NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION

0 Introduction

In this section I transferred my attention to nonverbal communication and how is it made by people. Here I went for the following aspects: functions as principal and then I continue with ways of expressing communication: manual language, kynesics, silence, appearances and paralanguage.

1 Definitions and elements

As a short definition: non verbal communication represents the process of communication through which is being sent and received wordless messages. First of all I should define these terms:

-'non' as a prefix in some adjectives or nouns, shows a negative aspect;

-'verbal; is spoken not written;

-'communication' is the process by which people exchange information or express their thoughts or feelings.

As a whole expression non-verbal communication refers to facial expression and eye contact, body language or posture, gesture and interpersonal distance. Communication can be made through object of communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, symbols and info graphics.

The elements of non verbal communication are: paralinguistic, including voice quality, emotion and speaking style and also prosodic features as rhythm, intonation and stress. However non-verbal communication can be identified in written texts due to handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words use of emotions.

In general, communication is made through a 'systematic encoding' and an 'appropriate decoding' as Weiner (1972) affirms. The editors explained those elements as a process that implies one person (an encoder), who is actively making his experience known to some other person (a decoder) by means of a shared code. But non-verbal behaviour is not necessarily communicative; it has to comply with the essence of being able to communicate clearly and with sense to the other person. For example, students may show signs of boredom during classes without any conscious intention to do so. As much as a learner will want to appear attentive he will still be incapable of suppressing the occasional yawn.

When a particular message is transmitted nor the encoder or the decoder need to identify the specific non-verbal cues. They are transmitting information about emotion, speech acts and significant details about individual differences and interpersonal relationships. To support this idea Hall (1984) explains that there is a notable difference between women and men in communication: women are clearer and better encoders than men. Women also smile and gaze often than men, and prefer closer interpersonal distance. Thus non-verbal communication is a source of defining better the relationships between people in terms of sex, age, and acquaintanceship.

2 Functions of non-verbal communication

Argyle (1988) discovered 5 important functions of non-verbal bodily behaviour in human communication:

expressing emotion

expressing interpersonal attitudes

accompany speech in dealing with the cues of interaction between speakers and listeners

self-presentation of one's personality

rituals expressed by greetings.

The functions above cause subjective and objective attitudes from the part of the interactants. Practically each individual is influenced by his own personality.

Other linguists like Malandro, Barker & Barker (1989) searched for another alternative of the non-verbal communication functions related with those six functions in human communication:

1. Complementing: adding and reinforcing the meaning with extra non-verbal cues to the verbal message

Contradicting: when our non-verbal messages contradict our verbal messages

3. Repeating: used in order to emphasize or clarify the verbal message

4. Regulating: serves to coordinate the verbal dialogue between people

5. Substituting: occurs when a non-verbal message is transmitted in place of a verbal message

6. Accenting: emphasizing a particular point in a verbal message.

The term complement, from the first function, indicates that the behaviour alone would not communicate the intended message. For example a handshake is always completed by a greeting e.g. Hello, nice to meet you.

A complementing non-verbal message changes the meaning of the verbal message by adding additional insights or information. (Malandro, Barker & Barker: 1989)

But these functions can be absent in the case of the Internet, as a tool of communication. If a person writes I hate college on the Internet, we can't make an assumption regarding the truth of the statement without more information. They could be laughing when they say it, or frowning, or crying. All those non-verbal cues would make a difference in determining the meaning behind the words. Some Internet users try to duplicate these non-verbal cues with etiquette by using smiley faces or words describing their feelings in parentheses. The message for the sender can reflect some of the missing non-verbal cues by sending the cues as written words.

3 Manual language

Another form of communication is that based on signs. See Figure 1. It is a system of communication that involves hand movements which offer meaning. In America, it is used by deaf people that formed an association: the American Sign Language. This language involves grammatical rules, phonology, syntax and morphology. Many countries from all over the world adopted this system with their own people with problems. In Romania the National Association of Romanian deaf people created a dictionary and a manual of Mimico-gesture in Romanian language. Every country formed its own manual language but not different from that of the America. As in any language a word can have more than a meaning. In 1975 at Madrid all the world associations founded World Association of Sign Language Interprets to which members can exchange information with other national association and can work very well at different global levels. The language of gestures is 75-100 times simplest than the verbal language. There are almost 2250 corresponding gestures to 56568 words from Dictionary of Romanian modern language according to Romanian Mimico gestures manual.

