Review of research on gesture

[Sherman Wilcox]

Thanks for this wonderful post, Randy. It's a feast!
-- 
Sherman Wilcox, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of New Mexico
Humanities 112
400 Yale Blvd. NE
Albuquerque, NM 87131
USA



On 12 May 2014, at 19:47, Randy LaPolla wrote:

> As Karl Popper said (Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography 
> (1976), Page 29): "Always remember that it is impossible to speak in 
> such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: there will always be some 
> who misunderstand you." It seems several people took what I said in 
> the wrong way.
>
> Although Popper didn't understand it, the reason why his observation 
> is correct is that communication isn't based on coding and decoding of 
> a shared code.
>
> To answer Johanna Rubba, communication happens when one person does 
> something with the intention of another person guessing the reason for 
> them doing it, and when the other person gets it right, you get 
> communication. That is it, there is nothing more to communication.
>
> This view of communication argues that a basic mechanism for making 
> sense of phenomena we experience in the world is abductive inference: 
> we observe a phenomenon or event (possibly using inductive inference 
> to first make a generalization about it), and then use abductive 
> inference to posit a hypothesis to explain why the phenomenon is the 
> way it is or why some event happened the way it did. This involves 
> creating a context of interpretation, using available assumptions, in 
> which the phenomenon or event “makes sense” to us. This sort of 
> inference is non-demonstrative (non-deductive), so the conclusion is 
> not necessarily true, but we generally assume our conclusion is true 
> until persuaded otherwise by further evidence of some type. The 
> particular context of interpretation created will depend on the 
> assumptions available to the individual, and as each individual has 
> had different life experiences, the assumptions available will differ 
> with each individual, and so all meaning-creation (understanding) will 
> be subjective. Abductive inference is seen as the major mechanism by 
> which we make sense of the world, and so is what gave rise to 
> religion, philosophy, and ultimately science (which added the step of 
> testing the hypothesis to try to falsify it), as well as most of our 
> every-day beliefs. It is seen as a survival technique, as 
> understanding the reason for some phenomenon or event can lead to us 
> better dealing with that phenomenon or event.
>
> One application of this survival instinct is inferring the intentions 
> of other humans, which we do instinctively in order to survive, 
> particularly if their action is out of the ordinary, such as walk 
> towards us with a knife in their hand. Most of the time people don’t 
> intend for us to infer their intentions, but there are times when 
> someone does something with the intention of another person inferring 
> their intention in doing it, and if the other person does infer the 
> intention correctly, communication has happened. That is all there is 
> to communication. Communication is seen not as a coding-decoding 
> process, but as involving one person showing the intention to 
> communicate, intending for the other person to infer their intention 
> in doing the communicative act, and abductive inference, creating a 
> context of interpretation in which the ostensive act makes sense. Even 
> the recognition of the communicative act as a communicative act 
> requires abductive inference. As the inferential process involved in 
> communication is the same as the one we use in understanding the 
> natural world, understanding communication gives us a way towards a 
> general theory of meaning creation.
>
> Language is not seen as crucial for communication in this view, but 
> when used, the role of language is to constrain the creation of the 
> context of interpretation by eliminating certain assumptions that 
> might otherwise be included in the context of interpretation. Language 
> is seen not as an object, but as interactional behavior which 
> conventionalizes at the societal level and habitualizes at the 
> individual level (much the same as any other societal convention or 
> personal habit). Language behavior conventionalizes as speakers 
> repeatedly use the same forms over and over to constrain the 
> hearer’s creation of the context of interpretation in particular 
> ways. Each society of speakers will chose different aspects of meaning 
> to consistently constrain the interpretation of, and they will do it 
> to different degrees if they do it at all, and they will use different 
> mechanisms to do so, so we can investigate the structure of languages 
> from the point of view of these three aspects. And as constraining the 
> interpretation with extra linguistic material requires extra effort on 
> the part of the speakers, for them to do this it must be important to 
> them that the hearer understand that aspect of the meaning better than 
> other aspects, and so all conventionalized aspects of language use are 
> seen to reflect aspects of the cognition of the particular speakers of 
> the language at the time the form was conventionalized. Over time the 
> original motivation for using the form can be lost, but out of habit 
> and convention the form will often continue to be used, and so will 
> seem unmotivated (arbitrary), but it would not have conventionalized 
> initially had it not been important to constrain that particular 
> aspect of the interpretation at the time it conventionalized. Each 
> language then is seen as uniquely reflecting the cognition of a 
> particular society of speakers. This cognition involves construing and 
> even perceiving the world differently in each language.
