NONVERBAL SEMIOTICS

LECTURES

1. a. Nonverbal Communication and Nonverbal Semiotics as a Complex Discipline(branches,

subsystems, problems).
b. Paralinguistics as the Component Part of Nonverbal Semiotics.
Monday, November 6, 10 am- 12am, Main building, Auditorium XII.

2. Voice and Tone In Culture and Language. Tuesday, November 7, 10 am – 12 am, Main
building, lecture hall 12 (Sali 12).

3. Body Language and Modern Kinesics as the Science of Gestures (people, ideas, units,
systems, approaches). Wednesday, November 8, 2 pm- 4pm, Main building, lecture hall 12
(Sali 12).

4. Classifying Gestures:
a.Geture with and without Speech. Semiotic Types of Gestures: quotable gestures (emblems),
illustrators and regulators.
b. Communicative and Symptomatic Gestures. Emotions and their Manifestations in Nonverbal
Acts. Thursday, Nov 9, 10 am – 12 am, Main building, lecture hall 12 (Sali 12).

5. Lexicography of Gestures. Gestures and Phraseology: Types of Lexical Information and the
Structure of Lexical Entries in the New Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Gestures. Friday,
Nov 10, 10 am – 12 am, Main building, lecture hall 12 (Sali 12).

6. Postures and Gestures: The Semantics and Rhetoric of Nonverbal Signs: Body Ethics and
Nonverbal Etiquette. Friday, Nov 10, 2 pm – 4 pm, Main building, Auditorium XV.

7. The Comparative Semanitics and Pragmatics of the Two Semiotic Codes: Nonverbal Acts of
Touching and Verbs of Touching. Monday, Nov 13, 10 am - 12 am, Main building,
Auditorium XII.
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8. Towards the General Theory of Proxemics (human proxemic behavior in communication:
functions, lexicon, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics; some peculiarities of Russian kinesics
and proxemics: emblems and distance. Tuesday, Nov 14, 10 am – 12 am, Main building,
Lecture hall 12 (Sali 12).

9. a. Nonverbal Semiotics, Cognition, Culture and Gender Styles

(the foundations of gender nonverbal semiotics, or men and women in nonverbal
communication). Wednesday, Nov 15, 2 pm – 4 pm, Main building, lecture hall 12 (Sali 12).

10. Beautiful Movements and Their Natural Language Names. Thursday, Nov 16, 10 am – 12
am, Main building, lecture hall 12 (Sali 12).

COURSE FINAL EXAM: Friday, Nov 17 , 10 am – 2 pm, Main building, lecture hall 12
(Sali 12).

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND ABSTRACTS OF THE LECTURES

NONVERBAL SEMIOTICS / GRIGORI KREYDLIN

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Signs are conceived and circulate in a world whose recent evolution implies a change in the
nature of geopolitical and intercultural relations. The evolution in the means of exchange, in the
representations of the world and in the strategies devised by political, institutional, social and
cultural actors lead semioticians to appraise and update their concepts and analysis tools. The
necessity for clarification of the specific contributions of semiotics to world comprehension and to
political, economic, cultural, aesthetic and anthropological issues is incontestable today. Through
the involvement in critical reflection on different world events, scholars working in different areas
of semiotics contribute to the process of clarifying issues arising from this reflection and take part in
the vital contemporary debate: how world cultures and the related sign systems can be made more
intelligible to each other within the framework of their own differences.
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I dare to suppose that the most considerable transformation in science that can be expected in
the 21st century is a change of the paradigm. This change is determined in many ways by the
converging views about the nature of thinking, the conditions and the content of communicative
processes. Nowadays many scholars are shifting gradually to the spirit and style of multidisciplinary
approach. The multidisciplinary thinking and multidimensional system of knowledge are bringing
substantial changes into all facets of life including semiotics, linguistics and general theory of
communication. Although the dominating concept in semiotic methodology is still reductionism,
the time has come for musing over perspectives of a really multidisciplinary and multi-channel
approach to discourse.
Human interaction in a communication process represents both a highly interesting topic for
scientific study and a challenge to any cognitive and semiotic scholar. Anyone who wants to
explore the process as a whole or to study some aspects of it from the very first must realize that
people engaged in conversation use as a rule not one but many sign systems simultaneously. Of
course, spoken utterances are given a sort of a privileged status in the hierarchy of attention, and
communication participants virtually always treat them as if deliberately meant. Nonetheless,
various aspects of individual's speech manner, appearance and nonverbal behavior, play also a
crucial role in an interactive process.
In one of the famous letters to his son (dated 4th of October, 1746), Sir Earl Chesterfield
advised him to make every effort to acquire "the real knowledge of people", and, for this, "not just
look at people but closely observe them". To observe closely implies not only to try to distinguish
all the details of the disclosing picture by taking a good look, but also to try to understand people
and their behavior. The knowledge of people, which the great English essayist and philosopher
talked about, and the understanding of human thoughts and deeds presupposes inter alia correct
interpretation of all sorts of nonverbal sign information in the communicative act.
Any person of any ethnos, race or culture is a thinking, feeling, and willing organism
distinguished from others and from objects in her/his ambience. Apart from knowledge, humans
experience relationships, sensations and affections, and create responses and reactions to them.
Humans are linked together in their relationships in space and time in complicated interdependence
and organize their verbal and non-verbal messages in definite ways to deal with anything in the
environment. The core subject I shall discuss in the course of my lectures is nonverbal human
communication (although I shall often consider it together with the verbal one) and the structure of
new sciences studying different aspects of the field. I want to talk about what happens when people
interact with others, when they express ideas or feelings nonverbally or, both, verbally and
nonverbally, what it means to express meanings nonverbally, what individuals really do then and
how they behave. Nowadays, the high degree of attention to different problems of oral
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communication is bound up with a constantly increasing scientific interest to paralinguistic, kinetic,
visual, tactile, spatial, gustatory, and other nonverbal semiotic units. These units are regarded as
elements belonging to separate subsystems of a system of nonverbal signs and to diverse semiotic
models of nonverbal behavior in general.
In lecturing I shall deal mainly with nonverbal interactive skills in people's oral
communication and describe morphology, syntax, and pragmatics of nonverbal semiotic units of
different types as well as their behavior in some communicative and social contexts. I shall dwell
upon the role of nonverbal researches in determining mechanisms and constructing models of oral
text production and comprehension and make some suggestions for today and future nonverbal
semiotic researches.
In 1927, Edward Sapir wrote, "we respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one
might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known
by none, and understood by all" (Sapir, E. The unconscious pattering of behavior in society //
E.S. Dummer (ed.) The unconscious: A symposium. New York: Knopf, 1927 (reprinted in
D.G. Mandelbaum, ed., Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture and personality.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963).
But I myself do not believe in the universality of meaningful gestures and of emotional
expressions. I believe that nonverbal signs of the given culture are largely incomprehensible to
individuals belonging to other cultures. To put it otherwise, I argue that each culture and most
country areas have their own "mute pictures". The world famous comedian Ch. Chaplin said once:
"Let me see how you are gesticulating and moving and I shall immediately tell you where you were
born". And it is not accidental that British Air company (BBA) used to warn the passengers: "Be
careful. Your gesticulation may bring you into unpleasant and ambiguous situations". You may kiss
your partner or shake hands with somebody in greeting; you may touch one's hand while speaking
or come closer to the person with a smile on your lips or with a frown on your forehead – virtually
every nonverbal sign acquire the unique meaning in different parts of the world. And even tiny
peculiarities in forms and meanings of gestures should be fixed in gesture dictionaries or/and
gesture grammars. The primary attention in my lectures will be given to my native Russian culture
and the favorite Russian nonverbal signs and modes of communicative behavior. But I shall not
confine myself to the Russian culture exclusively: I will seek for parallels, analogies and
discrepancies among different cultures in nonverbal systems and semiotic models.
Summing up, in my lectures I want to initiate the audience into the new complex science
discipline that has recently been called "Nonverbal Semiotics". I am going to discuss its main
concepts and terminology, as well as some theoretical and practical issues and approaches set
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within this field of knowledge. And I shall speak, of course, also about those scholars, whose
guidelines and ideas helped forward this science.
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ABSTRACT OF LECTURE 1

