Language and Evolution: Books, Presentations and Papers
Motor Theory of Language
To go to
Chapter I Hypothesis:Phonological/Semantic Equivalence
Chapter III Speech-sound and Gesture Elements
Chapter IV Verification: Relation of Sound and Meaning
Chapter V Evidence from other languages
Contents:
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The essential idea in the detailed development of the hypothesis of phonological/semantic equivalence is that the gross muscular expression of the word/articulatory pattern can be observed and analysed in the form of gesture and that complex gestures can be broken down into gestural elements associated with particular sound-elements (the phonemic terminology is not employed because it carries with it an elaborate set of presumptions about the nature of spoken language which are not necessarily consistent in detail with the approach in this book and which are in any case subject to dispute).
There is nothing particularly novel in emphasis on the close relation of gesture and speech, though gesture has nearly always been thought of not as parallel with speech but as a necessarily subordinate means of expression. This despite evidence for the existence of wholly gestural languages in North America and Africa, the analysis made of gesture languages naturally developing among the deaf and dumb and the long history of pantomime and mime, using gestures to convey meaning without words.
Classical support for the approach in this chapter can be found in the comment of the philosopher Demetrius on the Roman art of pantomime: "This is not seeing but hearing and seeing together: it is as if your hands were tongues". More recently, the most notable theory of the importance of the link between gesture and language was that developed by Sir Richard Paget (by training a physicist interested in the mechanics of language) who believed that he had shown that words derived from what he called tongue-gestures i.e. the patterning of the tongue in pronouncing a word had, he contended on the basis of introspection, a pictural resemblance to the meaning of the word. This theory was criticised by professional linguists but has not altogether been lost from sight So G. REVESZ in The Origin and Prehistory of Language (1956) referred to the supposed structural resemblances of sound and gesture language among the Sudanese and Hottentots - a circumstance stressed particularly by Wundt in his Elemente der Volkerpsychologie and used by him as evidence of the likelihood of a gesture language having been a kind of Ursprache. "Such a view could be justified to a degree if one established the probability of the common structural elements having originally arisen from gestures and that these particular structures form the necessary basis for phonetic language". And in 1954 in Destiny and Motivation in Language A .A. ROBACK commented "the tongue-gesture theory of language is the most satisfactory and acceptable at the present time".
The most complete and useful survey of earlier discussion of the use of gesture and its relation to language is still probably that contained in the study by Colonel Mallery of the US Army on Sign Language Among the American Indians which was published in 1881 in the First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. That shows, as also does MacDonald Critchley's book published shortly before the last war 'The Language of Gesture', how ancient has been interest in the nature and use of gesture and the relatively more important part that gesture played in the past as a means of communication. Besides the quoted Demetrius, Quintilian, Lucretius, Lucian, the Venerable Bede, Francis Bacon all devoted more or less attention to the subject.
Nevertheless in more modern times the discussion of gesture has been sparse and mostly not very systematic. Charles Darwin came near to the subject in his study "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals" (1872) from which the following is extracted:
"When our minds are much affected, so are the movements of our bodies ... A man who vehemently rejects a proposition will almost certainly shut his eyes or turn away his face; but if he accepts the proposition, he will nod his head in affirmation and open his eyes widely. The man acts in this latter case as if he clearly saw the thing and in the former case as if he did not or would not see it ... A person in trying to remember something often raises his eyebrows, as if to see it ... There are other actions which are commonly performed under certain circumstances and which seem to be due to imitation or some sort of sympathy. Thus persons cutting anything may be seen to move their jaws simultaneously with the blades of the scissors. Children learning to write often twist about their tongues as their fingers move, in a ridiculous fashion."
These are examples of gesture other than ordinary hand or arm gesture. Darwin spoke about the movements he observed as being from some sympathy - a tendency for one deliberate pattern of movement e.g. writing to be accompanied by similar patterned movement in another part of the body. In the expressive facial gesture he refers to first, the movement is apparently a metaphorical reflection of a mental process. This type of patterned behaviour is obviously not far removed from the more normal hand and arm gesture accompanying vigorous speech. Another interesting comment on the relation of gesture and mental process is that of Paul Valéry: "Les gestes de l'orateur sont des metaphores. Soit qu'il montre nettement entre le pouce et l'index, la chose bien saisie; soit qu'il la touche du doigt, la paume vers le ciel. Ce qu'il touche, ce qu'il pince, ce qu 'il tranche, ce sont des imaginaires, actes jadis réels, quand le langage était le geste, et le geste, une action."
More recent consideration of gesture has mostly been by linguists as an adjunct to discussion of the nature and origin of language. Bloomfield pointed out that the stimulus which calls forth speech leads also to some other reactions - facial expression, mimicry, tone of voice 'and above all gesture'.
"Gesture accompanies all speech; in kind and amount it differs with the individual speaker but to a large extent it is governed by social conventions ... To some extent individual gestures are conventional and differ for different communities. In saying goodbye, we wave the hand with the palm outward; Neapolitans wave it with the back outward. Most gestures scarcely go beyond an obvious pointing and picturing. American Indians of plains or woodland tribes will accompany a story by unobtrusive gestures, foreign to us, but quite intelligible; the hand, palm in, thumb up, is held just under the eyes to represent spying; a fist is slapped into a palm for a shot; two fingers imitate a man walking and four the running of a horse. Even where the gestures are symbolic, they go little beyond the obvious, as when one points back over one's shoulder to indicate past time".
