Kinesics is the non-verbal behaviour related to movement, either of any part of the body, or the body as a whole. In short all communicative body movements are generally classified as kinesic.
Kinesic communication is probably one of the most talked about, and most obvious non-verbal communication form. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most confusing areas of non-verbal communication behaviour as the various meanings communicated through body movements seem endless across cultures. Often, body movements that are clearly understandable in one culture make no sense in another. Yet often enough, frequently used kinesic movements in one culture may be highly offensive in another culture. Ekman and Friesen (1969) in their seminal work on kinesics classify kinesics into five categories: emblems, illustrators, affect displays, regulators and adapters.
Emblems are non-verbal messages that have a verbal counterpart. For example, the British sign for Victory (forefinger and middle finger erect) symbolises the letter V, a sign for victory often seen painted onto house walls during WWII. However, the same movement may symbolise the number two in the US and may be seen as insulting in Australia.
Other examples include the OK-sign, symbolising the O. However, this may be misunderstood as symbolising the number zero, and as such suggesting that the person the kinesic movement is aimed at is in fact “zero”, or worthless. It may also be seen as symbol of the female genitalia, and as such understood to be obscene.
Emblems as such are a bewildering array of different meanings. The list of possible interpretations and different meanings is, unfortunately, sheer endless. However, as they occur only sporadically, and usually in a very specific context, a wrongly used emblematic kinesic movement may relatively easily be identified as such. Because of their popularity, it is relatively easy, and usually easily understandable to the counterpart, that the movement was not intended in the way it might have been understood.
Illustrators on the other side are less clearly linked to specific sayings or words being used. Illustrators are used more consistently to illustrate what is being said. Again, the usage and the amount of illustrators used is different from culture to culture. For example Latin cultures in general make more use of illustrators than Anglo-Saxon cultures. And again, Anglo-Saxon cultures make more use of illustrators than many Asian cultures.
In terms of influence on business communication the importance of illustrators usage is quite significant. Especially as these are more continuous as well as more subconsciously interpreted than emblematic kinesic movements. For example in some Asian cultures extensive use of illustrators are often interpreted as a lack of intelligence, whereas in Latin cultures the absence of illustrators is easily construed as a lack of interest.
Affective Displays are body, or more frequently facial, movements that display a certain affective state, i.e. emotions. Affective displays are often less conscious than illustrators, but also occur less frequently. As argued before, the basic affective displays are often understood without much problem, as they convey universal emotional feelings. However, the degree and frequency with which affective displays are used across cultures is much less universal.
A lack of such affective displays may well be understood as a lack of emotion, which in turn is probably wrong. There has been a long standing stereotype of ‘hot-tempered’ and ‘cold’ cultures, much of which can be attributed to the extend to which emotions are expressed, especially by using affective displays. An Italian, for example, who makes extensive use of affective displays to express his anger at a certain situation, may well have the same degree of anger as a Japanese person. Yet, a Japanese person in this situation would be expected to show significantly fewer affective display movements than his Italian counterpart. This, however, does not suggest that the Japanese person is less angry than his Italian counterpart.
The subconscious nature of affective displays, and the varying degrees of their usage make the interpretation of affective displays frequently quite bewildering across cultures. For example the frequent and extensive subconscious usage of affective display movements by an Italian can be understood as threatening or imposing in a culture in which affective display movements are more restraint. I.e. the Italian person seems to ‘blow up in one’s face’, although that is probably not what he intended at all.
Regulators are non-verbal signs that regulate, modulate and maintain the flow of speech during a conversation. These can be both kinesic, such as the nodding of a head, as well as nonkinesic, such as eye movements. Fatt (1998) suggests, that these are one of the most culturally determined kinesic signs.
As regulators moderate the flow of information, and are frequently used as a feedback of whether or not the other person has understood the message they can be highly confusing. Vargas (1986) notes, that black students in the US felt insulted, because they perceived that they were being talked down to by their white educators. She concluded that black students made different use of regulators and that therefore the white educators were under the impression that the black student did not understand what was being said to them. Whereas the white students would nod an murmur “uh-huh”, black students in the research appeared to nod less perceivably and use “mhm” as a regulator utterance.