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AND NONVERBAL SEMIOTICS AS A

COMPLEX DISCIPLINE (BRANCHES, SUBSYSTEMS, PROBLEMS).
PARALINGUISTICS

As we all know, people engaged in conversation use not one but several sign systems
simultaneously. Of course, spoken utterances are given a privileged, or favored, status in the
hierarchy of attention and they are almost always regarded as if deliberately meant. However,
various aspects of nonverbal behavior, e.g. what kinds of sounds people pronounce and why, how
they stand or sit, how they orient themselves, what do they indicate in gesturing, the manner in
which they alter their postures, and the like, play also a crucial role in human interaction. Human
communication as such results from and is a composite of all the specific sign systems as they occur
in the total cultural complex.
There are three central questions on which I will address myself in this lecture.
(1) What is nonverbal semiotics and what scientific disciplines are included in it? (2) What
are the aims, tasks, structure, contents, and theoretical and practical significance of these constituent
sections of nonverbal semiotics? (3) What are paralanguage and paralinguistics, the science
regarded as one of two kernel sections of nonverbal semiotics.
With the development of techniques of linguistic analysis, it became possible to include
some extra-linguistic phonetic -- noises, vocalizations, voice and tone qualities, some accentual and
intonation characteristics -- phenomena in the study of oral communication. Paralanguage
embraces all these and some other units, categories, events and activities resulting in the
identification of individuals as members of societal group and as persons of a certain sex, age, state
of health, mood, position in a group, bodily condition, location, etc. From the characteristics listed
are derived cultural identifications of gender, health image, body image, social status, mode, etc.
Paralinguistics is the science the main object of which is paralanguage. The propositions,
ideas, methodology, devices and working instruments of the science are discussed.
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ABSTRACT OF LECTURE II

THE SEMIOTICS OF VOICE: VOICE IN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

The analysis of speech activity and communication implies that it results in not only an
answer to the question "What is said?" but also to the question "How is it said?" Voice, voice
features and means of their expression in written texts of various genres and types influence
communicative interaction and its interpretation. Semiotic and linguistic investigations of the
concept 'voice' and the polysemic Russian words OLOS 'voice' and TON 'tone' are discussed.
The lecture goes into explication of meanings of the word and reveals important semiotic
oppositions among different types of voices such as male and female, adult and childish, speech and
musical, proximal and dismal, individual and social, universal and culture-specific voices.
The correspondence between emotions and voice characteristics as well as several sign processes, in
which voice and its features are of crucial significance, are described. In the end of the lecture, I
shall consider some cultural connotations that determine either syntactic behavior of the Russian
language units or vocal peculiarities of communication acts in general.
***

MEANINGS OF THE RUSSIAN WORD GOLOS 'VOICE'

(The updated and improved semantic description)

Speech voices:
1. GOLOS 1 (Voice 1) = 'the sound or sounds appeared in result of vocal chords' vibration and
uttered through the mouth of human beings or animals (or through the mouth-like cavity of
some living creatures, esp. birds).
Examples: (а) I could not hear the girl's voice. (b) We like his gentle voice.
2. GOLOS 2 (Voice 2) = 'the organ of the production of such sounds'.
Examples: (а) I have felt at once that Kate had a voice weak from illness. (b) He should not
tense his voice.
3. GOLOS 3 (Voice 3) = 'the faculty of uttering sounds through the mouth by the controlled
expansion of air'.
Examples: (а) He has lost his voice. (b) I gave four lectures today and my voice has gone
hoarse.
Designation of a person:
4. GOLOS 4 (Voice 4) = 'the individual possessing the voice 2 or the voice 3'.
Example: Детский GOLOS вдруг спросил: "Это всё мне?" lit. The childish voice has
asked suddenly: "Is this all for me?"
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5. GOLOS 5 (Voice 5) = 'the creative personality in his/her making and evolution'.
Example: Dostoevsky had the voice of his own.
Mental meanings:
6. GOLOS 6 (Voice 6)= 'the expressed person's opinion, judgment, desire or will on one or another
topical issue'.
Examples: (а) -- The doctor advises me to go abroad. What do you think about it?
-- What can I say? I really think that in this case his voice is much more important than mine. (б) At future
elections the voice of the Caucasians will become deciding.
7. GOLOS 7 (Voice 7) = 'the right of a person to present and receive consideration of his/her opinion
or desire in settling issues at state or public institutions'.
Example: Every senator has only one voice.
Cultural meaning:
8. GOLOS 8 (Voice 8) = 'the qualification or evaluation of creative abilities, activity, style, trends,
and isolated works of art'.
Example: Обретают GOLOS-а и силу новые театральные направления (из рецензии) -- lit.
New theatrical trends are acquiring voices and force (from review).
Intentional meaning:
9. GOLOS 9 (Voice 9) = 'the inner command, the person's drives to some actions'.
Example: the voice of conscience; the voice of reason.
"Natural" meaning:
10. GOLOS 10 (Voice 10) = 'the sounds accompanying the phenomenon of nature or the work
of machinery '.
Examples: (а) I was standing on the shore and was listening the voice of breaking waves. (б) Those
were the voices of our jet airplanes.
Musical meanings:
11. GOLOS 11 (Voice 11) = 'the sounds of singing'.
Examples: (а) Then the children sang in clear ringing voices. (б) In the weak voice of an old
lady she drawled in a sing-sang voice (G. Gazdanov, Night roads).
12. GOLOS 12 (Voice 12) = 'the faculty to singing'.
Example: The concert had to be postponed: the singer had lost his voice.
13. GOLOS 13 (Voice 13) = 'one of the parts of musical composition or vocal part in a vocal
ensemble'.
Example: a score for piano and voice.
14. GOLOS 14 (устар.) (Voice 14, outdated) = 'tune, melody'.
Example: GOLOS этой песни был мне знаком (А. Пушкин) -- lit. The voice of the song was
familiar to me.
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MEANINGS OF THE RUSSIAN WORD TON 'TONE'
(The updated and improved semantic description)