>
> This discussion has focused on language and gesture, but as Wally 
> said, there are other aspects, such as prosody, that are equally 
> relevant. Gumperz talked about many of these things as 
> "contextualization cues". For me, all of what we do in a communicative 
> situation can be a contextualization cue (I don't see a distinction 
> between conceptual information and contextualization cues the way 
> Gumperz did, or between conceptual and procedural information the way 
> Relevance Theory does: everything helps in the creation of the context 
> of interpretation). As Nick says, you have to take the whole 
> communicative situation into account and see all aspects as working 
> together towards the same goal, whether it involves "language" or 
> "gesture" or "prosody" or whatever. Also, communication doesn't 
> necessarily involve language or gesture or prosody. It can be leaving 
> an item out in a conspicuous place, as when my part-time cook left out 
> the almost-empty container of rice in order to communicate that I 
> needed to buy more rice, or another time when she left a cup in the 
> sink to communicate that the faucet was leaking and so I should have 
> it fixed. Anything can be used in communication. We most often combine 
> all of these elements together. If whatever we did to communicate 
> worked, we will use it again when the same or similar situation 
> arises, and then that can become a personal habit and a societal 
> convention. This includes conventionalization of conversational 
> routines, and also of gestures, as well as linguistic forms. All forms 
> and conventions used in the communicative act have the same function: 
> they constrain the creation of the context of inference of the 
> addressee, that is, constrain the addressee's search for the relevance 
> of the communicator's action. This is possible because of the 
> Cooperative Principle, which at its core is really saying we assume 
> people are rational, and so when they do something there must be a 
> reason, and we can guess (using abductive inference) what that reason 
> is, and thereby infer the person's communicative intent. Communication 
> is never fully deterministic, as Popper points out, but by 
> constraining the interpretation to a more appropriate extent (for the 
> situation) you can be more likely to have the person infer what you 
> intend for the person to infer.
>
> This is a very brief summary of a theory of language development and 
> communication that I have developed over the last 20 years out of the 
> intersection of my work in documenting languages radically different 
> from IE languages, in historical linguistics, in typology, and in 
> pragmatics. I teach a whole semester course on this. I recorded the 
> class this past semester, and have begun putting the audio of the 
> lectures and the slides on iTunes U 
> (https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/pragmatics/id849441717 ). The 
> first four or so hours go into great detail about how this works, with 
> many natural examples, to show how abduction works and how it isn't 
> coding and decoding and how anything can be communicative and how 
> meaning creation generally works. (Somehow my assistant put them up in 
> a way that the numbering is reversed, so start with item 17 ad work 
> up, or just hit the sort button to reverse the sort. The slides to go 
> with the audio are called "Notes" on the site.) The course is 
> officially called Pragmatic Theory, but for me it is Meaning Creation, 
> as it is all about how we create meaning in our minds (the only place 
> where meaning is--there is no meaning in letters or sounds, any 
> meaning we "get" is created in our minds based on our experiences).
>
> I also have some papers presenting the theory, and some also applying 
> the theory to things like the nature of grammatical relations:
>
> LaPolla, Randy J. 1997. "Grammaticalization as the fossilization of 
> constraints on interpretation: Towards a single theory of cognition, 
> communication, and the development of language". Paper presented to 
> the City University of Hong Kong Seminar in Linguistics, November 6, 
> 1997.
