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Paralanguage

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Paralanguage

Tim Wharton

‘We speak with our vocal organs, but we converse with our whole body’.

(Abercrombie, 1968: 55)

Introduction

According to Albert Mehrabian’s ‘7%-38%-55% Rule’ (1981), 55 per cent of the emotional

information communicated in a given exchange is communicated via ‘body language’, 38 per

cent via the way say the words we say (intonation, affective tone of voice etc.) and only

seven per cent from the words themselves. While the accuracy of these claims has been

criticized (Trimboli and Walker 1987), and, indeed, Mehrabian (2014) himself has gone on

record as saying his results are often misrepresented, the so-called ‘non-verbal dominance

view of communication’ continues to play an important role in ethology, developmental

psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis and other fields. The very existence of such a rule is at

least suggestive. When it comes to the communication of affect, there is an assumption that

the non-verbal dimension of human communication is at least as important as the verbal one,

if not more so.

All of which, rightly or wrongly, has been of virtually no concern to linguists. The non-verbal

contributions to linguistic communication were left behind by the so-called ‘cognitive

revolution’ of the 60s and 70s (Hecht and Ambady 1999) as generative linguists abstracted

away from paralinguistic phenomena in order to focus on the linguistic code. Some

functionalist linguists, discourse analysts and sociologists continued to address aspects of

non-verbal communicative behaviour (see, for example, Bolinger 1983; Goodwin 1981;
Brown and Yule 1981; Garfinkel 1967; Goffmann 1964; Gumperz 1971; Hymes 1972;

Schiffrin 1994), but distinctions that are important from a pragmatic view have been left

relatively unexplored. The question of how that 93 per cent of behaviours might interact with

the seven per cent is largely ignored.

Those of us who work in pragmatics can afford ourselves no such luxury. Firstly, the aim of a

pragmatic theory is to explain how utterances are understood, and utterances, of course, have

both linguistic and non-linguistic properties. Secondly, the emotional dimension to speaker

meaning is at least as important, often more important, than those dimensions that tend to

receive more attention. Any pragmatic theory worth its salt simply must have a view on non-

verbal communicative behaviours and how they contribute to speakers’ meanings.

A problem of definition

But when it comes to the analysis of ‘paralanguage’, there is a problem of definition.

According to Poyatas (1993) paralanguage includes only the vocal aspects of language use

that are not, strictly speaking, part of language: affective tone of voice, the non-linguistic

elements of prosody (effectively, the 38% in the above rule). Facial expression and gesture,

which some researchers do analyse as paralinguistic (see below), are not part of

paralanguage. These, he claims, are better analysed as elements in a broader category of

‘kinesics’, which includes posture and ‘proxemics’. Proxemics concerns itself with the way

communicators orient themselves to one another and the distance they maintain between

themselves. (We only become aware of this when someone invades our ‘body space’).

Paralanguage is also sometimes defined so as to include ‘oculesics’ – the frequency of

glances, patterns of eye fixation, pupil dilation – and ‘haptics’ – the communicative domain

of touch.
For Poyatas, paralanguage is:

[those] nonverbal voice qualities, voice modifiers and independent utterances produced

or conditioned in the areas covered by the supraglottal cavities (from the lips and the

nares to the pharynx), the laryngeal cavity and the infraglottal cavities (lungs and

esophagus), down to the abdominal muscles, as well as the intervening momentary

silences, which we use consciously or unconsciously…

(1993: 6)

A radically different stance is taken by Abercrombie (1968). He defines paralanguage so as to

include all those aspects of linguistic communication that are not part of language per se, but

are nonetheless somehow involved with the message or meaning a communicator conveys.

In order to avoid too much overlap with other sections of this handbook, the

conceptualisation of paralanguage adopted here will necessarily be the one proposed by

Poyatas. But notice that, so defined, the set of paralinguistic behaviours is a very (very) small

one – basically, all those aspects of prosody that are not deemed grammatical – and so before

continuing I would like to add the following two caveats.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, defining paralanguage to include vocal but not, say,

facial expressions is to overlook the vitally important observation that they work closely in

tandem with each other. Consider the following from Bolinger:

This kind of working in parallel is easiest to demonstrate with exclamations. An ah! of

surprise, with a high fall in pitch, is paralleled by a high fall on the part of the eyebrows
 … A similar coupling of pitch and head movement can be seen in the normal production

of a conciliatory and acquiescent utterance such as ‘I will’ with the accent at the lowest

pitch – we call this a bow when it involves the head, but the intonation bows at the same

time.

