Review of research on gesture

[Nick Enfield]

“Might be relevant”? LOL Chuck Goodwin, here being characteristically modest (like a number of others in this thread), is a pioneer and inspiration in work on the relation between “language and gesture”.

I’d like to add a comment on the ‘language and gesture’ issue, related to Mike Morgan’s comments, among others. The term ‘gesture’ is hopelessly ambiguous, in a way that sabotages much discussion on the topic. Sometimes it means ’the communicative movements people make with their hands when talking’. Other times it means ‘the “imagistic, gradient, holistic” component of an utterance’. It’s often the case that these two things correlate, but they are not equivalent. The same ‘semiotic continuum’ from symbolic to ‘imagistic’ is seen within the modality of visible bodily movements as is seen within audible vocalisation (from lexical items to ‘tone of voice’). One cannot equate ’the visible part of the spoken language utterance’ with ‘the non-linguistic part of the utterance’. The problem must be approached starting with a semiotic characterisation of the whole utterance and its components, not from the idea of ‘language’ (as if any of us, when pushed, can draw a clear line between what does and does not count). From this perspective—Cornelia Müller’s work is a good example—we begin to see grammar-like properties in speakers’ co-speech hand movements. As Adam Kendon put it in 1986: “A theory of utterance should not begin with a division between ‘speech’ and ‘gesture’.” This is why he now eschews use of the term ‘gesture’ entirely.

Nick






On 12/05/14 20:08, "Goodwin, Charles" <cgoodwin at humnet.ucla.edu<mailto:cgoodwin at humnet.ucla.edu>> wrote:

A paper that might be relevant to this discussion:

2007 Environmentally Coupled Gestures. In Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language. Susan Duncan, Justine Cassell, and Elena Levy, eds. Pp. 195-212. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3327733/Papers PDF/Goodwin Environmentally Gestures.pdf<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3327733/Papers%20PDF/Goodwin%20Environmentally%20Gestures.pdf>

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Charles Goodwin
cgoodwinCharles Goodwin
     Applied Linguistics
     3300 Rolfe Hall
     UCLA
     Los Angeles CA 90095-1531

    cgoodwin at humnet.ucla.edu<mailto:cgoodwin at humnet.ucla.edu><mailto:cgoodwin at humnet.ucla.edu>
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/clic/cgoodwin/




On May 8, 2014, at 3:45 AM, Everett, Daniel <DEVERETT at bentley.edu<mailto:DEVERETT at bentley.edu><mailto:DEVERETT at bentley.edu>> wrote:

http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/002084

Folks,

This paper reviews the very important research on gestures of David McNeill and many others, as well as  the history of gesture studies and their significance for language evolution, as well as for psycholingusitics, typology, functional and formal linguistics. The abstract:

"This paper is a review article about the pioneering work of G. David McNeill and various others on the interaction of gestures with human language and their vital role in the evolution of human language. McNeill argues, for example, that language and gesture must have begun together, that neither could have preceded the other. He also makes the case that the gesture-syntax connection was the most important step in language evolution and that compositionality and recursion played lesser, secondary (though extremely important) roles. I argue that McNeill's work is compatible with various papers and books of my own, especially Everett (2012). I further argue that McNeill's work supports the research program of "embodied cogntion." I argue that linguistic field researchers, theoreticians, and typologists cannot continue to work in a "gesture vacuum.”"

Dan