The Pragmatic Functions Of Non-Verbal Behavior

Communication has always been taken to play a major role among people in their various activities and has been considered as the basis of all human contact. Since it is so important in human life, it is necessary for people to have a clear understanding of it. But the fact remains that there has been no agreed definition on communication due to its nature of complexity. Burgoon and Saine (1978) define it as giving meanings to information, including the sending, receiving, encoding and decoding of this information. Of course there is no need denying the usefulness of this definition and many others, but an extended definition of communication as a process and the factors essential to that process is of great value. Therefore communication is more appropriably defined as "a dynamic process in which man consciously or unconsciously affects the cognitions of another through materials or agencies used in symbolic ways" (Andersen, 1972: 5).In this definition, one term that needs special attention is the latter part of this definition, "materials or agencies used in symbolic ways". A symbol stands for, suggests, or represents something. Usually words and language are thought of as agencies used to communicate. "Language, it is natural to say, has two principal functions: that of an instrument of communication, and that of a vehicle of thought." (Kasher, 1999: 116) This sentence indicates the importance of language as symbols used in communication. In addition to words and language in oral and written communication, there are many more used as symbols, such as voice, pitch in oral communication, body movements, postures, facial expressions, dress, physical positions, distance, and many others in face-to-face communication. All these and a lot more, summarized as " Non-verbal Behavior", have meanings and are used as symbols in communication, which is the focus of the thesis.There are many great works in this field, such as Birdwhistle's Introduction to Kinesics, Malandro and Barker's Nonverbal Communication, Fast's Body Language. The thesis attempts to explore this new discipline from the perspective of relevancetheory proposed by D. Sperber and D. Wilson. The American philosopher Paul Grice, in his book Studies in the Way of Words, has put forward the intentional theory of meaning. He indicates that there must be an intention behind the meaning of every utterance and that the utterer intends the information receiver to recognize and give response to this intention. Then comes the question: how the receiver realizes the intention of the information sender and responds to it? According to the view of relevance theory, people have intuition for relevance and are relevance-oriented. In communication, the information sender makes his communicative intentions manifest to the receiver and provides necessary evidences for him to infer from; on the other hand, the receiver infers from these evidences in order to be aware of the sender's intention. Just as Sperber and Wilson have proposed, every utterance communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. An utterance is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context. Thus a behavior has relevance to the receiver if it creates a certain contextual effect in the specified context by three ways: strengthening existing assumptions; contradicting existing assumptions; combining with existing assumptions to yield contextual implications. Therefore, in defining optimal relevance, they hold that the assessment of relevance is a matter of balancing output against input: here contextual effects against processing effort. In another way, other things being equal, the greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance; and other thing being equal, the less the processing effort needed to obtain these effects, the greater the relevance.Based on relevance theory and context, the thesis makes an attempt to analyze the pragmatic functions of non-verbal behavior in communication from two samples. In communication, together with words and language, the information sender makes good use of various kinds of non-verbal behavior which may repeat, contradict, substitute, complement, accent or regulate the verbal behavior. In processing the messages, the information receiver will consider this non-verbal behavior as relevant in that it has created contextual effects for them in a given context. One of the samples is a written text, "Granny Liu Pays Her First Visit to the Jung Mansion",from A Dream of Red Mansions and the other is a visual extract from the film Scent of A Woman, that is, the great speech the hero Frank Slade made at the end of the film.The thesis intends to study the non-verbal aspect in communication and expound its different pragmatic functions. Since non-verbal behavior is an indispensable tool that accompanies verbal communication to transmit information and reveal feelings and attitudes, it is important to pay attention to the functions of non-verbal behavior employed by the information sender and the receiver in communication. One of the points that is of great value is that this study of non-verbal behavior is based on relevance theory and context, which is a new angle to investigate this field. People regard newly presented information as relevant and creating contextual effects in their interpreting and understanding. It is a fact that non-verbal behavior has been mainly studied from cross-cultural perspectives before. Thus people have placed their stess on the differences of non-verbal behavior in different nations and cultures. Unlike those studies, the thesis puts its emphasis on the pragmatic functions of non-verbal behavior in discourse through the discussion of two samples. Another point that is of importance in this study is that it makes an analysis of non-verbal behavior from two kinds of text, the written one and the visual one. The employment of a visual text helps people have a much clearer and more intuitional idea of the topic, deepening the study of non-verbal behavior.