he thus helps to be natural again.” Personally, I have experienced many times how by interacting with total and truly felt ‘naturalness’ with someone who (for intellectual, socioeconomic and even personal reasons) is not at ease with me, that icy shell, through which the person seems unable to relate, melts quite rapidly and allows our interaction to develop as an enjoyable experience. 53. See these and other aspects of the ‘reading act,’ discussed in Chapter 1.9, Volume III. 54. See Chapter 5, Volume III, devoted to punctuation. 55. “Oralidad y Escritura,” Universidad Complutense (Madrid) summer course, to which Profs. J. J. de Bustos and A. Narbona kindly invited me (the basic text of my lectures, in Poyatos 1996b). 56. In her famous biblical visions (registered by Clemens Brentano), Blessed Sister Katharine Emmerich (1774–1824) heard and saw, for instance, John the Baptist speak with a voice that “pierced like a sword. It was loud and strong, though tempered with a tone of kindness” (Emmerich 1914, Vol. I: 413), and Jesus, who, in another instance, “gravely replied” (Emmerich, Vol. I: 407). At any

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rate, it is precisely a lack of ‘proclaiming ,’ and not merely ‘reading,’ God’s Word that so many times can render rather ineffectual many Sunday church lectors, untrained for such an important ministry. After making this reference to the Gospel, I received from Prof. John Pilch of Georgetown University a pre-publication copy of an article (Pilch 1999) where, by a welcome coincidence, he also ponders those hidden features of the Baptist’s paralanguage in his proclamation, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2), among others: Did he speak loudly or softly? fast or slow? breathlessly or in measured tones? Was his voice pleasant or grating? Was he shouting or speaking in smooth cadences? […] this added something to the message. The vocal aspect was evident and significant to his listeners but lost for the most part of modern Western readers 57. This anticipatory character will be seen again when studying conversation (Chapter 7), interaction (Chapter 8, Volume II) and specifically kinesics (Chapter 5, Volume II). 58. On naturalness in both the theater and the cinema, see Chapter 4.7, Vol. III. With regard to any type of public read discourse, one must consider what that implies in professional interpretation, the subject of Chapter 8, which includes the very interesting comments by Edna Weale (1997: 298–299). 59. Before devoting a whole monograph to paralanguage (Poyatos 1993a), I outlined the topic in a number of publications, some of which are referred to in Vol. II. 60. Kinesics (discussed, like paralanguage, throughout the three volumes) and the basic principles of its research (just introduced here), is treated more at length in Chapter 5, Vol. II, its complete definition offered in 5.1. 61. See these levels in Chapter 8, Volume II, on interaction. 62. See the importance of ‘speech markers’ in Chapter 6.3. 63. The latter in her review article about my book Paralanguage (Key 1995: 385). 64. See Note 4, about Frank Lloyd Wright’s building. Our interaction with the surrounding environment is more closely related to language and other communicative activities than we think (cf. Rapoport 1991). I had occasion to comment, for instance, on the nonverbal aspects of hotel lobbies while speaking in Turkey to hotel managers and European tourism area directors, emphasizing the importance of spaces, volumes, the possibility of attaining true ‘public privacy’ in such places, sensory interaction with the architectural and objectual environment, the role of peripheral vision, etc., all of which are related to language itself, as is explained more at length in Chapter 7 of Volume II. 65. Specifically about yawning, coughing, sneezing and spitting, see Chapter 3, Volume II (the last three, in Poyatos 1996a). I always tried to elicit interest among students and others in the systematic study of verbal and nonverbal norms of good manners within the lower social strata, since it seems unfair to have manuals, often quite unpractical and unrealistic, based only on the higher classes. Through observation and informants, one could gather verbal norms (for instance, in Spain, verbally: ‘Perdone la manera de señalar’ or ‘Aunque esté mal el señalar,’ when indicating the size of something; or ‘[…] un cerdo, con perdón,’ when speaking of a pig; nonverbally: never giving someone a glass of water but on a plate). We must allow, though, for inter-group borrowings as well as for the evolving of social behavior norms. Chapter 5 66. I first discussed and carried out a transcription of the Basic Triple Structure in Nancy in 1976 with the C. R. A. P. E. L. joint team from the Universities of Nancy and Birmingham working on the interrelationships between the linguistic, paralinguistic and kinesic components of speech (under the auspices of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Having already discussed it at

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meetings, I had been asked to demonstrate its feasibility. Actually, I had been inspired in the late 1960s by a pioneering work, The First Five Minutes, by the psychiatrists Pittenger and Danehy and the linguistic-anthropologist Hockett (1960), done on a five-minute segment of a psychiatric interview. Mainly by means of arbitrary graphic symbols, they represented the linguistic and paralinguistic behaviors of a schizophrenic girl, adding to it a minute analysis of what goes on during the interview. I realized the obvious need to add to that the third element of the triple structure, kinesics, considering that those analysts had missed what the patient must surely have displayed (crossing and uncrossing of legs, eyebrow movements, shoulder shrugs, fidgeting, lint-flicking, etc.), most likely in addition to reactions like blushing, glistening eyes, etc.). Thus, quite gratefully to their work, I added kinesics as a starting point, which lead me to acknowledge the relevance and possible interactive functions of still other levels in a more exhaustive transcription. I had occasion to discuss the topic in some lectures and symposiums (e.g. one on spoken Spanish, organized by University of Valencia A. Briz in 1995 [Poyatos 1997c]). In 1996 I was one of the examiners for Laura Cerdán’s doctoral thesis at the University of Barcelona (Cerdán 1997). 67. Poyatos 1983a: 199–202, 1993: 167–171 and note 5. In Spanish: Poyatos 1985b: 50–51, 1994a: 154–160, 1996b: 220–224. 68. On the specific paralinguistic-kinesic configuration of laughter and the other paralinguistic differentiators, see Poyatos (1993a: 248–284). 69. Once during a shared course I observed how a colleague, when he was in the audience (therefore an important participant) left the room once in a while, which attracted the attention of others and certainly made me wonder about his motive. Later I learned that he suffered from claustrophobia, which ultimately was reflected in some sensibly perceived reactions, obviously something to be registered in a transcription. 70. I needed to coin the term ‘chronemics’ (Poyatos 1972a: 84 [acknowledged by Mary R. Key’s December 1973 “Newsletter”]) — as analogous to proxemics — as the study of the conceptualization, structuration and handling of time, from speech drawling and clipping to the duration of any other interactive behavior, and whole encounters (Poyatos 1976a: 152–154, 1983a: 210–212). 71. From the beginning of my work on nonverbal communication, I implicitly began to call attention to the problems related to the nonverbal systems in the realm of foreign-language teaching, which a few others were also exploring, thinking mainly of kinesics (Breault 1963) but also in conjunction with paralanguage (e.g. Hayes 1964). In the 1970s I served as consultant in a project directed by Thomas Sebeok at his Indiana University Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, for which they were using my first book on nonverbal communication (Poyatos 1976a, commissioned by the New York State English Council). However, apart from isolated comments, I have discussed this topic formally (based on a seminar I gave in 1984 at the University of Toronto Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) in a volume edited by André Helbo of the University of Brussels (Poyatos 1992d) and at the Training Course for Teachers of Spanish organized by Universidad del País Vasco and Fontys University of Professional Education at Tilburg, Holland, in 1997. The interest in this area — much too often overemphasizing kinesics (and limited almost exclusively to emblematic ‘gestures’ at that) — in detriment of other nonverbal systems, has been increasing (e.g. for Spanish, Raveau 1979, 1991; Coll, Gelabert and Martinell 1990; Cestero 1998, 1999a, 1999b [both adding paralinguistic co-behaviors]; for Italian, Diadori 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994 [at whose Università per Stranieri, besides discussing other nonverbal topics, I spoke on foreign-language teaching in 1998]; for foreign-language teaching in general, Cestero et al. (1998 [six articles by Master students of Spanish as a foreign language, University of Alcalá], 1999b). Recently, a project on nonverbal communication in the teaching of English and Spanish as foreign languages, to which I would be associated, is being contemplated at the University of Seville.