These comments immediately raise some basic issues - how far is it really true to say that gesture is largely social convention? Bloomfield seems to contradict himself by talking about 'obvious pointing and picturing' which clearly is not merely a social convention and about the American Indians' signs being 'foreign , but quite intelligible', certainly odd if they are social conventions the product of a society totally different from ours. Secondly, he raises the distinction between 'obvious' (? natural) and symbolic gestures - an aspect that also requires careful examination.
Sapir refers similarly to the relation between language and gesture and the gestures of the North American Indians; he describes their gesture language (understood by tribes of mutually unintelligible forms of speech) as "imperfect transfers, limiting themselves to the rendering of such grosser speech elements as are an imperative minimum under difficult circumstances. In these latter systems, as in such still more imperfect symbolisms as those used at sea or in the woods, it may be contended that language no longer properly plays a part but the ideas are distinctly conveyed by an utterly unrelated symbolic process or by a quasi-instinctive imitativeness. Such an interpretation would be erroneous. The intelligibility of these vaguer symbolisms can hardly be due to anything but their automatic and silent translation into the terms of a fuller flow of speech ... We shall no doubt conclude that all voluntary communication of ideas, aside from normal speech, is either a transfer, direct or indirect, from the typical symbolism of language as spoken or heard or, at the least, involves the intermediary of true linguistic symbolism. This is a fact of the highest importance. Auditory imagery and the correlated motor imagery leading to articulation are, by whatever devious means we follow the process, the historic fountainhead of all speech and of all thinking."
But he offers no evidence for these assertions. Chomsky has on this subject followed the line of the two eminent American linguists:
"Consider the common gestures one uses in helping someone to park a car. Your actions are purposive, integrated and propositional. But it is unlikely that any significant purpose would be served by studying such gestures and human language within the same framework. In fact, if you consider how these various systems are purposive, informative and structured, then very striking differences appear between human language on the one hand and all the other systems (that is animal communications, gesturing and walking) on the other"
But the gestures involved in parking a car are a very limited set of gestures compared with the extent of gesture accompanying spoken language and gesture formed into language systems for the American Indians, deaf-mutes &c. In fact, the most comprehensive recent American study of sign-language - Stokoe's Semiotics and Human Sign Languages (which deals largely with the gesture-language of the deaf and dumb) - sets out to rebut this view and to show that sign-language can be approached and analysed in an identical way to the various forms of analysis of language that have been undertaken recently (not least as a result of Chomsky's initiatives). However, he achieves this by drawing a distinction between the occasional use of gestural communication between two persons not having a common language and the use of "a small closed set of distinctive features of bodily action, having no meaning in themselves, (which) combine to form an open, larger set, the sentences of sign language ... The signs of a sign language are gestures as that term is commonly understood, or misunderstood. What differentiates signs from gestures that are not signs is syntax. They occur in phrases or sentences. Similar or identical gestural phenomena which are not signs signify messages which need no parsing because the vehicles have no syntactic structure; each one means what it does by virtue of being what it is. Signs however in a sign language mean what they mean by virtue of relation to other signs used with them as much as by being signs". This is a rather paradoxical defence of the status of sign language as primary and not dependent but it leaves the conclusion that for Stokoe, gestures are naturally meaningful and signs are conventionally meaningful beyond any natural meaningfulness they may have.
More generally, he draws attention usefully to the use of a sign vehicle - a type of gesture - shared with animals in the form of Kinesics as defined by Birdwhistell (1952) "This is a language-related system of bodily actions including gestures and static positions as well to signify messages auxiliary to the language exchanges they accompany or momentarily substitute for" i.e. a return to the concept of general pantomimic communication.
Later comment on gesture has tended in this way to see it as part of the larger context of human bodily behaviour. The comments of Benjamin Whorf (who otherwise has so much emphasised the specific cultural aspect of language) are particularly interesting from this point of view, since to a considerable extent his attitude to gesture is rather different from his attitude to speech-language:
"Our linguistically determined thought world ... engages even our unconscious personal reactions to its patterns and gives them certain typical characters. One such character ... is gesturing when we talk. Very many of the gestures made by English-speaking people at least .. serve to illustrate by a movement in space not a real spatial reference but one of non-spatial references that our language handles by metaphors of imaginary space. That is we are more apt to make a grasping gesture when we speak of grasping an elusive idea than when we speak of grasping a doorknob. The gesture seeks to make a metaphorical and hence somewhat unclear reference more clear".
Here Whorf seems partly to be arguing that natural gesture is used to explain and emphasise what he would say is a language-determined analysis of our mental processes (he would argue that speakers of another language-class, particularly the Indian languages, would not order their ideas in terms of a metaphorical concept of 'grasping' and presumably then would not use a grasping gesture to explain their thought); partly he is suggesting that once we have formulated our concept of our own mental process in terms of the metaphor of grasping, we tend to produce the natural action of grasping as a gesture, which leads to the view that the gesture itself is not culture-determined. That there is a natural and universal basis for gesture, and indeed for metaphor, is indicated by his subsequent statement:
"It would seem as if kinaesthesia, or the sensing of muscular movement, though arising before language, should be made more highly conscious by linguistic use of imaginary space and metaphorical images of motion ... Synaesthesia, or suggestion by certain sense receptions of characters belonging to another sense, as of light and colour by sounds and vice versa, should be made more conscious by a linguistic metaphorical system that refers to nonspatial experiences by terms for spatial ones, though undoubtedly it arises from a deeper source. Probably in the first instance, metaphor arises from synaesthesia and not the reverse."
