Speech Sounds In Several Languages example essay topic

Use of Paralanguage and Kinesics in Everyday Life The use of kinesics and para language in everyday life is the most prominent use of persuasion we use subconsciously. They are used subconsciously because you may not know what they mean. Which can cause cultural tension if you do something that may seem harmless to you but may be a great insult to another culture. Paralanguage has many forms such as whistling which can be used by many people as a means of entertaining by whistling a song or even in American culture used to hound women on the streets because they appear to be attractive. These two uses of persuasion I will discuss about in my paper. Iwill discuss the history of both and also how they are used today in everyday life.

To start of with I will define kinesics. Kinesics is articulation of the body, or movement resulting from muscular and skeletal shift. This includes all actions, physical or physiological, automatic reflexes, posture, facial expressions, gestures, and other body movements. Body language, body idiom, gesture language, organ language and kinetic acts are just some terms used to depict kinesics. In ways that body language works in nonverbal acts, body language parallels para language. Kinesic acts may substitute for language, accompany it, or modify it.

Kinesic acts may be lexical or informative and directive in nature, or they may be emotive or empathic movements. Posture is one of the components of kinesics. Posture is broken down into three basic positions: bent knees, lying down, and standing. Artists and mimes have always been aware of the range of communication possible through body stance. Butt here are some cultural differences in posture positions. Most people use the bent knee position to eat, but while the Romans used to eat lying down.

Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark described the sleeping posture of the Tibetans before World War II. He said that the local men slept outside at night huddled around the fire, hunched over on their knees with their faces resting in their palms. In 1932, William James did a study of expression of bodily posture. He recognized the relationship of facial expression, gesture, and posture. He declared that studying each one independently was justified for the purpose of analysis, but they should be recognized as a whole unit that function as an expression. He devised four basic kinds from 347 different postures in his experiment.

The four basic kinds are: approach, withdrawal, expansion, and contraction. Approach referred to such things as attention, interest, scrutiny, and curiosity. Withdrawal involved drawing back or turning away, refusal, repulsion, and disgust. Expansion referred to the expanded chest, erect trunk and head, and raised shoulders, which conveyed pride, conceit, arrogance, disdain, mastery, and self-esteem.

Contraction was characterized by forward trunk, bowed head, drooping shoulders, and sunken chest. Studies have identified postural behavior with personality types and ways of life, for example relaxation, assertiveness, and restraint; and have noted the correlation of certain kinds of movement in sleeping and waking acts. Posture is a substantial marker of feminine and masculine behavior. The relationship of posture to sex gestures is obvious in the stereotypes in U.S. advertising.

Posture is an indicator of status and rank and is also a marker of etiquette. In a study of Roman sculpture and coinage, Brilliant demonstrates that posture identifies the noble and the peasant. In Western culture one was taught to stand when an elderly person enters the room. The face seems to be the most obvious component of body language, but its certainly the most confusing and difficult to understand. Modern studies of facial expressions dates back to the nineteenth century, starting with Charles Bell, who in 1806, published Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression: As Connected with the Fine Arts.

Charles Darwin's, The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, in 1872, was apparently influenced by Bell's earlier work. Facial expressions are like sentences in human language, they are infinite in variety. The relationship of facial expression to other components of body language and to language itself, is sparsely examined and such observations a shave been made are recent. It does not take very extensive scientific study to observe that a smiling face makes a sentence sound different from a sentence articulated by a sorrowful, droopy physiognomy.

There are five basic physical descriptions of facial expressions: neutral, relaxed, tense, uplifted, and droopy. The neutral could result in various expressions such as pleasure, mask, respect, thoughtful, and quiet attention. The relaxed could result in love, pleasure and submission. The tense results in fear, surprise, determination, contempt, and extreme interest.

The uplifted could result in happiness, anxiety, rage, religious love, astonishment, attention. Finally the droopy, in distress, suffering, grief, dismay, and shock. Facial expression may portray the actual emotion felt and accurately accompany the speech. On the other hand, facial expression, as with other body language and nonverbal components, may contradict the verbal expression, thus giving the real message. One's facial expression may be practiced and may thus be made convincingly to lie, along with the speech act, about one's real feelings. Artists and clowns have effectively exploited facial expressions and gestures as social weapons and entertainment.

The eyes and mouth, it is generally agreed, carry the heaviest load of communicative and expressive manifestations. When the eyes of two persons meet there is a special kind of communication. This special kind of communication is not always desirable. In some cultures the Evil Eye, the direct stare, is one of the worst possible social and / or supernatural offenses.

The term eye contact is used to identify this special relationship. Eye contact is one of the closest possible relationships. It can be used as a 'regulator' in conversations in an informal kind of way, and it can be used in a more precise signal, for example, between the chairman of a meeting and a member who is asking for the floor. At the end of a social evening, couples may signal 'Let " so!' only by eye contact. Deaf persons are insistent on eye contact interactions; they depend heavily on kinetic movement to supplement the " conversation. ' The avoidance of eye contact also signals something meaningful.

Looking away contributes to maintaining psychological distance. Other eye behaviors are symptoms of abnormalities in human beings, such as excessive blinking, depressed look, dramatic gaze, guarded gaze, and absent gaze. The blink frequency can be a measure of tension, or even of sobriety as some researchers have concluded. The mouth is a remarkable communicator, both on the obvious and subtle levels. In fact, most mouth movement is not associated with sound at all.