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72. In fact, I have always adviced university students to try to take modern novel and theater first — as they would find there the sort of living idiom they are simultaneously trying to learn in their language courses — and only then to venture in the language of earlier literary periods. 73. As for the material itself, apart from the basic components that constitute the paralanguage and kinesics of a language-and-culture complex, treated in this volume, all has been outlined in Chapter 4, along with the ten possible realizations of language, paralanguage and kinesics, individually or jointly. Therefore, the aim here is only to suggest the basic methodology for both textbook and classroom, summing up the main points as an incentive and eventual guide for future work. 74. The list, in the horizontal sheet, shows the gestures in a first column, leaving the other columns for their abbreviated descriptions on the different cultures. Chapter 6 75. A brief version presented before the Semiotic Society of America (Poyatos 1982c), then a book chapter (Poyatos 1983a: Chapter 4) and a slightly larger version with a few added comments on iconicity (Poyatos 1986c), besides some outlines in English and Spanish (e.g. Poyatos 1988c: 60–67). 76. See Fig. 2.5., Chapter 2. 77. Cf. Koechlin (1992: 72–73) for some political variants of this gesture, originally popularized by Winston Churchill. 78. I have opted for ‘speech markers’ instead of ‘language markers,’ since they occur in spoken language. These markers include Efron’s (1941) ‘batons,’ Ekman and Friesen’s (1972) ‘underliners’ — which earlier (Ekman and Friesen 1969) identified only as movements directly associated to speech to illustrate what is being said verbally — and Birdwhistell’s (1970) ‘kinesic markers,’ all regarded by them as kinesic only. Apart from te movement-content relationship, which would correspond to ‘externalizers,’ discussed below, studies of speech-body movement synchronization have analyzed various forms of syntactic markers beyond the morphological ones identified here, revealing the intimate relationship between speech flow and body movement (Condon and Ogston 1966, 1967; Kendon 1972b; Scheflen 1963, 1964, 1973; von Raffler-Engel 1980b). Further crosscultural studies would show many specific differences among speakers of different languages and emphasize the iconicity of cultural styles. 79. Chapter 5 of Volume III, about punctuation, should be read as complementary to this section on speech markers, as it reveals the important nonverbal functions of punctuation. 80. In some as different as Argentina and Malaysia, but the Turks shake a hand (as in French ‘Oh-làlá!’) while whistling ingressively; in Niger one runs a forefinger in the hollow of the other hand (as if spreading something); the Ghanaian man touches imaginary breasts against his chest with the exterior lateral edges of both fists and then blows lightly through one of them; the Saudi Arabian slides a forefinger down his cheek, etc, and a traditional mainland Chinese male puts both hands to the sides of his face, all revealing different attitudes. 81. With no verbal reference, these gestures would not illustrate and, therefore, would qualify only as emblems. 82. Semioticians speak of ‘iconicity’ when the significant resembles the signified. Kendon (1981b: 34–36) has questioned its validity, as well as the concept of ‘resemblance,’ giving as an example the gesture for ‘gun,’ with different cross-cultural variants (e.g. in North America, not imitating the pulling of the trigger, but only ‘aiming’ with index and middle fingers suggesting the barrel); however, despite those differences, we see gestures moving, as Kendon writes, “up the scale of codedness” and becoming truly iconic when, through past experience, a sign ends up as a ‘replica’ of a ‘model’ (e.g. the type of perfume associated with a woman of poor reputation).

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83. We could argue that spelling it with k, ‘ki-ki-ri-ki,’ would evoke better the rooster’s erect figure. See imitations of animal sounds cross-culturally, in Chapter 4, Volume II. 84. See Chapter 6.9, Volume II, on the echoic repertoires of English and Spanish. 85. The communicative processes leading to externalizers are treated again in Chapter 8, Volume II, on interaction. 86. See, for instance, spiritually-elicited crying in Chapter 3.3., Volume II. A vast literature today defines and describes such phenomena, for example: on ‘resting in the Spirit,’ former Franciscan University of Steubenville President Scanlan (1979: 45–49), Sanford (1972: 221–226); on the gift of tongues, DuPlessis (1970: 81–91); on healing, surgeon Reed (1995), ex-psychiatric nurse B. Shlemon, R. N. (1976), psychiatrist Tournier, M. D. (1974, 1983). 87. The topic of what here are called random behaviors is a fascinating one, yet there seems to be no recent serious studies reviewing past research, whether philosophical, anthropological or crosscultural, nor literary ones. Further research could be elicited by the comments and many examples offered throughout the three volumes, and also by Krout’s (1935) extensive article including a corpus of 160 “autistic gestures” and reviewing some earlier writings (Freud 1914, Olson 1931, Luria 1932, Allport and Vernon 1933; Koch 1933) which “were in favour of the assumption that the so-called sensory and affective processes, changes in attention, perception, thought, and even sleep, bear a definite, describable and measurable relation to involuntary motor movements” (2). Krout writes that when an individual, inhibiting his direct response to an external situation, responds to subsequent internal stimulation explicitly, we have what we may call autistic gestures” (18), different, he adds, from the infant’s reflex movements or “the adult’s talking to himself.” (18). One must consider, of course, how difficult it is at times to ascertain whether those gestures are unconscious and random, conscious and random, unconscious and habitual, or conscious and habitual. After observing them for many years, I find it impossible to assert with Krout, first, that they have “no obvious relation to existing extraorganic stimuli” (119), and second, that they are not responded to by an observer; although it is true that by definition they are not consciously perceived by the actor, which is not easy to establish either. I would agree, however, that they “tend to be consistent in their reappearance” and that, in cases observed in their situational context, they “originate in conflict situations of which they become symbolic, as proved by the emotional freightage of their stimuli” (120). Krout adds that “The theory of autistic gestures is that, in the presence of conflict and blockage, there may be an escape of impulses into effector-systems [a muscle, a gland, etc.] which, were the impulses uninhibited, would provide normal outlets for them” (120). But, again, I find it extremely difficult to conclude in each specific occurrence whether the salesperson’s counter-tapping is conscious or unconscious, random or habitual, for there may be specific circumstances that make that behavior recur, and then it would not be random; while, in addition, it may happen in other circumstances as well. At any rate, my calling attention to the behavior seeks to increase a much needed sensitiveness toward our interaction with others and with the environment, as Chapter 7, Volume II does too. Although, as Dittman (1963:1550) says, “Every external movement [and, we can add, sounds] in human beings is a source of information about the psychophysiological state of the person moving,” kinesic acts such as “playing with jewelry, clothing, scratching, rubbing, random touching of various parts of the body” (Mahl 1968: 301) during clinical encounters are not the social externalizers I wish to emphasize here, nor other similar behaviors discussed by Freud (1914), like “symptomatic acts,” Freedman (1972) or Scheflen (1972), although they are intimately related to social occurrences of everyday life. Kinesic random behaviors have been discussed in different situations (e.g. Givens 1981, on gaze and what here is termed random behaviors, between strangers in public places; Smith et al. 1974, on tongue showing).

