The Pragmatic Act Theoretical Account For Nonverbal Adaptability

As an indispensable and important composition of communication, nonverbal communication (NVC) has attracted more and more attentions. Recently, studies of NVC are widely scattered. However, the previous research mainly concerns the definition, classification and comparison of NVC, most of which fall into partial, empirical and superficial studies. Since NVC bears characters of ambiguous and less-systematized, pragmatists'efforts are urgently needed to explain the various phenomena caused by NVC. Some previous pragmatic studies, though trying to explain NVC with certain well-known pragmatic theories and principles, such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, and Relevance Theory, etc., and having indeed reached some constructive achievements, are still confined and limited in some degree by the traditional intrinsic constraints of micro-pragmatic study. Then, a macro-pragmatic version, on the contrary, presents its huge explanative force and vitality.Jacob, L. Mey, as an important representative of macro-pragmatics proposes an important macro-pragmatic theory—Pragmatic Act Theory (PAT). Serving as the theoretical framework of macro-pragmatic studies, PAT sets the keynote for the exploration of the social and cultural aspects of pragmatics. According to Mey (2001), a typical pragmatic look at people using language is looking at them as performing pragmatic acts (PAs). Then "pragmatics studies language as it is used by people, for their own purposes and within their own respective limitations and affordances" (2001:207). Pragmatics, in other words, is a discipline about human adaptability, and pragmatic act (PA) is the "contextualized adaptive behavior" (2001:227). Different from Speech Act Theory (SAT) which is always speech-centered, PAT concludes all these contextualized communicative activities into PAs, such as speech acts, indirect speech acts, conversational acts, nonverbal acts, etc. Therefore, NVC, as one of PAs, bears an explicit nature of adaptability, as well as situation-derived and situation-constrained. In this sense, a macro-pragmatic interpretation of NVC is in fact a study of nonverbal adaptability. On this theoretical basis, the present study assumes that a truly pragmatic interpretation of NVC should be conducted from a perspective of macro-pragmatics, i.e. a pragmatic act theoretical account. Based on this assumption, the paper attempts to look for its practical rationality and feasibility via the analysis of plentiful examples, and finally figures out that: (1) nonverbal adaptability felicitates the "setting-up" of contexts through processes of mental and physical preparation; (2) "uptake" between the interlocutors can be accomplished, threatened, and even cancelled by nonverbal adaptability; (3) nonverbal adaptability is inter-determined and interdependent with the interlocutor's "common-scene"; (4) nonverbal adaptability functions between affordances and constraints of the context.This paper tentatively conducts a complete and systematic study of NVC in a macro-pragmatic domain, in which the adaptive and situation-derived as well as situation-constrained natures of NVC are laid stress on, and finally a systematic mechanism under the framework of PAT is constructed. Besides, as for the development of macro-pragmatics, which is always blamed for its lack of theoretical systems and concrete analyzing frameworks, a newborn PAT is timely employed, tested and proved in this paper. Finally, the present study is wished to take the research of NVC several steps further, and to shed some lights on the extended study of this topic in the future.