Studies On The Ideographic Means Of Symbolic Body Language

Body language is a visualized symbol system (some with sound) which canexpress and exchange information and it consists of people’s facial expressions, bodypostures, body movements and postural changes and so on. Body language can beclassified into symbol body language and non-symbol body language. Symbol bodylanguage means the body language has been symbolized and it has signifier andsignified. Non-symbol body language is not symbolized and has no fixed actions; itusually plays a coordinative and auxiliary role in language communication. Through theway of planar contrariety, this thesis analyzes the symbolic characteristics of bodylanguage. According to the four principles of creating Chinese characters in LiuShu(XiangXing, ZhiShi, HuiYi and XingSheng), this thesis makes a comparative analysisand points out that body language also can express meanings by means of these fourforms—XiangXing, ZhiShi, HuiYi and XingSheng. Through the analysis of theideographic means of symbolic body language and its semantic features, the thesisexpounds the language features on the signifier and signified which the ideographicmeans of body language has and reveals the common characteristic between bodylanguage and Chinese characters. That is using the same means to realize theideographic functions. All of these are conducive to extend the scope of body languageresearch and the field of body language application.