Cultural meanings:
1. TON 1 (Tone 1) ‘the isolated sound, color, hue, or tinge as the smallest unit of the aesthetic space’
Example: Some tones on his painting were too harsh.
2. TON 2 (Tone 2) = ‘the integral, holistic quality of a piece of art (i.e. the color itself, the sound
itself, etc.) expressing the emotional mood from its perception’.
Examples: (a) Tone is a result of influence of a color upon a person (V. Kandinsky); (b) The sky
and the sea got painted into dark tones.
3. TON 3 (Tone 3) = ‘the style of writing or the manner of creative works’.
Example: The false tone of his works ensues from erroneous comprehension of the gist of the matter
(G. Pomerants).
4. TON 4 (Tone 4) = ‘the life style or the general characteristics of live events’
Example: The rules of good and bad forms of behavior (lit. The rules of good tone.)
5. TON 5 (Tone 5) = ‘the spontaneous, subconscious and uncontrolled principle of life’
Example: The fundamental tone of Orthodoxy (E. Knyazev).
Musical meanings:
6. TON 6 (Tone 6) = ‘The interval consisting of two half-tones’.
Example: a quarter of tone; quartertone music; fundamental tone.
7. TON 7 (Tone 7) = X has the tone 7 = 'capacity of a musical instrument Х to produce tone 1'.
Examples: (a) There was a piano with a pleasant but not a very clean tone. (b) The violin had an excellent
tone.
Technical meanings:
8. TON 8 (Tone 8) = 'the typical sound produced by some organs (e.g. heart, lungs, bowels) of a
human body at their action '.
Example: The tone in the left lappet was dull.
Speech meanings:
9. TON 9 (Tone 9) = 'the degree of a pitch of the voice sounding at the moment of speech'.
Example: (а) She was talking with her daughter in a level tone.
10. TON 10 (Tone 10) = 'the way of vocal expression (= the style or the manner of speech) of the
speaker's emotions, his attitude towards the addressee or the subject of the speech'.
Examples: (a) His preaching tone of voice was disagreeable to me. (b) "That's all nonsense!" – he
was speaking in tone of an expert (Y. Krelin). (c) "Restrain the tone of your voice" – I said angrily.
11. TON 11 (Tone 11) = 'the style of an oral or written speech' .
Examples: (a) I tried to keep up the adopted tone to the best of my abilities (M. Chulaki). (b) The
general style (lit. tone) of his poems.
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ABSTRACT OF LECTURE III

BODY LANGUAGE AND MODERN KINESICS AS THE SCIENCE OF

GESTURES
(People, Ideas, Units, Systems, Approaches)

The main sign system that parallels natural language in oral communication is body
language. Recent researches have clearly demonstrated the importance and ubiquity of body
language system in interpersonal encounters, and many studies have shown cross-cultural
similarities and differences in body language communication. Nonverbal cues such as manual
gesture units, meaningful body postures and movements, facial expressions, glances and tactile
contacts, have been found to play the role of paramount importance in human interaction. These
units can replace words, word combinations and utterances or be in conjunction with verbal
messages in the communication process, and all types of gestures (as I shall call them for brevity)
can reinforce, elaborate or contradict the verbal communication.
It is easy to demonstrate that participants of the dialogue mutually regulate one another in
regard to different aspects of body behavior. And it is evident that manual and leg gestures,
postures, facial expressions, body movements and manners have both semiotic and cultural
significance.
When Ferdinand in Shakespeare's "Tempest" tells Miranda: "Here is my hand" and she
replies: "And mine, with my heart in it", we understand clearly that these are not two pathologists
who are talking and understand what the persons are talking about. When the first President of
Russia Boris Eltsin urged Russians: "Let us raise from the knees, we shall never more stand on the
knees" he apparently assumed that standing-on-knees-posture has the meaning that all Russians
would comprehend identically. Similarly, when George Herbert observed: "Many kiss a hand they
wish cut off" he clearly took for granted that there was a contradiction between the two actions and
presumed that the gesture hand kissing had meaning, which he considered self-explanatory. The
same applies to the supposed "contradiction" between, for instance, smiles and tears ("Reproof on
her lip and a smile in her eyes" – these are the words of Samuel Lover ("Rory O' More".)
The body language (BL) is the other main nonverbal sign system in oral communication of
any type, style or genre. It often acts with the natural language augmenting, underlying and
modifying the meanings of messages communicated by the corresponding linguistic rules. But it
can also get along without speech. When I say that BL is a system I imply that (1) its units have
their own history of birth, development and even death; (2) BL has a unique structure, i.e. set of
elements and relationships between them, formed mostly in the course of BL evolution; (3) BL has
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its own and unique grammar and vocabulary organized in an ordered and well-structured way;
(4) BL units can be decomposed and represented through more simple (up to the primitive)
semantic or/and morphological elements, and (5) it is interpreted and for the most part "translated"
into the natural language counterparts. The elements of BL include (a) gestures proper, (b) mimics,
or facial expressions, (c) postures, (d) body movements with symbolic (in Pierce's terms) meaning
and (e) complex, verbal-nonverbal forms, manners.
Here are just only some examples of gestures: (a) Japanese bows are not similar to Chinese
bows, e.g. Chinese bow kou-tou does not look like Japanese bow futserei); (b) when one wants to
learn what the gesture "zero" (or "OK", or "ring" as it is termed some time) means, one must know
the nationality of the gesturer, where she or he was born, or where she/he lives, etc.; (c) Western
cultures treat hands as semantically equal, and that is quite opposite to what Islamic countries think.
Imagine that you come to Indonesia or Malasia. There you must never give money, food or any gift
by the left hand because Islamic culture considers the left hand to be a dirty one and calls it "toilet"
or "evil".
In Ghana, many people consider pointing by the left hand to be a taboo. The Japanese
scholar Sotaro Kita has recently investigated consequences of this taboo on the Ghanaian
communication practice by observing gestures that were produced during naturalistic situations of
giving route directions. First, there is a politeness convention to place the left hand on the lower
back, as if to hide it from the interlocutor. Second, as a consequence of left-hand suppression, right-
handed pointing may involve an anatomically staining position when indicating a leftward direction
across the body. Third, pointing is sometimes performed with both hands together, which does not
violate the taboo. But despite the taboo, left-handed pointing is not suppressed fully. The examples
of such cases will be given in the lecture.
Different cultures have different speech or sound accompaniment while gesticulating. There
is the Russian gesture that can be "translated" into English as "throwing sharply the right hand (for
right-handers) up to down". Russians usually accompany the movement with the words "Ах, черт"
lit. 'Oh, devil; shit'. Latin Americans also use the similar body form but with absolutely unlike
speech expressions (they do it, naturally, in Spanish).
It is generally assumed that gesture units such as frowns, hugs, kisses and lots of other forms
of bodily behavior codify something. But what exactly do they codify? Do they have the same
meaning in different contexts and life situations? And if their meaning varies, is there an invariant
of all types of communicative usage? For example, does raising the hand in class during lectures
mean the same as raising the hand while voting? Or, does a greeting waving a hand that Russians
like so much represent the same as Russian parting waving? Or, does Slavic greeting kiss mean the
same as English or French, etc. kisses? In general, does the cognitive interpretation of a body sign
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unit depend to some extent upon some distinct and describable physical features and properties of
the unit? Presumably, kissing the hand differs from kissing somebody's cheek, but does each of
these sign forms of behavior have constant meanings?
In the lecture I shall answer these and some other questions concerning gestures of different
types and forms. I shall trace the history of kinesics and speak about those scholars who contributed
much to the development of kinesics. Besides, I shall discuss some of crucial ideas and researches
that provided the progress of the science.
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ABSTRACT OF LECTURE IV