In total his position is not clear and as has already been said there seems to be some inconsistency between his view of language, as determining thought-patterns, and his view of gesture as arising from a biologically determined kinaesthesia and synaesthesia which in turn give rise to the metaphorical use of language. However, the tendency of his comment is in line with the modern trend towards a much deeper explanation of gesture in terms of brain function and the integrity of bodily action. He was much influenced in this by his admiration for an early French writer on language, Fabre D'Olivet, who, he said, thought in an anthropological and not simply a grammatical way; "to him, speech was not a 'faculty' exalted on its own perch but something to be understood in the light of human behaviour and culture, of which it was a part, specialised but involving no different principles from the rest. The vocal sign (phoneme) was a highly specialised gesture or symbolic act, language a development of total somatic behaviour becoming symbolic and then diverting its symbolism more and more into the vocal channel - such is his teaching put in modern idiom" (in La Langue Hébraique Restitué Fabre d'Olivet 1768-1825). The step from this to an integrated view of speech-language and gesture as part of total human behaviour is a short one.
A continuation of this kind of approach to gesture is seen in Charlotte Wolff's Psychology of Gesture. Writing from the standpoint of French psychological training, she attempted to study gesture in the mentally disordered against the background of a general psychological and neurological account of gesture. After arguing that gesture is not peripheral but depends in the first place on the core of personality, she expresses the position of gesture in the total behavioural scheme as follows:
"The static and kinaesthetic senses .... are the fundamentals of spatial orientation, which is the medium of all movements and gestures .... The kinaesthetic sense determines the position of the ego in the world both physically and mentally. Kinaesthetic consciousness is related to the feeling of identity .. The static sense is responsible for the feeling of balance and postural behaviour" and in the same way as Whorf she speaks about synaesthesia: "There is no complete differentiation of the senses. Sounds, for example, can produce visual images; many musical people see colours or forms whilst listening to music". She refers to the view that "the entire organism reacts to a stimulus .. There are two fields of reaction to a stimulus. The field of perception in the cortex of the brain and the field of 'background' which is the entire organism .. each perceptive process and each organic process affects man as a whole". From this she arrives at the assertion that "gestures are expressive movements of the whole body, of every degree of intensity .. Obviously those organs which are free in movement, such as the hands, the feet and the face, are the natural organs of gesture .. The language of gesture with which the hands are endowed is one of the most valuable keys to the human mind". "Concrete thought by its peculiar nature contains a motor element which tends to discharge in movements of the hands. 'Les gestes spatiaux' constitute therefore a part of thought itself ... The gestures of spontaneous or creative thought give an outline in space of what is passing through the mind".
The line of development from Darwin's concept of some form of sympathy as giving form to gestures and some overflow of nervous energy as providing the impulse for them to the view of gesture as an integral part of total organismic reaction is apparent. Though most writers have thought of gesture as a supplementary means of expression comparable to facial expression, intonation, accent and emphasis i.e as what nowadays would be called paralinguistic features, some have gone further and suggested that gesture could have contributed to the origin and formation of language historically or to the current forms of language. The most conservative view perhaps would be that expressed by Bloomfield who said: "Whatever may have been the origin of the two (gesture and language) gesture has so long played a secondary role under the dominance of language that it has lost all traces of independent character ... Doubtless the production of vocal sound by animals, out of which language has grown, originated as a response-movement (say contraction of the diaphragm and constriction of the throat) which happened to produce noise. It seems certain, however, that in the further development language always ran ahead of gesture". Henry Sweet went rather further than this:
"Gesture .. helped to develop the power of forming sounds while at the same time helping to lay the foundation of language proper. When men first expressed the idea of 'teeth', 'eat', 'bite', it was by pointing to their teeth. If the interlocutor's back was turned, a cry for attention was necessary which would naturally assume the form of the clearest and openest vowel. Sympathetic lingual gesture would then accompany the hand gesture which later would be dropped as superfluous so that ADA or more emphatically ATA would mean 'teeth' or 'tooth' and 'bite' or 'eat', these different meanings being only gradually differentiated".
It is interesting that in this obviously speculative view of the origin of language Sweet should have identified as the key link between gesture and language the sympathetic lingual gesture accompanying a natural hand-gesture. His view is close to that of MacDonald Critchley, who studied gesture from the point of view of a neurologist, that "the two faculties, that of speech and that of gesture, seem to have developed side by side, gesture being comparable with an elder brother of speech". Colonel Mallery in interesting speculations deriving from his study of American Indian sign-language went a good deal further; he suggested that an analysis of the original conceptions of gestures may aid the ascertainment of some relation between concrete ideas and words and he pointed out that meaning does not adhere to the phonic presentation of thought, whilst it does to signs. He went on to discuss the possibility of arriving at the etymology of words from gestures and observed that in the languages of North America, the connection between the idea and the word is only less obvious than that still unbroken between the idea and the sign, that the languages remain strongly affected by the concepts of outline, form, place, position and features on which gesture is founded. "The visual onomatopoeia of gestures .... would therefore serve as a key to the audible". He concluded that there was no need of an absolute decision upon the priority of communication of ideas by bodily motion and by vocal articulation. It is enough to admit that the connection between them was so early and intimate that gestures, in the wide sense indicated of presenting ideas under physical forms, had a direct formative effect upon many words. Tylor in Primitive Culture pointed out that by expanding, modifying or so to speak colouring, sound is able to produce effects closely like those of gesture-language.
