Review of research on gesture

[Rong Chen]

Randy, 

Thanks and I would accept almost all of your points. "Almost" because I felt that your views 1) downplay the role of language a bit too much so that 2) communication is seen as entirely subjective. I start with the first point.

I agree that language is the result of conventionalization. But I also think that the process of conventionalization has a biological aspect to it. The fact that human beings share the same biological makeup has to mean something, although what it means is up for debate (and has been debated for decades). So, for instance, the way our eyes are "constructed" is believed to have led to the way language presents reality in particular ways (the figure and ground gestalt, among others). Our articulators are "constructed" in the same way so that different languages draw from a common inventory of sounds. Our whatever--heart? mind? Body?--is constructed in the same way that causes us to have a similar set of emotions. (I am convinced that you are among the first to acknowledge all this, given your vast experience documenting and studying languages.) This will lead to some commonalities among languages, rendering language capable of transcending specific speech situations across time and space. 

Even socialization could transcend speech situations. No one I know denies the specificity of each life experience. The fact is that there is no exact replica of any experience. But there is also something in common about these experiences and/or the human mind is capable of extracting "sameness" from different experiences.  There could even be something inherently similar in different human experiences. In other words, different communities at different times may share a set of general social principles, whatever they might turn out to be (intentionality of speech? Cooperation? Assuming truth in communication unless there are reasons not to? Desire to retain autonomy?). If these things do exist (and again I expect your agreement on this), they exist because, I think, of something socially natural (which would possibly be an oxymoron to you) about human beings. In the sense that human beings strive to survive, and survival often requires coexistence with each other in a community, we could have, due to our shared survival instinct and the way our brain is constructed, collectively "discovered" or "formed" these principles, things that offer us the best chance for coexistence, for survival. 

So, I am of the opinion that because of the shared biological makeup and general social principles, language is the codification (or extraction) of shared life experience that has in part resulted from conventionalization. It hence provides a system for speakers to use as signposts for hearers (leading to an intended destination) rather than a means to constrain hearers (from going aimlessly in all directions). It makes sense for the human mind to choose the shorter route to an end (rationality), and to direct someone to a place seems to be a shorter route than to prevent that someone from going to unintended places.

Now, the second and consequential point, about the subjectivity of language and communication. The view that completely denies the transcending prowess of language seems to be based on the argument along the lines of "Since language is always used in social context and social contexts differ, language is social and social only (hence subjective, elusive, unfixed, relational, dynamic)." I have always felt a bit uncomfortable about that claim. First, it is unfalsifiable. Second, it seems to require a leap of logic. If that statement stands, so should the following: "Since language is always used when there is sufficient amount of nitrogen and oxygen (for the speaker to stay living), it has to do with nitrogen and oxygen. Further, since all human beings depend on nitrogen and oxygen for survival, language is the same for all humans." (I apologize for making the statement sound sillier than it is and for making myself sound ruder than what I think I am.)

Further, if we say communication is entirely subjective because speakers have different life experiences, we are implying that understanding is a miraculous rarity. I am not sure that is the case. Listening to Bach played by different performers in different places at different times, one notices the uniqueness of each pianist. (Uniqueness is, for the most part, why one goes to a concert in the first place.) But one also notices something Bach in all of them. Shakespeare is read by English speakers (non-English speakers, too) all over the globe for the past three hundred years and we all have our own takes about each work, but I think if we round up a group of readers across time and space in one room, we would discover an amazing amount of shared interpretation. If I count successes and failures of my communication on an average day, I think I the number of successes would exceed that of failures.  You (someone living and working in Australia) and I (growing up on a Chinese farm but now living in North America) met for the first time and conversed a bit a few years ago in Beijing, and we seemed to understand each other quite well (at least in my view). Those who believe that communication is entirely subjective will have to grabble with  this reality. But this reality would be a bit easier to explain if we give language and other communication media--gesture, prosody and others--a bit more credit.

Rong Chen
  


-----Original Message-----
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] On Behalf Of Randy LaPolla
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 6:48 PM
To: Funknet List
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Review of research on gesture

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
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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