English and Russian gestures in their contrastive comparison as illustrated by stand-up shows

Abstract

Настоящее исследование посвящено выявлению специфики наиболее характерных жестов представителей английской и русской лингвокультурной общности в жанровой специфики «Стендап Шоу» и путей нейтрализации культурных барьеров, способных вызвать «сбои» в процессе межкультурной коммуникации. Объектом исследования послужила культура речи, особенности жестов, а также речевой этикет в комедийном жанре театрального и телевизионного искусства «Стендап Шоу», где актер вступает в неподготовленный диалог с живой аудиторией. Именно неподготовленность и спонтанность актера и позволяет выявить в нем особенности использования жестов. Другой аспект исследования состоял в том, чтобы понять является ли язык жестов универсальным, своего рода «Эсперанто» как для русской, так и английской лингвокультурной общности. В начале исследования были высказаны различные гипотезы на предмет восприятия жестов. Некоторые из них нашли полное подтверждение, а некоторые - показали достаточно противоречивый результат.

The goal of the study was to evaluate the role of non-verbal communication in a multicultural environment (English and Russian). The method which was chosen was to analyze the understanding of the non-verbal part of Stand Up Shows. As a matter of fact, when an actor is performing he/she is obliged to exaggerate the gestural communication to keep his/her show alive and interesting. Of course, this kind of exaggeration of nonverbal communication should clearly help the people participating to the study to have a good understanding of the meaning of the various gestures. Another aspect of the study was to see if gesture language was a universal language, a kind of "Esperanto" of communication despite the differences of culture. Some of the results were intuitively predictable, starting from the simple fact that our own gesture language is easier to understand than gestures from another culture. Nevertheless the differences between the degrees understanding of foreign and national gestures is not very high. This is a rather predictable conclusion as everyone knows that a traveler in a foreign countries may express basic needs and have some kind of communication with gestures, though the understanding is certainly helped by the verbal communication. Some of the results are radically different from what we could have expected intuitively. This is specially the case of the socio-cultural environment and namely the profession. Some professions such as actors, comedians could have supposed to have a good comprehension of non-verbal communication were actually the worst performers. So this essay presents the goal we wanted to achieve, the methodology and the results.