CLASSIFYING GESTURES
(Semiotic, Morphological, Functional, Syntactic And Semantic Types Of Gestures)

Gesture is a semiotic medium of expression that human beings have at their disposal, which
they can use for a wide range of purposes. What forms of gesture are created and used depends on
the circumstances of use, the person's specific communicative goals and what other modes of
expression are also available. In the lecture I want to show that:
(1) Recognizable, stereotype and stable gesture forms do have meaning. Gestures can
convey meaning of the same kind as those encoded in natural languages. The semantics of
nonverbal communication presents just the same problems and requires similar methodology as the
semantics of natural languages.
(2) Gestures are opposed to physiological movements, which are not signs. One thing is to
scratch the back of the head when it is itching and quite another one is to express ideas of ignorance
or perplexity. In the first case a person performs the physiological action, and in the second case
he/she performs the semiotic action, i.e. gesture. Purely physiological activities by definition do not
belong to body language. Of course, the concept of gesture is not sharply bounded. Physiological
movements and semiotic gesture actions vary in the degree to which they partake of the features of
gesturality. Imagine that I am drinking coffee with you. I may take a long time to finish because I
do not want the conversation to finish but in lingering I am not engaging in gesture. On the other
hand, you, impatient to leave, finally drain your cup with a flourish – titling your head back further
than necessary, slamming your cup down on the saucer – and all this is an unmistakable indication
of your wish to go off. In this situation we may say that the act of drinking coffee had been made
over into a gesture.
(3) Visual representation of meaning is an integral part of everyday oral talk. That implies
that as American psychologist Prof. A. Kendon says, "Even within the context of situations where
talk is the featured mode for the expression of thought, such thought is not only linguistically
formed, but also, in an important way organized in image".
(4) Gestures are iconic in their nature but they may become symbols via the act of
symbolization. The latter exploits parallelism between meaning and form, moving from concrete
representation towards abstract meanings through the process of visual metaphor. Between iconic
and non-iconic gestures lies a large area of overlap.
The different classification schemes that have been offered in literature on nonverbal
semiotics reflect the different ways in which gesture has been viewed as a form of expression or
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communication. Gestures can be classified according to many criteria, such as whether they are
voluntary or involuntary; natural or conventional; whether they are indexes, icons or symbols;
whether they have literal or metaphorical significance; how they are linked to speech; according to
their semantic domain, e.g. gestures can be divided into those that are 'objective', serving to refer to
something in the real world, and those that are 'subjective', serving to express gesturer's state of
mind or soul. Gestures can be also classified in accordance with their contribution to the
propositional content of discourse, whether the serve in some way to punctuate, structure or
organize the discourse, or indicate the type of discourse that is being engaged in; and whether they
play a primary role in the interaction process, as in salutation, as a regulator in the process of turn-
taking in conversation, and the like. Not surprisingly, a single, unified classification scheme does
not exist, since so many various dimensions are possible. All the non-verbal elements are first
divided into several sets and subsets, such as communicative units, emotional units, deictic and
etiquette gestures. Each of the classes is then classified into smaller groups of entries. Terms of the
entries are related in meaning, style or part of body playing the most active role in gesticulation.
The classes of nonverbal semiotic units obtained are then put in concordance with semantic types of
the natural language idiomatic units.
Among manifold types of gestures that take part in the human interaction processes,
emblematic gestures (or emblems, or quotable gestures) are of the paramount importance. By
emblems I imply nonverbal body signs of different forms and structures, which have autonomous
and distinct lexical meaning and which are capable to codify and communicate it irrespective of
verbal context.
The pivotal role of explanatory nonverbal dictionaries and of powerful semantic language
for the description and semantic classification of emblems is discussed. The semantic classification
designed relies both on (the types of) lexical meanings, which emblems can encode, as well as on
cognitive functions, which they fulfill in different interpersonal and social discourses.
The two categories of meaningful gestures, communicative and symptomatic emblems, are
considered the most significant from the semiotic point of view. Examples drawn from
lexicographic descriptions of Russian emblems are presented to illustrate some fundamental
discrepancies between the two kinds of gestures.
Three main semantic subclasses of communicative emblems are singled out; these are
deictic, etiquette and communicatively neutral emblems. Symptomatic emblems constitute a more
homogeneous semantic domain. Examples and synoptic lexicographic descriptions of all these types
of emblems will be given.
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ABSTRACT OF LECTURE V

LEXICOGRAPHY OF GESTURES
(Gestures And Phraseology: Types Of Lexical Information And The Structure Of Lexical
Entries In The New Explanatory Dictionary Of Russian Gestures)

