Abstract

This study addresses some significant semiotic, communicative and rhetorical aspects of postures. It deals with basic Russian postures and compares their functions, meanings and regularities of usage with those of Russian manual gestures. The notions of nonverbal ethics and etiquette of interactive communication are introduced that estimate, among other things, the measure of freedom which one body possesses toward another. The paper focuses on some cross-cultural discrepancies in postures and postural representations of emotions and on different semiotic oppositions and postural patterns that serve to communicate ethical information, and explain how social and cultural meanings such as " decent" and " indecent" can be expressed nonverbally.