STUDY OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION OF CONFERENCE INTERPRETERS’ LINGUISTIC PERSONALITY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the relevance and significance of nonverbal communication in a comprehensive approach to the study of the linguistic personality of a conference interpreter. The author explains the use of the communicative-functional approach to the analysis of verbal and nonverbal behaviour of the interpreter’s linguistic personality. The hypothesis of the study brings out that the nonverbal behaviour of the interpreter’s linguistic personality is determined by the content of the translated utterance, the interpreter’s internal motivation and intention (the pragmatic level of the linguistic personality), and it is consistently proved that nonverbal means shall be considered as part of the structural model of the linguistic personality, influencing the verbal representation of the linguistic personality. The author analyses a nonverbal sign (at its beginning, middle and end of its expression) and a translation syntagm as minimal units of study. The units of the study were collected by solid sampling from 14 video recordings of interpretation series, total study includes 105 minutes with records of nonverbal signs used by linguistic personality the interpreters participated in the study. As a result, the author classified nonverbal signs into vegetatives and somatives, and she structurally described the content of the groups of kinesic somatives, oculesic somatives and prosodic somatives, presenting the semantic content of nonverbal signs; within kinesic somatives, the author described a subgroup of comfort-gestures. The paper concludes about the prospect of further study of nonverbal communication and its importance for the study of linguistic personality in general.