Guide Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation

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Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation - Kindle edition by Dorthe Duncker Bettina Perregaard, Christian.
Table of contents

Gestures were considered to be part of non-verbal communication, clearly and fundamentally different from language. Social psychologists Ekman and Friesen had presented a classification of non-verbal behavior, conceiving of hand gestures as illustrators to the stream of speech. Drawing on psycholinguistic evidence Feyereisen , Butterworth and Hadar suggested a fundamental difference between gestures and speech for an overview see Hadar, McNeill countered this position and engaged in a lively controversy with the then prevailing understanding of gesture as unrelated to language McNeill, , , The importance of this discussion for gesture studies cannot be stressed enough.

McNeill prepared the ground for a psychological and linguistic perspective on gesture, and showed that gesture is a highly valuable object of study for both psychologists and linguists. With the advent of Cognitive Science in the s and s, his model of gesture and speech as forming one integrated system opened the doors for linguists to study gesture. What gestures reveal about thought paved the way for gesture studies to emerge as a field. Kendon also adopted a critical stance toward the idea of gestures as forms of non-verbal communication. Kendon underlined the tight integration of gestures with speech in the process of utterance formation.

It is as if the process of utterance has two channels of output into behavior: one by way of speech, the other by way of bodily movement. In the early s, he published a series of papers on a kinesic system, a village sign language, employed by the Enga community in Papua New Guinea. Those papers offer a minute analysis of the formational properties, the semiotic functioning, and utterance construction of the Enga sign language Kendon, a , b , c.

What began with an elaborate analysis of the primary sign language of the Enga in Papua New Guinea led to a broad study of alternate sign languages employed by Central Australian Aboriginal speech communities Kendon, b. Kendon put forward arguments — historical, functional, and material i. By taking into account the full spectrum of gestures — including conventional and non-conventionalized kinesic forms — a historical process of sign formation from ad hoc created visual actions comes into view that can be described as a lexicalization process.

In this process, gestures change over time, becoming increasingly stable, and may even develop into kinesic words, signs within a signed language. In these circumstances, where a spoken language is not available to create a context for gestural use, and where propositions must be exchanged as well as acts of interactional regulation, gestural units must be established that can serve, as words do, to refer to units of meaning that can be recombined to create complex signs with specific meanings.

Emblems differ from gesticulation in that they have acquired a fixed-form meaning relation. In linguistic terms, these gestures are lexicalized. Over the course of the story the pantomime becomes reduced and abstracted to a hand motion.

How do we get to know a new word? The social establishment of novel words as part of their creation

Note that arbitrariness is considered to be an outcome of a historical process of change. Kendon not only points out that his view of the transitional process is grounded in his work on alternate and primary sign languages mentioned above, but also says, with reference to Klima and Bellugi , chapters 1 and 3 , Bellugi and Newkirk , and Kyle and Woll that similar processes have been described in sign language studies many times before.

Wilcox , describes routes from gestures to signed language with reference to American, Catalan, French, and Italian Sign Languages and with reference to historical documentations of gesture in the Mediterranean region. Several overviews of grammaticalization in sign languages have been offered Wilcox et al. Already in that brief a book chapter, Kendon brings in a second line of argumentation concerning the relation between gesture and sign: functional commonalities between gestures and words in spoken languages.

From the point of view of communicative function, gestures can be used like words. This applies to all gestural forms, be they spontaneously created, holistic ones, or emblematic ones. Kendon already argues that gestures may be integrated in the vocal utterance, and then take over the function of a word. Chapter 11 shows different forms of pointing gestures and how they work in conjunction with speech. Chapters 12 and 13 then discuss semiotic motivation and contexts of use of gestures with pragmatic functions and how they form gesture families. For all kinds of gestures, close analyses of their integration into the verbal utterance are given.

Slama-Cazacu had already described this phenomenon as mixed syntax. More recently it has been described as simultaneous construction Vermeerbergen and Demey, , as multimodal grammatical integration Fricke, , as multimodal utterance Ladewig, a ; Ladewig, in press , as composite signal Clark, ; Engle, ; or as composite utterance Enfield, , ; Clark, for speakers; Janzen, for signers. It is as if he is using his hands to draw sketches of the objects he is talking about and, by means of these sketches, he adds a kind of description, allowing, perhaps, the nature of the objects to be envisaged in a more precise way than the verbal description by itself might allow.

The total meaning of what he is now saying is a product of an interaction between the meanings of his verbal phrases and the manually sketched illustrations that go with them. This is an example of what Enfield [34] has called a composite utterance. The discussion of iconicity and the emergence of kinesic phonology concerns the historical development of signs from spontaneously created gestures that we have dealt with above. Under the rubric of discourse construction, Kendon , p.

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One example he gives compares the spatial inflection of signs as described by Liddell , where signers set up so-called surrogate spaces to which they then point to later on in their discourse. Kendon gives examples where a speaker does just the same thing, first when setting up a gesture scene and later on pointing to the location set up before gesturally.

However, this seems to be but a regularization of techniques that are widely used by speakers when using gesture for depictive purposes. Kendon offers three lines of argument in support of a view that sees no categorical difference between gesture and sign.


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He sees commonalities between gestures and signs with regard to historical, functional, and material aspects. Kendon, , p. In contrast to McNeill, he does not limit his account of the phenomenon to gesticulation singular gestures , but includes conventionalized recurrent forms of co-speech gestures, emblematic gestures, as well as a thorough engagement with the analysis of sign languages. Kendon a already suggested a bridge between gesture and sign against the backdrop of the historical development, functional and media specific commonalities:.

