A Study On The Individual Differences Of Body Language From The Sociolinguistic Perspective

Human communication can be divided into two forms:verbal communication and nonverbal communication. Just as the term suggests, verbal communication refers to the communication with language as a medium. However, nonverbal communication refers to all the communication other than verbal communication. Verbal communication is commonly regarded as the most important, efficient, powerful means of communication. Thus, by far, nonverbal means of human communication is often ignored. Albert Mehrabion held that when people communicate with each other, most of the information is conveyed nonverbally, and only a small amount of information is conveyed by verbal communication. So, nonverbal communication plays a vital role in human communication. Body language is a very important part of nonverbal communication. Many scholars at home and abroad pay more attention to body language. It usually contains gesture, posture, facial expression, touch and so on. Body language is of vital importance in utterance meaning, such as supplement, accenting, expression, symbol or substitute.As an indispensable part of sociolinguistics, individual differences arouse great attention of many scholars. Individual differences can be defined as comparatively stable differences of different individuals in psychological features. Individual differences consist of the differences between genders, the differences between characters, the differences between social statuses and so on. However, the present studies on body language just refer to the definition and classifications. Only rare scholars spend time on body language from the perspective of individual differences. According to the theory of individual differences, this thesis researches the body language and is attempted to explain and analyze the differences between different genders, characters and social statuses from the perspective of sociolinguistics so that we can resolve the confusion and contradiction brought by these differences to people’s daily communication. Furthermore, as for the research methods concerned, the study focuses on the observation and questionnaire to find the useful data, which will be expounded and analyzed in detail.The main individual differences of body language are discussed in this paper, which can be summarized as the follows:(1) the differences between genders;(2) the differences between characters;(3) the differences between social statuses. Body language, as an important part of nonverbal communication, is influenced by individual differences to a large extent. Through detailed discussion, this study has proved that different individuals will use different body language in the same context. So, we must lay more stress on the profound influence of individual differences to the body language communication and make proper use of body language in daily communication.Finally, the study aims to give reasonable explanations to these differences, and points out that it is very helpful to understand and use body language properly in successful nonverbal communication.