In natural face-to-face interactions, verbal communication always occurs in association with expressions of nonverbal behavior. The functional contribution of these multimodal aspects to the meaning of the message and to its effects fulfils multiple communicative functions that differ according primarily to the speaker’s intentions, to the interpersonal relations between the speaker and the addressee, to the nature of the message, and to the context.
When nonverbal behavior is reproduced in a written literary text, it becomes functional to the textual and narrative process as it serves as a signifier for the reader. A fictional character is never fixed and unchanging. Through writing, each author encourages the explicit or implicit evocation of a multisensory world, which readers decode and reconstruct, inevitably conditioned by their cognitive and cultural environment.
In this paper, we refer to Salinger’s famous novel