Overview

Verbal and nonverbal communicative acts mark the links within our discourse, help us to exchange turns and give backchannel in conversation. This book analyses the communicative system of gaze in depth, investigating its structure and functions the same way that words and gestures are studied, and shows how to do so by establishing a phonology, a morphology and a semantics of eye communication, before finally outlining a lexicon of gaze. Poggi provides a detailed semantic analysis of lexical items, highlights the role of gaze in multimodal communication, and illustrates its uses in everyday life, politics, education and musical performance. The meanings we communicate by gaze are intertwined with the multimodality of our communication, thus integrating, complementing, sometimes contradicting, whether deliberately or inadvertently, what we say with words or gestures. Starting from a robust theoretical framework, this book also provides an overview of the methods that can be exploited to study gaze, ranging from ethno-semantics to observation and simulation, and provides examples of their use. A timely and original contribution that is essential reading for advanced students, scholars and researchers of multimodal communication, pragmatics, social psychology and related areas.

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9781032678337

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Reviews

It is widely accepted that “the eyes are the mirror of the soul,” a proverb so ingrained in common knowledge that we often take it for granted, seldom contemplating its profound implications. Fortunately, scholars like Isabella Poggi exist to illuminate the beauty and complexity of our behavior, particularly when it is camouflaged in plain sight, making it challenging to discern. Similar to the allegory of Plato’s cave, Poggi guides us to comprehend how limited our understanding is regarding the use of our eyes, providing a thorough and scientific exploration of their role in our social lives. Upon completing this book, one inevitably perceives others’ eyes through an entirely different lens. Alessandro Vinciarelli. Full Professor at University of Glasgow - School of Computing Science Poggi provides a profoundly original treatment which has the potential to revolutionize the fields it addresses. The book is bound to make the reader think and reconsider many assumptions they have been taking for granted, while at the same time it is written in clear language that will be accessible even to beginners. Applying a variety of methodologies, Poggi produces a coherent proposal for the bold, maybe even daring, thesis that gaze can be described as a language, not in a metaphorical sense, but literally, that it is organized like language, hence with the equivalent of phonemes, morphemes, words, meanings, pragmatics, and so on, through much of gamut of linguistic constituents. This book has the potential to bring together several different fields (the study of gesture, gaze, and emotions, Ekman’s FACS, ethology, some areas of robotics and of eye tracking) in an integrated field. The book is groundbreaking and a synthesis at the same time. Poggi’s effort is a refreshing example of scholarship and theory building. Dr. Salvatore Attardo, Professor at Texas A&M University Isabella Poggi’s The Language of Gaze offers powerful new insights into the role of gaze in human interaction. Attardo and Pickering’s recent Eye-tracking in Linguistics focuses on eye movements when a person describes a visual scene and, more relevantly, gaze patterns between two people during a humorous conversation. There has been much study in the past of manual gesture as a complement to the use of spoken language (as distinct from the use of hands, face and other parts of the body in signed languages) as well as study of facial expressions of emotion, with cross-species accounts going back to Darwin. Recent work has seen facial expression (including the direction of gaze) studied not only in relation to emotion but also as a complement to language use in signaling syntactic information and managing turn taking. Poggi contributes to such studies but carries them further by not only highlighting the role of gaze in multimodal communication but also suggesting how “talking with the eyes” – and facial expression more generally -- can have an important impact on how humans interact in everyday life, politics, education, and more. In this way, Poggi builds upon and greatly extends her exploration -- in her book with Francesca D’Errico, Social Influence, Power, and Multimodal Communication -- of how democratic leaders and dictators use words, voice, gesture, face, gaze, and posture to boast about their own merits or insult and ridicule rivals. Michael Arbib, University of California, San Diego

Author Information

Isabella Poggi has been a Full professor of Psychology at Roma Tre University, and a member of European Networks on Embodied Communication, on Emotions, and Social Signal Processing.

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