Figure 1-Sign Language Alphabet from www.squidoo.com

The features of the manual language depends on the four basic kinds of articulatory parameters in the production of articulation of signs as Bonvillain (2003) says: Hand configuration, Place of articulation, Movements of Hands, and Orientation.

The Hand configuration contains 41 different hand shapes. These signs are very clear and cannot be omitted or misspelled (Figure 1Figure 2 Some contrastive signs in ASL (Klima and Bellugi, The signs of language, 1979:42, Harvard University Press )

Place of articulation: the articulation of signs is made due to the signing space which consists of the area in front of a signer's body extends from the top of the head to the waist and from side to side to the extent of arm's reach with elbow bent. (Bonvillain 2003:32). Having in consideration that signs are conditioned by the visual channels of transmitting the information, the most common area in which they are produce is that next to the face or the head. Signs can be made with one hand or with both hands. Depending on what distance they are from another or in what position are from the other hand signs can form different meaning. See figure3

Figure3 Some contrastive signs in ASL ( Klima and Bellugi, The signs of language, 1979:42 Harvard University Press )

Movement of hands: the complexity of the hand movements is a cause of the direction of the movement, for example the axis can be on the vertical: as upward, downward, or on the horizontal: as rightward or leftward. The second important feature is that of the way the hand is moved: straight, circular or twisting path. But the movement of the hand also depends on the bending at the wrist of knuckles, wiggling the fingers, and opening or closing the hand. (Figure4)

Figure4 Some contrastive signs in ASL ( Klima and Bellugi, The signs of language, 1979:42 Harvard University Press )

Orientation: the last parameter which I found essential is the position of the palms regarding the other parts of the body: up or down, facing left or right, or directed toward or away from the person. Except these positions there are also other elements of contact on the hand: fingertips, thumb tip, palm, side of hand, and back of hand.

As a language with a grammar, signs can transmit not only the meaning of the verb (continuative, incessant, pre dispositional and allocative) but also the gradualism of the adjective.

The sentences respect the same topic as in the verbal language: subject-verb-object. The users of the Sign Language learn that apart from the grammatical aspects, vocabulary, syntax, body modifiers and affective facial expressions there is also a culture of the Deaf Community involving Deaf History.

This complex community of norms and values challenges its members by increasing their expressivity and receptivity to society and developing their skills of understanding better the world.

4 Kinesics

Kinesics is a systematic study of the relationship between non-linguistic body elements as facial expression and gesture (for example blushes, shrugs, or eye movement) and communication. Pronounced as it follows: kə-ˈnē-siks, kī-, -ziks, it has its etymology in the Greek language (kinēsis). The first appearance of the term was made in 1952, by Birdwihstell, in the study: Introduction to Kinesics. Through his work he discovered new ideas about the communication made through movements of the body.

Another linguist Knapp (1972:94-95) affirmed that kinesics can be compared with language because at the base of each one there is a minimal unity kineme in our case and phoneme in the case of language which is produced by a group of movements , that are not identical, but which may be used interchangeably without affecting social meaning.

The most important risk of using kinesics is that of being misinterpreted in any intercultural communication circumstances. For example Figure 5. The effects can lead to violence or just aggression from the part of the receiver, who is not able to decode the message due to cultural differences. It is a very important problem of behaviour. In my opinion the sender should know very well the culture of the recipient otherwise he could offend him.

Figure 5 Different significations (www.wikipedia.org)

It is an issue of social personality. Another example is the head shaking : the Romanians say yes when they shake their head from up to down on vertical , and say no when they shake it from right to left on horizontal, while the Bulgarians do exactly vice versa.