In order to fix all or at least basic body language units that one might call "the semantic core
of body languages", as well as to describe their usage in a communicative process, my students and
me have worked out and constructed some entirely new types of dictionaries. The enterprise has
been highly appreciated by George Soros foundation "Open Society" and got two first prizes at two
competitions of International scholar projects.
The project has been launched in 1996 under the title "Comparative cross-cultural
dictionaries of gestures, postures, facial expressions, and body movements". Nowadays we are
making data-systems and dictionaries of gestures and natural language idiomatic units that are
etymologically or semantically based on gestures, i.e. semantically related to them. All the
lexicographic products are based on huge corpora of Russian texts and are of explanatory type.
They hold units, which all have socially shared meanings and are shaped according to socially
shared conventions.
The first step we have undertaken was compiling the Dictionary of Russian <emblematic>
Gestures (DRG). The DRG is original both in the lexical stock and types of information that are
assigned to entry units. The stock includes about 200 major Russian emblems that occur in any sort
of oral text, be it an ordinary or business talk, or etiquette formulas. All the lexical information
within a dictionary entry is distributed into 17 areas, or so called zones; e.g. physical representation,
typical nomination, syntactical zone, semantic definitions, stylistic specifications, examples of
usage, and many others.
The DRG has been devised for the formalized lexicographic description of any type of
emblems. Its essential properties are: (1) voluntary orientation on the Meaning-Text Model theory
as a general framework for descriptions of emblems; (2) availability of the thoroughly described
semantic description based on the semantic meta-language, which serves a trustworthy foundation
for explanation of meaning; (3) large lexical stock represented in the Dictionary; (4) explicitness
and systematic organization of the information in the Dictionary entries, and some others.
The pivotal role of explanatory nonverbal dictionaries and of powerful semantic language
for the description and semantic classification of nonverbal sign units is discussed. The semantic
 16
classification designed relies both on (the types of) lexical meanings, which emblems can encode,
as well as on cognitive functions, which they fulfill in different interpersonal and social discourses.
The lexicographic mode of exposition reflects the whole repertoire of semiotic non-verbal
behavior - categories, origins, usage and coding. The user of the DRG can get all the necessary and
sufficient information about gestures as well as learn fundamental properties of body motion in its
relationships with speech and ordinary life situations. However, I regard the DRG not only as a
complete guidebook to the Russian body talk but also as a textbook on fundamentals of this
significant part of the language. The fact that many kinetic units have evolved into frequently used
idiomatic expressions argues for this view.
In my humble opinion, it is the first dictionary of gestures based fundamentally on the
general linguistic and semiotic theories, and it presents all the information concerning gestures and
their discourse behavior in complete, explicit, and precise fashion. We deliberately oriented the
DRG both to ordinary readers for their practical purposes and to students. That is why we have tried
to seek for a compromise between scientific mode of exposition and a style suitable for study in a
class or self-study. This longed-for flexibility will probably make the DRG effective both for
linguists and non-linguists.
The organization and the structure of the DRG allow for carrying out a comparative analysis
of the two semantic systems - Body Russian and Russian phraseology. The special idiomatic, or
phraseological zones are foreseen that hold an extensive portion of information and have contents
flexible enough to relate Russian emblematic hand, leg, head, etc. gestures, facial expressions and
postures to those Russian idiomatic expressions, which are semantically equivalent or concomitant
to them.
The core of the lecture constitutes some observations and statements concerning the most
important aspects of Russian emblematic gestures and the corresponding idiomatic expressions that
are called gesture phraseology. Special attention is paid to correlations in semantic features of both
types of the nonverbal and verbal lexemes, to relevant social parameters -- social components of
meanings -- gender and age variation, style, presence/absence of other people in an actual
communication act, etc.), and to syntactic behavior of these units in oral discourse.
The basic unit of the DRG is a single Gesture Lexeme or a single Gesture Phraseme -- one
word or phraseological unit taken in one separate sense. A dictionary entry for these units is a triplet
<name, image, thesaurus-classification point>. A set of entries for gestures, which are sufficiently
close in meaning and are identical in form, is subsumed within one Vocable.
A regular dictionary entry is divided into the following zones: 1. Morphological
information; 2. Stylistic specification; 3. Physical Description; 4. Extensions; 5. Definition;
6. Commentaries; 7. Government Pattern; 8. Conditions of Usage; 9. One-word Characteristics <of
 17
semantics of a gesture>; 10. Other Nominations; 11. Gesture Accompaniment; 12. Speech and
Sound Accompaniment; 13. Gesture Analogues; 14. Speech Analogues; 15. Phraseology; 16. Types
of Encyclopedic and Etymological Information; 17. Illustrations.

***

A Dictionary Entry From The Dictionary Of Russian Gestures Adapted For An English
Reader (Example)

CHESAT' V ZATYLKE /'to scratch the head', imperf./

part of body: HAND
active organ: FINGERS/PALM
passive organ: HEAD
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION:
The person is scratching the back of his head with his fingers or palm.
EXTENSIONS:
Extensions are possible: pen, pencil, thin twig, and the like
DEFINITION:
X cheshet v zatylke = 'Having received a new piece of information that a gesturer (X) takes
as concerning himself and inducing him to some actions, X is experiencing difficulties in the
comprehending the situation or in choosing plans for the future actions'.
COMMENTARY:
Head is (apart from anything else) an organ of the person's intellectual life, a symbolic place
where our thoughts are present and where they carry out their work. Scratching the back of his head
X is acting the way as if he is trying to set his thoughts in motion and to produce intellectual efforts.
CONDITIONS OF USAGE:
This gesture is male chiefly. It is rarely used by children and almost never by women.
ONE-WORD CHARACTERISTICS:
zameshatel'stvo 'embarassment / confusion'
OTHER NOMINATIONS:
[In popular speech] poskresti v zatylke (lit. 'to scrape the back of the head'). This expression
is used only in the form of past tense, perfective aspect: On poskrjob v zatylke 'He has scraped the
back of his head'.
GESTURE ACCOMPANIMENT:
 18
The gesture is generally escorted by the facial expressions, which tend to accompany the
feelings of perplexity or surprise, e.g. "podnjatie brovi" ('brow lifting') or "nahmurivanie brovej"
('frowning the brows'), "podzhatie gub" ('pursing the lips'), and the like.
SPEECH AND SOUND ACCOMPANIMENT:
N-da (m-da); hm.
PHRASEOLOGY:
Chesat' v zatylke means 'not to do things one should do'. (Compare Russian "chesat' jazyk
(jazyki, jazykom) 1" -- English to wag the tongue, to natter = 'to chatter instead of doing something
useful or important'.)
The definitions of idiomatic expressions "chesat' v zatylke" and "chesat' jazyk" reflect
dogmatic principles of the natural (human) logic - "to think is a useless thing, a kind of idleness"
and "to talk is not to do". The link between the meaning of the entry gesture and the meaning of the
phraseological unit is of a connotative nature.
 19
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE VI

POSTURES AND GESTURES

(The Semantics And Rhetoric Of Nonverbal Signs: Body Ethics And Nonverbal
Etiquette)

Studies on semiotics of postures and postural behavior have become significant and topical
for their scarcity. The scholars working in the field of kinesics have only recently begun to describe
these nonverbal sign means of expression systematically and with the necessary accuracy -- despite
the obvious fact that the existence of a person in the real world is conditioned largely by the
attention he gives to postures and to various body actions he performs. It is a well-known fact the
natural language reflects estimations and views on body stance. It provides special tools for
statements about body orientation and ethical motivation of physical body actions and gestures and
conveys the wide range of special propositional attitudes that control a normal interactive
communication. Much less is known that various meanings and ideas of social and psychological
character – ethical, moral, and esthetical – are communicated through postures themselves.
The main purpose of my talk today is to discuss some communicative and rhetorical aspects
of gestures proper and postures. I use the word posture here as designating a meaningful and
socially significant nonverbal sign. The term posture is opposed to pose, or word combination body
position, which signify, by definition, biological activities, stances, or bodily morphological forms
rather than gestures. Poses are regarded here as conditioned modes of static body placement in
physical environment and as natural configurations of body that are present in any situation. A
person does not make a pose; her/she has a pose. People have poses, which are anthropologically
natural to them, and they are capable to modify poses by their own efforts. Postures are, on the
contrary, conventional symbolic signs that humans take in order to express different ideas and
attitudes.
I shall consider and discuss a peculiar corporeal ethics of communicative interaction as it is
expressed in the core units of the postural system. In the lecture I am going to speak of relationship
between ethics and etiquette. The evaluation of degree of freedom which one body has towards
another, the estimates 'decent' and 'indecent' that pertain to postures and to their verbal nominations,
the controversial issues what postures are ethically proper and what are improper in the given
communicative situation, what is pragmatics of different body stance elements – all these problems
are put and discussed in the lecture.
The Russian vocabulary used in reference to gesture and posture gives an idea of its
communicative variety. For example, standing lazily and standing at attention, sitting in a sprawl,
stretching out, leaning, reposing, lounging, crouching, etc. – these items do not close out the whole
 20
repertoire of typical Russian postures. But there are several basic and favorite Russian gestures and
postures, which are common to all within a particular community or a group. Some issues
concerning the rules of postural displays, such as the coordinating relationship of posture, gesture
and facial expression, postures of status and rank, the significance of Russian postures being
markers of individual's emotions, the language names for postures and some other questions are
considered as well.
One of the neglected aspects of nonverbal semiotics is a typology of possible evaluations of
nonverbal signs – typology, which would be based on various kinetic parameters. In the Russian
culture, for example, some ethically marked gestures and postures are tailored for a particular
addressee in the conversation.
 21
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE VII