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88. Some of which are true cultural habits, identified as a topic within literary anthropology in Chapter 7 of Volume III. 89. The seventeenth-century Spanish author adds eight more such behaviors (II, III, I). 90. See Fig. 5.1, Chapter 5, Volume II (from Poyatos 1988d: Table 1]). 91. See a short cross-cultural inventory of greetings in Chapter 5.10, Volume II. 92. My 1991 Ghanaian student Yaw Adjei (in his late thirties) assured me that kissing did not exist in Ghana — not even a word for it in the country’s four official languages (Ashanti, Fanti, Wassaw and Ga), except a verb denoting ‘sucking someone’s mouth,’ on account of its lustful connotation — and that he had never seen anyone kissing in Ghana; and, rather curiously, added: “Maybe high-class people do it in private.” In fact, my University of Lagos colleagues Durojaiye and Ikepeazu-Bello informed me in writing in the mid-1990s that “educated and elite husbands and wives, also lovers, do kiss [in the mouth], a borrowed custom, but not to be practiced in public […] The educated Nigerian who are reluctant about kissing are so from hygiene and modesty consideration […] and all sexual acts […] are private acts.” Naturally, since the iconicity of sexual kinesics and proxemics is perfectly codified, taboos and the more permissive attitudes are based on a visual code (responding to a moral one) that sometimes must be complemented by contextual elements that will make a given behavior appear as sexual on nonsexual (e.g. the frontal embrace, according to circumstances and parakinesic qualities). 93. See Chapter 3.9, Volume II, on spitting as a paralinguistic-kinesic behavior. 94. It is interesting to contrast this attitude with the following nineteenth-century statement (applicable today in the English culture): “In my childhood I could not imagine a more afflictive punishment than for my mother to refuse to kiss me at night: the very idea was terrible” (A. Brontë, AG, III). However, when, tired of bowing at the door of an elderly Japanese couple after spending the evening with the whole family, my hands just went to theirs, they reacted by accompanying me to the bus stop and then riding with me to my subway station; and at a large Christian prayer group in Tokyo (and recently at an eighty-country assembly near Rome) Japanese men and women (including university colleagues) embraced me most warmly. 95. See, on crying, Chapter 3.3.3, Volume II. 96. See Wildeblood (1965), for the history of “the polite world,” in Europe. 97. To the example in note 21 I would add that one night the seven-year-old daughter of a Japanese colleague spending some time at my University, asked her daddy for “a good-night kiss,” to which he did not know how to respond. When later in Japan, after spending a weekend at their home and talking to both parents about the significance of that incident, we were about to part at the Osaka railway station, he looked at his wife, then at me (somewhat resigned to shake their hand and bow) and, always the polite Japanese, said, “Please!” and I hugged his wife. 98. Sometimes, of course, the manipulation of certain body-adaptors is tangential to their functions, as with the Singapore Chinese costume of biting the tip of a new shoe or slipper before wearing it (to avoid, rather symbolically, their hurting later). As a vast area of cultural, cross-cultural and historical study. the history of fashion and etiquette throws much light upon the evolvement of behaviors conditioned by clothes (cf. Braun and Schneider 1975; Davenport 1948; Kohler 1963; Laver 1969; Leloir 1951; Vicary 1988, 1989; Wildeblood 1965). Chapter 7 99. Above all, Duncan (1972, 1973, 1974a, 1974b, 1975a, 1975b, 1980); Duncan and Fiske (1977); Schegloff (1972); Schegloff and Sacks (1973); Sacks et al. (1974); Dittmann (1972); Jefferson (1973);

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Jefferson and Schenkein (1977); Markel (1975); Gallois and Markel (1975); Wiemann and Knapp (1975); West and Zimmerman 1982. The 1973 IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (Chicago), mentioned in Chapter 1, note 2, was also a milestone in interdisciplinary studies of interaction, the theme of a pre-congress conference hosted by the University of Chicago Psychology Department through one of its members, Starkey Duncan, Jr., and Adam Kendon (then from Oxford University Department of Experimental Psychology), Richard M. Harris (Bronx State Hospital) and Mary Ritchie Key (Kendon, Harris and Key 1975). During the 1970s I profited in my work on nonverbal communication from my personal contact — besides Thomas Sebeok, then Director of the Indiana University Center for Semiotics and Linguistics Studies — with Starkey Duncan, and Albert Scheflen, of the Bronx State Hospital and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (until his death in 1980). Together we presented similar topics (published later) at national and international conferences of anthropology (1973 ICAES, 1976 American Anthropological Association) and I myself began to offer my model on conversation in other conferences (Poyatos 1976a: 49–66, 1980a, 1983: Chapter 7, 1994a: Chapter 7) as well as through lectures for colleagues and students in many universities, developing a more exhaustive scheme (Poyatos 1988a), which I have later refined as shown in Fig. 7.1. In the last few years I came into contact also with some Spanish colleagues and research teams studying various aspects of conversation (e.g. Briz 1995; Gallardo Paúls 1993, 1996; Guillén Nieto 1994). 100. Those structural studies gave due credit to the most prolific of all pioneers in the field, Erving Goffman, who died in 1983 (Goffman 1955, 1956, 1961, 1963, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975), and were notably enriched by important work on interaction by Kendon (1970; see also 1982, from an international institute on Nonverbal communication led by Ekman and Scherer [1982]); Kendon and Ferber 1973; Argyle (1957, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1975, [see also 1992]); Argyle and Kendon 1967; and, about gaze, Argyle and Cook 1976. 101. Cf. Edmondson (1981), Goodwin (1981), Taylor and Cameron (1987), Wilson (1988), Coulthard (1985); Svennevig (2000), on the conversational ‘getting acquainted’; Tanaka (2000), on Japanese turn-taking patterns and grammatical structures. 102. Throughout this chapter the terms ‘auditor’ and ‘listener’ are not used indistinctively, since one can always hear (‘auditor’), but not necessarily listen (‘listener’). 103. The topic of staged conversation is discussed in Chapter 6 of Volume 3. 104. This principle, regarded as universal, as is the widely held concept of ‘face-to-face’ conversation, are not necessarily so, as Koechlin (1992: 60) reports of two Madagascar’s Vezo interlocutors, who often are one literally behind the other. 105. Once I observed two different candidates with two different interviewers: the interviewer who crossed and uncrossed legs and shifted arm and trunk posture ‘allowed’ his cointeractant to do the same almost every time; the other sat quite stiff and kept his legs crossed the entire forty-minute interview, and his candidate, who had crossed her legs at the beginning, never uncrossed them, being clearly less relaxed than the other candidate. Naturally, to the positive interviewer’s behaviors just mentioned one should add the sensitive use of conversational openers and tension relievers, writing as minimally as possible (unless clearly noting down what is positive), and a general verbal and nonverbal articulateness (the latter essential also in the interviewee). More has been written on the interviewee or candidate’s do’s and don’ts (e.g. Medley 1979; Allen 1983; von Raffler-Engel 1983) than on the interviewers’ positive behaviors and attitudes (e.g. Merman and McLaughln 1983). 106. For there is a superabundance of pseudoscientific publications replete with easy generalizations.

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107. Basic behavioral channels — for which only some of the possible behaviors are mentioned, and which the reader should always regard as susceptible of functioning simultaneously when possible — are indicated thus: Lg, language; Pg, paralanguage; K, kinesics (often between / /); Px, proxemics. 108. After using for many years the term ‘turn claiming’ (borrowed from Duncan and others) and having realized its demanding connotation, I have opted for differentiating three basic ways of ‘asking’ for the speaker’s turn. 109. Besides “feedback” (Argyle 1967, 1969, 1972, 1975; Poyatos 1976a), it has been called “accompaniment behavior,” “back-channel communication” (Yngve 1970; Duncan 1972b, 1973, 1974a, 1975a, 1975b, 1977) and “listener’s response” (Dittmann 1973). 110. Note that a priori or a posteriori feedback normally includes other attitudes that are not basic (indicated in Fig. 7.2), which should be simultaneous. 111. See, from the same play, a much longer example of simultaneous turns of different contents, in Volume III., Chapter 6.3.E, on conversational realism. 112. Some of these pauses are treated as paralinguistic ‘alternants’ in Chapter 4.7 of Volume II. 113. The reader must keep in mind that a few of the pre- and post- behaviors, as defined earlier, can be identified throughout this chapter. 114. Studied in Chapter 8.10 of Volume II and in Chapter 8.11 of this Volume. Chapter 8 115. I first offered my thoughts on this topic in an article published in TextContext, the journal edited by Hans Vermeer at the University of Heidelberg School of Interpreters and Translators (Poyatos 1987). It contained the basic material of the lectures I had given on two occasions in that School as well as at the one of the University of Mainz in Germersheim; I also discussed these issues in places like the Department of Translation and Interpretation of Bogaçizi University, Istambul, and the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation of Barcelona’s Universidad Autónoma, as well as at the University of Alicante. For the 1993 International Congress of Applied Linguistics, I organized a symposium on this topic. After outlining the topic of kinesics in interpretation in a book in Spanish (Poyatos 1994b: 223–226), I had an opportunity to discuss this and more aspects in an edited volume (Poyatos 1997a), where readers can find the inspiring work of two top professional interpreters, Sergio Viaggio and Edna Weale, as well as articles by some film dubbing practitioners and teachers. The present chapter totally supersedes and elaborate on my previous discussions. However, the article from the Heidelberg journal (Poyatos 1987) is being reprinted (because of its pioneering character, according to the editors) in a volume by Franz Pöchhacker and Miriam Shlesinger (in press). Given the growing multidisciplinary development of nonverbal communication studies and their importance for the fields of translation and interpretation, the reader should seek out possible discussions of nonverbal communication in journals like The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, Babel, Transit, etc., and those active in research should endeavor to further the theoretical and methodological ideas presented here through these and other periodicals as well as at national and international conferences. 116. Besides the introductory outline of paralanguage and kinesics in Chapter 4, the more detailed discussions are found in the first six chapters of Volume II, and in the monograph Paralanguage (Poyatos 1993a). 117. Based on Chapter 7 of Volume II. In that chapter, interactive silences are discussed in Section 7.8 and conversational pauses in 7.10. 118. Cf., for instance, Hasada (1997: 91–94), who discusses some of the Japanese differences, whose knowledge, as for other cultures, should be part of the bicultural fluency so desirable in an interpreter.



