英语论文网

significant increase in the number of nonverbal research efforts. Birdwhistell’s Introduction to Kinesics in1952 and Hall’s Silent Language in 1959 were two milestones of this decade. In 1956, Ruesch and Kees produced a book entitled Nonverbal Communication: notes on the Visual Perception of Human Relations. This was the first book to use the term nonverbal communication in its title. 1960s produced a “nuclear explosion” of nonverbal studies. During this time, the classic theoretical piece was Ekman’s and Friesen’s article on the origins, usage, and coding of nonverbal behavior. The 1970s proved to be a time of summarizing and synthesizing on nonverbal studies. It began with Julius Fast’s Body Language in 1970. This book was the best-selling volume at that time and it has now been translated into several Chinese versions. The1980s were a time of further development of nonverbal communication studies. Some nonverbal researches of this decade focused on identifying the ways a variety of nonverbal signals work together to accomplish common communicative goals. The research on nonverbal behavior in our country began from 1980s. Scholars such as Hu Wenzhong, Bi Jiwan, Deng Yianchang and Liu Runqing have done some research work. [2](P40-41) Why we began the research on nonverbal communication later than western countries, so far as I know, there’re some reasons for it. Since Joseph Stalin had criticized the “gesture” of Mar in 1950, the scholars in our country who studied linguistic theory considered it as guiding principle to confirm the function of language communication absolutely without considering the position and function of nonverbal communication in communication. As a result, the range of study is only limited to language and communicative tool based on language. [1](P1) And during 1960s-1970s Cultural Revolution happened in our country bringing a disaster to the study of this field. 2. Definition and classification of nonverbal communication There are various definitions for nonverbal communication among different scholars. According to Knapp [2](P41) the phrase nonverbal communication refers to communication effect by means other than words (assuming words are the verbal element). When defining nonverbal communication, Samovar and Porter propose that “nonverbal communication involves all those nonverbal stimuli in a communication setting that are generated by both the source and his or her use of the environment and that have potential message value for the source or receiver”. In this definition, the role of the environment, the message value of nonverbal stimuli and the communication setting are emphasized as three important factors in nonverbal communication. [2](P41) In short, nonverbal means for communication, which is considered as “silent language”, expresses meanings or feelings without using words. As different linguists describe nonverbal communication in different dimensions, there is no general agreement in classification as yet. Here we only propose some of the common topics most communication theorists address themselves to: “Nonverbal communication consists of all signaling systems that do not use words.”[3](P181) 1) body modes of nonverbal communication(kinesics): posture, gestures, eye contact, facial expressions, appearance, smell, shifts in skin color, uses of clothing and body decoration, body orientation, any other movement of any other part of the body; 2) space language(body distance or prox