So far the comment quoted on the specific relation of gesture and language has been very general and speculative. There have been attempts to give a more precise content to the concept of a gesture/language link. Reference has already been made to Wundt's comment on the structural resemblances of sound and gesture languages among the Sudanese and Hottentots but the most carefully worked theory of the relation of language and gesture up to now has been that of Sir Richard Paget. His view in Human Speech - Some Observations, Experiments and Conclusions as to the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Possible Improvement of Human Speech (1930) was that the earliest human language may be said to have been a language of gesture signs. Features which were at first made by hand were unconsciously copied by movements or positions of the mouth, tongue or lips:
"Human speech arose out of a generalised unconscious pantomimic gesture language made by the limbs and features as a whole ... in recognising speech sounds, the human ear is listening to indications, due to resonance, of the position and gestures of the organs of articulation." In developing his theory Paget referred to Chinese, Polynesian and Semitic languages as well as more familiar Indo-European languages. His view was that the basis of symbolism is the ability of the articulatory apparatus, and particularly the tongue, to imitate motion and contour in the external world; the muscles of articulation perform in miniature what originally were gross gestures of the hand or body generally; the addition of phonation to the movements produced meaningful utterances in which the muscle action represented the meaning. So Paget proposed that the proto-Polynesian words for large and small, OHO and I-I, were appropriate because the mouth forms large and small apertures rather than because of the quality of the sounds themselves. Relying on introspection, he presented the outlines of many tongue gestures associated with particular words drawn from a variety of languages and claimed that the outlines so formed bore a clear resemblance to the meaning of the words. Paget referred extensively to a proposal on similar lines made 70 years earlier by Dr. J. Rae. In some ways Rae presented a more comprehensive and systematic theory than Paget, the main points of which can be listed as: "The study of the Polynesian languages gives us the key to the original formation of language itself and to its whole mechanism. Man is an imitative animal. Language has its origin in the same source. The sound should seem an echo to the sense. In the first sounds giving names to events or objects there was really something suggestive by analogy of the things they were intended to mark. The lips, the tongue, the whole mouth assume different forms in the utterance of different syllables and all these forms may have resemblances to objects and actions external. Every sound in every word (in Polynesian) has significance and denotes something having a real connection with the thing or things denoted ... The particular configuration of the organs has positive analogies, direct or indirect, with the actions or objects indicated .. There is a real connection between the sign and the thing signified ". He concludes: "It will be no disgrace to human speech if, after all, it should turn out to be (as I believe it is) a branch of human gesture".
Paget's theory was either ignored or greeted with ridicule. It was christened derogatorily as the 'TA-TA' theory (in saying TA-TA, the tongue makes a gesture similar to that of the hand in waving goodbye) and Paget's specific suggestions for the tongue-gestures associated with particular words were dismissed as fanciful, subjective, unverifiable. So Roger Brown, a more sympathetic critic than most, commented "As one reads through Paget's evidence incredulity grows strong. GAR is appropriate to DEVOUR because it is a swallowing motion; KAR is appropriate to ROLL because it involves a rolling motion. Paget alone judged whether each word was appropriate or not. It is clear that others less convinced of the theory would often not have made the same decisions."
However, not all have dismissed Paget's theory. Reference has already been made to Roback's comment in 1954 that the tongue-gesture theory of language was the most satisfactory and acceptable at the present time. Critchley pointed out that a number of philologists and phoneticists, notably Jousse, Morlaas, Jespersen and Davis as well as Sir Richard Paget had thought that all speech is an elaboration of phonated buccal-labial-lingual gestures and referred to Paget's claim to have identified an intimate alliance between the sound of a word and its meaning for about four fifths of all short words in the English language.
Perhaps the most substantial support for Paget's theory came from Johanesson who did a good deal of work, published in Icelandic, in verification of it. His view was that Paget's theory was the most probable and likely to revolutionise philology; according to his research, of the 2,200 Indo-European roots constructed by philologists, the most important class could be explained as an imitation by the speech-organs of the movements of the hands as the first man began to speak. "I am convinced ... that no explanation of the origin of language is acceptable except the gesture theory, an imitation of the gestures of homo sapiens before he learned to employ his speech organs ... A long time must elapse before philology is led into these new patterns. Philologists, like many others, have a fear of being thought unorthodox and prefer to walk in well-beaten paths". (Nature - 1944).
Most recently, Swadesh has shown considerable sympathy for Paget's approach. "The shape of objects is imitated in human gestures and from there passes into vocalisation. This is due to two circumstances. One is that in humans as in other primates, the lips are flexible and can be used to copy shapes, such as round or flat. The other is that the passage of air through spaces gives a resonance that is related to their shape". He refers specifically to Paget's theory and quotes another example of its application: "A word like the Latin CAPIO - I TAKE or English CAPTURE, whose root begins with a K sound and ends in the sound P, made by closing the lips. It has been suggested that the formation of the K sound at the back of the mouth, while the lips are open, is comparable to the open hand. The closing of the lips then is analogous to the fingers closing with the thumb as one takes hold of an object. Thus the pronunciation of the root CAPIO is like the action of taking. Of course not all words are to be explained in this way, in fact only a few. And yet the possibility that some words developed in this way is not denied by other qualities also evident in language." Johanesson in fact claimed to have demonstrated a gestural origin for 500 Indo-European roots, a quarter of the whole material - and suggested that these were the first basis of the Indo-European languages.
