CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number r, February 1993© 199.docx

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number r, February
1993
© 1993 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/93/34oi-oooi$2.50
Primate Calls,
Human Language,
and Nonverbal
Communication'
by Robbins Burling
Human beings use at least two fundamentally different forms of
communication. One includes language and some other closely
related signals, the other most of our nonverbal communication.
This second form of communication resembles the communica-
tion system of otber primates mucb more closely tban it resem-
bles language, and it should be recognized as the primate
commu-
nication system of tbe human species. Since our surviving
primate communication system remains sharply distinct from
language, it is implausible that it could have served as tbe base
from which language evolved. Tbe emergence of language from
any earlier primate communication system is equally implausi-
ble. Given that language is inseparably bound up with human
cognition, tbe most promising place to look for tbe antecedents
of language is in primate cognitive abilities. We are more likely
to find hints about language origins by studying how primates
use their minds than by studying how they communicate.
BURLING is Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics
and Associate of the Center for South and Soutbeast Asian Stud-

ies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109,
U.S.A.). Bom in 1926, he was educated at Yale University
(B.A.,
1950] and at Harvard University [Ph.D., 1958). He has taught at
the University of Pennsylvania and, as Visiting Professor, at the
University of Rangoon and the University of Gothenburg. His
publications include Rengsanggri: Family and Kinship in a Garo
Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963],
"Cognition and Componential Analysis: God's Truth or Hocus-
Pocus?" [American Anthropologist 66:20-28), The Passage of
Power: Studies of Political Succession (New York: Academic
Press, 1974), Learning a Field Language lAnn Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1984), and Patterns of Language (New York:
Academic Press, 1992). The present paper was submitted in
final
form 5 IX 92.
r. I first presented the ideas developed in this paper in a series
of
lectures at the Unive:rsity of Michigan in the fall of 1991. I am
indebted to my colleagues and to the students who attended for
tbeir stimulating comments. I am particularly grateful to those
who commented on earlier drafts of the paper: Loring Brace,
Wil-
liam Croft, Allan Gibbard, John Mitani, David Moody, Emst
Pul-
gram, Ron Wallace, and Milford Wolpoff. Most of these people
disagree witb me, some on small points, some on serious issues,
and none of them must be blamed for the stubbornness with
which
1 have resisted their objections.
The evolution of the human capacity for language can
be approached from either of two directions, forward
from the anatomy and hehavior of our earliest hominid
ancestors—the most plausible model for which is pres-

ent-day nonhuman primate anatomy and hehavior—or
backward from language itself. It is natural for primatol-
ogists and linguists to start from opposite directions—
primatologists looking forward, linguists looking hack-
ward—hut between the starting point and the ending
point lies a great gulf of the unknown. Primatologists
and linguists often start with very different assump-
tions, and they may fail to appreciate the assumptions
made hy those on the other side.
In particular, a numher of primatologists have looked
for continuities between prim.ate and human commiuni-
cation systems, and they have listened for anticipations
of language in primate calls. Many linguists have heen
so impressed by features of language that they regard as
unique that they have dismissed primate calls as too
impoverished to have relevance for language. One pri-
matologist, H. Lyn Miles, has expressed complete faith
in continuity in the following way: "Unless one takes a
creationist view, human language evolved from earlier
hominid communication systems, which in turn share
origins with ape communication in the hominoid sys-
tems of the Miocene" [Miles 1983:33—44}. On the other
side, Derek Bickerton may he unusual among linguists
more for the explicitness with which he has stated his
position than for the position itself. After heaping scorn
on the idea that "you could get from a call system to
modem language . . . by a series of imperceptihie stages/'
he says: "Once we have gotten over the 'communica-
tive' hang-up, we can see that where we must look for
distinctiveness of human language is not in what it
shares with call systems—hoth communicative—but in
how it differs from call systems" (Bickerton 1981:220).
There is a divergence of viewpoint here that deserves to
be addressed with more than reciprocal ridicule, and the
purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of pri-

mate call systems for an understanding of the origins of
the human capacity for language.
I have to start hy acknowledging that I stand on the
linguist's side of the gulf. I will arrive at the judgment
that primate calls are unlikely to give us much insight
into the origins of language, hut I will try to lay out
the basis for my judgment in a way that will encourage
reasoned debate. Even if my argument finally proves
wrong, I hope I can state it clearly enough to he an-
swered and refuted. Although I am skeptical ahout the
relation between animal calls and language, I do helieve
that primate communication systems can tell us a great
deal about the origins of human communication—hut
ahout our nonverbal communication rather than ahout
language itself. Briefly, I will present and defend the fol-
lowing propositions:
1. Human beings have at least two fundamentally dif-
ferent forms of communication. One includes language
along with some other closely related signals. The other
(which I will refer to as our "gesture-call" system) in-
cludes most of our nonverhal communication. Human
26 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number i,
February 1993
language is almost as different from human nonverhal
communication as it is from primate communication.
2. Both the messages communicated hy the human
gesture-call system and the means hy which they are
communicated are very much like the gesture-call sys-
tems of other primate species. Our system deserves to

he recognized as constituting the primate communica-
tion of our own particular species.
3. That hum.an language emerged as an elahoration or
evolutionary outgrowth of our own gesture-call system
seems implausible. If it did not emerge from our own
gesture-call system, its emergence from some other ges-
ture-call system is no more plausible.
4. If language did not emerge from a gesture-call sys-
tem, we must ask what other starting point it might
have had. Since language is Inseparably hound up with
human cognition, the obvious place to look for hints
ahout possible antecedents of language is in the cogni-
tive ahilitles of primates. I will conclude by suggesting
that we are likely to learn more about language origins
hy studying how primates use their minds than hy
studying how they communicate.
Alarms, Grunts, Words, and Smiles
While a good many linguists have shared Bickerton's
scom for primate calls, a few have been as enthusiastic
ahout calls as any student of animal hehavior. It was a
linguist, Charles Hockett, who developed what may still
be the most influential and carefully worked-out conti-
nuity theory. In the decade following 1959, Hockett
wrote and collaborated on a series of brilliant papers that
analyzed the similarities and differences among various
forms of animal and human communication and ex-
plored the role of commimication in human evolution
jHockett 1959, 19600, b, 1963; Hockett and Ascher
1964; Hockett and Altmann 1968). In particular, he
pointed to various "design features" hy means of which,
he felt, the similarities and differences among commu-
nication systems could he understood. Hockett's work

was so influential that the names he used for these de-
sign features have hecome familiar to everyone inter-
ested in the origin of language. The design features that
he called "displacement," "productivity," and "duality
of patterning," for example, are not found among nonhu-
man primates but new to humans. Other features that
are characteristic of language, such as "discreteness,"
"traditional transmission," "semanticity," and "arhi-
trariness," are, at most, rudimentary among most mam-
mals, but Hockett seems to have felt that they might
he found among some nonhuman primates. Still other
features, such as the use of the "vocal-auditory chan-
nel," are shared with all mammals (i96oi>.93). For Hock-
ett, the evolution of language could he understood as the
progressive addition of design features, and he proposed
very specific mechanisms by which a prim.ate call sys-
tem could gradually have heen converted into language.
Since the time when Hockett wrote these articles, pri-
matology has hlossomed. We now know far more about
primate calls than was known then, and we are particu-
larly fortunate that Dorothy Cheney and Robert Sey-
farth have synthesized the results of their own extensive
investigations of primate com.munication with the find-
ings of other primatologists in How Monkeys See the
World (1990). No observers of primate communication
have contrihuted more to our understanding than they,
and communication and call systems are among the cen-
tral topics of their hook.
As they treat animal calls, Cheney and Seyfarth are
always careful to explore their relevance for language,
and this will strike most readers, as it would have struck
Hockett 10 years ago, as only natural. A central motiva-
tion for primatology must be the hope of finding hints

about the antecedents of human behavior. Given that it
is the most distinctive of human traits, it would be
strange not to look for the antecedents of language, and
to Cheney and Seyfarth and to many others it has
seemed natural to look for these antecedents among pri-
mate calls. Both language and primate calls are used for
communication, and they are produced hy homologous
vocal organs. Where else, as Miles suggests, should we
look for the origins of language?
It is precisely because of its excellence that I will fo-
cus, in the next few pages, on Cheney and Seyfarth's
book. It is representative of the best modem work on
primate communication, and tbe concerns that I express
about its assumptions could be directed just as fairly to
much other recent work. In fact, Cheney and Seyfarth
are commendably cautious in their conclusions. No one
can know better how difficult it is to determine just
what lies behind those primate calls. Nevertheless, I
douht that I am the only linguist to feel, in the course
of reading their book, that they struggle almost obses-
sively to ferret out language-like aspects of primate
calls, and I suggest that their work, like the work of
Hockett and many others who have been interested in
human and primate communication, is marked by two
subtle but pervasive biases.
First, I am struck by their painstaking attention to
vocal communication at the expense of other forms of
communication. It is, to be sure, possible to draw infer-
ences about other forms of communication from their
discussion. They consider grooming in some detail, for
exaraple, and the reader can infer the communicative
function of grooming. But Cheney and Seyfarth never
treat grooming as a communicative event. They never
ask what sorts of messages are passed back and forth In

