Gesture Adds More Than Structure

There are more ways language can express meaning than by structure University of Chicago psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow told members assembled for the Evolang conference in Barcelona today (Thursday, March 13, 2008). Speech can only use structure, but gesture can include imagery. The implication was that linguists who study only syntactic structures are not examining the whole of what is available to language users.

Goldin-Meadow did not discuss tone of voice, which is well-known among professional writers as making written language much more difficult to follow than spoken speech. Instead Goldin-Meadow focused on the way gesture adds to expressiveness. She did however mention that gestures can include strength variables that serve to modulate meaning.

It has been widely accepted that sign languages developed by communities of deaf people are true languages using language structure. The sentences used by deaf communities reflect the same predicate frames, recursive ability, etc. as in spoken languages. Signed words are stable, arbitrary, etc. as in spoken languages. Signed communication is used to consider to the here and now, to tell stories, talk to oneself, etc. as in spoken languages.

The novelties in Goldin-Meadow’s presentation came more from her accounts of the way hearing people use gesture as they speak. These gesturers include the hearing parents of deaf children who do not themselves known sign language. In these cases, the children and parents communicate through “homesigns,” gestures that express meaning but are used by only a few immediate members of a circle. The users are not members of a deaf community and homesigns do not develop into a fully structured language.

Even so, the deaf children do give their homesigns a linguistic structure, while their hearing mothers do not. In fact, the homesigns of American deaf children more closely resemble the structures of Chinese deaf children than they do their own mothers.

Why aren’t the homesigns of the parents more language-like? After all, the mothers do know a full language while the children do not. Goldin-Meadow answers it is because the mothers are always speaking as they gesture. For them, gesture is a supplement, not a complete means of communication.

Among speakers, gesture is often used to provide an image. For example, a person may say, “The plane ride was very…” and then instead of saying another word, the speaker holds an arm straight out, palm flat, and pumps the arm wildly up and down.

These kinds of gestures do not take a language-like form. They cannot be readily parsed into syntactic categories and their order is not predictable. Yet speech with gesture improves both communication and thinking. Gestures that supplement speech make it easier for listeners to understand the message, and they help the speaker learn. (See a 2007 report for more on this last point: here.)

Goldin-Meadow showed clips of hearing, English-speakers using gesture to communicate. When they are told to speak and gesture they use English syntax but when they are told to communicate through gesture alone they use a consistent, non-English ordering. Spanish speakers show the same pattern: Spanish syntax when gesture supplements speech, a consistent non-Spanish order when communicating through gesture alone. The same holds true for Turkish and Chinese speakers. What’s more, all the gesturers—English, Spanish, Turkish, and Chinese speakers—use the same order when gesturing alone.

Goldin-Meadow calls this universal gesture order: Actor (Ar) + Patient (P) + Act (A). Thus, a sentence like The Captain swings the pail becomes in gesture alone, captain + pail + swings, Ar + P + A. Thus, when gestures takes on the entire communicative burden, it assumes a language-like structure that is not taken from the spoken language.

The Ar+P+A form is similar to the Subject + Object + Verb form used in some full languages. So why don’t all languages use this seemingly natural SOV structure? Goldin-Meadow believes it is because the gesturers are under strong pressure to be semantically clear about what they are saying, but a full language has other needs as well and SOV may be sacrificed to satisfy them.

The presentation did not directly address matters of communicative origins, but it left this blogger with the sense that speakers have probably been including gesture from the very beginning. Adding my own bit of commentary here it seems that each language modality has its own communicative range:

speech: tone of voice + structure

gesture: imagery  + strength of gesture +structure

speech with gesture: tone of voice + imagery + strength of gesture + structure

writing: structure.

Comments

[JoseAngel]

While I find some suggestions useful, one should keep in mind that the structures in linguistic communication can be reshuffled and used creatively in a way that is "gestural" - or "stylistic" if you prefer. That was the gist of R. P. Blackmur's argument in "Language and Gesture". Imagery in words (metaphors, similes, etc.), expressive style, all add this "gestural" element. Language, whether written or oral, cannot be accounted for in purely "structural" terms, if we understand structure as "what is grammaticalized".

[JoseAngel]

While I find some suggestions useful, one should keep in mind that the structures in linguistic communication can be reshuffled and used creatively in a way that is "gestural" - or "stylistic" if you prefer. That was the gist of R. P. Blackmur's argument in "Language and Gesture". Imagery in words (metaphors, similes, etc.), expressive style, all add this "gestural" element. Language, whether written or oral, cannot be accounted for in purely "structural" terms, if we understand structure as "what is grammaticalized".