Regulators are vital to the flow of information. Therefore a misinterpreted regulatory non-verbal sign may be highly confusing in international business communication, and lead to serious problems, such as the problem illustrated above.
Adaptors include postural changes and other movements at a low level of awareness, frequently made to feel more comfortable or to perform a specific physical function. Because adaptors are usually carried out a low level of awareness, they have been hailed as the secret to understanding what your conversation partner really thinks. During the 1970’s a number of books, such as Nirenberg and Calero’s ‘How to Read a Person Like a Book’ popularised adaptors as the keys to ‘unlocking others secret thoughts’. Even today, adaptors are frequently seen as the ‘secret weapon’ of the HR executive (cf. Arthur, 1991). The importance given to adaptors seems however overstated, as well as oversimplified. Many adaptor movements, such as moving in a chair, may be employed more frequently to resolve a specific physical situation, rather than being an indicator of ‘secret thoughts’.
Adaptors as such may not carry any significant meaning, neither in their own culture nor across cultural boundaries. However, adaptors may easily be read as emblems across cultural borders, even if not intended. As adaptors are usually performed with a low level of awareness, such a misinterpretation can be highly significant precisely because the person performing the adaptor movement may not be aware that he is performing any precise movement (as would be the case when he would make a movement understood by him as en emblem). For example, the showing of the soles of the feet or shoe may be a result of taking up a more relaxed seating position. However, in many Arabic countries this gesture may be understood as an offensive emblem.
Kinesics are an important part of non-verbal communication behaviour. The movement of the body, or parts thereof, conveys may specific meanings, and many interpretations are culture bound. As many movements are carried out at a subconscious or at least low-awareness level, kinesic movements carry a significant risk of being misinterpreted in an intercultural communication situation.
Unfortunately, the sheer variety and complexity of kinesics makes it impossible to find an easy solution. Quaint “Do’s and Don’ts” can never capture the variety of emblems, illustrators, affective displays and other kinesic movements. However, awareness may reduce the amount of misinterpretation arising from the usage, or in fact lack of usage, of certain kinesic movements.
it is taken from http://stephan.dahl.at/nonverbal/kinesics.html
Human beings acquire most of their human through learning and the capacity for learning makes possible the remarkable differences in the patterns of behavior of humans, as well as their enormous adaptability to change. Few things are so intriguing the development of human behavior. Adult human being is marvelously adaptable, competently functioning persons within a complex society. How they progress to this point from a beginning as highly dependent and relatively incapable infants is a question of great intellectual interest and importance. One part of the answer to this question, to be sure, lies in an understanding of the processes of growth and development, characteristic properties shared by all living things. The other part, relating to a different set of circumstances in the live of the individual, is learning. The human skills, appreciations, and reasoning in all their great variety, as well as human hopes, aspirations, attitudes, and values, are generally recognized to depend for their development largely on the events called learning.
The realization that learning is largely dependent on events in the environment with which the individual interaction enable us to view learning as an occurrence that can be examined more closely and understood more profoundly. Learning is not simply an event that happens naturally; it is also an event that happened under certain observable conditions. Furthermore, these conditions can be altered and controlled; and this leads to the possibility of examining the occurrence of learning by means of the methods of the science. The conditions under which learning takes place can be observed and describe in objective language. Learning is a change in human disposition or capability, which persists over a period of time, and which is not simply ascribable to processes of growth.
In learning a foreign language, translation is something which is casual. Translation is the replacement of textual material in one language (Source Language) by equivalent Textual Material in another language (Target Language) (Catford, 1965:20). Translation is useful as an exercise in through understanding and in the exact rendering of the thoughts expressed in one language into another (Byme, 1983: 95), meanwhile, another definition mentions that translation is: “…a presentation of a text in a language other than that in which it was originally written” (Finlay, 1971: 1). Based on those definitions, it can be inferred that translation is the process of giving meaning of a text from one language to another. So the function of language is as a tool for communicating will come true.