the course of grooming. In spite of their extraordinarily
careful description of calls in corrununicative terms,
they never extend those terms to grooming or to any
other gestural signals.
It seems ohvious to this outsider to primatology that,
as do all mammals, primates use a complex comtnunica-
tion system that includes both vocal and gestural sig-
nals. Among primates, as among other mammals, these
different types of signals are used in close harmony.
They communicate similar kinds of messages, and, in-
deed, a great many animal signals comhine vocal and
gestural components. A dog's bark, like the arched-back
BURLING Calls, Language, and Nonverbal Communication 27
hiss of a cat, is simultaneously gestural and vocal, and
it would he artificial to treat the two components of
these signals as if they were independent. It takes only
the most casual inspection of pictures of hooting chim-
panzees to see that at least one primate vocalization also
has a gestural component. It is the unity of vocal and
gestural signals in a single communicative package that
persuades me to use the term "gesture-call system"
rather than simply "call system." I am surprised by the
willingness of so many primatologists to deal with vocal
communication as if it constituted an autonomous sys-
tem while failing to give the same serious treatment to
gestural communication.
To be sure, modem recording equipment allows play-
back experiments, and these allow human experiment-
ers to study the reactions of animals to calls that hu-
mans provide. There is no equivalent way to test an

animal's responses to gestural signals. Primatologists are
right to seize the opportunities offered hy recorded calls,
and Cheney and Seyfarth's play-back experiments are
rightly famous. Still, I am puzzled that they do not even
acknowledge that they are, for practical reasons, tempo-
rarily excluding gestural signals from consideration—
that they do not set their description of vocal communi-
cation within the larger context of the full range of
communicative signals. When observing monkeys in
the field, they must rely constantly on their own under-
standing of the gestural communication of their vervets.
It may even he that this side of vervet behavior strikes
them as so obvious as hardly to require description, hut,
not being acquainted with vervets, I wish they had said
more about it. I would like to have heen given an idea of
what part vocal communication plays in the total vervet
communicative repertoire. I suspect that it is not only
the possihility of play-back experiments that has led to
the one-sided attention to vocal communication. I fear
that the attention to calls comes also from the verbal
bias of the human ohservers. Our own language is vocal.
Vocal communication is so crucial to us that we may
exaggerate its role among animals. We too easily forget
to acknowledge that sound is only one part of their
multichanneled communication system.
The second hias that I see in Cheney and Seyfarth's
book, as in many other comparisons hetween human
and animal communication, lies in the failure to con-
sider human nonverbal communication—our gesture-
call system. In their eagerness to look for primate par-
allels to language, Cheney and Seyfarth ignore the
manifest parallels hetween primate calls and other kinds
of human communication. Perhaps the parallels have
seemed too ohvious to require discussion, hut it seems
strange to say nothing at all ahout human nonverbal

communication, even while searching in ever more in-
genious ways for the language-like aspects of primate
calls. If we want to understand the relation between pri-
mate communication and language, we should be helped
hy understanding the role of htiman nonverbal commu-
nication, and one of the purposes of this paper is to bring
himaan nonverhal communication into tiie discussion of
language origins.
I have had to go hack to Hinde's Non-Verbal Commu-
nication (1972) to find an extended treatment of nonhu-
man primate communication and human gesture-calls
within the same covers, and even this hook falls short
of the promise of its introduction. Most of its articles
treat just one of two topics. Some deal with vocal com-
munication among animals and make almost no refer-
ence to human communication. Others are limited to
the gestural aspects of human nonverbal communica-
tion. Most in this second group ignore human vocal
communication and make only passing reference to
other primates. Only one article in Hinde's book gives
central place to the phylogenetic relationship between
human and animal signaling. This is van Hooff's (1972)
fine article "A Comparative Approach to the Phylogeny
of Laughter and Smiling." If we did not know better,
we could easily get the impression from the rest of the
volume that animals communicate only with their
voices and humans use their voices only for language.
To regret the fact that Cheney and Seyfarth skip over
both the gestural communication of primates and the
nonverbal communication of humans in no way mini-
mizes the importance of their contribution to our under-
standing of animal call systems. In particular, they have
become justly renowned for their demonstration that
vervets give three distinctive alarm calls in response to

their three most dangerous predators: leopards, snakes,
and birds of prey (1990:102-10). Each of these predators
requires a different defensive maneuver, and vervets do
not have to see a predator in order to take the appro-
priate defense, so long as they hear another's alarm call.
By now, no one should any longer be under the illusion
that animals are incapable oi signaling significant infor-
mation about the environment. We must never again
suggest that animal calls are restricted to the expression
of emotion and intention.
Whether the vervet alarm calls can he said to mean'
"snake," "leopard," and "dangerous bird" is another
matter. Surely they mean much less than a word of a
human language. The leopard alarm call cannot he ex-
tended to a context in which it would mean "Have you
seen any leopards?" or "Don't worry, the leopard has
gone." Rather, each call is restricted to one very specific
context. We interpret an English word such as "leopard"
to he a label for a particular kind of object precisely be-
cause it can be used in a great many different situations
and to build a great many different meanings. Since
vervet alarm calls lack the flexibility of words, it is hard
to feel confident that they refer to objects in anything
vaguely resemhling the way in which words refer. That
vervets and other primates convey information about
the world is not in doubt, but alarm calls are used by
many other species of mammals and even hy birds.
Other species will need to be studied with the same
detailed attention as vervets before we can be confident
that vervet alarm calls are more language-like than other
calls.
In addition to the alarm calls, Cheney and Seyfarth
describe a series of distinctive grunts that vervets ex-
change with one another (1990:114-20). Tbese include

28 i CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number 2,
February 3993
one kind of grunt that a vervet makes when approaching
a superior and another used when approaching an infe-
rior. The differences hetween various types of grunts are
difficult for humans to hear, and for a long time they
were missed. The grunts make us realize that we have
probably seriously underestimated the complexity of the
calls that animals are able to produce and interpret. Each
species has to he skilled at interpreting the calls of its
own species, hut if animals have difficulty hearing the
subtleties of human language, it is hardly surprising that
humans have reciprocal difficulties distinguishing the
subtleties of animal calls.
As do their alarm calls, vervet grunts clearly indicate
something about tbe external world—the status of other
animals. They are not merely, perhaps not even primar-
ily, expressions of emotion or intention. Presumably,
they help to smooth the relations among the animals,
offering reassurances ahout each animal's knowledge of
its place in the hierarchy. Should they, however, he com-
pared to language? I suggest that when humans use sig-
nals that are most similar to these vervet grunts we do
not count them as part of language.
I once stood waiting for an intercity hus on the Uni-
versity of Michigan campus. It stopped just in front of
me, and I watched a young woman climb down the
steps. She glanced about the waiting crowd, and I saw
her face light up in recognition. From her expression
alone, I felt ahsolutely certain that she had caught sight

of a young man, and I was equally certain that this
young man was not her hrother. I followed the direction
of her gaze, saw the young man, and then watched them
greet each other warmly. I did not ask whether he was
her brother, and I did not have to. This young woman's
expression certainly conveyed something to me about
the external world. It conveyed information that was
comparable, in every way, to the information conveyed
by a grunting vervet. To the young man, it expressed a
recognition of their relationship. To me, a bystander, it
expressed som^ething about the kind of individual ad-
dressed, even though I had not, at that moment, seen
him. The smile of recognition, we can presume, was an
expression of the young woman's emotion, but we know
that only because we can empathize with her. Only the
most deprived among us have failed to experience simi-
lar emotions. We cannot as easily empathize with a
grunting vervet or feel what a vervet feels when ap-
proaching a superior. Nor do the emotional aspects of
the smile of recognition deny the information that the
smile conveyed. C^ertainly that smile told me that I was
hkely to find something in the world around me that I
had not known of before. As a vervet looks for a snake,
I could look for a boyfriend.
But would we want to compare that sm.ile to a word
or any other irnit of language? Does it have a meaning
that is at all similar to the meaning of a word? If so, what
is it? The emotion? The young man? The relationship? It
is wise to compare signals that are properly comparahle,
and it seems to me far more appropriate to compare a
vervet grunt with that smile of recognition than to com-
pare it with a word of a human language. The smile was
like a vervet grunt or alarm call in being confined to a
specific situation. It could no more be used to mean "My

boyfriend has gone now" than an alarm call could be
used to mean "The leopard has gone now." The signals
of our own gesture-call system can convey infonnation
about the external world, but I do not see bow this
makes them like language. I do not understand how it
makes animal calls like language, either.
Here, then, is the problem: Some primatologists seem
to he as eager as Hockett was to find parallels between
primate calls and language. The parallels that 1 find
more promising are hetween primate calls and human
nonverhal communication, and I will return to these
parallels later. First, however, I need to sort out more
carefully the differences between human language and
human nonverhal communication.
The Varieties of Human Communication
Human beings have at least two and perhaps three differ-
ent types of communication. Until these are recognized
as distinct, comparisons with animal communication
will always be difficult.
Of the many features that distinguish the two main
types of human communication, none is more impor-
tant than the principle of contrast. Language is charac-
terized hy pervasive contrast. The phonological system
of a language, by imposing absolute distinctions on the
phonetic continuum, is almost pure contrast, but we
can also speak of words and even sentences as being
in contrast. A language gives us tens of thousands of
absolutely distinct words, and there is no limit on the
number of absolutely distinct sentences that we can
create. Graded intermediate positions between the dis-
tinctive sounds, words, and sentences of a language
are impossihle. The result is a digital system of commu-

nication constructed from contrasting signals. It is this
kind of digital communication, characterized hy perva-
sive contrast, that I will call "language and language-like
communication." 1 regret this cumbersome label, but I
need a term that will embrace not only language proper
but several other kinds of human communicative sig-
nals as well.
The signals of our second form of communication
vary, in hoth form and meaning, along continuous
scales. This means that this kind of communication is
not characterized hy linguistic contrast and that it con-
stitutes an analogical rather than a digital system. This
is the kind of communication that I will refer to as our
"gesture-call system." By using this term 1 anticipate
part of my argument, but I believe it will be justified in
the end. As is implied hy the hyphenated term "gesture-
call/' I want to be careful to take both gestural and vocal
communication into account.
By recognizing the difference hetween the analogue
communication allowed by graded signals and the digi-
tal communication formed by contrastive signals, we
can sort our various kinds of communication into two
categories. Once sorted, the two kinds of communica-
BURLING Calls, Language, and Nonverbal Communication 29
tion will he seen to differ in many other ways. By sorting
properly we can clarify the similarities and differences
among various kinds of human and animal communica-
tion and clarify the place of human language within the
totality of human communication.

