Gesture - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2013

Sign Language poetry is especially valued for its presentation of strong visual images. Here, we explore the highly visual signs that British Sign Language and American Sign Language poets create as part of the ‘classifier system’ of their languages. Signed languages, as they create visually-motivated messages, utilise categoricity (more traditionally considered ‘language’) and analogy (more traditionally considered extra-linguistic and the domain of ‘gesture’). Classifiers in sign languages arguably show both these characteristics (Oviedo, 2004). In our discussion of sign language poetry, we see that poets take elements that are widely understood to be highly visual, closely representing their referents, and make them even more highly visual — so going beyond categorisation and into new areas of analogue.

Based on extensive fieldwork in Peru among Ashéninka Perené Arawaks, this study is a preliminary report on ideophone-gesture composites, with special focus on the meaning and functions of ideophone-gesture couplings within participatory learning frameworks. In expert-novice learning environments, ideophone-gesture composites appear to carry a unique cognitive-communicative load by forming scaffolding knowledge structures on the basis of the conventionalized ideophone-gesture inventories. The data are illustrative of Streeck’s (2009) vision of the hands’ involvement in meaning-making, i.e., that some of the ways in which depictive gestures evoke the world ascend from a basic set of everyday activities of hands in the world, within particular ecological and cultural settings.

Fourteen visibility experiments, which compared the overall rate of gesturing when participants could or could not see each other, have produced perfectly contradictory results: Seven found a significantly higher overall gesture rate in the visible condition, and seven found no significant difference. Experiments that used quasi-dialogues in which the addressees’ responses were experimentally constrained (e.g., using a confederate) found a significant difference; the experiments that used free dialogues did not. This review examined three possible explanations and found that (1) the use of quasi-dialogues did not ensure better experimental control, (2) the constrained addressees may have introduced a confound that could account for the significant difference, and (3) although mutual visibility did not affect the overall gesture rate in free dialogues, it significantly increased more specific features of gestures that are useful to addressees. These findings raise several issues about the utility of conventional visibility designs for understanding conversational gestures.