At least I shall suggest a way in which a bridge may be built across that gulf. Kendon, a , p. The bridge Kendon offered a long time ago turned out to be not viable for McNeill and fellow psychologists, such as Singleton et al. Given their particular interest in gestures as windows onto thought, this is understandable. In short, it limits the study of gesture to one type, namely to singular gestures.

It is puzzling.

Gesture and Sign: Cataclysmic Break or Dynamic Relations?

On the other hand, he considers gestures as profoundly different from language. McNeill describes these gestural movements as being meaningful in a global-synthetic, holistic manner. While the palm-up-open-hand PUOH gesture is conceived of as a singular gesture, metaphorically presenting the topic of discourse McNeill, , p. Singular gestures were viewed as images that are profoundly different from the conventional code of language, yet closely intertwined with speech:.

The topic of this book was, specifically, gestures that exhibit images.

With these kinds of gestures, people unwittingly display their inner thoughts and ways of understanding events in the world. Gestures are like thoughts themselves. They belong, not to the outside world, but to the inside one of memory, thought and mental images. Gesture images are complex, intricately interconnected, and not at all like photographs. Gestures open up a wholly new way of regarding thought processes, language, and the interactions of people.

They [singular gestures] are closely linked to speech, yet present meaning in a form fundamentally different from that of speech.

My own hypothesis is that speech and gesture [singular gestures] are elements of a single integrated process of utterance formation in which there is a synthesis of opposites modes of thought—global-synthetic and instantaneous imagery with linear-segmented temporally extended verbalization. Utterance and thought realized in them are both imagery and language McNeill, , p. The importance of the distinction between singular gestures and conventional recurrent and emblematic ones for McNeill is immense.

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He devotes the second chapter of his book to a substantiation of the fundamental difference between spontaneous gestures and codified signs:. The focus of this book is on spontaneous and idiosyncratic gestures … but it is useful to begin … with the more language-like gestures that constitute sign-languages. These are signs organized into true linguistic codes. We benefit in this way from the sharp contrast that we can draw between the spontaneous and the socially regulated kinds of gesture.

McNeill, , p. The sharp contrast drawn by McNeill concerns singular gestures on the one hand, and recurrent and emblematic gestures on the other. What McNeill does is to put the functional integration of singular gestures into a verbal utterance e. He thus blends the functional argument with the historical one. Moreover, in Kendon a gesticulation, language-like gestures and pantomimes are not described as alternatives. But commonalities regarding gesture and sign as expressive medium are excluded from the continuum in McNeill.

Although McNeill later published a revised and expanded version of the continuum McNeill, , this blurring of historical and functional perspectives and the exclusion of commonalities concerning the kinesic medium of expression is maintained. Four aspects of the gesture-sign continuum are discussed separately: 1 the relationship to speech, 2 the relationship to linguistic properties, 3 the relationship to conventions, and 4 the character of semiosis McNeill, , p. Here again the term gesture is used in a broad sense to include non-conventional as well as conventional gestures gesticulation, pantomime, emblems.

Functional and historical aspects included in Kendon a.


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    4. McNeill suggests that, as one moves from gesticulation to sign, the obligatory presence of speech decreases emblems and pantomime switch places here , linguistic properties in terms of segmentation increase, the character of semiosis changes from global-synthetic to segmented-analytic, and with conventionalization come emblems and signs. This description actually could be read as describing the historical processes of gesture change that both Kendon a and sign language studies describe as lexicalization Janzen, , see above and below.

    McNeill, however, establishes a clear-cut dividing line between gesture and sign as if processes of increasing conventionalization were impossible. Yet this is precisely what Kendon keeps pointing out. Instead of a gesture-sign continuum a categorical distinction between gesture and sign is established. But why are the continua so important for McNeill that he reconsiders them and even expands his exposition? The answer is that they are vital in defining the scope of phenomena covered by his psychological Growth-Point model.

    Only those forms of gesture that show an obligatory presence of speech, that have no linguistic properties, that are not conventionalized and whose meaning is constituted in global and synthetic manner e. It is important to bear in mind that the concept of gestures as images is a rather idiosyncratic position of McNeill. A concept of gesture as image disregards the practical engagements of the hands in mundane practices cf. It is the dialectic between imagistic and propositional forms of thought in the mental Growth-Point that, following McNeill, are said to drive thinking processes forward.

    When singular gestures become language-like, they change sides and also imprint thought with propositional structures which are characteristic of a conventionalized system of codified signs. Such a limitation of the scope of phenomena under scrutiny is absolutely legitimate as long as it is dealt with explicitly, which McNeill very clearly does. It is very productive and even necessary for experimental studies.

    This is perfectly legitimate to underline a specific aspect of gesture as revealing spontaneous gestural forms of conceptualization, for example , or in an experimental design. It also excludes reflections concerning the material commonalities between gesture and sign, relating to the medium of expression, both historically and when gestures are used by signers. It still informs the discussion on the relation between gesture and sign.

    In a recent paper, Goldin-Meadow and Brentari present a detailed overview of the state of the art concerning the relation between gesture, sign and language. It is a strengthening of the McNeillian position against a Kendonian view of that relationship. Both produce imagistic [singular] gestures along with more categorical signs or words. In other words, they focus on singular gestures.