The present article is devoted to the special role of nonverbal means in communication. It reveals the function of the latter in the language system. The author offers a system linguistic approach to the differentiation between linguistics and paralinguistics, proves the idea, that a considerable amount of paralinguistic phenomena, e.g. descriptive and symbolic gestures, which modern linguistics doesn’t regard as a part of language system, nevertheless should be included in it as its integral and organic but peripheral section.

social behavior, verbal and non-verbal means of communication, system linguistics, paralinguistic, the peripheral part of language system.