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119. Weale (1997: 299–300) reports on how some of the radio listeners of a speech she had translated told her how disgusted they had been to hear that minister speak, because “He had a woman’s voice!” 120. On another occasion, Belgian Fr. Daniel Ange, with a female Spanish consecutive interpreter, spoke of Jesus and the Holy Spirit at a large conference, and the audience just loved the face from which the original words issued. I also remember the Hungarian consecutive translator at one of the famous evangelist Billy Graham: without really looking at the speaker, he was reproducing to perfection his kinesics and paralanguage because obviously he himself would have delivered that message with the same enthusiasm. 121. Once a friend of mine from the Spanish southwestern province of Cádiz (whose native speakers possess a very rich kinesic style) illustrated this function most eloquently to tell me that some goats would get into his flower garden and eat his flowers and that there was nothing he could do; simultaneously to the first idea (‘His goats come all the time into my flower garden’), he expressed their ‘eating’ with a light double up-and-down movement of the bunched fingers of both hands at waist level (but never verbally), while he was already verbalizing the third idea (‘and there is nothing I can do’). Note that the gesture, done with one hand, but much higher, is the Spanish emblem for ‘eating’. 122. Discussed in Chapter 1.10, Volume I. 123. “the involuntary drumming on the table shows the impatience which he is trying to hide linguistically” (Viaggio 1996: 285; trans. mine). Research in the field of interpretation and translation is only beginning to acknowledge the relevance of nonverbal emotional expressions in the meeting of cultures (e.g. Katan 2000). 124. That is why it so important for the interpreter to be able to see well both speaker and audience, for, as Viaggio (1997: 287) says: “his audience’s body language is his main — or even only — gauge to ascertain whether and to what extent he is succeeding in getting his message across.”



List of illustrations

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1

Culture and communication 4 Sensible and intelligible systems in a culture 9 Analysis of a culture through its culturemes 10 Semiotic-interactive processes in intercultural interaction 25 Somatic systems of interpersonal and environmental communication 33 Intersomatic and environmental sensory perception 35 External somatic communication 51 Types of body movements 52 Coding and interrelationships of interactive behaviors 54 Static and dynamic features of the speaking face 65 The basic triple structure 105 Segmental and nonsegmental elements in the triple structure 118 Total conditioning background of communicative activities 124 The total transcription of interactive discourse 140 Basic learning problems in the acquisition of language and culture 146 Interactive and noninteractive nonverbal categories 166 Semiotic-communicative processes of externalizers 190 The behavioral structure of conversation 231 Forms and functions of feedback 242 Simultaneous and multiple turns 252 Consecutive and simultaneous interpretation: Speaker’s, listener’s and interpreter’s sign perception and emission 273 Fig. 8.2 Components of interpersonal and environmental interaction 280



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353



Index of literary authors and works cited A Agee, J. A Death in the Family 176 Augustine, Saint Confessions 130 Aldecoa, I. D 146; El fulgor y la sangre 126, 183; Young Sánchez 222 Alas, L. La Regenta 75, 127, 129, 175 Alemán, M. Guzmán de Alfarache 197, 206 , 223 Anderson, S. Winesburg, Ohio 182 Ayala, F. La cabeza del cordero 64; El tajo 133, 167 B Balzac, H. de Eugénie Grandet 262, 265 Banerji, B. Pather Panchali 217, 206, 215 Baroja, Pío Camino de perfección 37; La busca 38, 209 Beecher Stowe, H. Uncle Tom’s Cabin 115, 117, 139, 140, 176, 263 Bhattacharya, B. He Who Rides a Tiger 90, 203, 222 Bellow, S. Herzog 83, 89, 198, 202, 203, 257 Bible, Holy: Exodus 218; Jonah 217; Judges 217; Sirach 63; Mark 208; Matthew 109, 311; Ruth 218; Song of Songs 81 Blasco Ibáñez, V. Arroz y tartana 57 Brontë, A. Agnes Grey ; The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 39, 53, 57, 71, 88, 117, 174, 181, 190, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198, 221, 259, 266 Brontë, C. Jane Eyre 125, 263; The Professor 216 Brontë, E. Wuthering Heights 187 Buero Vallejo, A. Historia de una escalera 182 Butler, S. The Way of all Flesh 258 C Caballero Bonald, J. M. Dos días de setiembre 186, 204, 212

Cather, Willa My Ántonia 59, 187, 202; O Pioneers! 129, 196, 197, 221 Cela, C. J. Pascual Duarte 167; Viaje a la Alcarria 222 Cervantes, M. de Don Quijote de la Mancha xxiv, 39, 43, 58, 66, 69, 82, 129, 194, 197, 201, 202, 203, 255 Collins, W. The Moonstone 53, 103, 209, 212, 216, 217, 221, 222, 238, 248, 260, 261, 262, 265, 266; The Woman in White 34, 35, 38, 41, 44, 45, 47, 52, 69, 71, 89, 170, 192, 197, 220, 221, 223, 227, 232, 238, 246, 254, 257, 264, 265, 266, 268 Colón, C. Diario del Descubrimiento 25 Conan Doyle, A. The Hound of the Baskervilles 48, 69, 255 Crane, S. The Blue Hotel 45; The Red Badge of Courage 201 D Defoe, D. Robinson Crusoe 1, 4 Delibes, M. La sombra del ciprés es alargada 53 de Mille, Agnes, Dance to the Piper 40, 169 Dickens, C. Bleak House 53, 55, 86, 88, 94, 105, 106, 120, 141, 142, 149, 175, 180, 181, 183, 197, 221, 223, 257, 258, 259, 271; A Christmas Carol 73, 120, 149; David Copperfield 89, 94, 203, 218, 222; Great Expectations 103, 120, 172, 181; Hard Times 171, 220, 262; Little Dorrit 116, 22 Martin Chuzzlewitt 31, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 182, 57, 57, 59, 5, 117, 125, 126, 127, 139, 169, 175, 176, 194, 196, 197, 199, 202, 203, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212, 216, 218, 220, 221, 223, 236, 242, 245, 257, 260, 262, 286, 287; Oliver Twist 202, 215; Pickwick Papers 89, 98, 107, 197 170, 174, 179, 181, 186,

356

Index of literary authors and works cited

187, 196, 202, 216, 218, 222, 223, 246, 247 Doctorow, E. L. Ragtime 164, 180, 199, 202; World’s Fair 83, 152 Dos Passos, J. The 42nd Parallel 40, 43, 76, 88, 126, 220; Manhattan Transfer 153, 257, 261 Dreiser, T. An American Tragedy 203; The Genius 66, 68, 127, 180, 183, 253, 276; Jennie Gerhardt 56, 66, 95, 121, 125, 155, 170, 176, 197, 211, 217, 287; Sister Carrie 83, 155, 173 E Eliot, G. Silas Marner 195, 238 Etiemble Blason d’un corps 63 Espina, C. Agua de nieve 58; Altar mayor 282 ; Despertar para morir 53, 128; La Esfinge Maragata 53, 58, 107, 170 F Faulkner, W. As I Lay Dying 258, 261; Sanctuary 95, 142, 169, 192, 215, 216 Ferres, A. La piqueta 93 Fitzgerald, F. S. The Great Gatsby 175 Forster, E. M. Passage to India 182 G Galdós, B. P. La desheredada 57, 128, 155; Fortunata y Jacinta 53, 56, 93, 95, 112, 210, 221, 242, 259; La de Bringas 76, 120, 149, 157; Nazarín 218;Tormento 71, 129, 175 Torquemada en la cruz 126; Torquemada en la hoguera 53; Tristana 262 Gaskell, E. Cousin Phillis 66, 69 Gide, A. La symphonie pastorale 256, 260 Galsworthy, J. A Man of Property 48, 173, 175, 200, 212, 221, 243, 255; Indian Summer of a Forsyte 117; In Chancery 45, 74, 207 Góngora, L. de Poesías 69 Greene, G. Stanboul Train 57, 127, 167, 200, 213 Grey, Z. Betty Zane 66, 205 ; The Border Legion 181 ; The Desert of Wheat 263 ; The Drift Fence 153, 259; Fighting Caravans 152, 187 ; The Heritage of the Desert 45, 167, 199 The Lost Wagon