I have been tempted to add a second feature to help
define the difference between our gesture-call system
and language-like communication, for it turns out that
all the types of communication that I call language and
language-like have to be learned. This means that they
differ from one community to another. I believe that
learning and cultural variation are, in fact, important
characteristics of these types of communication, but it
is risky to base a definition on learning because every-
thing that human beings do is the outcome of both our
inherited potential and our particular experience. Since
nothing is pure inheritance and nothing is pure learning,
it would be futile to try to distinguish two kinds of com-
munication in these terms. Nevertheless, as I will point
out, learning is more significant for the digital side of
our communication than for its analogical side.
I start with the clearest and most differentiated exam-
ples: On the one hand, laughs, sohs, smiles, and scowls
can he taken as prototypical examples of human gesture-
calls. On the other band, a natural language such as En-
glish is an equally prototypical example of language and
language-like communication. I hardly have to argue
that English is characterized by contrast. Nor should I
have to defend the proposition that a good deal of En-
glish has to be learned. In the past two decades, however,
Chomsky has argued so insistently that human beings
come into the world equipped with a mind and brain
that are designed by inheritance for language that he
can sound as if almost nothing were left to he learned.
Perhaps, therefore, I need to state what would otherwise
he ohvious: however much is huilt in, plenty remains to
be learned.
A word may be needed to justify the claim that laughs
and sohs, unlike the words of English, are analogue sig-

nals that vary continuously and even grade into each
other, lacking the contrastive character of language.
Laughs grade into giggles; giggles may grade into snorts,
snorts into cries of objection, cries of objection into cries
of anguish, and cries of anguish into sobs. This suggests
a chain that runs all the way from laughs to sobs with
no clear break at any point along the way. This looks
like grading with a vengeance. Certainly we can produce
a signal at any point along the continuum from a laugh
to a giggle, and the meaning conveyed will be propor-
tional to its location on the continuum. Even if the
chain does not reach quite all the way from a laugh to
a sob, human gesture-calls do show pervasive grading, a
feature that is missing from language.
Laughs and sohs and the rest of our gesture-calls are
also distinguished from language by the greater weight
of their genetic determination. We understand nothing
of the Chinese language without some learning, and it
takes a heap of learning to understand or to say very
much. We can understand a great deal of what is con-
veyed by Chinese laughs and sohs—and giggles and
snorts and cries of anguish, and so forth—from the mo-
ment we arrive in Beijing. I have never had to be con-
vinced of the universality, and hence of the inherited
nature, of many of our cries and facial expressions, but
anyone who doubts the cross-cultural similarity of hu-
man facial expressions will find that Ekman's (1982)
work clinches the matter.
Of course, I do not mean to claim that there is no
learned component to laughs and sobs or smiles and
frowns. Nor do I deny the inherited nature of our ability
to learn a language. Nevertheless, a clear difference in
the weight of inheritance and learning does distinguish

language from our gesture-calls. Along with laughs and
sobs, we have a large number of other nonverbal signals
that helong to our gesture-call system. Some are audible,
such as sighs, groans, giggles, snorts, gasps, and so forth.
Some are visihle, such as smiles, frowns, smirks, and
surprised and puzzled eyebrows. Many, including
laughs, sobs, screams, and giggles, can be both. All hu-
mans share these as a result of their common genetic
inheritance.
All this seem.s so obvious to me that I find it a trifie
embarrassing to belabor the matter, but it is needed as
a basis on which to build. The problems begin with vari-
ous forms of communication that may not seem to be-
long clearly either with gesture-calls such as laughs or
with a language such as English. I will note five such
cases.
1. Oh'Oh expressions. Speakers of all languages use a
numher of expressions (they don't quite deserve to he
called "words") that have consistent sounds and consis-
tent meanings hut do not conform to the usual phono-
logical patterns of the language and are not incorporated
into its syntax. Our own oh-oh is a good example. Oth-
ers are tsk-tsk, m-hm, uh-uh, and even the raspberry or
Bronx cheer. The number of such expressions is not
great, perhaps a dozen or two, hut they are distinctive.
On both phonological and syntactic grounds they are set
apart from ordinary words, but they differ even more
crucially from our gesture-calls. In particular, they are
in clear contrast, hoth with one another and with the
words of our language. It is no more possible to compro-
mise between the m-hm that means yes and the uh-uh
that means no or between uh-uh and oh-oh than it is to
compromise between two proper words. Oh-oh expres-
sions do not grade into each other, as do laughs and

giggles. They belong in the category of language and lan-
guage-like communication. In addition, oh-oh expres-
sions are conventional, learned, and far more variable
from one human society to another than are laughs and
sobs. Nothing but confiision results from a failiue to
distinguish oh-oh expressions from gesture-calls.
2. Conventional gestures. Because they are not vocal,
conventional gestures such as nods, head shakes,
thumbs up, V for victory, the finger, and many others—
the kinds of gestures that have heen called "emhlems"
(Ekman and Friesen 1969) and "quotable gestures" (Ken-
don 1992I—are less likely to be thought of as similar to
language. Like hoth the words of a language and oh-oh
expressions, however, they exhibit full contrast. There
30 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number i,
February 1993
can be no compromise, in either meaning or form, be-
tween the finger and a V-for-victory sign, for example,
in spite of the similarity of their form—fingers aimed
upward. No halfway point can be found between a nod
and a head shake that corresponds to the halfway point
between a laugh and a giggle. Conventional gestures
have to be learned, they are traditional, and they vary
from one culture to another. Like oh-oh expressions,
they belong with language and language-like behavior,
not with gesture-calls.
Both oh-oh expressions and conventional gestures are
clearly distinct from gesture-calls. We possess the latter
primarily hy virtue of our inherited humanity. Conven-
rional gestures have to be learned by participation in a

particular culture. Colloquially, we use the word "ges-
ture" to refer to hand and body movements of both
kinds, and this makes them easy to confuse, hut there
is a fundamental difference between a largely inherited
(and graded} smile or frown, on the one hand, and a
learned (and contrastive) nod or head shake, on the
other.
3. Deaf signing, Deaf signing requires mention here
only because it demonstrates so clearly that one of tbe
features that Hockett considered characteristic of both
language and mammalian communication, the vocal-
auditory channel, is not essential for either humans or
animals. Deaf signs form a contrastive system as do the
words of a spoken language. Sign languages have to be
learned, they are traditional, and, like spoken languages,
they vary from one culture to another.
4. Intonation. Linguists have always found intonation
difficult to handle. Tone, as in Chinese, is easy. Some
aspects of stress in languages like English can be dealt
with by ordinary kinds of linguistic analysis. But the
larger patterns of intonation—the melodies produced
by variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm that stretch
across phrases and sentences—have proved frustratingly
resistant to the kinds of analysis that linguists find natu-
ral. The worst problem is that intonational patterns do
not exhibit the kinds of contrast shown by vowels, con-
sonants, and tones. Linguists feel at sea without con-
trast, and yet intonational patterns generally grade into
each other. We can, for example, show surprise by the
way we raise and lower the pitch of our voices, hut we
can show varying degrees of surprise by varying degrees
of raising and lowering. The surprise intonation even
grades into the annoyance intonation, which grades, in
turn, into intonation that shows anger. Intonation of

this sort forms an analogue rather than a digital system.
Have I, then, trapped myself into saying that intona-
tion belongs to our gesture-call system rather than to
language and language-like communication? Yes, I have,
and I have done so dehherately. Tones in a language like
Chinese are certainly in clear contrast. So is word stress
in a language like English. Both belong on the language-
like side of the division. It is true that we find fear-
somely complex interaction hetween intonation, on the
one hand, and tone, stress, and other phonological and
syntactic aspects of language, on the other, and 1 will
not even try to sort out their complexities here. Rather,
1 will simply refer to those parts of intonation that are
graded and thus belong with the gesture-call system as
"tone of voice." Linguists generally take it for granted
that intonation must he a part of language, even when
they do not know how to deal with it, hut I really do
m.ean to propose that tone of voice amounts to an inva-
sion of language by something that is fundamentally dif-
ferent. Tone of voice conveys plenty of information. In
addition to expiessing a great deal about the speakers'
attitudes and emotions, it identifies the age and sex of
an unknown speaker and it identifies individual speak-
ers who are already familiar. Nevertheless, tone of voice
is not organized hy the contrastive signals of a digital
system. In spite of its intimate cohabitation with lan-
guage, tone of voice is part of our gesture-call system,
and it has many similarities with other kinds of gesture-
calls.
In addition to the ahsence of contrast, tone of voice
is less variahie from one language to another tban are
consonants, vowels, or tones. We can hear the anger or
joy in voices speaking a language that we do not know.