(1983: 98)

The parallels are so strong that a single, homogeneous account of these para-/non-linguistic

behaviours seems to be required, one that embraces the fact that they are, for the most part,

closely interlinked.

Secondly, in recent years there has been a huge amount of work in pragmatics suggesting that

the gap between linguistic meaning and speaker meaning is much wider than the one

originally sketched by Grice in his distinction between what is said and what is implicated

(1967, 1989). Work since his famous William James lectures suggests that speaker meaning

is not just underdetermined by linguistic meaning but massively so (Bach 2001; Blakemore

2002; Carston 2002; Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995; Recanati 2004). And that gap is bridged

not by more coding, but by inference.

The central aims of pragmatics are to explain how, by and large, hearers are accurate in their

reasoning (in the sense that it broadly reflects the speaker’s communicative intentions), the

principles behind that reasoning, and the route it takes. Any attempt to characterise linguistic

communication, then, must reflect the fact that it is an intelligent, inferential activity

involving the expression and recognition of intentions. An inferential, not a coding-decoding

approach is required, and our analysis of paralanguage should be no different.

Towards a pragmatics of paralanguage

Paralanguage and pragmatics: the state of play

Many approaches to the broad category of nonverbal communicative behaviours, however,

have been highly resistant to developments within pragmatics. Adam Kendon’s work has

provided numerous insights into gestural communication, as well a wide range of descriptive

categories into which gestures fall (McNeill 1992, Kendon 2004). But he explicitly endorses

a view under which the, as he terms them, invisible, ‘mysterious forces’ of intentionality are

beyond the realm of scientific study (2004: 15). Cooperrider 2011, who largely endorses this

view, outlines some of the arguments against adopting a more ‘pragmatic’ view on gestural

communication. In his work on facial expression, Alan Fridlund (1994) also circumvents

entirely the notion of intentionality.

Research into paralanguage is much the same, and works on an assumption dismissed long

ago by those working in pragmatics: that if something is communicated, it must be because it

encoded (Gussenhoven 2002; Ladd 1996; Ohala 1984). Ohala’s ‘Frequency Code’ is a prime

example. It is commonly known that the frequencies produced by small animals, with

consequently small larynxes, are typically higher pitched than those produced by larger

animals with large larynxes: according to Ohala, high pitched vocalisations encode

harmlessness, unassertiveness or submission, and low pitched vocalisations encode danger,

assertiveness and dominance. Inference, intentions, pragmatics are simply nowhere in the

picture. Lacking these key concepts, an explanatory account of precisely how paralanguage

contributes to human linguistic communication will remain incomplete.

MeaningNN and showing

Paul Grice’s ‘Meaning’ (1957) is one of the most influential philosophical papers of the past

fifty years, and remains a huge influence on linguists, pragmatists and cognitive scientists as

well as philosophers. In it, he began by drawing a distinction between what he called natural,

or indicator, meaning and non-natural meaning (meaningNN). The latter he attempted to

characterise in terms of the expression and recognition of intentions. Consider the distinction

between the kind of meaning inherent in (1) and (2):

(1) That black smoke meansN the tyre factory is on fire.

(2) That white smoke meansNN the Vatican Conclave has elected a new Pope.1

For Grice ‘what is meantNN’ is roughly coextensive with what is intentionally communicated,

and his notion of non-natural meaning has had a major influence on the development of

pragmatics. But a point often missed is that in the course of a communicative exchange

paralinguistic phenomena (some of which are, in a sense, natural) often play a role in

determining what has been meantNN. Consider the following examples:

(3) S (voice trembling): I feel fine, honestly…

(4) S (smiling to A, in a delighted tone of voice): It’s great!