Despite this later support, the initial scepticism about Paget's approach was not wholly unjustified and one cannot say that there were no sufficient grounds for criticism both of the formulation and the exposition of his theory. He presented in effect a hypothesis based on a hypothesis, both really unexplained and unverified. The first hypothesis was that gesture historically preceded speech and that the gesture-language first used fairly precisely expressed, by shape and movement, the objects and events referred to. This is as speculative as all the other earlier theories of the historical origin of language and can in the nature of it never be open to proof. Secondly he assumed a historical process by which the overt gestures were reflected, reproduced in miniature, in gestures particularly of the tongue and lips which were associated with the production of speech-sounds. Again there can be no evidence for this as a historical process and Paget presents little to explain or justify the hypothesis as a reasonable physiological speculation. His thinking on the possible relation between hand- and mouth-gesture seems to go no further than the incidental observation of Darwin referred to earlier in this Chapter. Whilst the bases of his theory are so speculative, even if one concedes his hypotheses the development of his theory in terms of existing languages is rather sketchy and open to challenge. He assembled from a good number of different languages an array of words chosen on no particular principle other than that he believed he could relate them to a pictural gesturing of the tongue and lips. Given the long history, in speculation on the origin and relationships of languages, of arbitrary and unscientific gathering of words to support a bewildering variety of theories, his method in collecting words to support his theory does not carry much conviction. Finally, after gathering his words, he presents, for the most part in rather imprecise diagrams, the specific tongue-gestures he asserts are associated with the particular speech-sounds and words. This, based unavoidably on introspection, is open to challenge or, as Roger Brown suggested, to total scepticism. The record of attempts to determine by introspection the positions and movements of the articulatory organs, particularly the tongue, for the main vowels and consonants, shows what room there is for disagreements and idiosyncrasy. Whilst more precise experimental techniques have in recent years put the subject on a more secure basis, the uncertainties in the subjective description of complicated movements of the tongue are so great that Paget's theory will inevitably remain a highly speculative one, at any rate in its detailed application. But it is not necessarily wrong in its main idea, that there is a link between gesture and language.
On the general nature of gesture one can make the following points in the light of the above survey:
(1) The phenomenon of gesture has been the subject of observation and speculation over many centuries;
(2) Gesture is a broad concept which can be divided into a number of distinct fields for attention, ranging from the restricted gestures of the orator, the unconscious small hand gestures that accompany speech, the more deliberate and striking gestures of the Italian or Arab, the general pantomime of primitive communication - or of the art of Roman pantomime, the systematic sign language of the American Indians or the deaf and dumb, the role of gesture as a part of total bodily expressive behaviour;
(3) There is an observable relation between different categories of gesture - the movements of the hand that accompany movements of the tongue, facial expression or larger bodily movements. This is the phenomenon of sympathetic gesture or what Paget treated not as symbolic gesture - onomatopoeia - but schematopoeia, a general resemblance in the patterning of hand and other gesture;
(4) the issue of the extent to which gesture is natural or conventional. The consensus would seem to be that gesture in its immediate origin is not conventional but this does not mean that there cannot be conventions about gestures as there are conventions for example about the manner in which we eat or walk or perform any initially natural function;
(5) the double question of the functional relation of gesture to language, first historically and secondly physiologically. The historical relation of gesture to the development of language is in principle unknowable but speculation such as Paget's on the influence of gesture on word-formation has also an immediate psychological and physiological aspect which can be further explored;
(6) finally the extent to which a more profound study of gesture cannot proceed without relating it to developing theory of brain function, particularly in the patterning of behaviour. Gesture, like language, cannot be studied in abstraction from the human organism of which it is a manifestation.
It seems appropriate before presenting any theory about the detailed relationship of gesture and language to give some description of gesture as it in fact is experienced. To some extent the word 'ordinary' gesture prejudges the question; the common experience is that there are wide differences in the use of gesture and indeed in the character of gesture, depending on the circumstances, the emotional state of individual, the nationality and mother-tongue. There can be a gradient in the use of gesture between almost total suppression to the fullest possible gesticulation, as is found in the Mediterranean countries. More specifically, the use of gesture can be categorised as:
These uses of gesture or gesture language have to be distinguished from communication codes which may employ in a systematised way movements of the hand or arm. The sign-language of Trappist monks, semaphore, road-traffic signs, the signs used by bookmakers - tick-tack - though they may appear similar to some gesture are in nature sharply distinct from the types of use of gesture categorised above.
The description of gesture divides into consideration first of what can be classed as ancillary gesture where it is used in parallel with speech or at any rate the communicators belong to the same speech community and secondly of the gesture-languages proper - of which the main examples documented are the sign-language of American Indians and the sign-language of +he deaf and dumb (meaning by this not the finger-alphabetic method of communication but the developed gestural system, in which finger-spelling plays no part or a completely subordinate part, finger-spelling as such being a code rather than a gesture system)
The description of ordinary gesture presents considerable difficulties. Not only is this virtually an 'anthropologically virgin field' as Brewer described it in an article on patterns of gesture among Levantine Arabs (1951) but the more vestigial the gesture, the less easy it is to observe the essential features of it and the greater the difficulty of representing diagrammatically or in words the nature of the gesture. The degree of gesture seems to be directly related to the degree of emotional tension on the one hand and perhaps to the speed of speech on the other. Even speakers who normally do not gesture will do so under stress; there is also gesture in the non-normal situation such as the measured language of public oratory. The slower the speech, the more elaborate the accompanying gesture can be. There is an interesting distinction between the effect of the rate of communication on the pattern of gestures if they are used as an accompaniment to speech and the effect if they are used as a substitute for speech. In gesture-languages used in place of speech, the need to abbreviate for speed leads to a conventionalising of signs - for example deaf mutes continually seek by agreement to shorten their signs more and more and thus the natural character of signs, the universal significance which is their peculiarly distinctive feature, may and often does become lost (Mallery). On the other hand, a slow spoken delivery gives time for the more self-conscious use of gesture and so the gesture of the orator or the actor is likely to be less natural and more conventional - and accordingly less useful as a basis for the systematic description of 'ordinary' gesture.
