Paraverbal Communication

Il discorso, la comunicazione verbale e paraverbale e il media training dell'intervista a Le invasioni Barbariche (La7) di Matteo Salvini e Pippo Civati messi a confronto, evidenziandone analogie e differenze.
Ne emerge un quadro che vede punti di contatto contenutistico (l'antirenzismo) contrapporsi a differenze comunicativo di grande rilievo.

La presente analisi è stata presentata al concorso indetto da Eidos communication, risultando vincitrice di una borsa di studio per la XII edizione del Master in Consulenza politica e marketing elettorale.

Smile and laughter are universal means of transmitting nonverbal messages. Smile is a very complex expression capable to transmit a wide range of information, denoting a wide range of emotions and feelings, such as pleasure, joy, happiness, satisfaction, promise, sociability, amusement, but also cynicism, embarrassment, emotional pain, slyness, shame and sarcasm. However, the interpretation of the meaning of the smile also varies from one culture to another, or even from one subculture to another. Instead, laughter seems to have more universal human connotations and interpretations, because it is the expression of some basic universal human emotions, such as joy, cheerfulness, pleasure, happiness. Laughter is generally the expression of good mood, but, more than that, it can also cause good mood. That is why laughter is also used as part of some therapies. However, the vocal component of laughter, considered part of paraverbal communication, may have specific cultural determinations. For example, when people accentuate by laughing a certain vowel, they want to express, at least in European culture, different mental states and behavioural intentions, which are decipherable only when the codes of communication and their meanings are known. Significations and interpretations of laughter and smile are thus functions of the socio-cultural context. The present paper deals with these aspects, highlighting the social and cultural dimensions of these two suggestive components of nonverbal communication.

With the flourishing of information technology in the last 50 years, electronic communication has become a significant part of our daily lives. As electronic language is written text, it is divorced from gestures, facial expressions, and prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, and volume. That is why emoticons have entered cyberspace; they infuse electronic communication with an emotional, human touch. This paper deals with typographic emoticons as linguistic units, and observes their structures and uses in sentences. The research corpus covers 258 French text messages collected with anonym questionnaire around the years 2008-2009. After a graphic analysis of typographic emoticons, we define-emoticon structure‖ as-a pictogram-like unit formed with alphagrams and topograms of distinctive significative function, and visually conditioned to the referent‖. Morphological analysis has shown that, in emoticon structure, graphemes of entirely different significances and functions become morpheme-like units, which, like word morphemes, can be derivational, inflectional, or abbreviated, but never unbound. Relying on a corpus, we isolated the two main uses of the emoticon: non-verbal and verbal. The former is the more frequent use, so it is considered in more detail in this paper. Analysis has shown that emoticons are not only paraverbal devices, but also structural markers, and they play a significant role in the formation of the sentence.