Paralinguistic Communication

Paralanguage refers to verbal communications that have meaning but are not part of the system of words and grammatical rules we call language. Paralanguage includes such elements as pitch, amplitude, rate, and voice quality. Laughter, imitatitive speech, and prosody are also forms of paralanguage. Paralanguage emphasizes the fact that people convey meaning not only in what they say, but also in how they say it.

Paralinguistics is a crucial component in all human communication. In any verbal interaction, we employ sets of culturally constituted codes to make a series of inferential judgments that interpret what is being said. These interpretations occur at several levels, including linguistic and paralinguistic, as well as kinesic, musical, interactional and others.

Paralinguistic communication often operates as a metamessage to alert communicants as to how to interpret a message. For example, in American English, a simple change in tone and stress can determine whether a linguistic statement such as “What a lovely dress” is a compliment or an insult. Paralinguistic elements are also used to initiate and sustain verbal interaction.

Paralanguage is believed by many scientists to be a survival of the gesture-call systems used by other primates to indicate current states of being, such as contentment, hunger, irritability, restlessness, sleepiness, and so forth. Yet, although many paralinguistic elements are universal, the ways they are used are culturally defined. For example,American English speakers use a sing-song rhythm to indicate mockery, but this rhythm is normative in many South Asian languages. Some Mayan Tzeltal speakers use a creaky voice for complaints and commiserations, and falsetto for polite greetings and formal conversation.

Moreover, verbal elements that are used as paralinguistic features in one speech community may be linguistic elements in another. Pitch is primarily a paralinguistic feature for most English speakers, but it is primarily a grammatical feature in many Asian speech communities.

The nature and breadth of paralinguistic communication varies not only across cultures but across modes of communication. The choice of medium used for communication—speaking, writing, photography, motion picture—enables and constrains the capacity of a message to carry paralinguistic cues. Face-tōface communication has the highest paralinguistic density. Telephone and recorded conversation carry verbal paralanguage but miss paralinguistic-kinesic pairings. Written text carries the least paralinguistic information, although there are creative alternatives such as the “emoticons” widely used in e-mail to indicate emotional states.

The significance of how a loss of paralinguistic information can affect meaning has been emphasized in studies of written communication such as court transcription or journalism. Although both forms of writing lay great emphasis on quotation, failure to capture nuances of speech can cause a statement to take on a very different meaning. The classic example is the cry of anger and incredulity by a crime suspect, “I did it?” being recorded as a confession: “I did it.”

Defining the boundaries of paralinguisitic communication is difficult. Paralanguistic communication is closely related to kinesic communication which includes gesture, body posture, and other nonverbal forms of communication. Often, particular gestures are routinely accompanied by particular sounds; [Page 1827]such pairings may not have the same meanings when separated.

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