Some social aspects of paralanguage

Abstract

The term ‘paralanguage’ and the corresponding adjective ‘paralinguistic’ are less than ten years old but already they loom large in the study of animal communication. In one sense all non-language communications (kinesics, haptics, as well as “vocalization”) are paralinguistic but this term is now almost exclusively applied to significant, non-linguistic noises made with the vocal tract. Observations of these phenomena are of course quite old. Demosthenes undoubtedly studied “delivery” and “tone of voice.” There are pre-Christian statements on phonology also, but no systematic study of that subject antedates that of Grimm in 1819, and that was a lucky forerunner. Actual investigation of phonology as structure, as patterns in a system, began with Ferdinand De Saussure late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. The first systematic study of paralanguage was by Henry Lee Smith, Jr. in a paper called “The Communication Situation,” mimeographed for the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Department of State in 1950. This was later expanded into “An Outline of Metalinguistic Analysis” in the 1952 Georgetown Round Table Conference on Linguistics and Language Study. Smith did not use the term ‘paralanguage,’ however, but ‘vocalization,’ subdivided into ‘vocal qualifiers’ and ‘vocal modifiers.’ Paralanguage became established with the most complete study to date, the 1958 article by George L. Trager “Paralanguage: A Preliminary Statement.” Other writers in the field are Norman A. McQuown and Charles F. Hockett. This study is more systematic than that of Smith and less complex than that of Trager. The infancy of the field, I think, warrants various approaches.

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