Well before they use words, small children are ahle to
communicate meanings with their tone of voice. The
very first words of children come with tone of voice
attached, and tone of voice does not need as much learn-
ing as do consonants, vowels, or words. This lets us hear
differences hetween a child's angry no and his matter-of-
fact no, and it also lets us hear intermediate forms, since
tone of voice, even in very small children, is continu-
ously graded.
To separate tone of voice from language will, no
doubt, strike many readers as hizarre, but I can point
to one suggestive line of research and one impressive
authority to back me up. The research concems aphasia.
As is well known, damage to the left cerehral hemi-
sphere is far more likely to cause aphasia than is damage
to the right. However, some aspects of intonation, in-
cluding the expression of emotion, are more seriously
disturhed by damage to the right hemisphere (Heilman,
Bowers, and Valenstein 1985, Behrens 1989). I have con-
siderably less than total faith in conclusions ahout brain
functioning formed by the study of damaged specimens,
but this surely suggests that the emotional aspects of
intonation, or what I have called tone of voice, rest on
different neurological foundations than does most of
language. The authority on whom I can call is Dwight
Bolinger, who probably knows more about intonation
than any other linguist working today. In his book Into-
nation and Its Parts Bolinger says, "Intonation is part of
a gestural complex whose primitive and still surviving
function is the signaling of emotion" (1986:195). If Bol-
inger assigns intonation to the "gestural complex," I
have all the authority I need to assign it to what I have
called the gesture-call system.
5. Iconic calls and gestures. Iconic calls and gestures

mimic the forms of the things they stand for. We easily
outline shapes with our hands, but iconicity refers to
more than just the imitation of shape. If I move my hand
back and forth several times to emphasize repetition,
this is as iconic as outlining a shape. Noises that imitate
BURLING Calls, Language, and Nonverbal Communication | 31
the sounds of the world are equally iconic. Linguists
have generally dismissed onomatopoeia as marginal to
language, but we regularly use ad hoc iconic noises in
imitation of the sounds we hear. We use our hands to
form a stream of iconic gestures. Since they are not in
contrast, iconic signals do not, by the definition I have
given, belong to language and language-like communica-
tion. They also lack, by definition, one of the features
that linguists have always regarded as an essential char-
acteristic of words: arhitrariness.
Their graded nature puts iconic gestures and noises
on the gesture-call side of the human communicative
divide, but their lack of arbitrariness distinguishes them
almost as clearly from our other gesture-calls. Iconic sig-
nals are also less like the gesture-calls of other mammals
than are other human gesture-calls. Bee dancing is
iconic, but except for humans mammals produce very
few signals that are iconic in any way. Iconicity may,
however, be one area of communication in which non-
human primates, or at least chimpanzees, have inched
part-way along the same path that humans have trav-
eled. A few captive chimpanzees seem to have shown
incipient iconicity. Chimpanzees in the wild do not
even point, and they rarely do so in captivity, but Kanzi,
a young pygmy chim.p described by Savage-Rumbaugh

et al. (1986), was ahle to indicate the direction that he
wanted to travel by "extending his hand" (p. 226). Even
the chimpanzee ability to mimic the gestures of humans
hints at the beginnings of iconicity. Viki, the home-
reared chimpanezee hest remembered for her failure to
leam spoken language, made some partially iconic or at
least imitative gestures in order to indicate her desires.
Hayes and Nissen (1971:107) report that she made mo-
tions of kneading or ironing when she wanted a turn at
kneading the dough or ironing the napkins.
To humans, who use iconic gestures so easily, it
seems surprising that iconicity is so restricted among
the other primates. Representational drawing shares a
good deal with iconic gesturing—hoth imitate shapes of
the world, one with a finger in the air, one with a stick
in the sand—but even though chimpanzees enjoy
spreading colors on paper and certainly recognize pic-
tures, they have never, so far as I am aware, heen per-
suaded to produce even the simplest representational
drawing. Still, the ability even to recognize pictures is
restricted to primates, and this primate ability may he a
step in the direction of iconicity. Most manunals display
no iconicity at all in their gesture-calls, and neither visi-
ble nor audible iconicity is extensive except among
bumans.
Iconic gestures are used in close association with lan-
guage (McNeill i987:chap. 7). We move our hands and
heads and adjust our facial expressions as we talk, and
these "paralinguiStic" gestures have considerable ico-
nicity. Our hands spread wide when we descrihe some-
thing big. OUT faces may pinch together in connection
with something small or something trivial. We point to
people, places, or objects as we talk about them. The
movements of our hands and heads often punctuate lan-

guage, emphasizing the points of stress that are also
shown by intonation, so that iconic gestures are used in
close harmony with intonation and often for the same
purposes. Because so much of our iconic gesturing is
visihle rather than audihle, linguists have only rarely
been tempted to consider it part of language. We have
not felt compelled to include a description of iconic ges-
tures in our grammars in the way that we have felt com-
pelled to include a description of intonation, and this in
spite of the fact that some of our gestures are very nearly
as intimately glued to language as is tone of voice.
Imitative noises and iconic gestures, including those
that accompany language, are so different both from the
other components of our gesture-call system and from
language and language-like commimication that a good
case can be made for considering them to form a third
category, largely limited to humans. Certainly it is our
noniconic gesture-calls that show the closest similari-
ties to the gesture-calls of animals. However we decide
to categorize them, iconic gestures do not alter the es-
sentially mammalian nature of the rest of our gesture-
call system, and in the remainder of this paper I will
have rather little to say about them.
The five types of communicative signals that I have
reviewed may seem, at first, a hit problematical, but deaf
signing, oh-oh expressions, and conventional gestures
are all characterized by the pervasive contrast of a digital
communication system and by great variation from cul-
ture to culture. They deserve to be grouped with lan-
guage proper as language-like communication. Smiles,
laughter, frowns, and sobs, and also tone of voice are all
analogue signals. They are graded, and all are suhject to
considerably less cultural variation than language-like

signals. Iconic calls and gestures are distinct from both.
They form an analogue rather than a digital system, hut
they are, for the most part, a human specialty. We still
know rather little about the extent of cross-cultural vari-
ation in iconic calls and gestures, so it is difficult to
guess the relative contributions of heredity and learning
to iconicity.
Language and the Human
Gesture-Call System
I have used the difference between analogue and digital
principles to distinguish our gesture-calls from our lan-
guage and language-like communication. This is a use-
ful way to start because several other differences turn
out to run parallel to it. By pointing to the differences
in the learned and inherited components of language and
gesture-calls, I have already suggested one further differ-
ence between them.
In addition, the human gesture-call system is incapa-
ble of communicating the rich information of language.
True, human gesture-calls, such as the smile of recogni-
tion that I described earlier, can convey some informa-
tion about the environment. Even while acknowledging
this, we have to recognize that the amount of environ-
mental information they convey is tiny by comparison
with that conveyed by language. Oiu gesture-calls are
32 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number i.
February 1993
much more useful for conveying delicate shades of emo-
tion and intention than for describing the world. With

frowns, smiles, shrugs, sighs, whimpers, and chuckles
and also with tone of voice, we let one another know
how we are feeling, and we convey a good deal of infor-
mation about what we plan to do next. We may even
be able to convey these messages more subtly with our
gesture-calls than with language. The discomfort that
many of us feel when trying to discuss serious or diffi-
cult matters over the telephone stems at least in part
from our inability to read one another's gestures and
facial expressions. This leaves us uncertain about the
other person's feelings, and we find it difficult to com-
pensate for the missing gesture-calls with mere lan-
guage.
We can show our anger, our boredom, or our playful-
ness with our gesture-call system. We can show others
how much we love them. But we cannot tell stories. We
cannot agree on a time and place to meet for lunch. We
cannot describe the difference between a maple and an
oak or between a table and a chair. We might manage a
certain amount of description of maples and oaks with
iconic gestures, but we certainly cannot do it with our
noniconic gesture-calls. We could easily enough invent
gestures with which to agree on a time and place for
lunch, but such gestures would have to be characterized
by contrast, and in the very act of agreeing on them we
would be devising conventional gestures. They would
not be part of oiir gesture-call system.
The limitations of our gesture-call system have sev-
eral ingredients. One is the restricted number of its sig-
nals. To he sure, our gesture-calls can be combined and
modulated in ways that convey a wide and subtle spec-
trum of complex emotions, but by comparison with our
linguistic vocabulary the number of our gesture-calls is
tiny. Every natural language has names for thousands of

objects, situations, and actions. Our gesture-call system
has no names at all. A smile of recognition is not a
name, and neither, I believe, is a vervet grunt or alarm
call.
The noniconic part of our gesture-call system is pro-
ductive only in the sense that any system with graded
signals is productive. There is an infinity of positions
along any graded continuum, and therefore there is al-
ways a possibility of finding a new position, hut we can-
not add entirely new gesture-calls to our repertoire in
the way that we so easily add new words to our lan-
guage. Nor can we invent new ways of combining our
gesture-calls. We can easily produce a sentence that no
one has ever said before, but it hardly makes sense to
ask whether gesture-calls can be combined to produce a
new utterance. Deaf signing is as productive as spoken
language. Oh-oh expressions and conventional gestures
do not join in syntactic constructions and therefore can-
not have the degree of productivity shown by signed and
spoken languages, but we can add new conventional ges-
tures and new oh-oh expressions to our repertoire. We
cannot add new gesture-calls or tones of voice.
Another limitation of oiir gesture-call system is what
might be called its "immediacy." We can refer to the
present state of our emotions and intentions with oMr
gesture-calls, but we carmot refer to the past or the fu-
ture or to things that are out of sight or far away. In
Hockett's terms, displacement is impossible with ges-
ture-calls. In fact, our gesture-call system is even more
limited than the impossibility of displacement implies,
for our ability to use our gesture-calls even to refer to
things in our immediate surroundings is narrowly cir-
cumscribed. Like chimpanzees, we can follow one an-

other's direction of gaze. Unlike chimpanzees, we can
easily point. But I am no more capable than A chimpan-
zee of using my gestuie-cail system to tell you that a
bird we both are looking at is red. With language we
can easily form new propositions about the state of the
world, then or now, there or here. We cannot form any
new propositions at all about the world with our ges-
ture-call system. Hockett's design feature of displace-
ment covers only one limited aspect of a much more
general characteristic of language—its use to form prop-
ositions. Human smiles of recognition, like vervet
grunts and alarm calls, are not new propositions. If they
are propositions at all (which I doubt), they belong to a
fixed and limited repertoire.
If we cannot tell true stories with gesture-calls, we
certainly cannot tell fairy tales. If we cannot form true
propositions about the world, we cannot form false prop-
ositions. We cannot lie. We can, to he sure, feign, or at
least we can try. The poker player must act as if his
cards were other than they really are. The boxer pretends
that he is about to hit from the left when he is really
plaiming to hit from the right. We can try to pretend to
a happiness we do not really feel, or, conversely, we can
try to hide our excitement or pleasure. Feigning emo-
tions, however, is not the same as lying, and most of us
are not very good at it. Most of us find it much easier
to lie with words than to mislead with gesture-calls. We
can also lie with conventional gestures or oh-oii expres-
sions. A nod or m-hm is as much of a lie as yes, if the
nodder really helieves no or uh-uh. To give a false head
shake is a lie, to laugh at a joke that one does not find
funny is not. Once again, conventional gestures and oh-
oh expressions are more language-like than are gesture-
calls.

