Kinesics: Manifestness Of Intentions And Inference Of Contextual Effect

Communication can be mainly divided into two categories,namely,verbal communication and nonverbal communication(Bi Jiwan,1998).In people's daily life,nonverbal communication exerts great influence in terms of social interaction.Many linguists believe that in a face-to-face interaction about 35 percent of information is communicated by words,while the rest of the message is conveyed by nonverbal behaviors.The most common and universal nonverbal behaviors displayed in communication is body language.The systematic and scientific study of body language is referred to as Kinesies,including gestures and postures,facial expressions,eye contact,touch,body positions and other kinds of nonverbal behaviors related to body movements.The study of Kinesics involves various subjects such as Linguistics,Pragmatics,Social Psychology,etc. This thesis aims to investigate kinesics in light of relevance theory.Supported by the Relevance Theory in pragmatic interpretation of Kinesics, this thesis attempts to analyze kinesic behaviors by elaborating how it manifests informative and communicative intentions as well as how it infers contextual effect,namely,contextual implication,strengthening of assumptions and contradicting of assumptions.In accordance with Relevance Theory proposed by Sperber & Wilson(1986/1995),nonverbal communication,including Kinesics,is regarded as an ostensive-inferential act and conveys the informative and communicative intentions of the communicator by sufficient processing efforts, from which contextual effect arises.Based on this theoretical foundation,this thesis follows four analytical approaches,namely,gesture and posture,facial expression,eye movement,and touch,to explore Kinesics' pragmatic functions of manifestness of intentions as well as inference of contextual effect in the kinesic behaviors collected in Jane Eyre.The purpose of the thesis to interpret how Kinesics in this novel manifest intentions as well as infer contextual effects.This thesis has the following achievements:1)It makes observation and collection of items of kinesic behaviors displayed in Jane Eyre;2)it gives account of the respective functions in accordance with the classification of Kinesics as postures and gestures,facial expressions,eye movements and touch in manifesting intentions with the illustration of 21 items;3)it makes exploration of how kinesic behaviors function to infer contextual effect with the interpretation of 15 items.As to the significance,this study is valuable in the fact that:1)It provides an evidence for the investigation of Kinesics from the perspective of Relevance Theory;2)it provides evidence for the extension of nonverbal communication study from the pragmatic aspects;3)it makes some contributions to nonverbal communication as well as verbal communication learners' awareness of nonverbal stimuli,and thus enhances their nonverbal communication abilities to achieve successful communication.It will be a potential supplement for the study of nonverbal communication as well as language learning and teaching.