As an important part of non-verbal communication, kinesics can be analysed in any situation, especially on interviews or exams, (the person in cause must respect some rules of behaviourism). Any utterance a person makes, is completed with a kinesics pattern, for example it can be showed emotions, it can be released physical or emotional tension, it can be controlled the flow and pace of communication, or even it can be substituted words and phrases. For example when an adult asks a child, on summer, if he wants ice -cream, for respect he will say no, but having his eye pointed out to the ice-cream, with a glance in his look as if he desires it a lot, and with a low voice. So the person can transmit a negative verbal message but judging after its body he can say the opposite.

Goodwin affirms that body movement is always followed by the eye contact. That is because the movement attracts the attention of the listener and the eye instinctively looks after moving objects and focuses on them. Usually movements help the person who uses them to convey thought to the audience. By looking directly in the eyes of each of the participant at the discussion, the sender personalizes the discussion presenting and stimulating the desire for him to be listened more intently, that is the kind of thinking that the person will produce. Also the eye contact secures the attention to the person and to what it is said, it signals the nature of the relationship between the actants, it shows interest on the person or on the subject of the discussion. A person who has eye contact more than 60% of the discussion is more interested on the person and not on the topic. And the last important role of the eye contact is that of regulating the conversation. For example if a person looks down when he speaks with his friend he presents disagreeing to that issue.

Any movement of the body or even facial expression can be presented as a gesture. In general, gestures depend on the personality of the user. If he is dynamic and vigorous he will use many gestures, but if he is calm and easygoing he will think twice before he does anything with his hands or body. In the case when the user is relaxed, regarding his shoulders or arms, and he is concentrated on communicating the meaning of his ideas to the audience the gestures will add to the effectiveness of the speech act. They should appear as a spontaneous and enthusiastic personality not an artificial one.

Usually gestures are descriptive when is portrayed an object or an action, or imitative when is described size, shape, or movement of the object. But there is also the eye contact avoidance which cannot establish a relationship between the actants. These can be presented when the person does not look at his participant at the discussion, or even when he continues to stare at him. When he looks away, or on the left, he can transmit the feeling of a lye, or not self estime. There appears a question from the part of the lecture: What is wrong with him? and the message is not received as it should be.

A particular type of gestures is the facial expression. To express what the user is feeling and thinking he must act in his most natural appearance in the end succeeding to influence his audience. The most common facial expressions are those that show feeling as: surprise, fear, joy, dejection, anger, poise, and interest. Facial expression establishes to the person in discussion a stronger understanding of what it is felt. It can appear as an automatic reaction (for example to a surprise party) or as an awareness of it. But there are also cases when the face is a lack of expression and that is when the silence starts its process of communication.

5 Silence as a way of communication

Silence can be interpreted as an act of non-verbal communication that shows different meanings depending on the cultural terms of interpretation. It appears anywhere in the society, at any social class with a purpose and a meaning .Silence is a cause of the situational and interactional context in which is used. Bonvillain (2003:42) suggests that: silence does not simply exist but is actively created by participants

In some societies silence has the role of the formal procedure for example it is used in audiences, ceremonies, governmental or legal proceedings, or even theatrical events. It depends on the event to which the encounters meet. Another significant role is that of establishing the status between people, and their relationships: parent /child, employer /employee, teacher /student.

But more than once silence had been given a negative understanding. The silent participants can present: hostility, disdain, disinterest, or anger. Although, to some specific context it can show contemplative thought, respect for others, or desire to avoid conflict. For example a person who enters in a chamber of the funerals does not start to laugh , or to be so excited due to the death of the person in cause, he is silent, and cries for him in the most peaceful way.

Goodwin speaks about the silent treatment which any person makes especially in a relationship, at some point in his /her life. For example when a couple quarrels the man asks:

-Do you want to talk about it?

-No (I want to be silent to punish you , for not knowing why I am upset, do you figure it up-said in her mind).

It is the treatment that does not communicate anything certain, because it is not known if the man or the other person who asks is really interested in finding out the true problem, but if indeed he is interested he will try to look for the answer.

According to Hall (1914) the silent language has a very important role in the way in which people talk to one another without the use of the words. Its vocabulary is formed from unwitting gestures and actions that take place in different contexts. The factors which influence the concept are time and space.