>
> http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla-1997-Grammaticalization_as_the_Fossilization_of_Constraints_on_Interpretation.pdf
>
>
>
> LaPolla, Randy J. 2003. Why languages differ: Variation in the 
> conventionalization of constraints on inference. In David Bradley, 
> Randy J. LaPolla, Boyd Michailovsky & Graham Thurgood (eds.), Language 
> variation: Papers on variation and change in the Sinosphere and in the 
> Indosphere in honour of James A. Matisoff, 113-144. Canberra: Pacific 
> Linguistics.
>
> http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla_2003_Why_languages_differ_-_Variation_in_the_conventionalization_of_constraints_on_inference.pdf
>
>
>
> LaPolla, Randy J. 2005. Typology and complexity. In James W. Minett 
> and William S-Y. Wang (eds.), Language acquisition, change and 
> emergence: Essays in evolutionary linguistics, 465-493. Hong Kong: 
> City University of Hong Kong Press.
>
> http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla_2005_Typology_and_Complexity.PDF
>
>
>
> LaPolla, Randy J. 2006. On grammatical relations as constraints on 
> referent identification. In Tasaku Tsunoda and Taro Kageyama (eds.), 
> Voice and grammatical relations: Festschrift for Masayoshi Shibatani 
> (Typological Studies in Language), 139-151. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: 
> John Benjamins Pub. Co.
>
> http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla_2006_On_Grammatical_Relations_as_Constraints_on_Referent_Identification.pdf
>
>
>
> LaPolla, Randy J. 2006. The how and why of syntactic relations. 
> Invited plenary address and keynote of the Centre for Research on 
> Language Change Workshop on Grammatical Change at the Annual 
> Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society, University of 
> Queensland, 7-9 July, 2006. To appear in Christian Lehmann, Stavros 
> Skopeteas, Christian Marschke (eds.), Evolution of syntactic relations 
> (Trends in Linguistics Series). Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
>
> http://tibeto-burman.net/rjlapolla/papers/LaPolla_Draft_The_how_and_why_of_syntactic_relations.pdf
>
>
>
> LaPolla, R. J. 2010. “On the logical necessity of a cultural 
> connection for all aspects of linguistic structure”. Paper presented 
> at the 10th RCLT International Workshop, “The Shaping of Language: 
> The Relationship between the Structures of Languages and their Social, 
> Cultural, Historical, and Natural Environments”, 14 July 2010.
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/zijgwtkkr0qtadq/LaPolla-2010-On_the_Logical_Necessity_of_a_Cultural_Connection_for_All_Aspects_of_Linguistic_Structure.pdf
>
>
> Randy
> -----
> Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （罗仁地）| Head, Division of 
> Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological 
> University
> HSS-03-80, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 
> GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://randylapolla.net/
>
> On May 12, 2014, at 3:57 PM, Tahir Wood 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
>
> On May 10, 2014, at 12:50 AM, Johanna Rubba wrote:
>
>>
>> Language "not at all necessary for communication"?  I'd like to ask 
>> Randy to define communication. Certainly language isn't the only form 
>> of communication, but I can't imagine how people would build a 
>> society without being able to communicate about abstractions, 
>> hypotheticals, inner thoughts and feelings, the past, and the future. 
>> I guess it would be helpful also for Randy to define gesture. He says 
>> that it isn't sign language, and indeed that it isn't language. But I 
>> don't know of any non-language communication system that deals with 
>> abstractions, which are certainly essential to human culture. And, 
>> although media like phones and writing lack gesture, communication 
>> can still happen through them, albeit incomplete.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Professor, Linguistics
>> Linguistics Minor Advisor
>> English Department
>> Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo
>> Tel. 805.756.2184
>> Dept. Tel 805.756.2596
>> E-mail:  jrubba at calpoly.edu
>> URL: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>> *******************************************
>> "Justice is what love looks like in public."
>> - Cornel West