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Fernando Poyatos (2002). Nonverbal communication across disciplines.

Volume 1: Culture, sensory interaction, speech, conversation. Volume 2:
Paralanguage, kinesics, silence, person...

Article  in  Gesture · October 2006

DOI: 10.1075/gest.6.2.11fey

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 Book reviews 273

Fernando Poyatos (2002). Nonverbal communication across

disciplines. Volume 1: Culture, sensory interaction, speech,
conversation. Volume 2: Paralanguage, kinesics, silence, personal and
environmental interaction. Volume 3: Narrative literature, theater,
cinema, translation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reviewed by Pierre Feyereisen

Readers of the Gesture journal cannot but adhere to the main assumption of
this series of books, that human communication has a basic triple structure
involving language, paralanguage and kinesics: “what we say — how we say it
— how we move it” (Introduction to Volume 1, p. xv). In addition, according
to Poyatos, this tripartite core does not function in isolation, but in close rela-
tion to bodily reactions, objects and environmental space. Poyatos calls these
basic units of communication “culturemes”, which he defines as “any portion
of cultural activity or non-activity perceived through sensible and intelligible
signs with symbolic value…” (Chapter 1 of Volume 1, p. 10). Examples would
be the siren of a police car or the characteristic features of urban architecture
in North-American cities. Thus, the scope of communication is very broadly
conceived and humankind is considered as a fundamentally signifying species,
giving meaning to a wide range of natural and social events.
Admittedly, these claims are not quite new in the current study of human
communication. The major innovation of Fernando Poyatos’s enterprise is to
be found elsewhere, in the material he relies on: he moves beyond his own
personal experience to include citations from fiction and non-fiction litera-
ture (mainly novels of a realistic genre, but also the Bible, poems, plays, etc.).
Thus, a more accurate title to the series might have included the term ‘literary
anthropology’ used for the last chapter of Volume 3, or the study of ‘commu-
nication in and through literature’, as proposed on page xxiii of Introduction
to Volume 1. A central tenet is that “narrative literature, from the early ep-
ics to the contemporary novel, constitutes, both culturally and universally, the
richest source of signs among our other intellectual achievements” (Volume 3,
p. 185). Accordingly, to illustrate various topics, Poyatos has selected a large
number of quotations (3876 to be exact: details are given in Volume 1 Intro-
duction, p. xxiii), principally from English literature, but also from original
Spanish, French, and Portuguese texts, and from translations of works writ-
ten in other languages such as German or Russian. Each volume ends with a
scientific reference list and name and subject indexes as usual, but also with a
literary reference list and with indexes of literary authors and works. Readers of
274 Book reviews

Gesture are probably familiar with this highly original approach to nonverbal
communication through Poyatos’s paper published in this journal in 2002.
The major goal of such a monumental work should be to find some struc-
ture in the huge number of observations of non-verbal communication consid-
ered in its broadest sense. What is the best way to proceed? Poyatos’s favourite
technique is the elaboration of lists, inventories, repertoires, collections, series,
etc. For example, human signs can be classified according to the sensory sys-
tem (vision, audition, olfaction, etc.) used to capture some of their features
(colour, shape, movement, etc.; see Figure 2.2. in Volume 1). Chapter 3 of Vol-
ume 1 on the ‘audiovisual reality of discourse’ considers the various features of
the speaking face (permanent, changing, dynamic, artificial) produced by the
different body parts: lungs for audible breathing, teeth showing while laughing,
lips, cheeks, tongue, chin movements and configuration, etc. Likewise, Chapter
3 of Volume 2 contains a list of “quasilexical” paralinguistic items (laughing,
crying, shouting, etc.) and Chapter 6 of Volume 2 (entitled “the sound co-ac-
tivities of language”) lists in the alphabetic order the English vocabulary of vi-
sual-audible movements (from bang, bat, batter to wriggle and zigzag). Chap-
ter 6 of Volume 1 expands the categories of gestures proposed by Ekman and
Friesen (1969), following Efron (1972 [1941]): emblems, deictics, pictographs,
etc. Further developments of the kinesic repertoire (gestures, manners, pos-
tures) are provided in Chapter 5 of Volume 2. There are no strong constraints
on the sequence of chapters across the three volumes and most often they can
be read independently of each other.
No doubt, classification constitutes only a preliminary step in scientific
investigation. To indicate that further research is still needed, each of the 25
chapters that form the whole set generously ends with a list of 25 “topics for
interdisciplinary research” (for instance, Volume 1, Chapter 3, Topic 1 is “Per-
manent facial features in the formation of interactive first impressions”). To
break the systematic character of this practice, which reminds us of some of the
literary processes of the Oulipo group, two lists (Chapters 6 and 7 of Volume 1)
contain only 24 topics. Poyatos’s manifest intention throughout his series is not
to present a systematic coverage of research findings in various disciplines or
about specified communicative functions but instead to “encourage others to
carry out a more exhaustive investigation” (Introduction to Volume 3, p. xvii;
consider for instance the detailed proposal for a research programme on greet-
ing in Section 5.10 of Volume 2).
All these lists testify eloquently to the variety and wealth of the phenom-
ena encompassed by the notion of non-verbal communication and the amount
of investigation that is still needed to explore and map the domain. However,
 Book reviews 275