Train 37, 195, 223; The Last of the Plainsmen 46, 69; The Last Trail 38, 39, 40, 45, 59 106, 121, 155, 170, 170, 195, 210; The Lone Star Ranger 43, 55, 119, 215; The Man of the Forest 142, 212, 219; To the Last Man 143 ; Majestic Ranch 120, 155, 212; The Rainbow Trail 37, 38, 40, 45, 126, 193, 212, 220; Riders of the Purple Sage 37, 38, 89, 95, 115, 142, 176, 221, 265 ; The Spirit of the Border 233, 239, 267; The Thundering Herd 38, 43, 46, 265; The U. P. Trail 38, 59, 109, 152, 244; Wanderer of the Wasteland 43, 76, 139, 187 H Hailey, A. Hotel 192, 261 Hardy, T. Far From the Madding Crowd 37, 57, 116, 182, 194, 28; The Hand of Ethelberta 158, 200 ; Jude the Obscure 3, 88, 89, 141, 169, 182, 257; A Laodicean 41, 70, 73, 217, 241, 259; A Pair of Blue Eyes 139, 210, 227; The Mayor of Casterbridge 46, 110 ; The Return of the Native 100, 180; Tess of the D’Urbervilles 63; The Trumpet-Major 47; The Woodlanders 71, 112, 231, 261 Heller, J. Catch-22 125, 153 Howells, W. D. A Hazard of New Fortunes 123, 222, 229, 257; The Rise of Silas Lapham 40, 69, 173, 175, 182, 216, 253 Huxley, A. Crome Yellow 6, 188, 211; Eyeless in Gaza 42, 45, 48, 63, 66, 68, 84, 105, 112, 141, 192, 194, 201, 223, 236, 240, 256, 257, 258, 261, 262, 264, 265; Point Counter Point 58, 66, 127, 128, 179, 182, 194, 195, 196, 202, 220, 231, 286 J James, H. The Ambassadors 115; The Bostonians 47 ; The Europeans 70 ; The turn of the Screw 258 Joyce, J. Dubliners 66, 197, 201, 215, 219, 220 ; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 76, 199, 200, 203; Ulysses 73, 89, 112, 184, 204, 219 Juan Manuel, Don El Conde Lucanor 67

Index of literary authors and works cited

K Kerouak, J. On the Road 153 L Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers 39, 155, 182, 193, 199, 207, 220, 223, 224, 257; Women in Love 125, 210 Lee, H. To Kill a Mockingbird 231,233, 238, 240, 244, 249, 256 Lewis, S. Babbitt 41, 72, 123, 238; Dodsworth 263; Main Street 153; Cass Timberlane 44, 213–14 López Pacheco, J. Central eléctrica 129, 181, 200 López Salinas, A. La mina 207 M MacLennan, H. Two Solitudes 181, 215, 264 Mailer, N. Barbary Shore 39, 48, 60, 70, 72, 176, 198, 206, 212, 221, 223, 238, 247, 255, 263, 287, 288; The Deer Park 57, 72, 180, 198, 215, 227, 236, 238, 256, 261, 262, 263 Malamud, B. The Tenants 141, 199 Markandaya, K. Nectar in a Sieve 202 Martín Gaite Entre visillos 53, 180 Martín Santos, L. Tiempo de Silencio 122 Maugham, W. S. Cakes and Ale 67, 72, 74, 115, 240, 265; Of Human Bondage 40, 66, 187, 204; The Painted Veil 67, 105, 141, 143 MacCullers, Carson, The Member of the Wedding 223 Montherlant, H. de Les Célibataires 191, 208 Morton, H. V. Through the Lands of the Bible 209 N Nicolson, N. Portrait of a marriage Norris, F. The Octopus 40, 44, 174, 187, 192, 205, 211, 222, 235, 236, 237, 240, 241, 243, 245, 253, 256, 260, 265, 287; The Pit 40, 48, 66, 126, 139, 142, 143, 152, 209, 212 O O’Neill, E. Ah, Wilderness! 258; Desire Under the Elms 94

357

P Pardo Bazán, E. Los Pazos de Ulloa 138 Parkman, F. The Oregon Trail 152, 218 Pereda, J. M. Sotileza 56, 58, 180 Pérez Galdós, see Galdós Poema del Cid 8, 127 Porter, K. A. Ship of Fools 128, 153, 158, 199, 217 Q Quevedo, F. de El buscón 200; Visita de los chistes 225; El sueño de las calaveras 140 R Rao, R. Kanthapura 208, 219, 220 Richardson, D. Peace Child 170, 180 Ruiz, J. El libro de buen amor 67, 72, 81, 83 S Salinger, J. D. Catcher in the Rye 56, 70, 111, 137, 152, 172, 196, 209, 210, 214, 242 Sánchez Ferlosio, R. El Jarama 87, 168, 178, 180, 181, 186, 200 Shaw, G. B. Pygmalion 250; Saint Joan 94 Singh, K. Train to Pakistan 201 Steinbeck, J. East of Eden 158, 261; The Grapes of Wrath 93, 96, 128, 129, 199, 201, 202, 219, 261, 266; Of Mice and Men 260, 265; Tortilla Flat 154, T Teresa de Ávila Vida 194 U Usher, R. “Left in Spain…” 139 V Vallejo-Nájera, J. A. Olaizola, J. L. La puerta de la esperanza 251 W Wells, H. G. The Invisible Man 192, 217 West, Nathanael, The Day of the Locust 42, 126 Wharton, E. After Holbein 113; The Age of Innocence 46, 74, 248, 259; Ethan Frome 34, 38, 40, 48, 70, 74 ; The House of



358

Index of literary authors and works cited

Mirth 48, 59, 133, 165, 193, 206, 216, 246, 253, 262, 265; The Other Two 141 ; The Reef 42, 44, 48, 58, 66, 71, 72, 116, 119, 140, 143, 170, 193, 196, 216 Wilde, O. The imortance of Being Ernest 143 ; The Portrait of Dorian Gray 81, 141, 142, 196, 262 Williams, T. The Glass Menagerie 125 Wilson, A. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes 55, 71, 116, 117, 120, 128, 142, 168, 174, 177, 178,

179, 182, 185, 192, 195, 196, 205, 212, 224, 229, 230, 237, 238, 239, 240, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 249, 253, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 286 Wolfe, T. Look Homeward, Angel 41, 247 Woolf, V. Mrs. Dalloway 187, 196, 197 ; The Years 37, 39, 129, 130, 169, 174, 182, 192, 200, 264



Name index A Abercrombie, D. 87, 310 Adjei, Y. 268 Adler, R. B. xxi Allen, J. D. 316, 321 Allport, G. W. 314, 321 Almaney, A. J. 305, 321 Alwan, A. J. 305, 321 Amades, J. xvi, 321 Ange, D. 317 Araki, S. 305, 322 Archer, D. 160, 306, 321 Ardener, E. 324 Argyle, M. xviii, xix, xxi, 2, 208, 316, 317, 321, 322, 330 Asante, M. K. 305, 322 Ashcraft, N. 210, 322 Auerbach, A. H. 341 Augustine, St. xxii Austin, W. 139, 322 B Balázs, B. 107, 310, 322 Barakat, R. A. xvi, 321, 322 Barbachano C. 335 Barker, L. xxi, 332 Barnlund, D. C. 207, 305, 322 Bateson, M. C. 329, 333, 342 Birdwhistell, R. L. xv, 6, 103, 140, 173, 178, 313, 322, 333 Birk, J. 305, 339 Blacking, J. 326 Bloomer, H. H. 95, 322 Blurton Jones, N. G. xviii, 209, 322 Bok-Huurman, J. F. H. 331 Bordon, G. A. 305, 333 Bouissac, P. 337 Brackett, I. P. 99, 323 Brault, G. 312, 323

