You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, Alfred S. Hayes, and Mary Catherine Bateson. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1964. 294 pp.
PRAGMATICS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION. A STUDY OF INTERACTIONAL PATTERNS, PATHOLOGIES, AND PARADOXES. By Paul Watzlawick, Ph.D., Janet Helmick Beavin, A. B., and Don D. Jackson, M.D. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1967. 296 pp.
These two books are both about communication but approach the subject in very different ways. Semiotics deals primarily with language and associated forms of symboling activity. Pragmatics concerns itself with certain broad types of human interaction, bypassing consideration of the symbolic (mainly linguistic) vehicle of that interaction.
Approaches to Semiotics is a transcript of the Indiana University Conference on Paralinguistics and Kinesics (1962). It encompasses exploratory material from a number of different disciplines (medicine, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and education). The contributions are noteworthy for their thoroughness as well as for the caution and modesty of their conclusions. Throughout the conference the study of language serves as the point of departure for the examination of simultaneous or alternative communication modalities. No fuzzy sentimentality about 'nonverbal communications' appears in these pages. A progressive clarification of the concepts of paralanguage and kinesics emerges from the excellent discussions.
The emphasis of the conference, it seems, was on those aspects of communication which are peripheral to or superimposed upon the distinctive features of the vocal-auditory language code. These 'extralinguistic' phenomena are subsumed under the headings paralanguage (referring to sound) and kinesics (referring to body movement). Sixty scholars participated in the discussions, including psychiatrists and other physicians (Lawrence Z. Freedman, Paul J. Moses, Robert E. Pittenger, W. Clifford M. Scott), linguists (Norman A. McQuown, Thomas A. Sebeok), anthropologists (Mar