The result is that whilst there is a good deal of description of gesture falling into the categories (4) to (6) above and, of course, of developed sign-languages, there is very little description of small emphatic gesture as an accompaniment to speech even though it is the most commonly observed complex human behaviour apart from language itself. No doubt the absence of scientific treatment results from the belief that there is nothing systematic about ordinary small gesture and also from the difficulty of description (though kinesics, body-language, is tackling problems of the same degree of difficulty). A first approach to the analysis of ordinary gesture is to posit that gesture can be classified in terms of its duration, its elaborateness and its relation to the semantic content of speech So one can say that there are:
Perhaps most interesting and most needing description are word-gestures, those emphasising or illustrating single words: the grasping movement referred to by Whorf to illustrate the grasping of an idea, the circling gesture of the hand which some may use in saying that 'Something or somebody went round and round', the listening gesture, with the hand moved towards the ear to accompany 'What did you say?', the throwing up of a hand accompanying saying 'Ah, well', the vigorous movement down of the fist to accompany the word 'Stand' in saying 'I simply can't stand it', the forward movement of the hand and arm in saying 'Go', the beckoning with the finger in saying 'Come on ', the fingers touching the chest to emphasise 'I' in 'What I think is this', the downward movement of the hand accompanying 'one' in 'There is just 'one' thing', the outward movement of the hand and arm accompanying away' in 'Oh, go away', the finger pressed against the forehead in 'I just can't think what to do', or the hand raised with the fingers pointing up and elbow bent in 'Look, I've just about had enough'. The interesting question is how far these gestures are used uniformly by speakers of English, native-born or otherwise, and how far gestures like these accompany corresponding words in other languages. There is a large field for research here but to be conclusive, the research would require pretty extensive filming of ordinary speech by scientifically selected samples of speakers of English and other languages. Even without this research however it is possible to say that gestures of this form are widely used and there seems a considerable amount of uniformity in the pattern of specific gestures accompanying specific words.
As regards the more marked gestures in categories (4) and (5) above, there has been more study. For example, an International Dictionary of Sign Language has been published, there has been the study of patterns of gesture among Levantine Arabs by Brewer already referred to, and somewhat earlier Weston Labarre's discussion under the title of The Cultural Basis of Emotions and Gestures. Mallery, in his study of Indian sign-language, included a good deal of material on gesture, particularly by Neapolitans. The gesture described is normally what has been distinguished as attitudinal and propositional gestures above, i.e. elaborated gestures with possibly extensive meanings, though the American Indian sign language seems to be essentially a word-gesture system. Mallery gives a few examples of word-gestures from other sources e.g. the Brazilian Puris to indicate 'yesterday' say 'day' and point behind them; for 'today' they say 'day' and point to the sky and for 'tomorrow' they say 'day' and point forwards. This agrees interestingly with Bloomfield's observation on the representation of past and future time by spatial gesture, pointing forward for the future and backwards for the past. More familiar gestures Mallery mentions include holding a finger in front of the mouth to mean 'Be silent', holding the hand palm forward for 'Stop', the rubbing of thumb and index finger together meaning 'I want money', pulling the skin under the eye down as a warning against a cheat (a squinting person cannot be trusted), stroking the forehead meaning 'I am tired'. Brewer, whose comments on the gestures of Levantine Arabs were based on observation in Beirut, said that the similarities between symbolic gestures of the Southern Italians and Levantine Arabs were very striking and the gestures were in some cases almost identical. The same observation was made independently by MacDonald Critchley and raises interesting questions on the natural origin or diffusion of elaborated gestures.
Weston Labarre's discussion of gesture tends to come down on the side of a cultural or conventional origin for the more elaborated gestures. He refers to the wariness, derived from experience, of the anthropologist in speaking of 'instinctive' gestures since in the field his survival may depend on not assuming that a particular gesture used by the tribe he is studying has what seems to him to be the natural meaning. He discusses the different gestures for 'Yes' and 'No' found in different parts of the world and the complicated and conventional manner used in some places to indicate agreement. However, his discussion is far from conclusive; much gesture is obviously highly conventional and at its most conventional it becomes ceremonial but that there is a natural basis for much gesture is demonstrated by the gestures of small children and perhaps most strikingly by the natural gesture of the blind who could not have learned significant manual gesture. Mallery quoted the case of Laura Bridgman who was blind and deaf from birth: "She constantly accompanied her 'yes' with the common affirmative nod and her 'no' with a negative shake of the head" and Mallery observed that this was striking because these gestures are by no means universal. He also quotes an instance mentioned by Cardinal Wiseman of an Italian blind man who made the same elaborate gestures as the people with whom he lived as correctly as if he had learned them by observation.
