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Poggi, Isabella: Mind, Hands, Face and Body. A Goal and Belief View of Multimodal
Communication
(Körper ♦ Zeichen ♦ Kultur 19)
ISBN
978-3-89693-263-1 (05/2007)
433 Seiten, 22,7 x 15,3 cm, 108 Abb., Kt., EUR 56,00
Communication is multimodal. In everyday interaction we do not communicate only by words, but by our whole body. We talk by gestures, facial
expression, gaze, body movements, posture, and these communicative modalities interact with each other in subtle and complex ways. But can we disentangle the different sounds in a symphony, the different pieces in a
mosaic? This book claims that the communication scholar can write down the musical score of the communicative symphony by attributing a specific meaning to each single signal – to each gesture, gaze, facial
expression – and by finding out lexicons of all communicative modalities. If Linguists have been writing dictionaries of verbal languages for millennia, why not start compiling a new type of
dictionaries, and discover the lexicons and the alphabets of gestures, gaze, or touch? Part I of this book (Mind) presents a cognitive model of communication in terms of the notions of goal and belief; Parts II
(Hands) and III (Face) analyse gestural and facial communication in detail, by distinguishing universal and cultural aspects in gesture and gaze, showing the differences between gestures that are codified in our
mind and gestures that we create on the spot, and teaching how to make a dictionary of touch or how to find the meanings conveyed by the eyebrows. Part IV (Body) presents an annotation scheme to transcribe and
analyse signals in all modalities and to capture the meaning of their interaction, that has proved useful for empirical research on multimodality and for its simulation in Embodied Conversational Agents; to
illustrate the potentialities of this tool, multimodal discourses are analysed, taken from TV talk shows, political discourse, classroom interaction, speech-therapy sessions, judicial debates, university
examinations and comic movies. The subtleties of multimodality are dissected, showing how the whole body can be a tool for indirect and contradictory messages, deception, joke, irony and other sophisticated uses of
communication.
Prof. Dr. Isabella Poggi teaches General Psychology and
Psychology of Communication at Roma Tre University. She works to the construction of a cognitive model of mind, social interaction and communication, through conceptual analysis, observative research and simulation
in Embodied Agents. After her first research about the teaching of Italian as a first language, she has published books and papers about emotions (guilt, shame, humiliation, pity, enthusiasm), deception, persuasion,
verbal and multimodal communication in humans and machines.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: A goal and belief model of communication
Chapter 1: Goals, actions and beliefs
Chapter 2: A goal-based view of communication
Chapter 3: The
goal of communicating
Chapter 4: The Sender and the Addressee
Chapter 5: Signals and Modalities
Chapter 6: The meaning
Chapter 7: Communication systems
Chapter 8: Communication or successful
communication? The role of context
Chapter 9: A goal and belief definition of Communication. Some theoretical (and ideological?) implications
Chapter 10: Believable Embodied Agents. A new perspective for the
study of Multimodality
Chapter 11: Alphabets and Lexicons of mode-specific systems
Part II: Hands
Chapter 12: The study of gesture
Chapter 13: Gestures
Chapter 14: From a typology of gestures
to a procedure for gesture production
Chapter 15: Creative iconic gestures
Chapter 16: Creative iconic gestures in Aphasics
Chapter 17: Symbolic gestures and the Italian Gestionary
Chapter 18: Cherology
of Symbolic Gestures
Chapter 19: The semantic analysis of gestures. Some issues in gestural lexicography
Chapter 20: Gestures, ambiguity, and context
Chapter 21: Rhetorical figures in
gestures
Chapter 22: Iconicity in Symbolic Gestures
Chapter 23: Variation and norms of use in Symbolic Gestures
Chapter 24: The “tulip hand”. A semantic analysis of a holophrastic symbolic
gesture
Chapter 25: The communicative system of touch. Lexicon, haptology, and norms of use
Part III: Face
Chapter 26: Face Communication
Chapter 27: The meaning of performatives
Chapter 28:
The performative face
Chapter 29: Gaze as a communicative signal
Chapter 30: The signal of gaze
Chapter 31: The meanings of gaze
Chapter 32: The meanings of the eyebrows
Chapter 33: The eyebrow
raising and the frown: polysemy and synonymy in gaze signals
Part IV: Body
Chapter 34: Mind Markers in words, voice, face, hands, and body
Chapter 35: The “Musical score”. From single
signals to multimodal communication
Chapter 36: A richer score to analyse everyday (that is, complex) communication
Chapter 37: A score to taste the subtleties of everyday communication
Chapter 38: Music,
body and communication
Epilogue
References
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