6 Appearances

First of all, appearances represent the main impressions that a person makes, during the first 30 to 60 seconds in a conversation or a meeting. Goodwin suggests that appearances are impressions on things that exist physically without words, and to a certain point they can't be controlled.

What a person can influence with her /his height, weight, way of dressing, hair style or colour is the first thinking about him /her. But more than once, there was an unconditioned reflex to look at a person and to judge his /her appearance.

The most common moment of judging somebody after the first impression is when there takes place an interview. The interviewer analyses the person, in front of him searching for all kind of hidden details, like: for which reason he choose that red blouse or what is he transmitting through his dark emo aspect. The selected outfit tells him how well the candidate will interact with and be perceived by customers. Even the chosen accessories are transmitting professionalism. That tells, that the candidate cared enough to want to make a good impression and of course he is hired. The candidates chosen clothing and accessories are a form of powerful non verbal communication. Heathfield suggests all this process through a very simple sentence: Listen when hiring.

Clothing, a very important element in creating a first impression, must represent the person who wears them. They are mainly depending on the context. Each person has developed its own style: casual, bohemian, natural, astonishing, rave. But in some societies clothing can induce the rank or the status of the person who wears it, for example in China only the emperor could wear yellow. Another domain in which clothes can be considered very special is the religious one. I affirm that thinking on the clothes that priest wear during their performance of religious ceremony. As an immediate reaction they transmit interior peace, faith, light. See Figure 6

Figure 6 Dalai Lama: Life scene & portraits (www.onelittleangel

7 Paralanguage

Known as the study of non-verbal cues of the language, it depends most of all of: tone, pitch and accent, rhythm and intonation. There are many times when a simple change of the accent, gives to the utterance a new meaning. Taking in consideration the context in which paralanguage is used, it can appear conscious or unconsciously

The linguist Trager (1958) wrote that voice can be classified in a very complex system with elements like: voice set, voice qualities and vocalization. He described voice qualities as modifications that appear in a language together with the rest of the noises (that including pitch range, vocal lip control, articulation control, resonance and tempo). These elements confer to the speaker the unicity of the voice. The selection of these, build up the image which the person has about himself. As such he is imposing or not the respect. For the vocalisation aspect, he relates the issue with the noises which do not have a structural composition to appear in. That including vocal characterisers as laughing, crying, moaning, and yawning; vocal qualifiers: intensity, pitch, height and extent; and vocal segregates as the English uh- uh for negation, uh-huh for affirmation and the uh of hesitation. The third element, which completes the classification, is the voice set, which signifies the context in which the voice is embedded. For example, on the test made by Randal S Davis he searched the context for different sounds. So he gives to the utterance: Auch! an equivalence to the answer: That hurt!

The factors which influence the context are:

the situation ( depending on the location, on the participants at the action, on the moment of the act)

the gender ( male of female)

the mood (the person is angry, happy, sad, nervous, tired, excited )

the age (young, old, child, adult)

the culture of the person

the class ( simple, aristocratic, poor, rich)

They are very important factors because for example it is well known that a female with a certain status in the society is having a bigger tendency to increase the volume of the voice, or just having an imposing intonation next to a simple female whose husband is very authoritative with her.

In any language it is important to call to mind that paralinguistic (or paralanguage) elements are truly incorporated as part of the culture of each person. It is something that can't be changed or modified, maybe just adjusted when we conscious the culture of the other person who we address.

Analysed from a syntactic point of view Hodge (1996:11) says that the intonation pattern is made from variations of pitch, that usually are subtle and various. Used in a simple combination, is producing an important number of intonation patterns which define semantic field with a precision superior to the written form. The stream of sound that goes between the speaker and the hearer is characterised by the voice into fields, disposed into units of focus and fields. The prominence of the pitch movement indicates the focus of a field, and it is limited by the end of a pitch-contour. Practically the pitch -contour describe the shape of the field: rising pitch pointing forwards and falling pitch pointing backwards. So, if a speaker uses a rising note he ends with a question, giving the opportunity to the hearer to complete the field, like in the following example:

A: As I understood from our discussion you want to be a doctor?

B: Yes, I want to be a vet.