Weston Labarre concedes that in the language of gesture all over the world there are varying mixtures of the physiognomically conditioned response and the purely cultural one, and demonstrates strikingly the difficulty in distinguishing between nature and culture in his comments on other patterns of activity besides gesture. For example, he supposes that walking will be considered a purely physiological phenomenon but there is clear evidence of cultural conditioning, for example, in the manner of walking of the Shans of Burma compared with the hill-people, the Kachins, or in the non-European mode of walking of some Russians from the steppes who walked with left arm and left foot swinging forward at the same time. Argentine gesture-language, he says, is nearly as automatic and unconscious as spoken language itself, for when one attempts to collect a 'vocabulary' of 'ademanes' (language with the hands), the Argentine has to stop and think of situations first which recall the ademanes that 'naturally' follow. It is interesting to note that the Argentine gesture for 'mana¤a' which he describes involves accompanying the word by moving the hand forward, palm down, and extending the fingers lackadaisically - i.e. as for the Brazilian Indian and the American Indian (and indeed for Bloomfield who describes it as obvious), the future is indicated by moving the hand forward.
One of the main difficulties in a more systematic treatment of gesture (whether incidental gesture or gesture formed into a sign-language) is that of description, and the reproduction on the basis of a description, of the individual gestures. The more natural (the less self-conscious) a system of gestures is, on the whole the more difficult is the description whether in writing or by means of a diagram. Even the recording of individual gesture on film is not without its difficulties since (somewhat analogously to the problem of assessment of film records of acoustic patterns) it still requires comment to establish at what point the individual gesture begins and ends and which are the essential and which the accidental features of the total behaviour which includes a gesture as a part. The closer a system of gesture is to a code, which sharply restricts the form of gesture which may be used, the more possible it is to form a dictionary or vocabulary of gesture. So, for example, there can be a full and precise description in words or by diagram of the elements of the semaphore code or of the deaf and dumb manual alphabet. The next chapter is concerned with an attempt to present a system for the orderly analysis of natural gesture and as a preliminary to that, it is useful to consider how the problem of description and analysis has been tackled in relation to existing systems of gesture.
The traditional methods of describing the gestures used by the deaf and dumb have been in words or by fairly obvious diagrams but demonstration or imitation has always been a necessary accompaniment of these. The approach has been much the same as Mallery, for example, adopted in describing Indian sign-language - by drawings accompanied by an explanatory text - and this is the basis also of the international dictionary of signs and gestures compiled recently by Brun, and of the more recent collections of Indian signs by Tomkins and Hofsinde.
A much more systematic approach, for the recording of deaf and dumb language, has been that worked out by Stokoe and his collaborators, first presented in 1960 in a monograph entitled Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the visual communication systems of the American Deaf. His object in writing the paper was to bring within the purview of linguistics what he described as a virtually unknown language, the sign language of the American deaf. It was to assist linguistic analysis of the sign-language system that he devised a method of transcription of signs based on the analysis of individual signs or gestures into elements which he suggested were analogous to phonemes in the analysis of spoken language. The main difference is that the elements of sign-language are effectively simultaneously present in the gesture whilst the elements of spoken language, the phonemes, present themselves successively in any single word. However, once an analysis has been made, Stokoe argues that it is possible to analyse the pattern and use of the elements more systematically on lines parallel to spoken language analysis
The basis of Stokoe's system is aspectual analysis of the individual sign or gesture. Any sign or gesture can be considered as a combination of a number of features: pattern, movement and position. "The sign elements are smaller than the smallest sign (and do) not divide segmentally into vowels and consonants but aspectually into (what he formalises as) place markers, tabs, configurational markers, dez, and action markers, sigs, all of which may be visible at the same time". "The significance (of the sign) resides, not in the configuration, the position, or the movement but in the unique combination of all three."
It would take too long to set out the system more fully but it may be useful to give some indication of the content of the particular aspects. So the tab analyses signs in terms of position by reference to the head and body of the person making the signs; there are separate symbols for the upper part of the head, the face, the neck, the body &c which indicate that the sign is made in front of the part referred or moves from that level to another level. The pattern-aspect, the dez, includes symbols indicating that a gesture is made e.g. with a flat hand, a curved hand, a retracted hand, with the index finger pointing and so on; the aspect of movement in gesture, the sig, includes symbols indicating, for example, vertical movement of the hand, lateral movement, a twisting movement, the opening or closing of the hand and so on.
Stokoe prepared his dictionary by observation of the use of signs in real life and on film, It is not possible to reproduce here his analysis of individual signs (which requires use of his special symbols) but as an example of the structure of the coding used, he gives the sign for 'body': this is made, in the American deaf language, by dropping the flat or bent hands down along the sides of the body. In coded form, this involves: Tab for body or trunk, the space from shoulder to hips inclusive, double Dez BB or MM, which means the two hands are either flat, spread out, or bent at the knuckle, and sig either for downward motion (of the hands) or for a brushing or grazing downward movement (the hands following the sides of the body). This, simply translated means, that the area opposite which the sign is made is the body, the hands are flat or bent in making the sign and the gesture is made by moving the hands downwards parallel with the body or following closely the sides of the body.
However adequate this system may be for the recording of the signs used by the deaf and dumb and the teaching of them, there are some difficulties in its use for the analysis of incidental gesture of the kind that accompanies ordinary speech, which is the main concern of this chapter. Even for the American sign language, the coded statement for an individual sign only indicates how the sign is made by certain individuals in certain circumstances; the more rapidly signs are made, the greater the tendency to abbreviation and the less closely does the coded form of the sign represent the sign as actually used. The analysis into aspects - position, configuration and movement - can be unstable, since signs, for example, can be made in a number of different positions, there may be a certain arbitrariness in deciding what should be treated as position and what as configuration and the code symbols for movement may well become inadequate as gestures take more complex forms.