(5) S (lying, deliberately faking a happy tone of voice): It’s wonderful news…

(6) S: Aaaaaargh! That flaming hurts! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ouch!

(7) S (shivering, exaggerating a bilabial trill): Can we go please go inside?

In (3), vocal manifestations of the (S)peaker’s illness indicate to his (A)ddressee that he is

nowhere near as well as he would like them to believe; in (4), S’s delighted tone of voice

calibrates just how great S believes whatever she is referring to is; in (5), S fakes a natural
behaviour, which indicates that he is being ironic, and means the opposite of what he has

said; in (6), S’s natural paralinguistic expressions of pain say as much as the words he utters;

in (7), S exaggerates a shiver, perhaps so as to provide evidence for her request.

A controversial feature of Grice’s account of intentional communication is the line he draws

between showing and meaningNN, where meaningNN typically involves a linguistic convention

or code. This distinction has had important effects on the evolution of pragmatics since,

following Grice, pragmatists have focused on the notion of meaningNN and tended to abstract

away from cases of showing. However, I have argued (see Wharton 2009), that while there is

room for disagreement on whether cases of ‘showing’ always amount to cases of meaningNN,

there is little doubt that cases of ‘showing’ do qualify as cases of intentional communication

of the kind a pragmatic theory should be able to handle: meaning and communicating do not

always line up.

Bearing this in mind, and looking once more at examples (3)-(7), but this time through the

lens of an inferential-, as opposed to code-, model of communication, a range of further

questions comes to mind. In some cases, for example, paralinguistic behaviours betray our

thoughts and feelings to others in a way that does not amount to intentionally communicating

them (see example (3)). In others, they may be deliberately produced in a way that clearly

amounts to intentional communication (see example (4)). In still further cases, they are

involuntarily produced but may be deliberately (or overtly) shown (see (5)) and even

exaggerated (see (6) and (7)). Intentional verbal communication, then, involves a mixture of

natural and non-natural meaning, and an adequate pragmatic theory should take account of

both. Many aspects of paralanguage are natural but also shown.

Signs and signals

A further complication is that it appears not all phenomena that mean naturally work in the

same way. In the study of the information transmission between non-human animals a

distinction is made between signs and signals. Signs carry information by providing evidence

for it. Signals, on the other hand, are those natural behaviours that convey information and

have been ‘moulded by natural selection to do so’ (Seeley 1989: 547). It is their adaptive

function to carry information, where the adaptive function of a given trait or behaviour is the

effect which is historically responsible for the reproduction and propagation of that trait or

behaviour within a species (Millikan 1984, Sperber 2007).

Whilst a sign may happen to carry information for an observer, it would go on being

produced whether or not it carries this information. As a result of regular travel across dusty

soil, a predatory species might leave traces of their presence. Certain species of prey might

learn to associate such traces with the predator’s presence. The traces themselves, however,

cannot be said to have a signalling function. Signals, by contrast, do have a communicative

function. The function of the honeybee’s dance is to inform other honeybees about the

location of nectar. The function of the bullfrog’s call is to alert female frogs to the fact that he

is searching for a mate. If they did not carry this information, it would be hard to see why

these behaviours survive. Most animal communication seems to be based on signalling

systems of this type.2

In Wharton (2009) I argued that these distinctions apply in the whole range of human

communicative behaviours. I illustrate the distinction between natural signs and signals in the

human case by comparing shivering with smiling (compare (4) and (7) above). Shivering is a

natural behaviour whose function is to generate heat by rapid muscle movement. It may
provide evidence to an observer that the individual is feeling cold. However, it is not its

function to carry this information: it is not a signal but a sign.

Smiling, by contrast, appears to have evolved as a signalling activity whose function is to

convey information to others (van Hooff 1972; Ekman 1989, 1992, 1999; Fridlund 1994). As

Ekman, puts it, smiling and other spontaneous facial expressions ‘have been selected and

refined over the course of evolution for their role in social communication’ (1999: 51). Like

the bee dance and the bullfrog calls, they are signals rather than signs. If some natural

behaviours are coded signals, we would predict that they are interpreted by specialised,

perhaps dedicated, neural machinery, and this prediction appears to be borne out. Both non-

human primates and humans have neural mechanisms dedicated both to recognising faces and

to processing facial expressions (Gazzaniga and Smiley 1991).

