ABSTRACT
Term coined by Watzlawick et al. (1967) on the model of analogue calculators (which, like slide rules in contrast to digital calculators, operate with actual quantities) for nonverbal communication that operates mainly with body language and sign language and is based on a relationshi p of similarity between the signal and the referent. Analogue communication is used primarily for the representation of human relations; its semantics is complex, but situation-specific, and is often ambiguous (e.g. laughing, crying). As analogue communication possesses no morphological elements for marking syntactic relations (negation, conjunction), and no temporal differentiation, its translatability into digital communication is problematic.