collecting literary quotations might be a vacuous and endless enterprise if it

were not followed by analyses that reduce the diversity of meanings expressed.
You might read in a novel the phrase “an antique tone of voice” that you have
never met before. Is it a new kind of sign to be added to the list of various
voice qualities we can identify? Or can it be lumped together with other ex-
pressions of quiet satisfaction? From the 1950’s onwards, psychologists and
psycholinguists have attempted to chart the variety of emotional expressions
through multidimensional scaling techniques and in this way, they have iso-
lated principal components or clusters around basic prototypes. More recently,
further computational methods have been designed to identify the semantic
structure of the lexicon and to address the question of how people understand
new — or ambiguous — words in their contexts. Inferences and detection of
statistical associations play an important role in the process. However, I do
not think that using similar computational techniques to derive categories of
signs empirically would be the most informative way to exploit the richness
of the vocabulary used to refer to non-verbal signs in literature. Novelists tell
stories that happened only once and describe unique events that make sense
in the structure of the narrative. Let us consider this passage from Daisy Miller
(Henry James, 1878):
‘Won’t you come into the other room and have some tea?’ he asked, bending
before her with his decorative smile.

In this particular case, the unusual characterisation of the smile as “decora-

tive” is probably not intended to identify a particular kind of sign. Through
its pejorative connotation, it plays a role in the story by inducing in the read-
er a suspicion about the exaggerated and probably interested kindness of the
smiling person, who will contribute to the sad fate of the heroine, Miss Miller.
“Decorative” is an exquisitely concise form used to orient the progress of the
story rather than to depict a particular behaviour, and it cannot be understood
in isolation. Thus, the entomological method of excerpting literary citations
from their context should be questioned if the goal of the endeavour was to
exhaust the range of non-verbal signs. Certainly, Poyatos cannot be criticised
for minimising the role of the background in communicative activities. His
purpose is much less to complete a dictionary of gestural and vocal expressions
than to use “writers’ incisive observations” to document people’s behaviour in
their environment — and that not as mere illustrations but as ethnographic
material, in order to develop innovative perspectives in the scientific study of
non-verbal communication (Volume 1 Introduction, pages xxii-xxiii). In addi-
tion, Poyatos is well aware of what he calls the technical functions played by the
276 Book reviews

non-verbal behaviour in the narrative, allowing the novelist to create individu-

alised characters (Volume 3, Chapter 6). However, how these various stylistic,
communicative and technical functions of non-verbal communication relate
to each other, and how indications of non-verbal behaviour intervene in the
unfolding of the narrative, are issues that remain to be further specified, at
least in my opinion. One problem is the use of negative statements about the
absence of expected signs such as, for instance, in another passage from Daisy
Miller (Henry James, 1878):
‘It’s an intimate friend of mine…’ said Daisy, without a tremor in her clear little
voice or a shadow on her brilliant little face.

The use of the narrative past tense reinforces the idea of mechanical causality,
suggesting that communicative behaviour obeys rules and that events happen
by necessity. Here, negative statements correspond to failed predictions and
lack of support for an implicit model of public conduct. This reminds us of the
well-known role of inference in social perception, and the complex combina-
tion of signal processing with sophisticated guessing in interpersonal exchang-
es. Another problem concerns the reasons for which novelists pay such atten-
tion to non-verbal signs. In the case of the “decorative” smile, it could be in part
the concern for elegance and originality in writing, but it could also be a feeling
that suggestive allusions are superior to rough and explicit claims. Scientists
who have studied the use of non-verbal signals in the context of courtship, for
instance, have found that in this kind of situation, the ambiguous alternation of
signals of interest and indifference is more advantageous than verbal declara-
tions of intentions (e.g. Grammer, Honda, Juette & Schmitt, 1999). One might
hypothesise, more generally, that the progressive uncovering of the thread of
a story also has the advantage of leading the reader to build up, rather than to
passively receive, an appropriate interpretation.
Poyatos’s approach to communication, which is synonymous with personal
and environmental interaction (Volume 2, Chapter 8), is conceived in a much
more general sense than it is in other behavioural and social sciences. For in-
stance, the ticking of a clock, the swishing of a skirt, the scratching of a pen,
stillness and silence are all parts of communication. Everything that happens
or does not happen matters in the cause–effect sequences that, in this perspec-
tive, define communication. Travelling by train, with its trail of sounds, smells
and sights which interfere with characters’ speech and movements, emotions
and inner thinking is an example of communication abundantly represented in
the literature (Volume 3, Section 7.9). According to Poyatos, in a comprehen-
sive analysis of an encounter no element forming the context (being in a train
 Book reviews 277

