Paralanguage: A Linguistic and Interdisciplinary Approach to Interactive Speech and Sounds

There would be no doubt in the reader's mind that a comprehensive book on paralanguage has been long overdue. Different areas in nonverbal communication studies have been proliferating in the last thirty years, offering a great number of research and pedagogical avenues, man y practical applications in very diverse aspects of life, and a general awareness of how people and their environment communicate beyond words. But it seems that paralanguage has proven too great a challenge to be dealt with because of the difficulties involved and its inherent elusiveness. Thus, there being no ground-breaking interdisciplinary work on the subject — for interdisciplinarity cannot be avoided today without detriment to one's knowledge in any single field — a commo n source of data and a useful theoretical and methodological model was necessary for phoneticians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, doctors and nurses, speech therapists, anyone else engaged in professional interaction, foreign-language instructors, writers, students or readers of novels or plays, and those engaged in theater and film productions.