Non-Verbal Communication: Signals and Semiotics

• Non-verbal communication involves transmission of signals through means other than spoken words.
• Bodily gestures, facial expressions, spacing, touch, smell, whistles, and smoke signals are all examples of non-verbal communication.

Types of Non-Verbal Communication

• From Spoken Language:
  • Writing systems
  • Morse Code
• Independent of Spoken Language:
  • Sign Language

Samuel Morse

• Samuel Morse (1791–1872) was an American inventor.
• Morse developed an electric telegraph in and, in 1838, he is responsible for the Morse Code.
• Morse was motivated by his wife's death and the delayed news of her illness, leading him to seek instant message transfer methods.

Semiotics

• Human communication works through verbal and nonverbal means.
• Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, and their functions in communication.
• Subfields of Semiotics include biosemiotics, semiotics of food, and social semiotics.

Paralinguistics

• Paralinguistics comes from the Greek preposition "para" meaning alongside.
• It includes vocal communication characteristics that are considered marginal and optional/excluded from linguistic analysis.
• Three categories of paralinguistics:
  • Voice qualifiers: tone and pacing of speech (volume, intensity, pitch, tempo, articulation).
  • Voice characterizers: laughing, giggling, crying, moaning, and whining.
  • Vocal segregates: uh-huh indicates agreement/gratification; tsk-tsk indicates disapproval.

Kinesics

• Kinesics supplements speech using body movements and gestures
• Kinesics assumes that every body movement or facial expression is likely to have meaning
• Ray L. Birdwhistell (1918–1997) developed a method to study human communicative body movements
• kineme has been defined as the smallest unit of body motion

Components of Kinesics

• Facial expression indicates a range of emotions.
• Eye contact reflects culturally influenced avoidance or love.
• Hand gestures include handshakes which can have negative connotations.

Proxemics

• Edward T. Hall (1914-2009) developed proxemics, the study of spatial separation in face-to-face interactions.
• Proxemics includes studies about privacy, crowding, territoriality, and building design.

Proxemic Zones

• Intimate distance: used for embracing, touching, or whispering.
• Personal distance: used for interactions with friends or family.
• Social distance: used for interactions among acquaintances.
• Public distance: used for public speaking.

Haptic Behavior

• Haptic behaviour relates to the sense of touch.
• Haptic behaviour differs within societies that live in close proximity.
• Dutch individuals maintain greater distances than French and English dyads.
• People from southern France have different haptic behaviors from those raised in northern France.

Sign Languages

• Sign language is as old as speech.
• Ancient Greeks and Romans used signs in their communication.
• Sign languages are complete languages.
• Sign languages have phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax (grammar).
• American Sign Language (Ameslan), Navajo Sign Language, and British Sign Language are examples of sign languages.

Cheremes

• William C. Stokoe Jr. (1960) stated that sign languages have same grammar form as spoken languages.
• Sign languages have contrastive units called cheremes that combine to form meaningful sign units (morphemes).
• A chereme is a set of positions, configurations, or motions used in sign language.

Sign Language Morphology

• Each sign language morpheme is defined by hand shape, palm and finger orientation, place of formation, movement, direction, contact point, and other spatial/dynamic features
• Primary sign languages used by the deaf are highly structured, complete, and independent communication systems like spoken languages

Writing

• Writing is a form of "visible speech".
• It's impossible to trace where it originated.
• Writing systems developed in many parts of the world with more cultures borrowing then inventing them.
• Writing is abstract because spoken sound has a connection to a random symbol placed on a medium.

Protowriting & Rebuses

• Protowriting: Doodles, scratches, knots, scribbles, or marks used as mnemonic devices.
• Rebus: Pictures are used to represent words or their parts.
• Units use either phonetic or semantic value, with some containing both phonetic and semantic elements within them.

Chinese Characters

• Chinese writing has existed since the Shang dynasty oracle bones about 3,000 years ago.
• Ideographic characters: Symbols used to stand for an idea/thing, instead of sounds.
• Chinese examples:
  • Sun = 日
  • Mountain = 山
  • Horse = 馬

Cuneiforms

• Sumerian cuneiforms developed around 3500 BC.
• They were found in Mesopotamia.
• Cuneiforms were wedge-shaped marks made by a stylus in soft clay tablets.
• These tablets were baked or dried in the sun.
• Cuneiforms were used to keep economic records for temples.

Hieroglyphs & Rosetta Stone

• Hieroglyphs include a pictographic writing system developed around 3000 BC in Egypt.
• The Rosetta Stone was discovered in 1799, which had texts in Greek, Demotic Egyptian, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
• Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) discovered sound elements were in hieroglyphic signs because he knew Coptic which allowed the signs to be deciphered.

Logographs

• Logographs involve each word corresponding to an idea, concept, or spoken form.
• Logograph can be misleading if it is taken too literally.
• Chinese is considered logographic, but consists of phonetic or morphemic components.

Syllabary

• Syllabary is a system where the symbols stand for more than one sound (syllables).
• The Japanese took components from Chinese characters which resulted in 2 sets where the symbols used phonetic sounds:
  • Katakana (an angular system)
  • Hiragana (a cursive system)

Japanese Syllabaries

• Men used the Chinese form of writing (kanji) because they had to learn Chinese, due to public work
• Women used the private sphere and wrote using Hiragana syllabary.
• Tale of Genji is the first novel.
• Current script usage in Japan:
  • Hiragana: adverbs and modifiers
  • Katakana: foreign names and places
  • Kanji, hiragana, katakana, and roman

Cherokee Syllabaries

• Sequoya (ca. 1760–1843) invented the Cherokee syllabary in 1821.
• The syllabary included a mixture of Roman letters and fonts of all designs.
• The Cherokee syllabary was used by the Cherokee and also missionaries.

Alphabets

• Alphabet represents each distinct sound in a language by using signs or "letters".
• With English any word can be spelled out despite spelling inconsistencies because it has 26-letters
• Chinese dictionaries consist of up to 50,000 characters because it has a lot more words
• Japanese students have to learn 2,000 "daily use" letters because they have both syllabaries and letters

Alphabet Development

• Alphabets were mostly only used for consonantal values, few alphabets was invented compared to the dozens of syllabaries.
• Syllables are linguistically more accurate compared to what early generative phonology suggests

Alphabets' Development

• The first alphabets were used by a Semitic-speaking people in ancient Syria (1700 BCE).
• Early alphabets were designed for Arabic, Hebrew, and Phoenician around (1000 BC).
• The Greeks developed their alphabet based on the Phoenician system.
• Two centuries later, the Etruscans copied the Greeks, then Romans copied the Etruscans, creating the Latin/Roman alphabet.
• The Cyrillic alphabet, used in parts of Eastern Europe, was developed from Greek.

Phonemic vs. Consonantal

• Greek, Cyrillic, and modern Latin orthographies are phonemic alphabets where every sound has a letter
• Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic are consonantal alphabets where letters represent consonants and vowels are represented by symbols or with diacritics.