1.3 Status quo of study of non-verbal behavior
Nowadays, some foreign studies show that, in the course of daily communication, the information transmitted by verbal language only counts for a very small part, while the information conveyed by non-verbal behavior is much richer. The most conservative estimate, under a certain circumstance, 35 percent of information is conveyed by verbal communication and the rest by non-verbal behavior. Other people think that verbal behavior conveys only 7 percent of information, and the other 93 percent information is all expressed by non-verbal behavior. ( Zhu Di, 1986). Just as David Abercrombie puts it, “We speak with articulate organs, but communicate with the whole body.” The prominent cultural scholar T. Hall also illustrated the same idea, “Time speaks, and space speaks.”( Hall, 1959). Samovar also believes the body language signal performed by human body can reach up to 700,000(Samovar, 1981). What’s more, non-verbal behavior plays a special part in the expression of emotion and attitude. Not only can it convey meaning independently, but supplement what the verbal behavior conveys. As a result, there is no doubt that more than half information in human communication is conveyed by non-verbal behavior.
1.4 Major categories of non-verbal behavior
Knapp (1972) advanced seven dimensions which describe the major categories of non-verbal behavior research as related to communication. The first category is kinesics, commonly referring to “body language” which includes movements of hand, arm, head, foot and leg, postural shifts, gestures, eye movements and facial expressions. The second category is paralanguage, defined as content-free vocalizations and patterns associated with speech such as voice pitch, volume, frequency, stuttering, filled pauses(for example, “ah”), salient pauses, interruptions and measures of speech rate and number of words spoken in a given unit of time. The third category involves physical contact in the form of touching. The next category is proxemics which involves interpersonal spacing and norms of territoriality. The fifth category concerns the physical characteristics of people such as skin color, body shape, body odour and attractiveness. Related to physical characteristics is the category of artifacts of adornments such as perfume, clothes, jewellery and wigs. Environmental factors make up the last category and deal with the influences of the physical setting in which the behavior occurs, a classroom, an office, a hallway, or a street corner. This is a rather thorough description of the categories of non-verbal behavior. And the main categories applied in oral English chasses are body language (kinesics), proxemics and paralanguage. The following is an attempt to probe into some of the categories.
(1)Gesture and body language
“Body language” or kinesics is used in every culture and language, in unique but clearly interpretable ways. “There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture.” wrote Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale. All cultures throughout the history of human kind have relied on kinesics for conveying important messages. Books like Edward Hall’s The Silent Language (1959), The Hidden Dimension (1966), and Julius Fast’s Body Language (1970) were just the first of a long string of self-help manuals offering lighthearted but provocative insights on the use of kinesics in North American culture. Today, virtually every book on communication explains how you communicate—and miscommunicate—when you fold your arms, cross your legs, stand, walk, move your eyes and mouth, and so on.
But as universal as kinesics communication is, there is tremendous variation cross-culturally and cross-linguistically in the specific interpretations of gestures. Human beings all move their heads, blink their eyes, move their arms and hands, but the significance of these movements varies from society to society. Consider the following categories and how you would express them in American culture:
a. Agreement, “yes”
b. “No!”
c. “Come here”
d. Disinterest, “I don’t know”
e. Flirting signals, sexual signals
f. Insults, obscene gestures.
There are conventionalized gesture signals to convey these semantic categories. Are those signals the same in another language and culture? Sometimes they are not. And sometimes a gesture that is appropriate in one culture is obscene or insulting in another. Nodding the head, for example, means “yes” among most European language speakers. But in the Eskimo gesture system, head nodding means “no” and head shaking means “yes”. Among the Ainu of Japan, “yes” is expressed by bringing the arms to the chest and waving the hands. The pygmy Negritos of interior Malaya indicate “yes” by thrusting the head sharply forward, but people from the Punjab of India throw their heads sharply backward. The Ceylonese curves their chins gracefully downward in an arc to the left shoulder, whereas Bengalis rock their heads rapidly from one shoulder to the other.
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