It is not hard to think of counterparts to shivering and smiling in other domains of

paralanguage. For instance, a speaker’s mental or physical state may affect the paralinguistic

properties of her utterance, enabling a hearer with the appropriate experience or background

knowledge to infer whether she is sober or drunk, healthy or ill, calm or anxious, etc. As with

shivering, these paralinguistic properties carry information about the speaker’s mental or

physical state, but it is not their function to do so: they are natural signs, interpreted by

inference rather than decoding. On the other hand, affective tones of voice, like affective

facial expressions, may well be natural signals, interpreted by innately determined codes and

interpreted via dedicated mechanisms rather than according to more general pragmatic

principles.

Conclusion
Natural codes are found in animals with no capacity for inferential intention recognition.

Honeybees and frogs both lack the ability to infer the intentions of others, but they can still

inform each other by means of their dance-based or vocal code. Communication among

humans, by contrast, not only requires the capacity for inferential intention recognition, but

may be achieved in the absence of any code at all – such as when I nudge my empty plate

toward you and you infer that I’d like another slice of apple pie. Human linguistic

communication exploits the human ability to understand the behaviour of others in terms of

the intentions behind it – sometimes known as the ‘mindreading’ ability. It involves both

coding and inferential intention recognition and this observation is no less important when it

comes to our analyses of how speakers and hearers express and interpret paralanguage than

they are to our analyses of how they utter and understand words.

Indeed, in a recent article (Vigliocco et al. 2014) it is pointed out that most of our current

understanding of language and cognition is based on the 7% of Mehrabian’s rule (and, even

more narrowly, on words from only a small sub-set of human natural languages). As this

chapter has been at pains to point out, linguistic communicative acts are complex acts,

composites of linguistic, non-linguistic and paralinguistic behaviours. I wonder how long it is

before someone asks whether drawing a line between the verbal and the non-verbal in the

first place is more to do with convenient abstraction, than it is based on a sound research

strategy.

Suggestions for further reading

Cosmides, L. and J. Tooby (2000) Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. In Lewis, M.

and J. Haviland Jones (eds.) Handbook of Emotions. New York: Guilford; 91-115.
This chapter explores the origins, function and evolution of emotions – often communicated

by paralanguage – and situates them within a cognitive psychological framework.

Grice, H. P. (1957) ‘Meaning’, reprinted as Chapter 20 of Grice, H. P. (1989) Studies In The

Way of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

This seminal paper is required reading for anyone interested in inferential theories of

communication. It also provided the inspiration for several of the distinctions presented in the

above article.

Kendon, A. (2004) Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

This book presents an exhaustive analysis of everyday conversations and, through this,

explores the varied role of gesture in utterance interpretation.

Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber. (2004) Relevance Theory. In Horn, L.R. & Ward, G. (eds.)

2004 The Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607-632.

This chapter provides a concise summary of Relevance Theory, the theory of communication

and cognition that provides the theoretical underpinning for much of the discussion above.

Wharton, T. (2009) Pragmatics and Non-verbal Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

This book explores how ‘natural’, non-linguistic behaviors – tone of voice, facial

expressions, gesture – interact with the linguistic properties of utterances, and how all

communicative behaviors can be integrated within an inferential theory of communication.

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Bolinger, D. (1983) ‘The inherent iconism of intonation’, in J. Haiman (ed.) Iconicity in

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Brown, G. and Yule, G. (1983) Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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1
The$reader$is$invited$to$consider$whether$high$pitch$vocalisations$‘meaning’$harmless,$unassertive,$
submissive,$and$low$pitch$vocalisations$‘meaning’$dangerous,$assertive$or$dominant$are$cases$of$natural$or$
non:natural$meaning.$
2
$The$reader$is$further$invited$to$consider$whether$high$pitch$vocalisations$‘meaning’$harmless,$unassertive,$
submissive,$and$low$pitch$vocalisations$‘meaning’$dangerous,$assertive$or$dominant$are$signs$or$signals.$

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