Braun 315, 323 Brentano, C. 310 Brislin, R. 339 Briz, A. 312, 316, 323, 339 Broome, B. 305, 323 Brosin, R. L. 333 Brown, J. E. 86 Brunt, R. J. 337 Buller, D. B. 323 Burgoon, J. K. xxi, 207, 323 Burnt, R. 323 Bustos, J. J. de 310 C Calero, H. H. 158, 334 Cameron, D. 316, 343 Caro Baroja, J. 309, 323 Carter, J. 288 Caspari, E. 6, 323 Catford, J. C. 78, 81, 82, 97, 309, 323 Cerdán, L. 312, 323 Cervenka, E. J. xvi, 340 Cestero, A. M. 158, 312, 323 Chase, J. 343 Chatman S. 336 Chesterton, J.K. 307 Churchill, W. 313 Clancy, P. M. 306, 323 Classen, C. 107, 323 Cohen, M. 321, 322 Cole, J. 326 Coll Mestre, J. 312, 323 Collett, P. 210, 305, 323, 324 Conaway, W. 305, 333 Condon, J. C. 324, 344 Condon, W. S. 227, 305, 313, , 324 Cook, M. 316, 322 Cottle, W. C. 343 Coulthard, M. 316, 324

360 Name index

Cranach, M. von 326, 330 Crook, J. H. 331 Crystal, D. xviii, 118, 139, 324 Cupchik, G. C. xix, 324 D Danehy, J. xv, 311, 335 Darwin, C. xv, 6, 39, 44, 46, 145, 167, 324 Davenport, M. 315, 324 Davis, M. xix, 324 DeFleur, M. L. xxi, 324 Diadori, P. xix, 158, 312, 324, 325 Dittman, A. T. 314, 315, 317, 325 Douglas, K. and M. 6 Dubos, R. 7, 325 Duncan, S. xvi, 32, 227, 230, 238, 244, 250, 315, 316, 317, 325 Dunund, S. 305, 325 DuPlessis, D. 314, 325 Dorojaiye, M. O. A. 315 E Eco, U. xx, 308, 336 Edmondson, W. 316, 325 Efron, D. xvi, 165, 167, 187, 313, 325, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. xvi, xviii, xix, 6, 145, 201, 204, 325 Ekman, P. xix, 6, 54, 58, 96, 111, 165, 167, 177, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 224, 309, 310, 326, 330, 345 El-Shiyab, S. xix, 327 Emmerich, K. 310, 327 Enninger, W. 323, 337 F Fathi, Y. 305, 324 Feldman, D. xxi, 327 Ferber 227, 316, 331 Fiske, D. W. 315, 325 Foote Whyte, W. 305, 328 Foppa, K. 326 Freedman, D. Z. 314, 327 Freud, S. 307, 314, 327 Friedman, R. J. 326 Friedrich, G. W., 334 Friesen, W. C. 54, 111, 165, 167, 183, 185, 186, 187, 224, 313, 326

G Galdston, I. 328 Gallardo Paúls, 316, 327 Gallois, C. 315, 327 Garrido Gallardo, M. A. 337 Gauger, H. 109 Gelabert, M. J. 312, 323 Gestrin, P. 340 Givens, D. 206, 314, 327 GoVman, E. 32, 210, 316, 327 Gold, S. J. 321 Golden, S. xix, 327 Golder, H. xix, 328 Gombrich, E. H. xviii Gómez, J. 339 Goodwin, C. 316, 328 Goody, J. 107, 328 Gottschalk, L. A. 341 Graham, B. 317 Green, G. xvi, 328 Grove, C. L. 305 Gudykunst, W. B., 322 Guillen Nieto, V. 316, 328 H Hadar, U. xix, 328 Hakamata, M. 305, 328 Hall, E. T. xix, 2, 305, 307, 328, 331 Hall, J. A. xxi, 207 Harper, R. G. xix, 308, 328 Harris, R. M. 316, 322, 325, 331, 333, 335, 341 Harrison, R. P. xxi, 345 Harryman, E. 334 Hasada, Rie xix, 170, 282, 317, 328 Hatim, B. xix, 329 Hawad-Claudot, H. xix, 8, 218, 329 Hayes, A. 104, 312, 329, 342 Helbo, A. 312, 338 Henley, N. 210, 329 Herzfeld, M. 336, 337 Hess-Lüttich, E. 336 Hewes, G. W. xvi, 329, 333 Hibbits, B. J. 222, 329 Hickson, M. xxi, 329 Hinde, R. A. xviii, 321, 325, 329, 332 Hockett, C. F. xv, 311, 333, 335 Hofner, D. 305, 340 Holoka, J. P. xix, 329

Name index

Holz-Mänttäri, J. 338 Howes, D. 107, 323 Hutcheson, S. 322, 332, 341 Huxley, J. xviii Hymes, D. 334, 344 I Ikpeazu-Bello, P. 315 Ingholm, C. 305, 329 J JeVerson, G. 315, 329, 340 Jespersen, O. 172, 173, 330 Jesus 109 John the Baptist 310 Johnson, H. 167, 330 Johnson, S. 305 Jourard, S. 207, 330 K Kahn, Joan Y. 190, 330 Katan, D. 318, 330 Katz, M. M. 326 Kearney, P. 324 Kees, W. xvii, 340 Keller, H. 307 Kendon, A. xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, 21, 111, 140, 227, 228, 313, 316, 322, 324, 325, 326, 330, 331, 333, 335, 336, 341, 342, 343 Kennedy, the — family 6 Key, M. R. xvi, xviii, xix, 322, 122, 207, 312, 325, 331, 333, 335, 336, 341 Klinkenberg, J.-M. 336 Kluchohn, C. 305, 331 Knapp, M. xix, xxi, 207, 315, 325, 331, 345 Kobayashi, M. J. 343 Koch, H. 314, 331 Koechlin, B. xix, 215, 313, 316, 331 Kohler, C. 315, 331 Koppel, J. M. H. van de xix, 331 Krescheck, J. 334 Krouschev, N. 288 Krout, M. H. 314, 331 L LaBarre, W. 6, 332 Landis, D. 339 Lapenies, W. 326

361

Lateiner, D. xix, 32 Laurel, S. 86 Laver, James 315, 332 Laver, John 91, 97, 310, 322, 332, 341 Lawick-Goodall, J. 209, 332 Leach, E. xviii, 208, 332 Leathers, D. G. xxi, 332 Leloir, M. 315, 332 Lenneberg, E. 6, 332 Lenhart, M. 336 Lepenies, W. 326 LeVine, R. 2, 332 Lieblich, A. K. 343 Lorenz, K. xvi, 332 Lowenthal, F. xix, 332 Luria, A. 314, 332 Luther, M. 109 Lyons, J. xviii M Mahl, G. 185, 314, 332 Malandro, L. xxi, 332 Malmberg, B. 75, 323, 333 Malinowski, B. 305 Malmkjer, K. xix, 333 Markel, N. 315, 327, 333 Marsh, P. 210, 324 Martinell E. 312, 323 Martínez, Mª J. 339 Mast, G. 322 Mattarazzo, J. D. xix, 328 McBride, G. xvi, 333 McCormack, W. 305, 325, 335, 339, 342, 343 McCroskey, J. C. xxi, 340 McDonnell, P. xix, 333 McLaughlin, J. F. 316, 333 MacNutt, F. 209, 332 McQuown, N. 139, 333 Medley, A. H. 316, 333 Mejía, S. 158, 333 Meo Zilio, G. 158, 333 Merman, S. K. 316, 333 Merrythew, A. 307 Michael, R. P. 331 Miller, J. xviii Minelli, L. 6 Moezelaar, M. J. M. 331 Montague, A. 207, 333

362

Name index

Morris, D. 207, 333 Morrison, T. 305, 333 Morsbach, H. xix, 333 Murphy, J. 267 N Nakajima, M. 21–22, 306 Narbona, A. 310 Newbold, D. xix, 334 Nicolosi, L. 78, 334 Nierenberg, G. I. 158, 334 Nixon, W. 267, 268 Nord, C. xix, 334, 338 Nydell, M. K. 305, 334 O Ochs, E. 323 Ogston, W. D. 227, 324 O’Hair, D. xxi, 334 Okby, M. 310 Oliver, D. L. 334 Olson, W. C. 314, 334 Ozu, Y. 308 P Pastner, C. 305, 334 Paul, apostle 109 Payrató, L. 157, 334 Pei, M. 97, 334 Peng, F. C. C. 337 Perelló, J. 75, 334 Perkins, W. H. 78, 334 Peter, apostle 109 Pike, K. 20, 78, 82, 88, 305, 309, 334 Pilch, J. 310–311, 334 Pittinger, R. xv, 139, 311, 335 Plax, T. G. 324 Ploog, D. 326 Pochhaker, F. 317, 337 Pope, S. B. 330 Posner, R. 337 Porter, R. E. 2, 305, 329, 335, 341, 342 Poyatos, F. xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii, xxiv, 2, 5, 10, 21, 22, 24, 32, 50, 63, 85, 139, 141, 144, 145, 150, 151, 186, 244, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 317, 322, 324, 326, 327, 328, 329,

