Gesture - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2012

Sign languages make use of the two hands, facial features, the head, and the body to produce multifaceted gestures that are dedicated for linguistic functions. In a newly emerging sign language — Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language — the appearance of dedicated gestures in signers of four age groups or strata reveals that recruitment of gesture for language is a gradual process. Starting with only the hands in Stratum I, each additional articulator is recruited to perform grammatical functions as the language matures, resulting in ever increasing grammatical complexity. The emergence of dedicated gesture in a new language provides a novel context for addressing questions about the relationship between the physical transmission system and grammar and about the emergence of linguistic complexity in human language generally.

This review describes the primary strategies used to express changes in conceptual viewpoint (Parrill, 2012) in co-speech gesture and sign language. We describe the use of the face, eye gaze, body orientation and hands to represent these differences in viewpoint, focusing particularly on McNeill’s (1992) division of iconic gestures into observer versus character viewpoint gestures, and on the situations in which they occur. We also draw a parallel between the strategies used in co-speech gesture and those used in different signed languages (see Cormier, Quinto-Pozos, Sevcikova, & Schembri, 2012), and suggest possibilities for further research in this area.

When speakers encode a locative relationship in speech, they express the location of an object or a group of objects (the ‘Figure’) in relation to one or more reference objects (the ‘Ground’). However, they can also use gesture to express the lexical Ground’s location at the same time: this has been called a ‘gestural Figure’ (Tutton, 2013). Our aim in this paper is to examine why speakers use gestural Figures, and what these gestures reveal about spatial conceptualisation. To do this, we provide an in-depth analysis of a recurrent context in which gestural Figures occur: when speakers encode location with English between and French entre. These gestures reveal the salient horizontal axis underpinning the use of between and entre in context. Our analysis subsequently shows that gestural Figures also occur with a variety of other items that encode locative relationships. We argue that this highlights the pivotal nature of the Ground’s location to the selection and use of lexical items that encode locative relationships, while also revealing the intrinsically Figure-like quality of the lexical Ground. On a cognitive level, this implies that the lexical Ground is actually conceptualised as a Figure, thus highlighting a crucial similarity between the concepts of Figure and Ground as applied to locative expressions.