From Linguistic Adaptation To Communicative Adaptation

Verschueren first proposes the pragmatic perspective in Understanding Pragmatics (1999), in which he claims that language use is a process of choice-making and has the adaptive property. On this basis, his well-known linguistic adaptation theory comes into existence. However, nonverbal communication plays an equal role as verbal communication does in our life. As for whether nonverbal communication has the property of adaptation like verbal communication, Vershueren does not give us a definite answer in his book.Recently, studies of nonverbal communication are carried out and develop very fast and widely. More and more students take nonverbal communication as their research topics in all kinds of theses and dissertations. However, most of the studies and research mainly concern the definition, classification and comparison of nonverbal communication, most of which fall into partial, teaching-related and empirical studies. Few of them are carried out from the pragmatic perspective.On the basis of above, this thesis expands Verschueren's linguistic adaptation theory to the field of nonverbal communication and tentatively proposes a new model of communicative adaptation theory as following: Communication is a process of choice-making during which communicative modes (verbal mode or nonverbal mode) should be chosen in the first place. Communicators ought to make a choice of language codes and structures if the process is realized through verbal mode. Conversely, communicators ought to consider and choose the nonverbal behavior if the process is realized through the nonverbal mode. The interadaptability between communicative modes and contexts plays a rather important role in communication which is considered as a dynamic process of meaning generation and during which communicators display different degrees of salience.