Our difficulty in using gesture-calls even to feign, let
alone to lie, is related to the fact that our gesture-call
system is less subject to deliberate control than is lan-
guage. The ghastly photographs in which people pretend
to smile are a monument to the trouble so many of us
have in voluntarily producing gesture-calls. The rela-
tively involuntary nature of our gesture-calls means that
we are in constant danger of "revealing ourselves."
When people say one thing with language but send a
conflicting message with their gesture-calls, they are
likely to be branded as liars. It will be not their language
but the nonverbal side of their communication that is
believed. Our gesture-calls sometimes convey our true
emotional state considerably more faithfully than we
want them to.
BURLING Calls. Language, and Nonverbal Communication | 33
Our gesture-call system lacks syntax. To be sure, con-
ventional gestures and oh-oh expressions also escape
syntax, and therefore it cannot be a defining feature of
language-like communication. Nevertheless, syntax is
confined to the language-like side of the division. Deaf
signing does have syntax, though it is quite different
from the syntax of spoken language. Gesture-calls can
occur together, sequentially, and sometimes even simul-
taneously, and their meanings add together, but they do
not enter into the elaborate kinds of syntactic construc-
tions that are characteristic of language, such as subordi-
nation, enfbedding, relativization, and agreement.
Even something as simple and transparent in language
as the modification of one word by another is impossible
for gesture-calls. We may be tempted to draw an analogy

and to suggest that we can "m,odify" a display of anger
by offering a smile along with it, hut the analogy is
surely strained. When we use two gesture-calls together
it is impossible to know which is modifying what. The
impression conveyed by simultaneous but contradictory
signs of anger and pleasure is more likely to be confusion
than subtlety. Gesture-calls can certainly join to pro-
duce a more precise or more forceful message than a
single sign could convey by itself. We can demonstrate
anger by combining features of posture, facial expres-
sion, and tone of voice. We can show both anger and
fatigue at the same time. But our gesture-calls simply
do not meld into tight syntactic constructions like those
of a natural spoken or signed language.
It is worth pointing out one aspect of our gesture-call
system that follows from its extensive grading: the im-
possibility of counting its signals. We have names for
some of our gesture-calls, and it is tempting to start by
listing the words that we use: laugh, smile, cry, frown,
sigh, squint, scream, pout, swagger, etc. That seems
easy, hut we soon run into problems. Do we count a
giggle and a guffaw as different from a laugh? Or are they
simply different forms of a single gesture-call? What
about a cry, a sob, and a whimper? There is an indeter-
minacy here that is intrinsic to a graded system. There
is no principled way to decide where one signal ends
and another begins. There is no way to decide how dif-
ferent two signals must he in order to be counted as
different.
To summarize: A substantial list of differences sepa-
rates the human gesture-call system from language and
language-like communication. Our gesture-call system
not only uses graded signals but requires less learning
than language-like communication. It can be used for

conveying subtle messages about emotions and inten-
tions, but its ability to convey propositions about the
world is severely limited, and it is incapable of being
used to construct new propositions. It is incapable of
displacement and lacks the productivity of language. It
is not suitable for lying or even for fiction. It is less
subject to deliberate control than language. In all these
respects our gesture-call system differs radically from
spoken or signed language or from oh-oh expressions and
conventional gestures. The conclusion must he that hu-
man beings are capable of at least two clearly distinct
forms of communication. Iconic calls and gestures are a
good candidate for a third. The failure to distinguish our
different types of communication can lead to hopeless
confusion.
Primate Calls and Language
Having sorted out the different varieties of human com-
munication, we are at last in a position to compare hu-
man and primate commionication. It makes little sense
to argue about whether primate communication and
language are alike or different. Obviously, they are alike
in some ways but different in others. With two forms
of human communication to consider, however, it does
make sense to ask which of them most closely resem-
bles primate communication. It will have become appar-
ent that I find our gesture-calls to offer more promising
comparisons.
Language is like the communication system of other
primates in all the ways in which it resembles other
forms of mammalian communication. We can go hack
to Hockett's design features and recall that he identifies
use of the "vocal-auditory channel" as a general feature

of mammalian communication. Two communicating
individuals use the same signals, a feature that Hockett
called "interchangeability." Since we hear our own sig-
nals, our language has a feature that Hockett called "to-
tal feedback." Sound disappears quickly, and therefore,
in contrast to bright plumage or urine marking, vocal
signals are also characterized by "rapid fading." Because
vervet alarm calls give information about the environ-
ment, we can also credit their communication with "se-
manticity," but hoth animal calls and human language
are also capable of conveying information about the
intentions and the emotional state of the signaler.
Whether it is fair to credit primate communication with
what Hockett called "arbitrariness" depends on how the
term is defined. For Hockett, arbitrariness was the ab-
sence of iconicity. By this criterion, a vervet grunt or
alarm call is certainly arbitrary—and so is a dog's bark
or a cat's purr. If to call a signal arbitrary we also require
it, like a human word, to be conventional and therefore
subject to cultural variation, then vervet calls are clearly
not arbitrary. Rather, they are set by the animal's ge-
netic inheritance and very different from conventional
human words.
The similarities between human language and pri-
mate calls are enough to tempt us to look for a phyloge-
netic relation between them, but the differences be-
tween them are also significant. It is not even quite fair
to describe primate communication and language as
sharing the vocal-auditory channel. Primate communi-
cation can be characterized as vocal and auditory only
by ignoring its gestural side and by failing to acknowl-
edge that many of its signals have both visible and audi-
ble components. Nor is it quite fair simply to charac-
terize both language and primate calls as having

34 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number i.
February 1993
semanticity without acknowledging the vastly richer se-
manticity of language.
Language allows displacement, talking about things
that are distant in time or space; primate con:imunica-
tion does not. Primates are capable of deception, and
some come close to lying, but without language they are
much farther from perfecting the art of lying than we
are. Hockett used the term "reflexiveness" to describe
the way in which language can be used to talk about
language. We must suppose that nonhimian primates are
unable to use their gesture-calls to describe their own
gesture-calls and therefore lack reflexiveness. Their
communication lacks the kind of productivity that we
take foT granted in language.
The songs of many species of hirds must be learned.
They are perfected only by the experience of hearing the
songs of neighboring conspecifics. Among mammals, in-
cluding primates, however, the evidence for learning is
slim. Snowdon [1990:227} points out that the learning
of comprehension is better attested than the learning of
production, but a few observers have pointed to hints
about the learning of production as well. Mitani et al.
|n.d.) report that the pant-hoots of chimpanzees in Ma-
hale differ slightly from those in Gombe, and after con-
sidering various alternatives they point cautiously to
learning as one possible explanation for the difference.
A recent study of cross-fostered rhesus and Japanese
monkeys (i.e., monkeys raised in the opposite group
from their own) suggests that they learned the foraging

calls of their foster parents rather than those of their
own species (Masataka and Fujita 1989). Admittedly, the
two species and their calls are not very different, but the
results do suggest some potential for learning. This is
an unusual finding, however, and Snowdon (1990:226)
points to a number of problems with the study, arguing
that "there is no conclusive evidence for vocal learning
in monkeys" (p. 225).
In contrast to language, primate communication, in-
cluding calls, exhibits extensive grading, but the call
systems of many species of primates, as well as other
mammalian species, have some discreteness as well. It
is difficult for an outsider to sort through the extensive
literature on grading, discreteness, and categorical per-
ception in primates, let alone in other mammals and
birds (e.g., Marler 1976, 1982; Marler and Mitani 1988).
In particular, the relation between discreteness in calls
and contrast in language is far from clear. When investi-
gating a language, a linguist can easily ask whether two
sounds, two words, or two sentences are the same or
different and expect decisive answers. We accept the fact
that a tiny difference in sound can make any degree of
difference in meaning. This is what linguists mean by
contrast, and this is why language can be characterized
as a digital system. Primatologists cannot ask their sub-
jects whether two calls are the same or different, and
therefore they have much more trouble in establishing
discreteness than linguists have in establishing contrast.
To determine whether the varied calls produced by an
animal are or are not discrete, the observer must listen
to enough calls to know whether the animal also pro-
duces calls that are acoustically intermediate. Calls will
be judged as discrete only if they fall into clusters that do
not overlap. By the operational criterion used for animal

