Review of research on gesture

[Mike Morgan]

Namaskar to all, from hot and sunny Kathmandu!

Okay, I hope nobody minds if I put in my 18 rupees worth (at current
exchange rates, US 2 cents)...

First, to be honest, I haven't (yet!) read Dan's review article which
started this thread... i WILL, but it is number 17 on my "to read list"

Second, for the sake of full disclosure (and because it SEEMS to influence
the regard which some people give comments), I am a sign language linguist.
BUT I wasn't always one (just as i wasn't always an Asian); I started out
as an Indo-Euorpeanist and got into sign languages by kismet. Because of my
background and interests, I do a lot of comparative and typological stuff
(I am a fluent signer of 7 sign languages, belonging, by conservative
estimates, to 3 different sign language families), but I mostly publish on
morpho-syntax (and specifically morpho-syntax IN discourse).

I agree that gesture research IS becoming more and more familiar to
linguists at large ... IN THE WEST (and am not sure, MAYBE I include Japan
in that West). For the rest of the world (or at least the broad swathes of
Asia and Africa where I have been living and working for years) that is NOT
the case. AND, alas, sign languages also are seen as closer to gesture than
they are to spoken languages (even the Linguistic Society of Nepal, which,
by Asian standards, is a fairly linguistically sophisticated group, always
schedules sign language presentations at their annual conference in
sessions with presentations on gesture ... and other miscellanea!). I
haven't lived in the West for decades, but I suspect that despite gradual
inroads among certain groups (functional and cognitive linguists?), gesture
is still NOT something the average Western linguist thinks of when s/he
talks about language structure. i.e. gesture is a beast apart, separate
form language ... and, I suspect, if pushed to take a side, most linguists
would say it was  "a lesser beast".

I got into sign languages, as I said, by (fortunate) accident... and the
first topic I chose was something I have done off and on since: structure
of natural discourse. This was in the early 90s, and Sign Linguistics had
been around for decades, and so I could read a wide(ish) variety of papers
(though rather limited pickings on sign language discourse at that time).
And so I had a list of what kinds of things to look at (and look for)...
but fortunately I think in the long run, I decided to IGNORE that list, and
just to transcribe EVERYTHING (visual) that was being done by the signer
that seemed even remotely to have potential for communicative goals
(ignoring of course that communication is but ONE use of language)... or at
least I would transcribe everything I could pick up on. I suspected that a
lot of that extra transcribing would turn out to be "wasted time", but I
also suspected that if i didn't transcribe EVERTHING i saw -- or if I just
followed the list taken from works done on other (western) sign languages
-- I would MISS a lot of important stuff as well. (And indeed, among other
discoveries, this is how I discovered that sideways head-tilt in Japanese
Sign Language was an evidential marker.)

ANYWAYS, so as not to make this too much of a story, over the years I have
decided -- as Dan seems to have decided -- that linguistics (and linguists
.. though of course NOT the linguist of THIS august group) have drawn a
false line in the sand .. based on the limitations of their experience.
Spoken language linguists (except for the enlightened few?) draw the line
thus: if it comes out of your mouth, it is language; if it doesn't come out
of your mouth, it is NOT (and CANNOT BE) language (i.e. it is MERE
gesture). They may not actually say it in these words, but in DEED that is
how they analyse language. Even many sign language linguists seem to get ti
wrong when they put sign languages as a beats apart (albeit, to us a
SUPERIOR beast!) .. and I point out in a review of *Markus Steinbach* and
*Annika* Herrmann (eds), Nonmanuals in Sign Language for e-Language which I
don't think has yet hit cyberspace, where in the introduction the editors
make such a categorical statement about spoken languages : that gesture
CANNOT be linguistic, that there is something about the visual modality of
gestures versus the oral modality of spoken languages that keeps them
forever and always in separate categories.

BUT, I don't think this is true. or at least not NECESSARILY true. And
because of the possibilities that gesture (or at least SOME gesture) not
only interacts with gesture in what I refer to as the Communicative
Semiotic, but in fact (some) gesture might in fact BE language. (My mental
picture of what the relationship is between the Communicative Semiotic and
the Linguistic Semiotic still has the latter inside the former, Venn
diagram style, but the size of the latter is growing and the boundary is
becoming more and more porous.)

SEEMS to me that choosing to ignore the potential of gesture IN language is
like choosing to ignore tone when describing a Himalayan Tibeto-Burman
language;YES, it is POSSIBLE that tone is not significant ... but based on
experience, this is NOT likely.


ok, think maybe I gave a bit more than 18 rupees-worth... apologies if
apologies are needed!



On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 1:42 PM, Tahir Wood <twood at uwc.ac.za> wrote:

> >>> Johanna Rubba <jrubba at calpoly.edu> 2014/05/09 06:50 PM >>>
> Fundamentally, if language (as opposed to gesture) isn't at all necessary
> to communication, why did it evolve?  It is a pretty elaborate system to
> have evolved in the absence of a need for it.
>
> There is another view regarding evolution, and that is that language
> emerged first as a mute system of inner modeling (Sebeok et al) and only
> later "exapted" for communication. Obviously language would have made a
> huge difference in the potentials for communication, which itself would
> have reflected back into enhanced thought processes again. Explaining it
> this way does have the merit of avoiding the mechanistic view, in which
> humans initially had thoughts just as we do and so they developed language
> "in order to express" those thoughts (!)
> Tahir
>



-- 
mwm || *U*C> || mike || माईक || માઈક || মাঈক || மாஈக ||  مایک ||мика ||
戊流岸マイク
(aka Dr Michael W Morgan)
sign language linguist / linguistic typologist
academic adviser, Nepal Sign Language Training and Research
NDFN, Kathmandu, Nepal