Universitat de Barcelona
One of the most striking features of the studies on nonverbal communication over the last quarter of the last century is the progressive establishment of a paradigm (in the sense of a research program or context) for analyzing multimodal communicative signals and procedures. At present, only the fact that different sources of data cannot be included in theoretically accountable models justifies the many distinctions in sampling and analyzing data that appear in a synchronized, convergent or even syncretic way throughout the production and reception processes.
In fact, the synchronization between mechanisms of language production and other non-linguistic (vocal and gestural) mechanisms has been stressed in the literature for almost thirty years, and the contradiction between the evidence of data and the traditional maintenance of a categorical distinction applied to verbality has become more and more obvious. Besides language, two other communicative modalities are apparently basic in human communication: paralanguage or vocal (non-verbal) communication, and kinesics, understood as the study of human communicative movements, i.e. gestuality in the wide sense (or manual gesture, facial expression, gaze, touch, and posture, in a more analytical view).
Looking to the future of pragmatics (as a theory of language use) and nonverbal studies it is obvious that to build a theory on negative foundations (i.e. "non-verbality") is very difficult. Therefore it would be very useful (a) to clarify what a theory about communication should be and (b) the degree to which a theory of pragmatics in particular and of language in general should accommodate nonverbal data.