Re:Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016)
by agumonkey on Saturday February 11, 2017 @07:53AM
(#13622398)
I agree, yet non-verbal is extremely important for in-situ, in the now, personal and interpersonal well being. N-Verbal can even make Verbal communication moot since one can say anything depending on its emotional state. Also, some things are extremely hard to describe by words yet can be conveyed with a silence, a look in the eye, a gesture.
I really agree about the abstract possibilities of speech, but I a bit annoyed at the fact in one's existence, the non verbal cues are so important, yet so often boldly ignored, and almost never taught.
Re:Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016)
by Typhon on Saturday February 11, 2017 @09:38AM
(#13622785)
You know who definitely agrees with you ? Linguists who specialize in conversational analysis, multimodal discourse analysis and interactional sociolinguistics.
It makes me kind of sad when people assume that "Chomsky's work = the whole of linguistics".
Furthermore, all known human languages allow you to attribute utterances to another, earlier speaker, what is known as reported speech (often, though not always as Pirahâ demonstrate, through an embedded clause "He said that X").
Human non-verbal communication (which is EMPHATICALLY NOT to be confused with sign languages), on the other hand, is typically not very expressive. Apart from the admittedly very important, but nevertheless quite specialized domain of human emotion (conveyed by facial expression for instance), it is more or less inadequate for much of what we want to communicate.