Whilst not rejecting as a possible basis for systematic description of ordinary gesture the system developed by Stokoe for American sign language, another approach to the description of gesture starts from a more traditional point of view and, in its systematised form, might be called the method of thematic analysis. The underlying idea is that all natural gesture is motivated by the urge of the speaker to communicate specific ideas, the content of particular words, no doubt with special emphasis. Thematic analysis involves considering the categories of resemblance between the ideas or words to be conveyed by gesture and the types of gesture available for these different categories. Sapir drew attention to the all but perfect freedom of voluntary gesture; Henry Sweet commented that it is far easier to find appropriate gesture-symbols than it is to find appropriate and self-interpreting phonetic ones - but this abundance and variety of gesture means that external description may be much harder than so to speak internal description of the gesture, in terms of what the speaker wishes to convey.
The categories of resemblance between the individual gesture and the word or idea to which it relates can be arranged in various ways. Gestures can be arranged on a gradient moving from the most concrete to the most metaphorical - in exactly the same way as the use of particular words ranges from the most concrete to the most metaphorical or metaphysical. As Sweet says "in a highly developed gesture-language the meaning of the gestures would not always be self-evident" but the number of self-interpreting signs is always likely to be much greater than the number of signs with a remoter relation to their meaning. MacDonald Critchley speaks about gestures as falling into two groups, symbolic and instinctive, but one can comment on this that both symbolic and so-called instinctive gestures may be equally natural (as Whorf's example of a grasping movement accompanying the attempt to grasp an idea shows).
The following list of categories of resemblance between gesture and idea or word is put forward for consideration. A gesture may resemble (in some way or other) its subject of reference:
(a) by the kind of movement involved - so the simplest gesture for hitting something referred to in speech is a movement of hitting. The gesture and the action referred to by the word are in this case virtually identical and the only difference between gesture and action is that the object hit is not present but only referred to in speech. The simplest gesture for giving something, for taking something is the normal movement of giving or taking. There is thus an extensive category of what one might call action-gestures where the meaning of the gesture is immediately obvious;
(b) by the kind of shape indicated by the stationary or moving hand and arm. The simplest example of this might be the gesture normally seen for a circle which is a circling movement of the hand and arm - and much the same gesture is used for expressing the word 'around'. Another example would be the gesture often seen if someone says that a thing is huge - both the arms are spread apart to indicate in a direct way the size of the object referred to (see particularly gestures traditionally used by anglers!); a zig-zag movement would be another example of a shape or form-gesture;
(c) by indication. This is perhaps not so much resemblance as a variant of the action-gesture. The most rudimentary gesture is to point to the object referred to or more particularly to the feature of the body referred to. So the gesture for 'me' is simply the hand pointing to the chest (or touching it in emphatic speech). A gesture for the ear is to point to or touch the ear - and so on;
(d) by display or attention. This is again related to the action-gesture and the indication-gesture. For example, gesture accompanying 'My wrist hurts' might be to hold up the wrist itself in a bent position. Gesture for a reference to the hand would be to hold up the hand. Gesture for reference to foot or leg to stretch out the foot or leg. The feature of this class of gesture is that the speaker concentrates his attention on the part of the body referred to (in the same way as he might look fixedly and deliberately at another person or an object to emphasise speech about that person or object - a kind of equivalent eye-gesture);
(e) by the sound. Apart from onomatopoeic sounds, there are other examples of sound-gesture, for example Bloomfield's reference to the sound of shot imitated by American Indians by a sharp blow of the fist on the palm of the hand; some sound-gesturing is naturally incorporated in speech e.g. in saying that the wind was whistling, emphasis equivalent to gesture is given by stressing the S-sound in the word whistling.
Whilst these are the broad categories of resemblance between the idea or the word and the gesture, one can also make an analysis of gestures in a broader way in terms of:
(a) how far the resemblance is total or partial. The resemblance of the gesture for 'hit' to the meaning of hit is virtually total. The resemblance of the Indian gesture for woman - which is a movement as if combing long hair - is obviously partial;
(b) how far the gesture is full and deliberate or rapid and vestigial. This as has already been pointed out varies between nationalities and also between individuals of different temperament - or for that matter varies from time to time for a single individual dependent on the emotional tension;
(c) whether the gesture is made with hand and arm, head, foot, body more generally or (as Paget would say) with the tongue and lips; attention-gestures are naturally made with the part of the body most directly referred to;
(d) how far the gesture is concrete or metaphorical. A gesture pointing to or holding the hand near the ear may be an indication-gesture for the ear, may mean 'I hear you' or may mean 'I am paying attention' (I am all ears, as the phrase is);
(e) how simple or complex the gesture is. The simplest gesture is no doubt pointing to something. Some of the complex gestures used by Italians, Arabs, Argentinians &c have already been referred to, which may have as their reference not a single word but expression of an extended proposition or complex attitude.
As a final comment, one can say that gesture is generally unambiguous but this does not mean that similar patterns of gesture may not be used in association with different words or ideas. Normally the context will show clearly the particular significance of a given gesture, either the verbal context or the situation context. There are some cases, fairly rare where gesture is ambiguous, the most notable being differences by nationality in the gestures for come and go; in Mediterranean countries a gesture for come is often used which people from Northern Europe would tend to interpret as meaning 'Go away'.
The object of this preliminary comment on the thematic analysis of gesture has been to provide some basis for the more systematic investigation of gesture and its relation to language contained in the next chapter where some of the points made above will be relevant._