calls, then, the vowels and consonants of language are
not discrete, since humans can and do produce sounds
that are phonetically intermediate between their con-
trastive phonemes. As a result, it is by no means clear
that primatologists and linguists are referring to the
same phenomena when they use the terms "discrete-
ness" and "contrast," though these have often enough
been taken to be the same (e.g., Marler 1976:270).
The final word on contrast and discreteness is not yet
in, but the fact remains that, unlike the sounds, words,
or sentences of a language, a great many primate calls
are variable and many grade into one another. As far as
we can tell, the meanings these calls convey are contin-
uously graded as well. It is difficult to count the calls in
a species's repertoire because it is impossible to decide
which points along the continua count as sufficiently
different to be credited as different calls (see Marler
1976). Although a few gesture-calls of any particular spe-
cies may be distinct from one another, the extent of
discreteness is tiny by comparison with that in human
language. This is what it means to insist that nonhuman
mammals, including primates, have analogue communi-
cation systems. There are, to be sure, important analogi-
cal elements in human communication, hut these are
found in our gesture-call system, not in language. The
digital principles that pervade language set it sharply
apart from animal communication.
The promise of primatology is the hope that primates
have more to teach us about ourselves than do less
closely related mammals, and primatologists have cer-
tainly been right to search for precursors of language
among monkeys and apes. As far as I am able to judge,
however, primate calls have not yet brought us apprecia-
bly closer to human language than have the calls of

other mammals. The features that primate calls share
with language are shared, in large part, by the calls of
nonprimate mammals as well. Many of these features
are found even among birds.
Primate Communication and the Human
Gesture-Call System
Having compared language with both the human ges-
ture-call system and primate communication, it remains
only to complete the triangle by making explicit the
similarities between primate communication and the
human gesture-call system. It seems obvious that these
share far more with each other than either shares with
language. If we return, once again, to Hockett's design
featiu-es, we see that our gesture-calls share all the fea-
tures that are credited to mammals generally: broadcast
transmission and directional reception, interchangeabil-
ity, rapid fading and total feedback. Primate communi-
cation and the human gesture-call system exhibit se-
manticity in much the same degree. The important
BURLING Calls, Language, and Nonverbal Communication | 35
human specialty of iconic gesturing lacks arbitrariness,
but the rest of our gesture-calls have as much or as little
arbitrariness as the gesture-calls of other mammals.
Our gesture-call system and primate communication
share more than just the features that Hockett identi-
fied, however. Our gesture-calls are no more restricted
to the vocal-auditory channel than is other mammalian
communication. It is as artificial to pull apart the visible
and audible aspects of human laughs and sobs as to pull

apart the visible and audihle aspects of a dog's bark or a
chimpanzee's pant-hoot.
Alarm calls, vervet grunts, and smiles of recognition
all convey information about the environment, but the
information seems hardly significant when set beside
the information conveyed by language. Human gesture-
calls are limited in just the same way as animal signals,
and the excitement about grunts and alarm calls must
not lead us to forget that human and animal gesture-
calls are far better at conveying information about the
signaler's emotional state and intentions than at describ-
ing the world. Animals can show their fear, subordina-
tion, aggression, and lust with their gesture-calls—and
so can we. Animals can identify the sex and age of an-
other animal by its cries and can identify known individ-
uals—and so can we. Animals can be warned by an-
other's behavior both about the animal's own intention
and about dangers in the environment—and so can we.
Our gesture-calls are less easy to bring under deliberate
control than is language. It is difficult to judge how
much deliberate control animals have over their signal-
ing system, hut it seems unlikely that their gesture-calls
are more voluntary than ours.
The "vocabulary" [if it is fair to use that word) of our
gesture-call system, like that of animal communication,
is restricted; its message system is closed. New gesture-
calls cannot be added to an individual's repertoire
through learning because their use is so narrowly deter-
mined by inheritance. The specific features of syntax
that all languages share—parts of speech, relativiza-
tion, subordination, modification, adpositions, comple-
mentizers, nouns, verbs, pronouns, and all the rest—are
nowhere to be found either in our gesture-call system or
in animal communication. Both are analogue rather

than digital systems, and their signals typically, though
not always, grade into each other. The extensive grading
of both human and animal gesture-calls makes them im-
possible to count.
The communication of nonhuman primates is multi-
channeled and uses the same modalities as does the hu-
man gesture-call system. In both cases, messages are
conveyed by three important means: facial expressions,
general postures of the body, and vocal noises. These
three work so closely together that treating them as sep-
arate systems is artificial. The homologies between our
facial expressions and those of apes are clear, but if any-
one has made a systematic comparison between human
nonverbal vocalizations and ape vocalizations I have
missed it. Comparisons with humans have focused in-
stead on language. When systematic comparisons with
human gesture-calls are made, I expect that homologies
will be as clear for cries as they already are for facial
expressions and bodily postures.
I deliberately defined the human gesture-call system,
and even gave it a name, with an eye toward emphasiz-
ing its similarity with other systems of mammalian
communication. Enough has now been said to justify
my conviction that we have a communication system
that is not merely primate but thoroughly mammalian,
and our own well-functioning gesture-call system gives
us a privileged understanding of how one such system
works. We would, I believe, gain more insight into the
gesture-calls of other animals by comparing them with
our own gesture-calls than hy comparing them with lan-
guage. It may he worth pointing to just one example.
Cheney and Seyfarth devote considerable effort to try-

ing to determine whether vervet alarm calls are "inten-
tional" or "voluntary" (1990:144-49). They show that,
as do a good many other animals, vervets vary their calls
depending on their audience. They give more alarm calls
when other animals, especially kin, are present. In other
words, vervets take account of who is listening. Cheney
and Seyfarth apparently believe that this could imply
voluntary control over the rate of calling. Quite apart
from the questionable logic of this inference, I wonder
if the very concern for whether calls are voluntary does
not arise from a preoccupation with language. We have
a strong sense of voluntary control over language. The
eager search for voluntary signaling looks like another
symptom of the yearning to find resemblances between
language and animal calls. Would we be equally con-
cerned ahout the voluntary nature of communication
if we compared nonhuman primate calls with human
gesture-calls rather than with language? Was the smile
of recognition of the woman on the bus voluntary? How
could we know? Does the question even seem impor-
tant? Our gesture-calls are less subject to deliberate or
voluntary control than is language. We try to control
them at times, but most often we forget about them.
Certainly, we give them much less attention than lan-
guage. Our privileged understanding of our own gesture-
calls ought to make us realize that voluntary control
is by no means an ail-or-none matter. Quite possibly
vervet grunts and alarm calls are subject to about the
same degree of voluntary control as a smile of recogni-
tion. If I were a student of primate communication, I
would find it difficult to suppress the knowledge of my
own deeply entrenched system of primate communica-
tion, and I would much prefer to interpret the communi-
cation of other animals in the light of my understanding
of my own gesture-call system than by comparing it
with language.

Having now made my case, I must conclude this sec-
tion with a cautionary note. I believe that our gesture-
call system is very much like the gesture-call systems
of other primate and even other marmnalian species, but
it is not identical to them, and I must be as clear about
the differences as about the similarities. Of course some
of our particular gesture-calls are unique, but since every
species has its own repertoire that is only to be expected.
Other differences are more significant. 1 have already
36 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number i,
February 1993
pointed to the human capacity for iconicity, which is
unquestionably an important human innovation. Even
more important, learning cannot be completely dis-
missed. By comparison with language, the human ges-
ture-call system is less variable cross-culturally, more
difficxilt to subject to conscious control, and more resis-
tant to modification by learning, but nothing that hu-
mans do is totally immune to learning. Although we
can, within limits, "read" the gesture-calls of someone
from a very different culture, we cannot do so with the
same confidence as with someone from our own culture.
We do learn to control our laughter on some occasions.
Different cultures do impose varied rules about when it
is appropriate to cry and when it is obligatory. A laugh
does not mean exactly the same thing in every culture.
That human gesture-calls show more cultural vari-
ability than do the gesture-calls of any other mamma-
lian species should, however, be no more surprising than
the cultural variability of human eating and mating hab-

its. Cultural variability does not keep us from regarding
human eating and mating as homologous with chimpan-
zee eating and mating. The human gesture-call system,
hke human gastronomy, is subject to cultural variation,
but its learned component does not turn it into some-
thing radically different from the gesture-call systems of
other animals. Language is radically different from both.
The human gesture-call system may differ from that
of animals in one other way, but on this I can only spec-
ulate. Since human language is so powerful, it may have
taken over some functions that are served by gesture-
calls among primates. It is not impossible that this has
narrowed our use of gesture-calls. Nevertheless, our
nonverbal communication remains profoundly impor-
tant to us, and if there are communicative functions
that have been usurped by language they are far from
obvious. The human gesture-call system remains very
much like other primate communication systems, and
1 conclude that primate communication should tell us a
great deal about the evolutionary background of human
gesture-calls. I think that it is unlikely to tell us much
about the origins of language.
The Cognitive Origins of Language
The similarities between hum.an gesture-calls and the
gesture-call systems of other mammals seem so clear
that I worry that others will find my arguments too obvi-
ous to require stating. I have taken the risk of emphasiz-
ing what may he obvious because I have been surprised
by the apparent lack of interest in human nonverbal
communication among primatologists, even among
those specifically concerned with communication. I am
impressed also by the easy assumption that the obvious
place to look for the antecedents of language is among

animal calls. In the quotation from Miles with which 1
began this article, for instance, divine creation is offered
as the only imaginable source for language other than a
hominid communication system. The relevance of pri-
mate calls to language has seemed to need no defense.
And yet, if language developed out of some earlier
form of primate communication, does it not seem
strange that it has grown so distinct from our own still
existing system of primate communication? Is it plausi-
ble that a primate communication system could have
evolved into language while still leaving behind a fine
and well-functioning but separate primate communica-
tion system? I do not think so. If the primate commu-
nication system of our early hominid ancestors had
evolved into language, I would expect the boundary be-
tween verbal and nonverbal communication to be much
less clear than it is. Must I then resort to a creationist
explanation, as Miles suggests? There is a third alterna-
tive, one that focuses on the way we think.
R. E. Passingham, whose book The Human Primate I
much admire, recognizes the close involvement of lan-
guage with human thought (1982:243):
the invention of spoken language has revolutionized
thought. The use of language for thought vastly am-
plifies the level of intelligence that can be achieved.
Animals think, but people can think in a totally
new way, with a completely different code. It is as if
the code used for storing and processing information
in a computer were radically altered; the results of
such a change might well be dramatic. Unlike ani-
mals people have ways of representing to themselves
hypothetical and highly abstract situations. It is only