Linguistic Errors may happen in receptive and productive skills, Oral and written skills. The respective skills include reading and listening while productive skills include speaking and writing.
In learning English, Indonesian learners have learned the Indonesian language. And they have been accustomed to speak Indonesian in daily lives. So it may be quite difficult for them when they learn another languages especially English as international language
Error analysis is a type of linguistics that focuses on the errors make. It consists of a comparison between the errors made in the target language/L1 and L2 itself. Errors are something done wrong or conditions of being wrong in belief or conduct (Horby, 1986: 290) Roger Bell (1981: 172) defines errors as sure sign that learner has not mastered the code of the target language. According to Dullay (1982: 139) errors are any deviation from a selected norm of language performance no matter what the characteristics or causes of derivation might be.
Nonlinguistic Factors and the dialect vs. language issue
Non-linguistic factors also often complicate matters further. A famous linguists once said, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy." What he was calling attention to were the political factors involved in how people determine just what a language is. A good, though very depressing, example of this can be found in the former Yugoslavia. The majority language in the former Yugoslavia was called Serbo-Croatian. This language was spoken throughout the country (Albanian and Macedonian, for example, were also spoken in parts of Yugoslavia, so Serbo-Croatian wasn't the only language.) Anyway, now that Croatia has broken off into its own independent state, the language of Croatia is officially Croatian, and the language now spoken in what is still called Yugoslavia is officially called Serbian. These are now officially two completely different languages, due to the fact that there is a political border between Croatia and Serbia. From the point of view of the linguist, of course, they are still a single language, and the differences between them are examples of dialectal variation on a par with, say, New York vs. Boston English. But, the animosity between Serbs and Croats makes them refuse to admit that they are speaking the same language (even though they know they are and can, of course, understand one another!). An example of politics working in the other direction is the case of China. There are quite a few languages spoken in China, but the Chinese government refers to them all as dialects of Chinese. Two of these so-called dialects are Cantonese and Mandarin. Cantonese is spoken in part of Southern China (it's spoken in Shanghai), while Mandarin is spoken in the north (it's the language spoken in Beijing). Though these two languages are both historically related, they are NOT mutually intelligible. Yet the Chinese refer to them as dialects of a single language as a means of enforcing a vision of cultural and political unity. Imagine if the Europeans decided that they were all going to call Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Provencal dialects of a single language, Romance, and you start to get the picture. Or imagine that we decide that English, Dutch, and German are all dialects of a single German language. Yes, these languages ARE historically related, but from the point of view of the linguist, their non-mutual intelligibility makes them different languages, not dialects of a single present day language.
What is Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It endeavours to answer the question--what is language and how is represented in the mind? Linguists focus on describing and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the language (ie., do not split infinitives). Linguists are not required to know many languages and linguists are not interpreters.
The underlying goal of the linguist is to try to discover the universals concerning language. That is, what are the common elements of all languages. The linguist then tries to place these elements in a theoretical framework that will describe all languages and also predict what can not occur in a language.
Linguistics is a social science that shares common ground with other social sciences such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and archaeology. It also may influence other disciplines such as english, communication studies and computer science. Linguistics for the most part though can be considered a cognitive science. Along with psychology, philosophy and computer science (AI), linguistics is ultimately concerned with how the human brain functions.
Below are several different disciplines within linguistics. The fields of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and language acquisition are considered the core fields of study and a firm knowledge of each is necessary in order to tackle more advanced subjects.
Phonetics Phonetics is the study of the production and perception of speech sounds. It is concerned with the sounds of languge, how these sounds are articulated and how the hearer percieves them. Phonetics is related to the science of acoustics in that it uses much the same techniques in the analysis of sound that acoustics does. There are three sub-disciplines of phonetics: Articulatory Phonetics: the production of speech sounds. Acousitc Phonetics: the study of the physical production and transmission of speech sounds. Auditory Phonetics: the study of the perception of speech sounds.
