Difference Between Professionals' and Non-Professionals' Interpretation on Hand Gestures
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
In our interaction with the world around us, we always communicate to different people, especially in our everyday activities, like riding a cab, choosing a meal for breakfast, schooling, shopping, and a lot more. This interactions use our body and these convey different interpretations to people, like hand gestures it is a non verbal communication which we used consciously and unconsciously that can actually replace a verbal phrase according to Laurie Wilhem (1993) this kinds of gestures have different style for the use of communication. However, using hand gestures may vary on how people interpret, because some hand gestures which we commonly used and interpreted as a whole may have different interpretations to other country, like hand gestures which we positively interpreted may interpret negatively by others which have different cultural aspects. Hand gestures interpretation also influenced by the environment or the society, if hand gestures are usually used by a certain group of people this will become a manner which they had already familiar with, supported by Basil Bernstein’s Sociolinguistic Theory of language codes (1971) Hand gestures as a part of pragmatics conveys interpretations out of its physical manifestations. Like pragmatics, it allows to us to observe how this meaning “meaning beyond the words” can be understood as mentioned by Steve Campsall (1991). The appointed meaning is there not because of the semantic aspects of the words, but because we shared certain contextual knowledge with the people, thus people also share certain interpretation in a society. In this study, the professionals and non-professionals are compared on how they interpret messages from hand gestures. This shows that the choice of an individual in interpreting hand gestures may vary on the kind of interaction in a group. The influence of the society on hoe people shares similar information in a group made them understand each other most
INTRODUCTION
In our interaction with the world around us, we always communicate to different people, especially in our everyday activities, like riding a cab, choosing a meal for breakfast, schooling, shopping, and a lot more. This interactions use our body and these convey different interpretations to people, like hand gestures it is a non verbal communication which we used consciously and unconsciously that can actually replace a verbal phrase according to Laurie Wilhem (1993) this kinds of gestures have different style for the use of communication. However, using hand gestures may vary on how people interpret, because some hand gestures which we commonly used and interpreted as a whole may have different interpretations to other country, like hand gestures which we positively interpreted may interpret negatively by others which have different cultural aspects. Hand gestures interpretation also influenced by the environment or the society, if hand gestures are usually used by a certain group of people this will become a manner which they had already familiar with, supported by Basil Bernstein’s Sociolinguistic Theory of language codes (1971) Hand gestures as a part of pragmatics conveys interpretations out of its physical manifestations. Like pragmatics, it allows to us to observe how this meaning “meaning beyond the words” can be understood as mentioned by Steve Campsall (1991). The appointed meaning is there not because of the semantic aspects of the words, but because we shared certain contextual knowledge with the people, thus people also share certain interpretation in a society. In this study, the professionals and non-professionals are compared on how they interpret messages from hand gestures. This shows that the choice of an individual in interpreting hand gestures may vary on the kind of interaction in a group. The influence of the society on hoe people shares similar information in a group made them understand each other most