rather than in a car, for example) can be neglected. Sensible and intelligible sys-
tems of signs are deeply rooted in a cultural and historical background defined
as “a series of habits shared by members of a group living in a geographic area,
learned but biologically conditioned…” (Volume 1, p. 2). A realistic novel may
encompass the multiple connections by which persons, things, acts, and events
are linked together more easily than a scientific essay. It may be concerned with
a totality, rather then with any one of its components.
This view contrasts with other approaches to non-verbal behaviour and
with other conceptions of communication that derive from the analysis of
meaning by Grice (1957), in which intentions play a central role. Intentionality
is not considered in Poyatos’s work. Grice attempted to distinguish signs with
natural meaning (cause–effect relationships like “Those spots mean measles”
as correctly diagnosed by a physician) from deliberate use of signs to mean
something to another person (like frowning to convey displeasure). Similar
analyses of the intentional use of meaningful actions have been proposed by
scholars such as Sperber and Wilson (2003) and Clark (1996). Of course, attri-
bution of intention is not simple. Performing a beat gesture, for instance, might
be unconscious, or a companion of the speech gesture used to mark emphasis
through intonation. In this case, the intention is to express the importance of
an idea, not to execute a particular hand movement. In other words, there are
several stages of processing from intention to articulation, and some of these
processes can be automatic and unconscious (slips of the tongue, for instance).
The use of facial movements to express emotions raises similar problems (Rus-
sell & Fernández-Dols, 1997). Nonetheless, the assumption that some signs are
used with the intention of affecting the partner’s mind directly (or indirectly
via speech properties) or of eliciting probable reactions helps the investigators
to delineate a manageable object of study such as conversational gestures or
expressions of affect. It allows them to separate communication from natural
causality. Poyatos takes a different perspective. In this way, his treatment of
stillness and silence as communicative non-activities (Volume 2, Chapter 7)
raises an interesting problem with the Gricean approach to communication.
On the one hand, it cannot be denied that immobility has a meaning (from
freezing in animal fights to an expression of self-control in martial attitudes). It
can also punctuate a sequence of movements like a silence in a melody. But on
the other hand, it can hardly be called a material sign. From Poyatos’s point of
view, disciplines such as psychology and linguistics have a very limited way of
looking at interaction. “We will always obtain an incomplete image of a given
interactive situation if we try to analyze what exactly happens — to later de-
termine how and why things happen the way they do — without carrying out
278 Book reviews