330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 338, 339, 340, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346 Proctor, R. F. 321 Q Quirk, R. 139, 324 R RaZer-Engel, W. von xvi, xix, 122, 145, 306, 313, 316, 325, 326, 330, 336, 339 Raha, M. K. 338 Ramsey, S. xix, 305, 339, 340 Rapoport, A. xvi, xix, 2, 5, 12, 47, 305, 311, 335, 340, 341 Raveau, R. 312, 340 Reagan D. 195 Rector, M. 158, 340 Reed Hall, M. 305, 328 Reed, W. S. 209, 314, 340 Reinecke, H. P. 341 Ricci Bitti, P. E. xix, 340 Richmond, Y. xxi, 340 Rimé, B. xxi, 327 Roe, A. 323 Rosenfeld, R. B. 321 Ruesch, J. xvii, 340 S Sacks, H. 236, 315, 340 Sadat, A. 288 Saito, M. 344 Saitz, R. L. xvi, 340 Salvá Miquel, J. A. 75 Samovar, L. A. 305, 329, 341, 342 Samuda, R. 305, 341 Sanford, A. 209, 314, 341 Sanz-Villanueva, S. 335 Sapir, E. 1, 305, 341 Scanlan, M. 314, 341 Scheflen, A. xvi, 210, 227, 229, 308, 313, 314, 316, 322, 341 SchegloV, E. 236, 315, 340 341 Schenkein, J. 315, 329 Scherer, K. R. xix, 167, 326, 330, 341, 345 SchieVelin, B. B. 323 Schifrrin, D. 206, 342 Schlesinger, M. 337



Name index

Schmitt, J.-C. xix, 309, 342 Schneider 315, 323 Schneller, R. xix, 342 Searle, J. R. xvi, 342 Sebeok, T. A. xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, 32, 198, 307, 312, 315, 326, 329, 342 Sherzer, J. 181, 342 Shimakawa, Y. 305, 340 Shlein, J. M. 332 Shlemon, B. 209, 314, 342 Shlesinger, M. 317 Siegman, A. 330 Siguán, M. 337 Silverberg, J. 305 Simpson, G. C. 323 Sitaram. K. S. 342 Skupien, J. xix, 324 Slama-Cazacu, T. 145, 342 Smith, A. F. 305, 328, 342 Smith, H. L. xv, 335 Smith, W. J. 343 Snell-Hornby, M 343 Söderbergh, R. 145, 343 Sommer, R. xvi, 126, 343 Stacks, D. W. xxi, 329 Stefani, L. A. 341 Stoddart, D. M. 307, 343 Streeck, J. xix, 331 Svennevig, J. 316, 343 Synnott, A. 107, 323 Sweeny, M. A. 305, 343 T Tanaka, H. 316, 343 Taylor, T. J. 316, 343 Teresa of Ávila, Saint 343 Thatcher, M. 171 Thayer, L. xviii Thorpe, W. H. xviii, 7, 307, 343 Tobin, Y. xix, 343 Todd, T. 18 Tournier, P. 108, 268, 310, 314, 343 Towne, N. 321 Trager, G. L. xv, 103, 139, 344 Training Management Corporation 344

363

Travis, L. W. 322, 323, 334 Trinta, A. R. 158, 340 Tytler, G., 309, 344 U Ueda, K. 344 V Vandryès, J. 344 Varela, F. C. xix, 344 Vermeer, H. J. xix, 317, 344 Vernon, P. E. 314, 321 Viaggio, S. xix, 279, 289, 317, 318, 344 Vicary G. Q. xix, 215, 315, 344 Vine, I. 326, 330 W Weale, E. xix, 277, 278, 311, 317, 344 Weaver, R. L. xxi, 344 Weiser, J. xix, 344 Weitz, S. xix, xxi, 341, 345 Wenzhong, H. 305, 345 Wescott, R. W. xix, 345 West, C. 315, 345 Wieman, M. O. xxi, 345 Wiemann, J. M. 315, 345 Wiener, H. 40, 307, 345 Wiens, A. N. xix, 328 Wildeblood, J. 127, 206, 215, 315, 345 Williams, T. R. 325 Wilson, J. 316, 345 Wodall, W. G. 323 Wolfgang, A. xix, 26, 305, 306, 326, 336, 345 Wright, F. L. 305, 311 Wurm, S. A. 305, 325, 335, 339, 342, 343 Y Yau, S. xix, 345 Yngve, V. H. 244, 317 Z Zabalbascoa, P. xix, 346 Zimmerman, D. H. 315, 345, 345



Subject index A acculturation 21–22 acquisition of verbal and nonverbal systems 145–148, Fig. 5.2 aVection, showing 208 Africans, black 207, 208 alter-adaptors behaviors 204–211 realization 205 alveolar-palatal areas 80–81 alveolar-palatal anomalies 81 Amazonians 216, 219 Anglo-Saxons 180, 199 animals 192 Arab cultures 209, 215 Argentina 313 arm(s), hand(s), finger(s) in interpretation, lack of 294 articulations, secondary alveolarization 80 labialization 88 laryngealization 78 palatalization 80 pharyngealization 79 velarization 80 interactive 51–52 articulateness 266 assisted articulations 82, 87, 98 B basic triple structure 103–132, Fig. 4.1 in interpretation 278–279 ontogenetic and social development 121–122 spatial and temporal transmission 123 total conditioning background of 124–130, Fig. 4.3 behavioral ethnography 7–8 behavioral geography 7

belch timbre 76 biophysicopsychological background 124–125 blindness in interpretation 293 body-adaptors behaviors 211–219 realizations 212–213 breathing 75 bronchial rattling Burma 216, 217 Bushmen 80 C Canada 58, 77, 218 Caucasus 26, 185 Central Africa Bororo’en 216 Chaldean Church 209 cheeks 83, 89 chemical activities in interpretation 277 perception of Fig. 2.2, 39–40, 190, 191 China 26, 313, 207, 220, 222, 223, 283 Chronemics 267–268, 312, 284 cleft-palate 81 clicks 80, 82, 87, 88, 91, 92, 93, 98 clothes 2111–214, 215–216 coding of verbal and nonverbal behaviors 54–55, Fig. 2.5 Colombia 24, 178 color perception Fig. 2.2, 46–47 communication epistolary 22 intersomatic 31–53, Figs. 2.1, 2.2 somatic 50, Fig. 2.4 between nonverbal systems consistency perception Fig. 2.2, 45 conversation model 137–139, 228–270 conversation behaviors in Figs. 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 230–270, 316

366 Subject index

chronemics of 267–268 configuration 228–229 counterfeedback 346, 259 feedback 240–243, 247, Fig. 7.2 definition 228 pauses in 253–266 in interpretation 288–292 initial behaviors in silences in 253–266 transcription of 133–143, Fig. 5.1 course on intercultural awareness 160–162 cultural patterns 126–128 culture cultural habits 5–8 definition 1–2, 305 as communication and interaction 3–5, Fig. 1.1 sensible and intelligible systems 8–10, Fig. 1.2 interrelationships among sensible and intelligible systems 15–17 among language and nonverbal systems 56–60, 281–283 cultureme model 10–15, Fig. 1.3 D deafness in interpretation 294 deictics 179–183 Denmark 20 dental anomalies 82–83 dental areas 81–83 dental articulations 82 percussives 82 scrapives 82 dermal perception 38, 40–42, 44–46, Fig. 2.2 dermal reactions in interpretation 277–278 discourse, read 113–114 E echoics 184–185 El Salvador 178 emblems 167–171, 285 emotional reactions 201 endosemiotics 307 England 315, 254 environment, reactions to 193 environmental background 125–126 esophagus 76

esthetic values 128 Ethiopian Surma 216 etiquette 127–128 Europe, Southern 208 event tracers 188, 286 external somatic communication externalizers 189–198, Fig. 6.2, 287 F face, the speaking distance and light in the perception of 74 visual and audible features in the perception of 74 in silent films 107, 310 facial signs 62–74, Fig. 3.1 cognates, false nonverbal 24, 27 fluency conversational 266–267 emitting 19 receiving 19 verbal-nonverbal cultural 19–22 fluency quotient 19–20 foreign-language teaching, nonverbal communication in 143–160, Fig. 5.2 France 20, 22, 120, 209 G Ghana 27, 207, 206, 208, 215, 209, 268, 313, 315 glottal catch 77 glottal trill 78 Greece 26, 27, 169 H Hispanic cultures 27, 208 Hong Kong 26, 208 Hungary 20, 22, 207 hyperrefined, the 128 I iconicity 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 198, 205, 206, 214, 223 identifiers 188–189, 286–287 ideographs 187 India 11, 20, 74, 127, 203, 206, 207, 215, 216, 220, 222 ineVable, the 104–108