because we possess spoken language that our tech-
nology and culture are so much advanced. It is lan-
guage, not maimers, that maketh man.
I like this passage, for it emphasizes the interdepen-
dence of language and the human mind, and I suggest
that it is much more difficult to disentangle language
from thought than to disentangle it from our gesture-call
system. Thought, as Passingham says, has been revolu-
tionized hy language. Our gesture-call system shows no
sign of revolution at all. If language emerged as a product
of our evolving mind we should expect to find an animal
hke ourselves, an animal with a mind that had become
dependent on language, that in the process of developing
language had itself been radically changed. Surely the
human mind has heen more profoundly altered from its
mammalian or primate antecedents than has the ges-
ture-call system, and it seems entirely leasonable to re-
gard language as the most important new component of
the mind. It is language, more than anything else, that
makes our minds different.
I must not imply, of course, that the role of the evolv-
ing mind and brain has been ignored by everyone con-
cerned with language origins. Among recent work that
has focused on the mind and brain is Calvin's (1983,
1987) suggestion that the adaptations of the nervous sys-
tem that made accurate throwing possible could have
contributed to language ability. Wallace (1989) has pro-
posed that the cognitive maps useful to early-hominid
foragers would have had analogues to language functions
BURLING Calls. Language, and Nonverbal Communication j 37

and could have played a role in fostering language abili-
ties. Jerison {1977:55) has gone so fax as to speculate that
language did not evolve as a communication system,
although that may be its primary function as we
know it today. From an evolutionary point of view,
the initial evolution of language is more likely to
have been as a supplement to other sensory systems
for the construction of a real world. This would be
consistent with the other evolutionary changes in
mammalian neural adaptations.
Very recently. Deacon (1992) has reviewed the kinds of
neural modifications required to get from a typical pri-
mate hrain to a human brain and suggested what these
changes may have meant for the development of lan-
guage. All of this work involves ways of thinking ahout
the foundations of language that have little to do with
animal call systems.
If our minds are more radically altered from the ances-
tral mammalian state than our gesture-call system, it is
hardly surprising that the minds of apes are intermediate
between the general mammalian and the human condi-
tion although the gesture-calls they use in the wild are
not. Ape minds give every indication of having moved
away from those of most mammals, and they have
moved in the same direction as ours, though not as far.
By our kinds of measures, apes are far smarter than other
mammals. They solve our kinds of problems more eas-
ily. When we try to understand the mind of an ape we
find it manifestly more like our own than is that of a
dog or a cat. When we look at primate communication
an intense search is needed to identify features that
move it away from the kinds of communication used
by all mammals or move it in the direction of human

language.
Passingham has more to say about the relation of lan-
guage and thought. I am less fond of the following quota-
tion than of the one given earlier, but this one is ame-
nable to repair: "Though invented for communication
language is as powerful a tool for thought. The symbols
devised for talking to others can as well be used for talk-
ing to oneself. The language that describes the world in
conversation also provides a means for thinking about
it" (Passingham 1982:235}. Here Passingham displays
the same bias that is displayed by so many others—the
unquestioned assumption that language is, in its origin,
a system for communicating with other individuals.
There is another way of looking at language origins, and
I can alter the quotation from Passingham to fit a view-
point that I find more congenial: Though invented as a
tool for thought language is as powerful for communica-
tion. The symbols devised for talking to oneself can as
well he used for talking to others. The language that
provides a means for thinking about the world also de-
sciihes it in conversation.
I find it more reasonable to see language originating
as part of a radically evolving mind than as a transforma-
tion of a call system. I suspect that we will learn more
about the origins of language by studying how apes and
other primates use their minds than by studying how
they communicate. When Cheney and Seyfarth leave
their hope of finding similarities between vervet calls
and language and turn, instead, to an investigation
of how vervets use their minds, I read with fascinated
admiration, and I look forward eagerly to the grow-
ing understanding of primate cognition that is certain
to come.

Comments
DAVID F. ARMSTRONG
Gallaudet University, Kendall Green, 800 Florida
Ave., N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002, U.S.A. 13 vm 92
Burling properly anticipates that many will disagree
with the fundamental argument set forth in this paper.
It is not a new notion that human spoken languages
differ so radically from other forms of communication,
hoth human and nonhuman, as to he disconnected from
them phylogenetically. However, after discussing in lu-
cid fashion the signed languages of the deaf and the
iconic gestures employed by hearing-speaking people.
Burling fails to exploit fully the opportunities for study
that these gestural language modalities afford us. In par-
ticular, he seems to hang most of his argument on the
idea that what separates language from nonlanguage is
contrast. He uses this test to separate various forms of
human communication into linguistic and gestural cate-
gories because he realizes that, in order to demonstrate
that language arose from cognition and not communica-
tion, he must show that gesture (surely for communica-
tion) is not related to language.
However, Burling demonstrates clearly that it cannot
be contrast that separates language from nonlanguage.
The case of vervet calls clearly shows this. "Vervets give
three distinctive alarm calls in response to their three
most dangerous predators." These calls are clearly sym-
bolic and in full contrast, one to the others. Of course,
they fail to be language on other counts, such as their
necessary association with certain stimuli, but they are
certainly contrastive. It is interesting to ask why they
might be contrastive, and the simple answer is that they

refer to categorically different entities: leopards, snakes,
and birds of prey. Although its use of arbitrary symbols
is generally thought to be a phylogenetically advanced
characteristic of spoken language, this is in fact not the
case.
A characteristic of human communication that may
separate it from primate communication is its use of
iconic gesture. Burling recognizes this explicitly as few
others have. The signed languages of deai people have
often been criticized as primitive because they make ex-
tensive use of iconic visible gesture. However, Burling
points out that few other mammals—perhaps only our
closest relatives, chimpanzees—have much capacity for
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Actions Speak Louder Than Words: Paralanguage,
Communication, and Education
Author(s): Alastair Pennycook
Source: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Jun., 1985), pp. 259-
282
Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other
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TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 1985
Actions Speak Louder Than Words:
Paralanguage, Communication,
and Education
ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK
McGill University
This article examines the importance of paralanguage (kinesics,
proxemics, and paraverbal features) in communication.
Gestures,
facial expressions, interactional synchrony, eye contact, use of
space, touching, aspects of voice modification, and silence are
shown to play a crucial role in human interaction and to be
highly
culture-specific. The implications of this broad paradigm of
com-
munication are discussed with respect to language
development,
and it is suggested that paralanguage be included as a primary
facet of communicative competence. Finally, the importance of
awareness of paralanguage in the classroom is discussed, and a
number of suggestions are made to facilitate students'
acquisition
of paralanguage.
INTRODUCTION
The term paralanguage was first used by Trager (1958) as a
synthesis of the linguistic and psychological material collected
on
the kinds and categories of voice modification which could be
applied to different situational contexts. According to his

typological
classification, any human utterance could be fully accounted
for in
terms of voice set, the physiological and physical peculiarities
which
allow identification of mood, state of health, age, sex, body
build,
and so on; voice qualities, recognizable speech events which
include
degree of control of pitch range, articulation, rhythm,
resonance,
and tempo; and vocalization, specifically identifiable noises
(sounds)
such as laughing, crying, and whispering, as well as uh-huh
(affir-
mation) or uh-uh (negation).
Trager was at this time engaged in providing a framework for
more general studies of culture and communication with
anthro-
pologists Edward Hall and Ray Birdwhistell, who provided
valuable
materials from their respective fields of proxemics, "social and
personal space and man's perception of it" (Hall 1966:1), and
259
2016 16:13:09 UTC
kinesics, gestures and other body movements, including facial
expression, eye movement, and posture. Thus, paralanguage
became

one of a set of interrelated subsystems comprising one's overall
communicative competence: "In analyzing a communication,
one
must, to cover all the data, include material in the areas of
paralanguage and kinesics as well as in language" (Trager
1958:278).
A degree of confusion has arisen, however, since paralanguage
has been used as an umbrella term to cover paralanguage in its
original narrow sense and also to refer more generally to all
aspects
of nonverbal communication. There is further confusion
concerning
the exact perimeters of the terms kinesics and proxemics, as
they
intersect with body language, haptics (touching), and so on.
Thus,
with some authors, we may find paralanguage subsumed under
nonverbal communication, as with Duncan (1969), who
includes
body motion, paralanguage, proxemics, olfaction, skin
sensitivity,
and use of artifacts under the title of nonverbal communication,
while with others, all aspects of nonverbal communication are
subsumed under paralanguage.
The 1984 ERIC definition of paralanguage is the "study of
those
aspects of speech communication that do not pertain to
linguistic
structure or content, for example, vocal qualifiers, intonation,
and
body language" (Houston 1984:185). This broader definition,
which
appears to be gaining popularity at present, is used in this
article and

is consistent with Loveday's (1982:91): "paralanguage ... the
vocal,
kinesic (gestural) and proxemic (spatial) channels which
accompany,
interfuse and partly synchronize the traditionally recognized
ones."
Unfortunately, this still leaves a terminological problem: how
to
distinguish between the narrow and broad definitions of
paralan-
guage, both of which are contained in the literature. For this
article,
paralanguage is used in the broad sense, and paraverbal
features is
used to refer to paralanguage in the narrow sense. Under the
rubric
paralanguage, therefore, are found kinesics, proxemics, and
para-
verbal features.
THE COMPONENTS OF PARALANGUAGE
Before a more detailed discussion of these subsystems, we
should
first be aware of the significance of paralanguage in any
framework
of communication. According to Stevick (1982:163), "if verbal
communication is the pen which spells out details, nonverbal
communication provides the surface on which the words are
written
and against which they must be interpreted." Furthermore, this
communicative channel is in operation at all times: "Whatever
language, or whatever the purpose in communication,
informational
260 TESOL QUARTERLY