Phonology Phonology is the study of the sound patterns of language. It is concerned with how sounds are organized in a language. Phonolgy examines what occurs to speech sounds when they are combined to form a word and how these speech sounds interact with each other. It endeavors to explain what these phonological processes are in terms of formal rules.
Morphology Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. It studies how words are put together from their smaller parts and the rules governing this process. The elements that are combining to form words are called morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning you can have in a language. The word cats, for example, contains the morphemes cat and the plural -s.
Syntax Syntax is the study of sentence structure. It attempts to describe what is grammatical in a particular language in term of rules. These rules detail an underlying structure and a transformational process. The underlying structure of English for example would have a subject-verb-object sentence order (John hit the ball). The transformational process would allow an alteration of the word order which could give you something like The ball was hit by John.
Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning. It is concerned with describing how we represent the meaning of a word in our mind and how we use this representation in constructing sentences. Semantics is based largely on the study of logic in philosophy. Language Acquisition Language acquistion examines how children learn to speak and how adults learn a second language. Language acquistion is very important because it gives us insight in the underlying processes of language. There are two components which contribute to language acqusition. The innate knowledge of the learner (called Universal Grammer or UG) and the environment. The notion of UG has broad implications. It suggests that all languages operate within the same framework and the understanding of this framework would contribute greatly to the understanding of what language is. Other Disciplines Sociolinguistics: Sociolinguistics is the study of interrelationships of language and social structure, linguistic variation, and attitudes toward language. Neurolinguistics: Neurolinguistics is the study of the brain and how it functions in the production, preception and acquistion of language. Historical Linguistics: Historical linguistics is the study of language change and the relationships of languages to each other.
Anthropological Linguistics: Anthropological linguistics is the study of language and culture and how they interact. Pragmatics: Pragmatics studies meaning in context.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.
Fitzgerald became a second lieutenant, and was stationed at Camp Sheridan, in Montgomery, Alabama. There he met and fell in love with a wild seventeen-year-old beauty named Zelda Sayre. Zelda finally agreed to marry him, but her overpowering desire for wealth, fun, and leisure led her to delay their wedding until he could prove a success. With the publication of This Side of Paradise in 1920, Fitzgerald became a literary sensation, earning enough money and fame to convince Zelda to marry him.
Many of these events from Fitzgerald’s early life appear in his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Like Fitzgerald, Nick Carraway is a thoughtful young man from Minnesota, educated at an Ivy League school (in Nick’s case, Yale), who moves to New York after the war. Also similar to Fitzgerald is Jay Gatsby, a sensitive young man who idolizes wealth and luxury and who falls in love with a beautiful young woman while stationed at a military camp in the South. Having become a celebrity, Fitzgerald fell into a wild, reckless life-style of parties and decadence, while desperately trying to please Zelda by writing to earn money. Similarly, Gatsby amasses a great deal of wealth at a relatively young age, and devotes himself to acquiring possessions and throwing parties that he believes will enable him to win Daisy’s love. As the giddiness of the Roaring Twenties dissolved into the bleakness of the Great Depression, however, Zelda suffered a nervous breakdown and Fitzgerald battled alcoholism, which hampered his writing. He published Tender Is the Night in 1934, and sold short stories to The Saturday Evening Post to support his lavish lifestyle. In 1937, he left for Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1940, while working on his novel The Love of the Last Tycoon, died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the Jazz Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1919), made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values of the previous decade were turned on their ear, as money, opulence, and exuberance became the order of the day. Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and, like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East. Even so, like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways, The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.
Name: Armin Ade Home: Yogyakarta, DIY, Indonesia About Me: I am armin study in Uneversity of Sarjanawiyata Tamansiswa in yogyakarta. I take english deprtement. See my complete profile
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, and named after his ancestor Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star-Spangled Banner. Fitzgerald was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though an intelligent child, he did poorly in school and was sent to a New Jersey boarding school in 1911. Despite being a mediocre student there, he managed to enroll at Princeton in 1913. Academic troubles and apathy plagued him throughout his time at college, and he never graduated, instead enlisting in the army in 1917, as World War I neared its end.