Subject index

ingressive speech 75, 77 interaction model 135–137 interactive articulations 51- 53 intercultural communication barriers of 17 processes in 24–27, Fig. 1.4 interaction, personal and environmental 279–281 interaction, reduced 49, 292–294 interpretation 117–118, 271–296, Fig. 8.1, 317 interaction in 279–284, Fig. 8.2 intersomatic communication direct and synesthesial 32–49 interviewing 316 intonation as communication 117–118 intrapersonal interaction 214 Irian Jaya 180, 216 Italy 171 J Japan 11, 14, 21–22, 26, 306, 308, 151, 170, 199, 208, 214, 215, 315 K kinephonographs 186 kinesics 116–117 definition 116 in foreign-language teaching 155–160 in interpretation 275–276 lexicality and grammaticality of 110–112 manners postures kinesthesia (kinesthesis) definition 34 kinesthetic perception 34, Fig. 2.2, 38, 39, 42–46 kinetographs 185–186 Kirghiz 217 kissing 169, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 218 Kotzobue Eskimos 209, 215 L labial articulations 85–89 laryngeal anomalies 78 laryngealization 78 larynx 76–78 language among other somatic systems 31–62

367

interrelationships with nonverbal systems 56–60 Latin America 7, 24–25, 170, 215 lexicality of nonverbal systems light in interactive perception 47–48, 74 lips, the anomalies of 89 artificial manipulation 84 postures and articulations 84–88 perception of 83 lungs and bronchi 75–76 M Madagascar 215 Malaysia 208, 313 Maliseet Indians 218, 267 mandible 94–95 mandible anomalies 95 Maronite Roman Catholic Rite 209 Mexico 24, 178 Micmac 218, 267 Mindanao 219 microkinesics 310 mirroring behaviors 29 Morocco 207 mouth-air mechanism 80 movement perception Fig. 2.2, 38–39 movements, body 50–53, Fig. 2.4 Muslim Arabs 22 Muslim men 203 Muslims 214 N narial articulations 98 nasal cavities 95–99 (nasal) velic articulations 97- 98 nasal anomalies 99 nasalization 96–97 naturalness 268, 310, 311, 313–314 New Guinea 169, 206 New Guinea Eipo 201 Niger 26, 169, 313 Nigeria 315 nonverbal categories 164–225, Fig. 6.1 North America 11, 22, 92, 306, 119, 121, 167. 169, 172, 178, 199, 204, 313, 207, 210, 254 North American Indians 218

368 Subject index

nonverbal communication courses and projects xxi- xxii, 297–304 definition xvii grammaticality and lexicality of 110–112 literary illustration of xxii- xxiii nonverbal communication studies beginnings xviii-xix interdisciplinarity xv, xvii- xxi nonverbal systems grammaticality and lexicality 110–12 O object-adaptors 219–224 Oceania 215 olfactory perception 39–40, 42, 43, 44, 307 orality of writing 108–109 orientation in conversation 228–229 P palatalization 80 Panama 181 paralanguage alternants 115–116, 151–154 definition 114 diVerentiators 115, 151 in foreign-language teaching 48–55 in interpretation 275–276 primary qualities 115, 150 qualifiers 115, 150 lexicality and grammaticality of 110–112 parakinesic qualities 117, 119 percussive articulations bilabial 88 dental 82 subliminal 92 pharynx 79–80 pharyngeal articulations 79–80 phonokinesics in interpretation 276 pictographs 183–184 postures, congruence and incongruence in interaction 229 preening 201 proxemics acquisition of Fig. 5.2, 146 transcription of Fig. 5.1, 143 pseudoeducated, the 128–129 public speaking 113–114

Q quasicourting behaviors 185 R random behaviors 193, 195–198, 203, 219, 223, 314 realizations of language, paralanguage and kinesics 119–121 reduced interaction 49, 292- 294 redundancy 60 Romans, ancient 222 Russia 170 S Saudi Arabia 26, 313 self-adaptors 198–204 sensory perception 32–49 Fig. shape perception Fig. 2.2, 42- 43 shared behaviors 129–130 silence in interpretation 276- 277, 284–285 Singapore 208 Singapore Chinese 315 size perception Fig. 2.2, 43 socioeconomic-socioeducational levels 128–129 somatic communication, external 50–51 sound perception Fig. 2.2, 39 South Africa Ndebele 216 space markers 177–178, 286 Spain 8, 12, 18–19, 20–21, 24, 306, 27, 119, 170, 172, 177, 180, 201, 202, 204, 214, 223, 318 speech segmental and nonsegmental 118–119, Fig. 4.2 transcription 133–143, Fig. 5.1 speech markers 171–177, 286, 313 spiritual experiences 194 stillness in interpretation 276–277, 284–285 strength perception Fig. 2.2, 45 swallowing 79 synesthesia 36–37 synesthesial perception Fig. 2.2, 38–40, 42–47, 49 T Tasaday 219 taste perception 40



Subject index

temperature perception 41, 60 texture perception Fig. 2.2, 44 teeth anomalies of the 82–83 perception of the 81 Thailand 206 thermal perception 41–42, Fig. 2.2, 190 Tibet 26 time markers 178–179 tongue 90–93 tongue articulations 91–93 tongue anomalies 93–94 total conditioning background touch, self- 198–204 translation, literary 22 transcription of speech 133- 143, Fig. 5.1 Trinidad 26 Tuaregs 8, 218 Turkey 11, 12, 27, 170, 313 Tyrol 78

369

Venezuela 24, 306 visual perception 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46 voice breathy 78 creaky 78 eunochoid 78 falsetto 78 harsh 78 hoarse 78 pharyngealized 79 whispery 77 vowels, sounds and gestures of 99–100

U usage, verbal and nonverbal 22–24

W Wasúsu 219 weight perception Fig. 2.2, 46 West Africa 215 whispering 77 whizzing 75 word of God 109 words limitations of 104–108 written 108–109

V velarization 80

Z zero decoding 24–27, Fig. 1.4

Table of Contents Volumes II & III Volume II. Paralanguage, kinesics, silence, personal and environmental interaction Chapter 1 Paralanguage, I: Primary qualities or basic personal voice features Chapter 2 Paralanguage, II: Qualifiers or voice types Chapter 3 Paralanguage, III: Differentiators, our eloquent physiological and emotional reactions Chapter 4 Paralanguage, IV: Alternants, our vocabulary beyond the dictionary Chapter 5 Kinesics: Gestures, manners and postures Chapter 6 The sound co-activities of language: From audible kinesics to environmental sounds Chapter 7 Silence, stillness and darkness as the communicative nonactivities opposed to sound, movement and light Chapter 8 The deeper levels of personal and environmental interaction: What happens or does not happen among people and between them and their environment

Volume III. Narrative literature, theater, cinema, translation Chapter 1 Nonverbal communication in the text: The reading act, the narrator’s or playwright’s expressive tools and the reader’s or spectator’s perception Chapter 2 The semiotic-communicative itinerary of the character between writer and reader or spectator Chapter 3 Sound and silence in the text: Presence and absence of language, paralanguage and kinesics, and extrasomatic sounds in the text and on stage Chapter 4 Kinesics and the other visual systems in the novel and the theater: The character before the reader or spectator Chapter 5 Punctuation as nonverbal communication: Limitations, ambiguities, possibilities Chapter 6 Functions of nonverbal communication in literature: Stylistic, communicative, technical Chapter 7 Literary anthropology: Interdisciplinary perspective on people, signs, and literature