Visible Acts of Meaning

Abstract

The authors propose that dialogue in face-to-face interaction is both audible and visible; language use in this setting includes visible acts of meaning such as facial displays and hand gestures. Several criteria distinguish these from other nonverbal acts: (a) They are sensitive to a sender-receiver relationship in that they are less likely to occur when an addressee will not see them, (b) they are analogically encoded symbols, (c) their meaning can be explicated or demonstrated in context, and (d) they are fully integrated with the accompanying words, although they may be redundant or nonredundant with these words. For these particular acts, the authors eschew the term nonverbal communication because it is a negative definition based solely on physical source. Instead, they propose an integrated message model in which the moment-by-moment audible and visible communicative acts are treated as a unified whole.