Understanding Nonverbal Communication

A Semiotic Guide

Marcel Danesi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350152656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The human body is a primary source of meaning-making, with the body conveying over two-thirds of our messages. But how can we understand these physical communicative cues? How are they being expressed and exploited in new media and multimodal online and mobile interaction? Offering an in-depth guide to help you investigate and understand real and virtual nonverbal communication using semiotic theory, this book assumes little previous knowledge of semiotics or linguistics. With in-depth, comparative case studies, each chapter deals with a traditional aspect of nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions, touch, and gesture, before extending the discussion to new media and cyberspace. Explaining the issues step by step and supported by exercises, directed further reading and a glossary of key terms, Understanding Nonverbal Communication provides you with all the tools you need to understand how nonverbal communication unfolds in all kinds of contexts, and the kinds of messages that it makes possible.

1

Nonverbal Communication

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Chapter Outline

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1.0Prologue

1.1Communication Models

1.2Modes and Media

1.3Mass Communications

1.4Computer-Mediated Communication

1.5Nonverbal Communication

1.6Useful Semiotic Notions

1.7Bimodality

1.8Epilogue

1.0 Prologue

Communication exists in all species, serving survival in specialized ways. For example, birds have developed distinctive coos that are designed to signal mating, warnings, and distress; dolphins have evolved whistles, burst-pulsed sounds, and clicks to communicate similar types of messages over long distances underwater; gorillas and chimpanzees have developed facial expressions, postures, and hand gestures that are akin to those utilized by humans to convey a vast array of meanings, from predator warnings to complex emotional states. Communication in humans serves similar needs; but it transcends them in unique ways, serving cultural meanings that have little to do with mere survival. This blend of nature and culture is a key characteristic of human communication.

This chapter deals with several pivotal notions of communication theory in general and nonverbal communication in particular. A useful distinction between human and animal communication systems is the one between signals and signs. Although reductive, for the present purposes, a signal in animal systems can be defined as a message sent out instinctively in response to some need or environmental situation. Signaling is also typical of human communication, but in this case, it can be both instinctive and intentional, as will be discussed in due course. Signs are structures devised purposefully to stand for something in some way—words, symbols, images, etc. Although some species appear to possess the capacity for sign-based behavior, such as various primate species, by and large, signing is a unique human faculty. The study of nonverbal communication (NVC) in humans involves examining the origins, meanings, and functions of the elements in this dual system of signals and signs. Traditionally, it is carried out by observing people interacting physically in their social ambiances; but today it has been extended to study interactions in cyberspace, as well as how it relates to verbal language and other representational systems.

There is a common perception among people that nonverbal behaviors are natural, reflecting universal instinctual patterns. But this is not the case. Consider the behaviors that characterize courtship practices. Humans, like other animals, sense and respond instinctively to mating urges. Across the animal realm, such responses are communicated by specialized signals, according to species. From an evolutionary perspective, humans have also developed similar signals; but there is a difference—the signals are modified and regulated by cultural traditions, which transform them into signs and cultural codes (systems of signs) which guide, for example, how partners touch each other, how long they make eye contact, what postures are appropriate or not in romantic contexts, etc. In effect, in human NVC, nature is in a deep partnership with culture—a partnership that is meant to bring about a “mutual optimization,” whereby the two—the natural and the cultural—function optimally in a symbiotic way.

1.1 Communication Models

Communication can be defined narrowly as the transmission and exchange of messages (in the form of either signals or signs, or both). The features of a communication system are specific to a species—that is, messages can be sent and received successfully (recognized as messages) by an organism if the sender and receiver belong to the same species. According to the early twentieth-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1909), system specialization relates to the anatomical structure of a species, as well as neural structure in the case of the higher primates, which shapes and delimits the kinds of information a species can receive and use.

