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Cross Cultural Differences Nonverbal Communication Essay

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Gestures provide one of the most obvious cases of cross-cultural differences in nonverbal communication. In South Italy gesture use is prominent and many gestures are conventional. These include ‘pragmatic’ gestures that indicate type of speech act or aspects of discourse structure and ‘substantive’ gestures that express utterance content (Kendon, n.d.). The examples of conventional ‘pragmatic’ gestures are the Mano a borsa(‘purse hand’) and the Mani giunte (‘praying hands’) are well known and have recognition as ‘quotable gestures’ or ‘emblems’. They express the illocutionary intent of the spoken utterances associated with them. The second two relate to discourse structure: The Finger Bunch, which is similar to the ‘purse hand’ in form, marks ‘topic’ as distinct from ‘comment’; the Ring, in which the tips of the index finger and thumb are brought into contact forming a circle, marks the ‘locality’ of a unit in relation to the theme. Emblems, in particular, tend to differ by culture. Emblems are gestures that substitute for language. Examples of emblems include waving hand to say “hello” or “goodbye”, nodding to say “yes”, putting your hand out so that someone stops, and more. Those are the examples of emblems in the United States. In Italy, handshake is common. It is used with everyone you meet, but women must hold their hand out first. When meeting for get together, they shake everyone hands, including children, then again when leaving (Bosrock, 2010). Furthermore,

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