as detailed and exhaustive a search as possible of all the elements of that situa-
tion…” (Volume 2, p. 327 original italics).
Such a philosophy of communication has methodological implications. As
Poyatos’s principal subject matter is the depiction by the writer of a multi-sen-
sory world through a text understood by a reader, a major problem is to iden-
tify the available means of transcription and translation. Poyatos supposes the
writer is omniscient, in contrast to researchers who face a quite different prob-
lem of discovering the hidden meaning in what they observe. Novelists know
the inner feelings and thoughts underlying verbal and non-verbal expression,
whereas scientists have to infer them from the precise characterisations of signs
and contexts of occurrence. Thus, fiction writers are allowed to use words that
force abstraction. Terms such as ‘gesture’, ‘expression’, ‘tone of voice’, which are
found in many quotations, refer to general categories of signs which require ad-
ditional processing to know what precisely they mean. For instance, the reader
needs imagination to decipher the behaviour of the character in a sentence like
“[he] puffed thoughtfully at his cigar” (Volume 3, p. 159). The literary art may
also be simply suggestive through some graphic conventions (see, for example,
Volume 3, Chapter 3: “His tongue clacked in compassion. Dth! Dth!” p. 85 and
Volume 3, Chapter 5, on punctuation as nonverbal communication: p. 137:
“Yes?…Ye-e-es?… Ye-e-e--es?…”). This contrasts with the descriptive methods
used in scientific disciplines dealing with non-verbal communication. Again,
Poyatos acknowledges and mentions multiple attempts to design valid tran-
scription tools, in spoken discourse and conversation analysis for instance (see
Volume 1, Chapter 5), but he does not consider them in depth, probably be-
cause he feels that they necessarily impoverish the reality they refer to.
From such considerations, the question arises of the nature of the inter-
disciplinary research Poyatos calls for and the meaning of the term ‘across
disciplines’ he uses in the series’ title. The Introduction to Volume 1 enumer-
ates a large number of disciplines and some of their prominent representatives
contributing to the study of non-verbal communication. In the Appendix to
Volume 1, Poyatos outlines the courses he taught on these topics between 1978
and 1998 in the departments of anthropology, sociology and psychology at the
University of New Brunswick. These are largely similar; for instance, the cul-
ture-specific uses of gestures were covered in all three programmes, although
some issues were considered in more or less detail depending on the audience.
The specificity of the different complementary approaches is not highlighted.
Accordingly, the different levels at which non-verbal communication can be
studied — the individual, the social group, the ethnic community — are not
clearly distinguished. Should they be? In my opinion, analysing communica-
 Book reviews 279

tion systems requires the identification of factors that may exert different influ-
ences at different levels. Individual age, for instance, is a variable which relates
to experience and the development of communication skill for psychologists,
to group membership and opinions for sociologists, and to educational and
familial practice for anthropologists. Each of these disciplines tries to describe
some mechanisms by which age influences communication, and a complete
image of the phenomenon can only be obtained from a convergence or combi-
nation of the different approaches. However, even if there are real connections
among levels of analyses, they cannot be investigated at the same time with
the same instruments. Different scales require different concepts and methods.
For instance, the qualities of gestures that are relevant vary depending on the
research question being studied, be it the representational content of gesture
in discourse production, the role of conversational gestures in turn taking, or
hand preference in relation to cerebral hemisphere specialisation. In another
direction, ethologists, among others, have been highly successful in combining
field and laboratory studies, in separating the issues of the causes, functions,
ontogeny and phylogeny of behaviour, and in addressing different levels of or-
ganisation such as individuals, dyads, groups, and populations (Hauser, 1996;
Hinde, 1987). By contrast, Poyatos does not clearly distinguish the contribu-
tions of the different disciplines involved in the study of non-verbal communi-
cation. At the same time, he is not very concerned with the theoretical debates
that, within each discipline, oppose competing views and stimulate empirical
research. In fact, fiction provides the reader with material that permits a large
range of interpretations that transcend the borders of disciplines. Let us take,
for instance, the sentence “He rejected the offer with a majestic wave of the
hand” (Volume 2, p. 195). Mentioning this gesture in the narrative may elicit
hypotheses about the psychological mechanisms underlying the movement,
the social relations among the participants, the cultural context of drink shar-
ing, etc. But most importantly, the action intervenes in the sequence of events
and actions that form a story.
A discipline that plays a minimal role in Poyatos’s work is the theoretical
study of literature itself. Poyatos’ interest in novels is largely confined to their
realistic content. Allowing fiction writers to escape most of the constraints that
constitute scientific disciplines causes him no serious trouble. In opposition to
such realist assumptions, contemporary literary theories emphasise the contri-
bution the reader makes to the interpretation of the text (see for instance the
notion of Open Work proposed by Eco, 1989). Poyatos is aware of the limits of
objectivism and he labels the process by which readers or spectators imagine
the scene evoked by the text, in relation to their cultural background, re-cre-
280 Book reviews

ation (Volume 3, Chapter 2). However, he pays almost no attention to the de-
piction of actions performed in a universe that differs from that we know (the
‘possible-worlds’ of philosophers). Yet, it is obvious that the fiction writer is
released from the rule of objectivity and can describe purely imaginary scenes,
as Lewis Caroll did in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865):
‘All right’ said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with
the end of the tail, and ending with a grin, which remained some time after
the rest of it had gone.
‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a
cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life!’