The Comparative Semantics And Pragmatics Of The Two Semiotic

Codes: Nonverbal Acts Of Touching And Verbs Of Touching.

Nonverbal acts of touching are highly important from babyhood, and at least at the adult level they are
not simply expressions of physiological functions; they are part of a symbol sign system. As a form of
meaningful behavior, touching is one of basic nonverbal means by which people can influence others,
establish and maintain relationships, communicate feelings, wishes, and thoughts. I shall try to illustrate
this statement by description of various types of Russian touching units and of some natural language
expressions denoting semiotic body contacts of different sorts
The sphere of touch is formed with communicative situations that are various in characters and spread
around from ritual and magic to everyday situations. According to basic domain of usage all acts of
communicative touching are divided by myself into cultural, or institutionalized, and social, or everyday,
acts (though I confess that this functional division is rather conditional because of real fuzziness of the
frontier between these acts.)
Cultural touches are subdivided then into several types, or categories; each type has its own domain of
application, conditions of proper use, assignment and meaning. Each cultural touch conveys the idea of
accessibility to some areas: to our body, to our mind, to our emotions. The operation of some types of
cultural touching does not finish when the hand or some other active part of a human body is removed from
the other person's body. Most cultural touches and models of touching activities are lengthy extended
nonverbal events.
As to an everyday touch, it can communicate emotional and relational messages to the addressee of the
gesture; it can express friendship, aid, comfort, or interest and convey intimate affection, particularly sexual
desire. Everyday touches are related to social and psychological adjustments among people. They often
occur in interactive encounters between communicatively or socially unequal partners such as
teacher/student, doctor/patient, executive/subordinate, etc. Normally, in the Russian culture the major
social status allegedly gives the person "the right of the first touching". Higher-status persons are more
likely to take the hand of the other or tap the other on the shoulder. In Russia, if a lower-ranking individual
is the first who touches his partner his action, beyond specially stipulated and conventional situations or
certain verbal and nonverbal acts, he/she is usually valued as violating the laws and rules of subordination,
and, from the ethical point of view, is regarded as abnormal or indecent behavior.
Most types and forms of everyday touches have several possible interpretations in contexts. It indicates
that many everyday touches have a number of meanings, which must be uncovered, explored, and
presented in a lexicographic format. In the lecture I am going to determine the functions and meanings of
 22
some basic tactile units and patterns of touching behavior. I shall focus mainly on Russian social tactile acts
and their representations in the Russian language. The relationships between Russian gestures of touching
and their speech counterparts, specifically, verbs of touching, are discussed. Though my purpose is to
compare verbal and nonverbal conceptualizations of touching activity within the two internal semiotic
systems, the universality of statements I want to make, will, as I hope, become evident. The reason for this
conclusion is the general semantic platform, that is the semantic language, which lies in the foundation of
the proposed typology. I argue that this platform is quite a sound and reliable one.
Russian everyday touch can communicate emotional and relational messages to the addressee of the
gesture. It can express friendship, aid, comfort or interest and convey intimate affection to the addressee,
particularly, sexual desire. Besides, everyday touch can reflect the social position or the personal status.
Touch instances often occur in interactive encounters between communicatively or socially unequal
partners, such as teacher/student, doctor/patient, executive/subordinate, etc. Normally, in the Russian
culture the major social status allegedly gives the person "the right of the first touching". Higher-status
persons are more likely to take the hand of the other or tap the other on the shoulder. If a lower-ranking
individual is the first who touches his partner and is beyond specially stipulated and conventional situations
or certain verbal and nonverbal acts, he/she is estimated as violating the laws and rules of subordination
and from the ethical point of view such behavior is regarded as abnormal or indecent.
As a testimony to the fundamental role of touch and its salience in human communication, the
language of touch penetrates the speech. The language units, the semantics of which includes reference to
nonverbal acts of touching, are verbs and verbal collocations. For verbs of <proper> touch, the focus of
attention is the act of touching itself; many of these words (though not all!) do not presuppose any
subsequent movement after the touch at all. But for many complex actions, the touch constitutes though
important but only preliminary, not basic phase of the action. In order to run the hand over a material
object, to palm or to feel it, one has to come in contact with the object first and only then make a certain
movement. The basic proposition in the semantic description of such sign movements and of the
corresponding verbs is not coming in contact. It presents the realization of the subject's wish to find out
some properties of the object examined. The verbal units describing these actions are not real verbs of
touch for the proposition expressing 'touch' does not have a status of single or basic assertion in their
semantic representations. The verbs гладить 'to palm, to stroke, imperf.', щупать 'to palp, to feel, imperf.',
or тереть 'to chafe, imperf.' taken in these meanings are not verbs of touch. I call them tactile verbs.
Some rules of culture-specific everyday tactile behavior and use of tactile verbs in different syntactic
contexts are formulated. Foe example, in many cultures, men have more privilege in touching behavior
than women. Russian men initiate touch when they are dating women. Other things being equal, this is a
man who takes the woman by the arm, puts his hand on her shoulder or waist, embraces or kisses her.
Models of touching behavior in status-bound interaction have some interesting characteristics.
 23
There are many possible modes of touch contact. Touching is usually performed by hand and its parts,
by arm, leg, or mouth (this is a morphological classification of acts of touch by active body parts).
Touching is usually done to the hand, arm, shoulder, head, knee, breast, etc. (this is a morphological
classification by passive body parts). And the nature of contact itself may be of several kinds as well
(this is a classification based on modes of touch – touching, patting, stroking, guiding, pinching, brushing,
grazing, shaking, hitting, holding, laying-on, kissing, embracing, palpating, tickling, grooming, and a great
many other kinds). Of all theoretical possibilities, relatively few are used in a particular culture as practical
gestures. Thus, in the Russian body language there are the following basic gestures towards people: patting
(head or back), slapping (face, bottom or hand), stroking (hair, head, face, knee, etc.), shaking hands,
kissing (anywhere), pinching cheek, holding (hand, arm, knee, etc.), kicking (bottom), embracing
(shoulder, waist, rarely: upper body), laying-on (hands), linking (arms), grooming (hair, face, body).
In the end, I envisage to discuss some types of touch, which are used as interaction signals in oral
discourse. One of them involves gestures of greetings and partings. The prevailing forms of Russian
greeting and parting gestures are: (1) hand-to-hand touches (handshake); (2) mouth-to-cheek (kiss);
(3) embraces (but not hugs!); (4) mouth-to-mouth touches (kisses, often together with embraces). But
Russian gestures of greetings can have additional elements of meaning. Thus, for the individual who has
acquired a new status, e.g. became adult, married; turned a chief, a school-director, etc., a gesture of
greeting is used sometimes to establish and confirm the new relationship between the persons and indicate
that the person acknowledges the partner's new status.
 24
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE VIII