In comparison with the written language the spoken language is felt more vivid and direct because information is ordered using gestures or different patterns that are easily accepted and remembered by the human perception.

Another linguist Collet (2003) described the paralinguistic clues in the following list:

gestures which betray

royal gestures

gestures with sexual aspects

borrowed gestures from strangers

smokers gestures

The gestures that betray are those which appear unconsciously, in general they are made by lovers when they want to hide their love, or when a person regrets something but he is not saying it out loud. Another situation when the gestures can show our thinking is at poker, because that game is based on the signs that the players transmit to each other when they want to hide their strategy or their cards.

Regarding the second clue on the list these gestures are produced only by the royal members. Having already a royal blood they do not fight for their dominant position, as simple people do. For example humour is playing a very important role in the life of the monarchy. The Queen herself has a direct look and big eyes, accompanied by a smile on her face when she speaks to the crow. The touch, the distance, the palm, the purse, the rubbing of the nose, all are signs which royal members do. Even Lady Diana had some distinctive gestures: blushing, looking down to earth.

The gestures with sexual aspects are those followed by an action. It is well known that people are transmitting in any time constant messages with sexual characters. For example a female, when she wants to be approached she has a glance of the man but with a fix look, waves her eyelashes, shakes her hair, smiles and puckers her lips. She also uses high heels to give the impression of long legs. During the process of the flirting the female can dispose three types of answers: invitation (where she allows him to make the first step), rejection (where she denotes a lack of interest to the man's signals), and the postponing (where she moves the process to another level of waiting).

The next type of clues is those gestures that are borrowed from strangers. For example the handshake was transmitted in the XV III century by the Englishmen in the process of striking the negotiation. Later on it was adopted by the French people as a greeting and it was very often used. Nowadays the Russians and the French and also the Italians and the Spanish are shaking hands more than once per day, as opposed to Germans and Englishmen.

The last clue is that of smokers. The way in which a person smokes, tells a lot about his feelings, or how he wants to be perceived by the persons around him. Most of the time, the position of the cigarettes shows the sex of the person. For example, see figure 7 where: the first position is adopted by men and the second by women .Usually men tend to be or just to give the impression of strength, virility while women use it as way of being sophisticated or attractive.

 

The position of the rented leg   The position of the extended leg

Figure 7 Smokers Gestures (Collet 2003:56 )

Still Collet exposed the gestures in: indicators of the dominance, of the humiliation, indicators that appear in conversation, in politics, indicators of the anxiety, and of lies .Through the gestures, people find out how are being interpreted their actions and their reasons, and also help them to focus on the messages that are being transmitted unintentionally, and on their effects.

Langton suggested a new classification of the paralinguistic clues:

1. Explicit: emoticons, cartoons, call-out descriptions

Style: typography, layout, colour, location.

3. Implicit: rhetoric, rhythm, sound, flex, vocabulary.

From the explicit type of clues emoticons, pronounced as [i-moh-ti-kon], are textual portrayal of a writer's mood or facial expression. The first emoticons did not appear in our days, but in 1881, in magazine Puck. See figure 8.

Figure 8 (Emoticons published in the March 30, 1881in Puck -www.wikipedia.org)

On the Internet, emoticons expanded in 1982, and since then they suffered an important development arriving to very complex representations. See figure9 Nowdays the majority of the Internet users, feel a need to use this type of graphical emotions in the sense in which they can't express their feelings through another way.

FigureEmoticons (training./Ecyberschool/cyberdays/netiquette/-cartoon-emoticon-faces-collection.)

8 Conclusion

Nonverbal communication represents that way of communication that is transmitted into the most natural way of using, it does not need any preparation, like the verbal language, and it follows as patterns almost the same elements of production: coder, and encoder, channel, message, and code.

Taking in consideration the fact that in certain situation it is almost an unconditioned reflex, look for example at the gestures that we make everyday, at our body position when we are bored, it cannot be controlled.

Another reason for which nonverbal communication is much more used than a word is that even if we are silent we can produce communication. Depending on the culture of oneself people might say many things, for example, the users of the signs language alphabet. Judging after the evolution of communication from our days, people are better transmitting ideas through image, appearance, emoticons, music, look etc.