Exploration Of The Paralinguistic Communication In Friends

Paralanguage serves as a complement to verbal language, and is indispensable for people to negotiate complete information in oral communication. Although paralanguage was overlooked by most linguists as a verge subject for quite a while and researches of it had not been developing in such an extensive and in-depth way as traditional linguistics had gone, the importance of it in delivering information has attracted more linguists to conduct researches of it in recent years. But few of these researches are carried out on a linguistic-theoretical basis, with not much in-depth and systematic analysis of how paralanguage functions for coherence of oral communication. In the current thesis, a discourse approach is taken to systematically analyze the role of paralanguage in the coherence of oral communication in an American comedy, Friends, which is one of the most representative comedies in America. Through study of the samples from the comedy, paralanguage is found to be contributive to coherence of oral discourse in many ways. Paralinguistic devices like prosodic features, vocal segregates, functional utterances and silence can function as cohesive devices. They also help to start, terminate or maintain turns in talk exchanges. What is more, paralanguage is considerably constructive in negotiating the complete meaning of many speech acts, and in inferring implicit meaning by violation of conversational principles. In the current study, effort is also made to explore what influences the use of paralanguage. The use of paralanguage in the comedy Friends is found to be characterized by variations between individuals and between the male and the female. Such variations are not random, but are underlain by a number of contextual factors, which encapsulate the situational context and the socio-cultural context of the discourse. The remarkable influence of context over use of paralanguage evinces the fact that contextual factors must be fully taken into account in the understanding of paralinguistic communication.