Towards the General Theory of Proxemics

(Proxemic Behavior In Communication: Functions, Lexicon, Semantics, Syntax,
And Pragmatics)

Gestures are associated strongly with different types of spatial communicative, or proxemic
signs, such as physical and psychological distances, body orientation, shift of positions, etc. I want
to expose some "enigmatic" and culturally significant scenarios and to state some explicit rules of
interplay between elements of kinetic and proxemic sign units in oral communication.
Proxemics is a science of communicative space, that is a science of how a man views the
communicative space and its parts, dwells in it and uses it. The principal subject of proxemics is
nonverbal conceptualization and cultural organization of space, ways of people's perception and
usage of space during communication. In the lecture I shall focus primarily on nonverbal ways of
communicative space conceptualization in their correlation with verbal ones. I want to introduce
and discuss the theoretical adequacy and practical utility of some important notions, including the
new ones, which relate some nonverbal and verbal aspects of a dialogue.
American anthropologist, one of the pioneers of proxemics, Edward Hall (Hall 1968) has
singled out three minor goals of proxemics: (1) the study of structure of natural or specially
designed discourse situations; (2) the construction of typology of human communicative spaces;
(3) description of meanings and functions which characterize various proxemics aspects of a
discourse situation as well as verbal and nonverbal means of their manifestation. Modern proxemics
deals also with (4) coordination of verbal and nonverbal patterns of human dialogical behavior in
different communicative spaces, and (5) cultural and social functions and meanings of those spaces
and spatial objects that are directly related to a human being. In particular, it involves
(a) formulation and calculation of meanings attributed regularly to spaces depending on human
activities within these spaces, for example, forms of dwellings and human superstitions associated
with them and (b) conceptualization and codification of devices which are designed for coding the
elements of living environment.
Every nation pictures the spatial arrangement of being in a special projection that can be termed
national conceptualization of space. I shall put here only two examples that show cultural functions
of proxemic behavior and demonstrate salient cultural and social differences in national
conceptualization of space.
 25
(a) According to the beliefs of the peoples of Nanais1, described in Nanais legends and folk
tales, their shamans, while entering a battle with their enemies, never do it, so to say, through direct
bodily contact. They still live as they have been living far from each other, and only their souls
enter the fight (shaman’s souls always live outside their bodies, in some place inaccessible for
enemies, and they look like Russian wizards in that their souls are known to be kept in an egg, at the
point of the needle, inside a bird, etc.). Visually this situation expresses a long sleep of shamans.
Therefore the period of their battles with enemies continue many days and nights without a break
and this does not seem incredible. (b) In Gypsy culture during home feasts men and women usually
sit in different rooms. That explains why in Moscow in the most famous Gypsy restaurant "U Yara"
the tables in some rooms are separated with a passage way and women and children sit to the left
and men to the right side of the room.
The language collocations and phrases to rent a corner, to have one’s own corner, somebody’s
own corner, to make somebody stand in the corner, to hack around from one corner to another are
illustrative enough to demonstrate the value of notion "corner" in Russian everyday life. A person
usually wants to have a corner of his own, i.e. a separate place in a house, apartment, room and even
in the office. He/she has a favorite chair, table, clothes, car and similar objects, which he holds dear
to him and which he is ready to safeguard and protect from outer encroachment. The following
quotation translated from Russian that belongs to the world-famous Russian-American writer
Vladimir Nabokov can serve a good example of how a writer can depict the nature of the main
character of the novel via description of his/her nonverbal behavior: "In any room, even the most
comfortable and incredibly tiny one, there is an uninhibited corner. And it was this very corner that
Sleptzov chose to sit down" (V. Nabokov. Christmas).
Speaking on the general theory of proxemics it is necessary to introduce and discuss some
culturally, socially and communicatively important notions that form the basis of its competence.
These are notions and oppositions such as open/closed territory, personal/other people’s territory,
desirable/undesirable space, small/large density of space. Thus, larger and less restraint parts of
space are prerogatives of strong and rich individuals, while the poor and the weak usually possess
small, dense, uncomfortable, poorly guarded and protected spaces. This fact results in pragmatic
estimation of natural language phrases, such as: They have a large apartment; He has not a house,
but a whole palace. The notions of yard, kitchen, store-room, red corner of Russian izba and their
representations in different cultures and nations also belong to the field of proxemics as a science,
which study of nonverbal conceptualization and cultural organization of a communicative space,
e.g. "In the corner-like rooms in Hungarian peasant dwellings, which had salient corners, the place

1
Nanais is a small nation inhibiting the banks of the Amur River in Khabarovsk territory. Their mother tongue, nanais,
belongs to the Altaic language family (subgroup of southern or Manchu-Tungus languages.
 26
for the head of the family coincided with location of “red corner”. In the framework of this system,
spatial structure reinforces the authority of the family head and supports the traditional Hungarian
family structure. Reorganization of the space often reflects the establishment of new family bonds.
On the basis of Edward Hall`s major contribution to the study of proxemics, namely, the
delineation of four social distances (social, public, personal and intimate), the distinction between
physical and psychological distance is proposed. I argue that the relevant information about both
types of distances must be included into language and body language dictionaries provided that we
aim to obtain a systemic description of proxemics acts. The important kinetic variables and
parameters that constitute the rules of proxemic behavior are considered, and some peculiarities of
proxemic interaction of universal and of culture-specific character are indicated and accounted for.
The effects of personal spatial arrangements on a communication processes and on psychological
states, and vice versa, have certain semantic, communicative, and pragmatic consequences.
 27
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE IX

Nonverbal Semiotics, Cognition, Culture and Gender Styles:

(The Foundations Of Gender Nonverbal Semiotics, Or Men And Women In Nonverbal
Communication)