If the eyes are the 'windows of the soul,' certainly the mouth is the very door. The grimace, in contrast to the movement made by a tic, is voluntary and within the control of the person who does it. Pouting is a well-known kinetic act of children. Sticking out the tongue among the children of Western cultures is a widely-known expression of insult.

Protruding the tongue, however, has other meanings. It is a component of a negative response among the aborigines in Queensland and Gipp's land where a negative is expressed by throwing the head of little backwards and putting out the tongue. Tongue movements may take place naturally when one is thinking deeply or preoccupied with writing or silent reading - such behavior when one is alone is known as 'autistic behavior. ' Jaw movement also occurs in moments of concentration, and in addition when the person is carrying on some activity with an opening and closing motion. The hands, of course, are of paramount interest here with a seemly endless array of possibilities which different cultures utilize in various ways.

In some cultures specific hand gestures number in the hundreds. Movement of the head conveys various meanings depending upon the tilt, uprightness, thrust from the body, and side movement. Paralanguage is some kind of articulation of the vocal apparatus, or significant lack of it, for example, hesitation between segments of vocal articulation. This includes all noises and sounds which are extra-speech sounds, such as hissing, shushing, whistling, and imitation sounds, as well as a large variety of speech modifications, such as quality of voice (sepulchral, whiny, giggling), extra high-pitched utterances, or hesitations and speed in talking. People from all different walks of life recognize that the human voice communicates something beyond language. These effects are referred to by impressionistic descriptions such as 'tone of voice,' 'voice quality,' 'manner of speaking,' or 'the way he said it.

' There are modifying features which can occur independently, such as crying and laughing, groaning, and whining. These are 'vocal characterizes' which one 'talks through' when they accompany language. The sounds used in language are referred to as segmental sounds or phonemes. They are produced by the articulatory organs of speech and each has a particular articulatory phonetic description.

Fricative sounds occur frequently, perhaps because of the air expired air movement is of much importance in paralinguistic. A surprising amount of para language makes use of sounds which might be considered more dramatic and exotic than the language sounds. These sounds are trills and clicks and sounds modified in exotic ways, which without the modification might be considered ordinary. Trills are a kind of iterative articulation; that is, repetitions of a flap articulation by the movable parts of the speech mechanism. Any part of the speech apparatus which can move may be involved in a trill, whether it be the lips, tongue, cheek, uvula, vedic, or vocal cords. The click sounds are made by causing a suction of air in the mouth cavity.

These percussive-like sounds are well documented as speech sounds in several languages, but, like the kiwi bird in New Zealand, they occur in only one geographical area of the world. The type of modification when the lips are involved, or puckered, is called, and in speech sounds is used in French, German, Scandinavian, and many other languages. In English this type of rounded lip modification is known as 'baby talk. ' Palatalization is a kind of modification made by the blade of the tongue in contact with the palate. It occurs very commonly in Slavic languages.

Nasalization is a kind of modification which permits air to escape through the nose while pronouncing an oral sound. Nasalized vowels occur in the language structure of French, but in English occur only in para language. Nasalization also occurs in strong emotions of love and hatred due to the swelling and shrinking of the nasal membranes in these circumstances. Pharyngeal ization is another modification and is produced in the back of the throat.

It results from opening up the area of the pharynx by tongue movement. This occurrence is noted in the Arabic language. Muscle constriction is a tightening of the vocal apparatus which produces sounds known as 'fortis' in language systems, in contrast to sounds made in relaxed manner, which are known as 'lenis. ' Constriction of the vocal cords is said to occur ina special kind of speech among the Amahuacas of Peru. There are extra-speech sounds used for communication which are treated here, never occur, as far as has been recorded, in any language system of the world. This group, non-language sounds, includes such 'noises' as the whistle, the kiss, the yell, the groan, clapping of the tongue, various percussive sounding noises made with mouth air articulated by the lips and tongue, but not to be confused with mouth clicks, and a variety of imitative noises, such as the bilabial 'pop' when the champagne cork is released.

Whistling as a communication device is world-wide, from spontaneous, expressive whistling for joy, or 'whistling in the dark,' to simple signals across distances, such as among mountain climbers in the Alps who call for help by whistling. The kiss isa bilabial voiceless click which is articulated in the manner of the other clicks actually used in languages which were described previously under specific language sounds. Kempe len classified kisses into three types, according to their sounds: the kiss proper, a clear-ringing kiss, coming from the heart; the weaker kiss, from an acoustic point of view; and a loathsome smack. The kiss is used in greetings and in affectionate display, but also has other functions with communicative value. The yell, and variations of it as expressed by the scream, shout, roar, howl, bellow, squeal, holler, shriek, or screech, are effective non-speech communications, difficult to describe technically, and almost impossible to duplicate the effect of in other kinds of communication media.

The Confederate Yell, during the Civil War, was a ul ant yell that was the signal for the Confederate troops to charge at the enemies. The use of para language in today's society is very prominent. We with children when we tell them to be quiet by saying 'shush. ' If we see something disgusting we can make a gagging sound which shows disapproval. We also use kinesics today a lot too. We use the 'O.K. ' sign to signal that everything is fine.

We even have body language for vulgar words that many people today seem to use a lot. The study of these two topics can help a lot in understanding what people are really saying in today's society. Without the understanding of kinesics or para language we would not be able to help bridge the gap between certain cultures or even each other. We need these two non -- verbal communication techniques to survive.