Inter-species communication is possible to limited degrees, in some specific modes. Tactility and vocalization seem to be the primary modes that allow for interactions between humans and some animal species, such as cats and dogs. Caressing a dog companion to convey affection will typically motivate responses such as tail-wagging and friendly barking that indicate an understanding of the meaning of the caress in kind. Sharing the same living space, and being codependent on each other for affective exchanges, the two different species—human and canine—do indeed appear to transmit feeling-states to each other through nonverbal signals. However, even within the confines of the tactile communicative mode, there is no way for humans to be sure that dogs understand the intent and meaning of the caress in the same way that they do. Humans can only infer it.

The transmission of signals and signs in real space has a very limited span—a vocal utterance can only reach someone within a certain auditory range, a hand gesture within a specific visual range, and so on. However, even early hominid cultures had developed tools, artifacts, and various other means to extend the transmission range, including drums (extending the auditory range), fire and smoke signals (extending the visual range), etc. Messages were also attached to the legs of carrier pigeons trained to navigate their way to a destination and back home. In later societies, semaphore systems, such as flashing lights or flag-waving codes, were employed to send messages over difficult-to-cross distances, such as from hilltop to hilltop, or from one ship to another at sea. The late Canadian communications scholar Marshall McLuhan (1964) claimed that the type of technology developed to amplify the ability to transmit messages determined how societies evolved—that is, a major change in communications technologies would bring about a concomitant paradigm shift in social systems and even in human evolution.

The term information comes up in any discussion of communication, and thus requires some commentary. For the present purposes, it can be defined simply as the specific type of sensory input (vocal, visual, tactile, etc.) that is experienced as relevant or significant to a situation, producing differentiated reactions or interpretations. For instance, screaming is perceived as meaning something different from laughing; a ringing alarm evokes a different reaction than a silent alarm; and so on. The type of input provides the relevant information required to react accordingly, varying from biologically-based to culturally-based responses. Knowing that a ringing alarm indicates danger is something that is learned in cultural context, whereas screaming and laughing are natural modes of vocalization, although they too are constrained in their specific meanings by culture. One of the first modern-day theories of communication, by the American telecommunications engineer, Claude E. Shannon (1948; Shannon and Weaver 1949), was based on measuring the probability of some signal. He showed that the information in a signal was inversely proportional to its probability of occurrence—the more probable, the less information it carried; the less probable, the more information it bore. Shannon also elaborated a model of communication (Figure 1.1) that has remained a basic one in communication studies to this day. Its main components are as follows:

1Sender: the source of a signal or message transmission.

2Message: the information that the sender intends to transmit to a receiver in some way.

3Transmitter: the organ or device that converts the message into a physical signal, in some medium. A verbal message, for instance, can involve a natural (biological) medium, if it is transmitted with the vocal organs. It can alternatively be transmitted through the medium of writing, or converted into electromagnetic signals for mechanical transmission.

4Noise: some interfering element (physical or psychological) in the signal’s transmitting channel that distorts or partially effaces the message. In radio and television transmissions, noise is equivalent to electronic static; in vocal speech, it can vary from any interfering exterior sound (physical noise) to the speaker’s lapses of memory (psychological noise).

5Redundancy: noise is why communication systems have redundant features built into them. These allow for a message to be decoded even if noise is present. For instance, in verbal communication the high predictability of certain words in many utterances or the predictability of specific sounds (phonemes) in common words greatly increase the likelihood that a verbal message will get decoded successfully.

6Receiver: the organ or device that has the capacity to receive the signal and understand (or simply process) the information present in it; in verbal communication it is a human being; in telecommunications it could be a radio set.

7Destination: the end-state or intended reach of a transmitted signal.

Figure 1.1 Shannon’s model of communication (Wikimedia Commons).

Shannon’s model is called colloquially the bull’s-eye model, because a sender (information source) is portrayed as someone or something aiming a message at a receiver—the bull’s-eye—in a target range. The model thus depicts information transfer as a unidirectional process dependent on probability factors, that is, on the degree to which a message is to be expected or not in a given situation. Wilbur Schramm (1963) later expanded on this model, adding bidirectional dimensions to it, referring to senders as encoders and receivers as decoders, thus implying agency within the communicative system. He also refined several other notions, adding the cybernetic notion of feedback to the communication loop, defined as the modi...