《红楼梦》中王熙凤的身势语解读(2)

菜单

4.3 To Reveal Psychological Thoughts 17

4.4 To Denote Social Relation 18

5 Conclusion 20

Bibliography 21

1 Introduction

Language is generally considered as the ability to acquire and use the complexity of communicative systems. Language plays an essential part in our daily life. Particularly, body language included in language, as an auxiliary means of sound language, plays a significant role in language communication.

Some researches having been done by many linguists show that information transferred by body language takes up 65% in face-to-face communication but verbal ways only account for 35%. Evidently, body language is an essential and powerful media through which people can communicate with others. Hu Wenzhong, a professor of Beijing Foreign Studies University, said in A Dictionary of British and American Culture (1995) that body language is the expressions and movements which are used to communicate with others or convey the information. From this perspective, body language is performed by physical behaviors, consisting of facial movements like facial expressions, body posture, gestures, eye movements, touch and the use of space, and other subcategories.

And body language is an essential skill of human beings to communicate or transfer the information with each other. To some extent, body language is complementary to remedy the inadequacy of spoken words. Therefore, sometimes it would be conscious and in other words we need to learn to use our body language for a purpose (Net 1). While some scholars thought that the body language is the reflexive actions of the body or a kind of subconscious actions to communication with the outside world and they may be the whole or part of the emotions. Obviously, body language occurs unconsciously and emotions can be communicated. From this perspective, body language, as a silent one, plays an essential part in our daily life which can't be substituted by sound language.

Allen and Barbara Pease, as two world’s foremost experts on body language and relationships, in their famous work The Definitive Book of Body Language that was published by Pease International in 2004, have an absolutely deep understanding of body language. They thought body language was an outward reflection of a person’s emotional condition. Each physical behaviors like gesture or movement could be a valuable key to an emotion of a person’s inner self may be feeling at the time. The key for reading body language was being able to understand a person’s inner emotional condition while listening to what they were saying and noting the situations under which they were saying it. This allowed human beings to separate fact from fiction and reality and even fantasy. (2004：11) From their statement, we can know our body language can express our feelings and be revealed by our emotions.

Body language can be pided into several categories. However, in the novel A Dream of Red Mansions according to its forms, the body language of various characters with different personalities can fall into three types: the facial expression, the gesture and postures. Wang Xifeng is the extremely typical example in this novel, and her body language is depicted in great detail.

The way a person communicates can be confined to his personality. Conversely, both a person's inner and outwards personality affect his style of communication. Therefore, this paper mainly interprets Wang Xifeng’s body language to analyze Wang Xifeng’s personality comprehensively. The formation of Wang Xifeng’s body language is not only related to the impact of social and family environment, but also related to her personal nature and cultivation. Therefore, based on the theory of body language, this paper will analyze the functions of Wang Xifeng’s body language from four perspectives, namely, exchanging ideas, conveying sentiment, revealing psychology and behaving character as well as denoting social relation.源-自/751+文,论^文'网]www.751com.cn