Pragmatic Investigation Of Nonverbal Behavior In Communication

Human communication covers two forms:verbal and nonverbal. Verbal communication is commonly regarded as the most important, efficient, powerful means of communication. While nonverbal means of human communication is often ignored. However, in face-to-face communication the bulk of information is sent and received through nonverbal channels. This suggests that nonverbal communication also plays a vital role in human communication.Though the study on nonverbal communication has attracted great attention, it was usually researched from cross-cultural studies or teaching methods. Considering that condition, this paper attempts to explore nonverbal communication beyond cultural perspectives, i.e. unconscious nonverbal behaviors.Relevance theory put forward by Sperber and Wilson was applied in this paper to analyze nonverbal behaviors in American drama "Lie to Me" from cognitive linguistics. Nonverbal behaviors were sorted in this paper as eye contact, gesture, body movement, facial expression, dressing, silence, physical contact, space and distance, paralanguage, timing, etc. which were studied with quantitative research combined with descriptive analysis. Corpus applied in this paper were collected from American drama "Lie to Me" which covers 3 seasons and 45 episodes, through which 215 scenes of nonverbal communication were collected, with 657 relevant nonverbal behaviors included.According to the above classification, there are 52 behaviors expressed with eye contact,44 gesture,59 body movement,430 facial expression,11 dressing,9 silence,7 physical contact,8 space and distance,26 paralanguage,11 timing. The ostensive-inferential model in nonverbal communication was analyzed with cognitive pragmatic theory combined with changes of cognitive contexts; besides, cognitive psychological process, cognitive models and its operating mechanism were discussed by applying pragmatic triangle model.The research result showed that nonverbal behaviors play a significant role in the communication process, and the analysis on communication process demonstrated that the ostensive-inferential communication model of relevance theory applied equally to nonverbal communication; but Sperber and Wilson failed to present speakers’real-time inferential process and procedures concretely and meticulously, or provide a particular set of schemes to signify the cross-space blending process of concepts; the pragmatic triangle model is an important complement to relevance theory. The previous study on relevance theory focuses on verbal communication, while it’s shown in this paper that the pragmatic function of nonverbal communication should be researched in a more profound way, as it would contribute to searching for the maximal relevance in the communication process.