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Stephen Jolly: Stephen Jolly is based at Nomura International plc, London, UK.
Introduction
In semantics, there is a division conventionally drawn between two aspects of human communication: the verbal and non-verbal (Lyons, 1977, p. 67). This is a division which all too often enables the linguistic scientist to mark off territory and confidently overlook those communicative channels which fail to conform to orthodox linguistics.
For the student of human communication, such a division is unacceptable in so far as it inhibits the development of a more wide-ranging human communicative science - an "anthroposemiotics" - which might begin to account for that full range of verbal and nonverbal behaviours which constitute interpersonal communication.
By "communication" is here meant what Birdwhistell (1967, p. 80) has called "the structured dynamic processes relating to the interconnectedness of living systems ... a multichannel system emergent from, and regulative of, the influenceable multisensory activity of living systems". While this is a definition which invokes a distinction between "informational" and "integrational" communication, it overrides the less productive dichotomy between verbal and nonverbal since it presumes that, in Birdwhistell's own words, studying nonverbal communication is like studying a noncardiac physiology (Knapp, 1972, p. 3).
Given the scale and complexity of the semiotic enterprise, it is clearly necessary to delimit the field of one's study for reasons of data management as much as to ensure validity of results. Such a necessity, however, should not be allowed to discourage the pursuit of crossdisciplinary research nor to provide an excuse for defensive academic parochialism. It is important to see one's own work on any one subsystem in relation to that greater semiotic system of which it is a part. This is the motive behind this paper which, although it will examine the nonverbal and somatic aspects of communication, will do so in the hope of adding to the general debate about the semiotics of human communicative behaviour.
In attempting to establish a typology of "intersomatic communication" which will account for "the confrontation of two human bodies as socializing organisms, equipped by a unique highly cognitive and intellectual ability that combines their mutual sensorial and intelligible perception and that of their society and their world at large, operating in time and space", Poyatos (1983, p. 54) classifies...