“Non-verbal communication tends to provide the context of verbal communication and has the power to disambiguate or invalidate the content of linguistic expressions”, (Krippendorff, 1986)
Discuss and provide relevant evidence to justify your arguments.
The concept of communication as Shannon & Weaver brought about is “all the procedures by which one mind may affect another. Communication is universal and involves not only written and oral speech, but also music, the pictorial arts, the theatre, the ballet, and in fact all human behaviour” (1949: 3). Literally, communication is also known as “a common sharing of information”. In general, interactional and transactional properties are two fundamental components of communication which play a vital role in our lives. Communication is generally characterized as verbal and non-verbal. Verbal communication, for the most part is referred to the utterances of words, speech or the sounds which we produce to convey meaning, whereas non-verbal communication is produced by any criterion other than words, such as eye contact, body language or vocal cues (Knapp & Hall, 2002). Non-verbal communications is powerful, influential and at some points even overwhelm the message conveyed in verbal communication. Krippendorff in the above statement above critically suggests that non-verbal communication provides the context of verbal communication to take place. In fact, in line with this idea a few other researchers consolidate and established their own analysis based on the researches carried. DeVito J. A, (p. 134: 2002) for instance, in his book ‘Human Communication’ also reinforced the statement. He plainly explains that non-verbal messages often comment on or communicate something about other verbal messages. These two consolidating statements are also known as ‘metacommunicate’ which is commonly used to accent or emphasize some part of a verbal message. In addition to that, Segal