| dc.description.abstract | 1.1 Purpose of the study
When people interact with one another in conversation, there
is much accompanying behavior which is not purely linguistic--
both verbal and body movement behavior. The purely linguistic
behavior itself is not the same as what one might find, e.g., In
a grammar of the language which the people speak. Yet all of
this behavior gives a very strong impression to an outsider, and
particularly to a member of the same culture as that of the speakers,
of 'naturalness' and 'appropriateness.'
The research reported here is a study of the conversational
interaction systems in three different African cultures with
three very differentjla~guages. While the-bulk of the work consists
of description and language-specific generalizations, the central
question as to why all or this behavior is 'natural' is answered
with the hypothesis that, at least in dyadic interactions, all of
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the linguistic and non-linguistic elements are part of a single
system of interaction. Rather than constituting separate 'channels'
which function independently, the verbal and non-verbal modes are
completely interdependent. This is not to say, however, that their
roles or functions are interchangeable. Under normal conditions
people don't attempt, e.g., to express the question 'How are you?'
by wholly non-verbal means, and 4>hey-do not (usually) indicate
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direction by verbal means.
Although it may be argued that the naturar context for 'language'
is conversational interaction, language has not been
studied extensively in this context nor has the context itself
been studied. It is only in recent years that studies of language
have progressed beyond the sentence and these studies
have for the most part dealt with narrative, i.e., monologue
(e.g. Grimes and Glock 1970). Although it is now over twenty
years since the publication of Birdwhistell's Introduction to
Kinesics (1951), no treatments of kinesic behavior in languages
other then English have appeared. The present study was conceived
as an attempt to fill these gaps by providing some basic
information concerning the behavioral organization of human
interactions in non-European cultures.
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