Among characteristics such as culture, nationality, race, age, social position, physical and
psychological conditions of the interlocutors, and interpersonal relationships, which determine in
many ways the actual dialog, gender and gender behavioral differences play a crucially important
role. By gender I understand socially and culturally loaded representation of sex, and gender
communication roles are gender-based social expectancies and modes of their realizations in verbal
and nonverbal semiotic interaction.
The problems of defining and distributing gender roles, as well as formulation and
rationalization of principles of people's interaction, have a great impact on human society
organization and communication. Initially, the gender roles seem to have been designated spatially,
that is, in accordance with the typical social place they were assigned by a given culture. For a
European woman such a place was her house, while a man was intended for the outer world. As a
result, women who used to spend plenty of time at home did not need much of such qualities as
ambition, aggressiveness, energy or enterprise. On the contrary, men had to struggle permanently
and violently for the place under the sun because their existence and existence of their families were
in constant danger.
Contemporary life and global social and cultural processes in the world have changed
significantly gender attributes of sexes and relations between sexes. Gender stereotypes, once seen
as stable and eternal, have been broken.
A wide range of studies indicates that today female and male semiotic interactive behavior
differ also in many ways. Many communicative prejudices and stereotypes are reviewed in the first
part of the lecture, which have a strong influence on dialog text production and comprehension of
different modes of human nonverbal semiotic behavior. However, I argue that gender nonverbal
dimension of an oral dialog is still left badly unexamined whereas it deserves much more attention.
As for the Russian (and Slavic culture in general) and the Russian body language material, it did not
come in view of specialists in semiotics and linguistics whatever. The lecture material can be
regarded as an attempt to single out and describe some universal and culturally specific gender
nonverbal stereotypes.
The main thesis I want to bring out and to discuss is the following: describing
communicative behavior one should speak not about nonverbal gender differences as it has been
 28
done before, but about culture- and communicative-specific nonverbal styles (male, female, adult,
infant, etc.) and one has to correlate nonverbal communicative stereotypes with the nonverbal
styles. The notion of masculine and feminine styles of communication behavior is introduced. Some
systemic similarities and discrepancies between the styles are shown that encompass gesture, visual,
tactual and proxemic signs and models of behavior.
Specific male and female Russian nonverbal signs, sign sequences and patterns of
communicative behavior will be presented, and cognitive and semantic interpretations that explain
some nonverbal gender differences will be proposed. Registration and taking into account gender
differences lead up to more successful inner and outer communication.
On the basis of cognitive, conceptual and semantic criteria, some gender aspects of
nonverbal dialog in business communication are investigated. The primary attention is paid to
cognitive functions that body signs perform in interpersonal and social interactions as well as to
some of general strategies of male and female nonverbal dialog behavior.
Here is only one example of gender peculiarities displaying in Russian business
communication. Russian female communicative behavior in business dyads is closely connected
with creating family warm atmosphere. Russian men, on the contrary, are more instrumentally and
task-oriented. The difference in disposition results in specific male and female conversational topics
and nonverbal behavioral patterns. Russian men in comparison with women are much engrossed in
their thoughts; they sometimes don’t notice what is happening around and possess a kind of
psychological deafness. Such kind of male behavior often brings to communicative failure or
complete disruption of business negotiations.
 29
ABSTRACT OF LECTURE X

Beautiful Movements And Their Natural Language Names.

Dialogic behavior and interaction of people is a multiple function for spatial location of
participants of conversation, distances, poses, gaze types and many other spatial-kinetics variables.
The direction of gesture, its width (i.e. the volume of the used space), course of gesture movement
(smooth or impetuous), mutual spatial orientation of partners, eye behavior of interlocutors and
distance between them significantly affect the form and meaning of a gesture. The variables
mentioned seem to be preconditioned or, at any rate, directly linked to deep psychological attributes
of a man and peculiarities of culture, which he belongs to. The width of movement, for example,
correlates with such features of human psycho as introversion/extraversion/ambiversion.
An introvert is focused on the inner feelings and prefers to conceal his/her emotions from other
people, an extrovert, on the contrary, likes being in public, to share his/her thoughts and feelings, to
expose them to public, an ambivert takes a state of balance between these two personality
configurations, combining the features of introvert and extravert. So we can expect narrow
movements from an introvert, stereotypically related to modesty, hesitation, prudence, and lack of
self-confidence. And wide movements are more typical for an extravert as they indicate boisterous
feelings, which he/she is eager to share with others; they indicate joy or exuberant fury, rising
spirits or enthusiasm.
Among all these dimensions and oppositions, the gender opposition is one of the most
important in the sphere of beauty and beautiful movements. In general, male and female beautiful
movements in the same culture and ethnos are different. Judging by the available materials,
aesthetic testimonials of body movements concern women more often that men. That is why I am
going to fix on beautiful female movements, though much of what is said about aesthetics of female
gesture movements is fully applicable to male movements.
Male and female nonverbal styles typical for the Russian culture are considered. The accent
is made on the cultural messages and reflection of beautiful movements in Russian oral texts of
everyday life that manifests itself in the "Pollyanna Principle", a relatively new concept in semiotics
and linguistic pragmatics. According to the Pollyanna Principle, a person in her/his communicative
activities prefers to express beautiful and good state of affaires rather than ugly or bad ones and
uses for this pleasant words and gestures trying to avoid or mitigate negative expressions.
The Russian female beautiful movements are distributed among several classes: (a) krasivye
'beautiful', prekrasnye 'perfect', ocharovatel'nye 'charming, fascinating', charujush'ie 'captivating,
ingratiating', velikolepnye 'excellent; superb', artisticheskie 'artistic'; (b) iz'ashnye 'elegant, dainty',
 30
gratsioznye 'graceful', velichavye 'majestic, stately', velichestvennye 'dignified; splendid'. The female
beautiful movements can be also qualified as: (c) m'agkie 'gentle', l'ogkie легкие 'light', plavnye 'smooth';
(d) zhenskie 'feminine, womanlike'; (e) tochnye 'accurate', uverennye 'confident', estestvennye
'natural'. I have divided this, a far from being complete list of adjectives into several groups, and in the lecture
I would like to answer the following questions: (1) what female movements people value usually as beautiful?
(group (a)); (2) what is considered elegant, graceful, or stately body behavior? and (3) looking at a female
movement or gesture how is it possible to predict such evaluation of movements by features of their form and
configuration (group (b)). The lecture material involves text illustrations from the Russian and other literature as well as
presents the results of the analysis of video records of female movements. The field observations and recordings have been
made in Moscow (Russia), Ann Arbor (Michigan State, USA) and Berlin (Germany).
In the end of the lecture I would like to propose and stand up for the thesis that elaborate
descriptions of beautiful gestures of men and women in any culture and society will make an
important contribution to the subjects of gender nonverbal semiotics and gender linguistics.
 31
LITERATURE

1. Brookes H. J. O clever ‘He’s streetwise.’ When gestures become quotable: The case of the
clever gesture. Gesture, v.1, № 2, 2002, p.p. 167 – 184.
2. Crystal, D. Prosodic and paralinguistic correlates of social categories // E. Ardener (ed.) Social
anthropology and language. London: Tavistock Publications, 1971, p.p. 162 – 174.
3. Davis, M., Weits, S. Sex differences in body movements and postures // C. Mayo & H.N. Henley
(eds.) Gender and Nonverbal Behavior. New York: Springer Verlag, 1981, 81 – 92.
4. Hall, E.T. Proxemics. Current anthropology, 9, 1968, p.p. 83 – 108.
5. Hewes 1955 – Hewes, G. World distribution of certain postural habits. American
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