Gesture - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2008

Emblems or emblematic gestures have been recognized as a category or type of gesture in many studies, ever since the pioneering work by Efron (1941) and the well-known typology of Ekman and Friesen (1969). In the Mediterranean area, the study of characteristic emblems shows very different patterns of combinations of linguistic and cultural features, and also of transference or interference between emblems as conventional communicative signals, which may be intimately associated with linguistic varieties and/or cultural backgrounds. The case of the linguistic and cultural contact between Catalan and Spanish offers some interesting tokens of this kind, which can serve as the starting-point for research into emblems throughout the Mediterranean region. The resulting distribution of the historical evolution of the same original emblems and verbal expressions on the one hand and recent borrowings on the other makes the Mediterranean region a particularly interesting laboratory for the analysis of multimodal communicative acts. The distribution patterns of emblems depend on factors such as historical origin, geographical spread, and their relation to verbal items. With regard to the last factor, some emblems seem to have been created from idiomatic expressions, but many others have a clear cultural basis, and are not so closely linked to spoken language.

The present paper focuses on early stages of development exploring the emergence of the gesture language system in infancy and its evolution toward the adult system. Old and recent studies carried on mainly in our Laboratory are described and discussed. According to the perspective that emerged in the late 1970s the findings on the role of gesture in the acquisition and development of language did not raise any particular interest in a wider audience. In more recent years a new theoretical framework emerging from different disciplines and perspectives (evolutionary, neuro-physiological, linguistic) made this approach to the ontogeny of language extremely relevant. Findings on the tight link between actions, gestures, and spoken words in young children support some hypotheses put forward by these different perspectives and are in accordance with this new theoretical framework.

The paper presents a framework for classifying gestures in terms of different parameters, and shows that the parameter of iconicity cuts across that of cognitive construction, which distinguishes codified gestures — those represented in memory as stable signal–meaning pairs — from creative ones — those invented on the spot on the basis of a few generative rules. While creative gestures are necessarily iconic, because they can be understood only thanks to their iconicity, codified gestures can be iconic too. A model for the generation of iconic gestures is presented, according to which, to create a new gesture, people select the features of the meaning to imitate in terms of their distinctiveness, ease of representation and ontological type. Finally, some principles for measuring the iconicity of gestures of Hearers and Signs of the Deaf are illustrated, thus outlining the continuity of iconic devices between creative and codified gestures.

In analyses of the grammatical structure of sign languages (Liddell, 2003), “classifier forms” which play a major role in these spatialised grammars, are looked upon as a “gestural” component of sign language. Kendon (2004) pointed out that some of the organizational principles of co-verbal gesturing can be compared to “classifiers” in sign languages. In this paper drawing on previous analyses of LIS (Italian Sign Language) metaphors in discourse (Russo, 2004a, 2005) the role of “classifier forms” in SL metaphors is examined and compared with some aspects of gestural metaphors produced during academic lectures in Italian. It is shown that similarities and differences between the two communicative devices can be pointed out only if the multimodal organization of both face-to-face speech activity and face-to-face sign language communication is taken into account. The gestural actions produced by speakers and the non-manual gestures produced by signers are interpreted as framing a speech act unit in this way providing a perspective for the interpretation of the lexical items within it. The distinction between langue and parole proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) is discussed and reframed by this analysis.

This paper examines the nature and properties of gestural and vocal deixis in verbal languages (VL) and signed languages (SL). We focus on two classes of pointing gestures which we argue need to be distinguished: (1) prototypical ostensive printings directing an interlocutor’s visual attention towards extralinguistic objects; (2) pointings to self and to one’s own addressee expressing person reference distinctions similar to those expressed by spoken pronouns. Drawing on previous work on SL and VL, and on new evidence on the development of deictic gestures and words for demonstrative vs. person reference in hearing children, we show how the two classes of pointings we explore convey indexical relationships of different complexity, and thus need to be distinguished in order to achieve a more appropriate understanding of gestural deixis, and of its relationship with vocal and, more generally, linguistic deixis.

The present study investigates the nature of mouth actions in Italian Sign Language (LIS) and shows how the manual and the oral modality can be integrated when the visual-gestural channel is chosen for communication. Finally, the role played by mouth actions in sign language will be investigated and paralleled to co-speech gestures by re-working Kendon’s continuum in order to show how orality could become gestural when co-occurring with signing.

The comparison between Joseph-Marie de Gérando and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac allows us to pose some questions — as pertinent today as they were in the eighteenth century — that have to do with the fully linguistic nature of sign language (SL), that is found fully exemplified, obviously, in vocal language (VL). The questions are: (a) From a semiotic point of view, what is the relation between these two forms of language that are so differently constituted: vocal language vs. a visual-manual form of language? (b) Can a language be fully linguistic if it is not a written language? That is, can a “language” be so called when, even if it displays a metalinguistic capacity, it cannot be written? Such questions had already been posed by de Gérando who, basing himself on the earlier teachings of Charles-Michel de l’Épée, followed an anthropological or ethnographic orienation which, according to de Gérando, Condillac did not have. De Gérando, that is to say, was more interested in the differences between languages than he was in their uniformity.