Literary theory coined the term ‘Poetics’ to identify a function that relies on
formal characteristics of the text rather than on its reference to the external
world. Poyatos is quite explicit about the difference that exists between “poetic
language, deliberately esthetic (and often evoking rather than saying)… and
functional language [that] can describe for us quite photographically and with
a minimum of indispensable elements (not chosen for their lyrical or esthetic
values) the characters’ visible and audible behaviours” (Volume 3, Chapter 6,
p. 154). He also notes that the two forms blend through the ‘poetization’ of
the functional description and the ‘functionalization’ of the poetic (ibid). This
leads him to introduce the notion of ‘false realism’, although this in itself is dif-
ficult to fully understand.
As a form of art, the descriptive language used in fiction differs from the
descriptive language used in scientific disciplines. This is not to say that litera-
ture cannot inform scientists who study non-verbal communication. First, it is
suggestive of the complexity of the communicative processes, as for example in
the following quote “He hesitated, smiled in anticipation of what he was about
to say” (Volume 2, p. 112) In this case, the speaker’s intention cannot easily by
captured by the simplistic notions of encoding and decoding and cause–ef-
fect relationships. The reader is confronted with the intrinsic ambiguity of the
signal, whose meaning will only be discovered in the continuation of the epi-
sode (was the smile apologetic or humorous?). The absence of expression, or
a feigned naturalness, may also be evocative. Thus, reading novels may have a
heuristic value by inspiring new hypotheses or communication models. This
is a realist stance. Second, literary works offer contrasts with scientific writing.
The requirements of precision and objectivity are more imperative for scien-
tists than for novelists, who have a greater licence to use vague references, to
pinpoint highly unusual actions, to give reality to their dreams or fantasies, and
even to describe the non-existent. Thus, being non-scientific, fiction may play
 Book reviews 28

the role of reinforcing scepticism toward what Barthes (1967) called the real-
ist illusion, which sees language use simply as the medium of thought rather
than a sovereign act. This is an anti-realist or poetic stance. Finally, being a
construction (in the same way as scientific theories are), works of fiction stress
important aspects of creative writing. Both fiction and non-fiction texts obey
rules of coherence, albeit differently, as fiction imposes some form of narrative
continuity whereas internal and external validity is required in scientific writ-
ing. Following Dubois (2000), who stated that the novel does not reproduce
reality but constitutes a kind of thought experiment aimed at striping down
a hypothetical mechanism, a novel (like a scientific theory) can be viewed as
the invention of a possible world of ‘necessity and contingencies’. After reading
some outstanding texts in fiction (as in the scientific literature) we no longer
see reality as before. Thus, literature helps us to imagine an orderly universe;
this may be called a post-realist stance.
In sum, rather than comprising the comprehensive handbook of research
on non-verbal communication that the general title of the series might evoke,
Poyatos invites us to enlarge our research horizons, to conceive original con-
nections, and to revisit literary works. He has gathered all the fruits of his long-
standing familiarity with literature and shared his enthusiasm for the explora-
tion of numerous aspects of human interaction which are frequently neglected
in language studies but are abundantly present in the contents of his library.

References

Barthes, Roland (1967). Science versus literature. Times Literary Supplement, 28 September,
pp. 897-898. Reprinted in K.M. Newton (Ed.), Twentieth Century Literary Theory: A
Reader. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1997.
Carroll, Lewis (1865). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Bilingual edition. Paris: Aubier-
Flammarion.
Clark, Herbert H. (1996). Using Language. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dubois, Jacques (2000). Les Romanciers du Réel. De Balzac à Simenon [The novelists of the
real. From Balzac to Simenon]. Paris: Seuil.
Eco, Umberto (1989). The Open Work (revised English translation). Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Efron, David (1972). Gesture, Race and Culture.La Haye: Mouton (1st edition 1941).
Ekman, Paul and Friesen, Wallace V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: catego-
ries, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 1, 49-98.
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Grammer, Karl, Honda, Masanao, Juette, Astrid and Schmitt, Alain (1999). Fuzziness of
nonverbal courtship communication unblurred by motion energy detection. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 487-508.
Grice, H. Paul (1957). Meaning. Philosophical Review, 64, 377-388.
Hauser, Marc D. (1996). The Evolution of Communication. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Hinde, Robert A. (1987). Individuals, Relationships and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cam-
bridge University Press.
James, Henry (1878/1994). Daisy Miller. Bilingual edition. Paris: Gallimard.
Poyatos, Fernando (2002). The nature, morphology and functions of gestures, manners and
postures as documented by creative literature. Gesture, 2, 99-117.
Russell, James A. & Fernández-Dols, José Miguel (1997). What does a facial expression
mean? In J.A. Russell & J.M. Fernández-Dols (Eds.), The Psychology of Facial Expres-
sion (pp. 3-30). New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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