ABSTRACT
Recent approaches to communication see it as an interactive process in which participants exchange meanings in specific contexts using the full range of communicative resources that are available to them. In recent linguistic theory ‘meaning’ is not something that pre-exists in words or depends on the predefined senses available in dictionaries or grammars, but something that emerges from the mutual understanding, frames of reference and schematic knowledge that is shared by speech participants in actual communication settings. Since language is simply one amongst a range of human resources that include gestures, images, bodily contacts and even smells, communication theory is concerned with semiotics – or the emergence of meaning through rule-governed sign systems. Communication embraces the full range of senses:
Recent writing across the humanistic and social science disciplines, not least anthropology, now increasingly explore the role of emotion and expressiveness as universal features of human life, querying the assumption that humans are, or ever could be, purely cognitive, verbal and rational creatures. Linguistic expression is only one special form amongst an array of communication modes that draw on looks, sound, feel, smell, taste etc.1
