Wharton T. Pragmatics and non-verbal communication

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. — 229 p.The way we say the words we say helps us convey our intended meanings. Indeed, the tone of voice we use, the facial expressions and bodily gestures we adopt while we are talking, often add entirely new layers of meaning to those words. How the natural non-verbal properties of utterances interact with linguistic ones is a question that is often largely ignored. This book redresses the balance, providing a unique examination of non-verbal behaviours from a pragmatic perspective. It charts a point of contact between pragmatics, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, ethology and psychology, and provides the analytical basis to answer some important questions: How are non-verbal behaviours interpreted? What do they convey? How can they be best accommodated within a theory of utterance interpretation?'... a most timely work... not only does Wharton achieve an innovative, brave and systematic re-analysis in coherence with the cognitive theoretic pragmatic paradigm he endorses, but also he raises many intriguing and stimulating questions, and suggests new and challenging directions for future work which will spark off much discussion and research.' Lodz Papers in PragmaticsAcknowledgements page
Natural pragmaticsOverview
Natural and non-natural meaning
Gricean meaningNN
Showing and meaningNN
Deliberately shown natural behaviours
Pragmatics and the domain of pragmatic principles
Relevance theory and the showing–meaningNN continuum
Semantic undeterminacy and lexical pragmatics
Translational and non-translational activation of concepts
Interjections and language
Interjections
Interjections and concepts
Interjections and ‘response cries’
Interjections and meaning: ‘what do interjections communicate?’
Interjections and procedures: ‘how do interjections communicate?’
Interjections and language: ‘are interjections part of language?’
The naturalness of interjections
Natural codes
Codes, signs and signals
What type of information is conveyed by natural codes?
Concepts, procedures and meta-procedures
Prosody and gesture
Prosody
What does prosody encode?
Gesture
Mindreaders
Other minds
Experimental evidence and future directions
The showing–meaningNN continuum and beyond
Two ‘showing–meaning’ continua
A prince among primates
Myths
Beyond