ABSTRACT
Speech is the central activity in the type of social interaction we call conversation. At the same time, conversation is a multichannel communication phenomenon, which involves both verbal and nonverbal signs in a highly structured relationship. Yet students of conversation have been excessively concerned with verbal phenomena. In the psycho-, socio-, anthro-, and ethnolinguistic research traditions, all of which turn their attention increasingly to conversation analysis, nonverbal signs of both the vocal variety (voice quality, intonation, pausing) as well as the nonvocal variety (gaze, facial expression, gestures, body posture, and movement) are often neglected. 1 Conversely, students of “nonverbal communication” have been mainly concerned with nonverbal behaviors as dependent variables indicative of either social rules or psychological states of the sender. Often, nonverbal signs are studied in isolated channels, neglecting the structured interrelationships between these nonverbal signs as well as the also highly structured interrelationships with verbal signs in speech behavior (cf. Scherer, 1974a, b; Weitz, 1974b).