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or expressive, emotions and attitudes always project themselves
in
an overlay of superimposed patterns" (Key 1975:9). More
precisely,
Birdwhistell (1970:158) has stated that "probably no more than
30 to
35 percent of the social meaning of a conversation or an
interaction
is carried by the words." These figures appear to have gained
fairly
wide acceptance, as a number of authors cite 65 percent as the
communicative load carried by the paralinguistic channels.
Meh-
rabian and Ferris (1967), however, provide the following
figures for
weight of importance in communication: face, 55 percent; tone,
38
percent; words, 7 percent.
Any such figures need to be treated with caution and are
clearly
dependent on individual, contextual, and cultural factors, but
they
nevertheless indicate the great significance of this area of
study. The
relationship of language to paralanguage has been expressed
perhaps
most pithily by Abercrombie (1968:55): "We speak with our
vocal

organs, but we converse with our whole body."
Kinesics
In his seminal work, Darwin argued for an evolutionary origin
of
the expression of emotions in man: "The same state of mind is
expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity"
(1872:17). Since that time, much of the research in expressions
and
gestures has sought to answer this nature/nurture controversy.
Eibl-
Eibesfeldt (1974), who took up Darwin's suggestion that
congenitally
blind children be studied, found that deaf and blind children
indeed
laughed, smiled, and cried (see also Knapp 1978, Chapter 2).
She
also discovered a number of universal, cross-cultural trends,
such as
the "eyebrow flash" of recognition and greeting that can also be
found among primates. In some cultures, however, such as the
Japanese, this expression was considered indecent and was sup-
pressed. Ekman has also been a strong proponent of the
argument
for the universality of expressions. Ekman, Sorenson, and
Friesen
(1969) compared the recognition of photographs displaying
seven
emotional states--happiness, fear, disgust, contempt, anger,
surprise,
and sadness-among people of both literate and nonliterate
societies
and found a fairly high correlation. An experiment by Ekman
and
Friesen (1975:24) showed that Japanese and American students

used
"virtually identical facial expressions" when alone but showed
"little
correspondence between . . expressions" in the presence of
another
person. They concluded that there was a pan-cultural element
in
facial displays of emotion, that is, in the association between
facial
muscular movements and discrete primary emotions, but noted
that
cultures may still differ in what evokes an emotion, in rules for
controlling the display of emotion, and in behavioral
consequences.
PARALANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND EDUCATION
261
2016 16:13:09 UTC
La Barre directly challenged the "innateness" argument by
citing
differences across cultures in the expression of emotions, such
as
smiling, which "may almost be mapped after the fashion of any
other culture trait," or laughter, which "is in some senses a
geographic
variable" (1947:52). The strongest proponent of the nurture
side of
the controversy has been Birdwhistell. Analyzing expressions
through
the use of modern technology, rather than through the

anecdotal
information used by La Barre, "in a new experimental world
made
possible by the sound camera, the slow-motion analyzer, and
the
tape recorder," Birdwhistell (1970:5) has argued for a
"reevaluation
of evolution." After extensive research, he concluded that
"although
we have been searching for 15 years, we have found no gesture
or
body motion which has the same social meaning in all societies
...
Insofar as we know, there is no body motion or gesture that can
be
regarded as a universal symbol" (1970:81).
The safest position to take in this argument seems to be that
certain types of expressive behavior, such as perspiring or
pupil
dilation, depend on the autonomic system and are presumably
innate, but for most other forms of nonverbal communication,
the
expressive meaning differs greatly across cultures. Thus, there
may
be a mixture of both innate and learned components in any
social
signal: Greetings, for example, nearly always involve face-to-
face
approach, touching, mutual gaze, and some type of verbal
formula
(Argyle 1976). Yet, as everyone is no doubt well aware,
greetings in
North or South America, France, Japan, or Russia, for example,
differ considerably. Even the handshake itself has different
forms-

according to length, pressure, and style-and different functions-
whether greeting, farewell, or sealing a bargain (Hall and Hall
1983).
In East Africa, Creider (1977) identified seven different
handshakes,
varying according to respect, age, and friendliness.
The observation and description of gestures have long been the
hobby of travelers and the work of anthropologists.
Birdwhistell
(1970) has completed the most extensive survey of American
gestures and expressions, listing 57 facial kinemes (compare
pho-
nemes), for example, 4 degrees of eyelid closure and 3 kinemes
of
head nod, which may be combined into orderly structures of
behavior (kinemorphs) in an interactive sequence contributing
to
social meaning. In addition to facial movements, Birdwhistell
has
categorized movement and posture for the head, trunk,
shoulder,
arm and wrist, hand and finger, hip, leg and ankle, foot activity
and
walking, and neck.
On a less technical level, most of us-and especially ESL teach-
ers-probably have one or more amusing anecdotes to tell of
gestures that have been misinterpreted: the Japanese tour guide
262 TESOL QUARTERLY
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trying to regather her group, only to find them dispersing even
more
in reaction to her gesture (Seward 1968:42), or the unfortunate
results of using the "thumbs-up" gesture to hitchhike in
Australia or
Latin America. That gestures may carry unambiguous meaning
is
evidenced by the story of an Italian butcher, jailed for publicly
displaying the "cuckold" sign to his neighbor (Time 1965).
There are many fascinating accounts and descriptions of
gestures,
some organized by type, for example, the signs for yes or no
(Jakobson 1972); some by country, for example, Japan
(Morsbach
1973) or Puerto Rico (Nine-Curt 1976a); and some cross-
culturally
(e.g., La Barre 1947 or Morris, Collet, Marsh, and
O'Shaughnessy
1979). Creider (1977) found that although a number of African
gestures were shared, only 13 out of 69 were found in both
Africa
and North America, and only 18 in both Africa and Latin
America.
What is clearly demonstrated by all these studies is that
gestures are
culture-specific, and their use or misuse can lead to
amusement,
bewilderment, miscomprehension, or insult. As Hall (1976:76)
sug-
gests, "the chances of one's being correct decrease as cultural
distance increases. Even two people as closely related as the
Americans and the English have problems reading each other's
kinesics."

What is less obvious than these overt gestures, however, is that
our
bodies are conveying information constantly during any
interaction.
Furthermore, these body movements are coordinated with
speech
so that it is possible to identify hierarchical structures of body
movement that correspond to linguistic segments: "When, in a
speaker, the body motion co-occurring with his speech is
examined,
it is found that the points of change in the flow of sound
coincide
with the points of change in body movement" (Kendon
1974:151).
These "kinesic markers"-head nods, eye blinks, small lip move-
ments, chin thrusts, and other body movements-mark the
rhythm
of the speech and are produced, according to Dittman (1974),
as a
by-product of the speaker's ongoing task of casting thoughts
into
speech. Thus, such body movements provide important clues to
the
listener in the ongoing task of understanding what the speaker
has
said. There is, therefore, a close relationship between
suprasegmen-
tals and other parts of the analogical system (Noonan-Wagner,
Acton, and Wood 1981). A study by Hadar, Steiner, Grant, and
Rose
(1983) found that rapid head movements indicated stress, and
juncture was marked by contrasting ordinary movements with
stillness.
It is not only the speaker, however, who is in constant motion,

for
the listener tends to mirror the movements of the speaker. This
interactional synchrony is of particular significance, since it
provides
PARALANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND EDUCATION
263
2016 16:13:09 UTC
a means by which people signal their mutual attentiveness: "To
signal attentiveness, interactors use proximity, orientation,
gaze,
head nods, alert posture and bodily movements" (Argyle
1976:72).
An important function of these interactions is to indicate not
only
stress, junctures, pauses, or attentiveness, but also to organize
discourse and signalone's readiness to yield or take a turn, or to
suppress an attempt to take a turn (Duncan 1974, 1976).
Eye contact plays an important role in regulating interpersonal
communication. In the United States, prolonged eye contact
indi-
cates readiness to yield a turn (Heaton 1978), but eye contact
may
differ extensively among cultures, as a number of authors have
noted. While many Western societies regard people as being
slightly
suspicious or "shifty" if they avoid a certain amount of
culturally
prescribed eye contact with a partner in face-to-face

conversation,
Japanse children are taught to refrain from direct eye contact
with
others (Morsbach 1973). In many Eastern cultures, downcast
eyes
are a sign of respect, which can lead to misinterpretation in the
West
(Levy 1979, Wolfgang 1979).
The movements that signal interactional synchrony also differ
across cultures, according to the rhythm and discourse
organization
specific to each language: "Rhythm in any language is always
closely
tied up with other muscular rhythms of the body" (Allen and
Corder
1974:45). This may be readily observed in dubbed films; no
matter
how good the lip-synchronization, there is often nevertheless
an
unsettling conflict between the rhythm and flow of the spoken
words and the nonverbal rhythm and flow. As Hall (1976:74)
puts it,
"humans are tied to each other by hierarchies of rhythms that
are
culture-specific and expressed through language and body
move-
ment."
Finally, it is interesting to note that we seem to have less
control
over our nonverbal behavior than over our verbal behavior, so
that
"nonverbal leakage" (Ekman and Friesen 1974 and compare
Meh-
rabian 1972, Chapter 5) may often reveal what words do not.

CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number r, February 1993© 199.docx

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CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 34, Number r, February 1993© 199.docx