Gesture in (Finnish) Sign Language
Tommi Jantunen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
In this talk I will present the various ways gesture is manifested in sign languages in general
and in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL) in particular. I will first discuss, from a diachronic and
a synchronic perspective, the (consequences of the) obvious fact that signs are more or less
conventionalized articulatory gestures (see Jantunen 2015). I will then go on and replace the
underlying and traditional "articulatory view" on the gesture with a more "semiotically-based
view" (Okrent 2002), which leads on to the discussion of the sign as a possible combination
of morphological and gestural elements (see Liddell 2003). Finally, I will take the
semiotically-based view on the gesture and contemplate the role the gesture has also on other
levels of linguistic structure. In particular, I will present some recent work I have done partly
with my colleagues on the role the gesture has both in (Finnish) sign language prosody and in
syntax. The relevant questions here concern the linguistic vs. gestural status of head
movements and positions in sign languages, and the role the gesture might have in explaining
the frequent ellipsis of syntactic material in FinSL (see Jantunen 2013, Puupponen et al.
2015).
References
Jantunen, T. (2013). Ellipsis in Finnish Sign Language. Nordic Journal of Linguistics
36(3):303-332.
Jantunen, T. (2015). How long is the sign? Linguistics 53(1):93-124.
Liddell, S. K. (2003). Grammar, gesture, and meaning in American Sign Language.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okrent, A. (2002). A modality-free notion of gesture and how it can help us with the
morpheme vs. gesture question in sign language linguistics (or at least give us some criteria to
work with). In R. P. Meier, K. Cormier & D. Quinto-Pozos (Eds.), Modality and structure in
signed and spoken languages, 175-198. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Puupponen, A.; Wainio, T.; Burger, B. & Jantunen, T. (2015). Head movements in Finnish
Sign Language on the basis of Motion Capture data: a study of the form and function of nods,
nodding, head thrusts, and head pulls. Sign Language & Linguistics 18(1):41-89.
1 Considering gesture, grammar, and grammaticalization
Jürgen Streeck, The University of Texas at Austin, the USA
Speech-accompanying gesture does not really lend itself to grammatical analysis: there are no
gesture-equivalents of multi-word constructions nor can we speak of well-formed gesture
expressions; it is also generally not possible to identify syntactic relations among gestures.
And yet, grammatical considerations often come into play when we investigate gestures. For
example, the presence of gestures may shape the grammatical structure of an utterance, and
there may be language units (words) dedicated to anchoring gestures in sentences or
utterances. Furthermore, some gestures seem to serve grammatical functions, i.e., functions
that otherwise ‘function words’ or grammatical morphemes serve (e.g., negation). And,
thirdly, some conversational gestures appear to have acquired their meanings in ways not
unlike grammatical elements in spoken language, through ‘grammaticalization’. While the
term is not entirely approriate to describe the emergence of ‘functional’ units in gesture, the
parallels to spoken language are quite visible. The paper will examine two instances of
‘grammaticalized’ hand gestures, hand closings and slicings, and explore how their
experiential qualities might be related to their meanings and communicative functions.
2 Gestures and their relation to grammar
Silva Ladewig, European University Viadrina, Germany
Within the past ten years researchers became increasingly interested in the study of gesture
and grammar, claiming that gesture relates to grammar itself by fulfilling grammatical
functions such as aspect (Bressem 2012; Duncan 2002) and negation (Calbris 2003; Harrison
2010), by forming stable units together with speech (“multimodal constructions”, e.g. Andrén
2010; Bressem 2012) and by exhibiting proto-syntactical structures themselves (Fricke 2012).
Research on multimodal language use integrates these phenomena into different grammatical
frameworks such as Functional Grammar, Cognitive Grammar, or Construction Grammar.
Moreover, the various approaches differ in the way they address verbo-gestural phenomena:
Researchers either start from the point of view of speech and identify particularly interesting
verbal grammatical phenomena or they take recurrent gestural phenomena as their starting
point and investigate their relation with the grammar of speech. Yet, regardless of the
approach, two basic lines of thought can be traced in the current discussion of gesture and
grammar, which will be discussed and exemplified in this talk.
First of all, the talk will attend to gesture itself and focus on processes of semantic bleaching
and grammaticalization, gestures may undergo when becoming linguistic units. Using the
example of “recurrent gestures” (Ladewig 2014a) which may build gestural repertoires within
a speech community (Bressem & Müller 2014), it will be shown that one gestural form, such
as the cyclic rotation of a hand, shows different degrees of lexicalization according to the
different contexts in which this gesture may be used. A lexicalized gesture may then
grammaticalize and enter the linguistic system of sign language as a marker of aspect, for
instance (Wilcox 2004).
The second part of the talk will address the relation of gesture and the grammar of spoken
language. Using the example of interrupted utterances completed by gestures, processes of
gesture-speech integration will be elucidated (Ladewig 2014b). By presenting the results of
perception experiments, it will be shown that gestures, in these cases, preferably substitute the
linguistic units of nouns and verbs and that they are perceived and conceived differently,
dependent on the grammatical slot these gestures are integrated into: In noun positions,
gestures are conceived as depicting objects, in verb positions they are considered as profiling
actions. It will be argued that the replacing of nouns and verbs and the creating and
understanding of these multimodal utterances is possible because our hands embody the
“conceptual archteypes” (Langacker 1991) of nouns and verbs, which are objects and actions.
Both phenomena (semantization and grammaticalization of gestures and integration of
gestures) are discussed from a linguistic-semiotic perspective (Müller 2013) which aims at
revealing the potential of gesture to fulfill linguistic functions, yet is sensitive to the medial
properties of hand gestures. As such the talk offers insights into one line of research within
the field of multimodal communication addressing the relation of grammar and gesture.
References
Andrén, M. (2010). Children's Gestures from 18 to 30 months. (PhD ), Lund University,
Lund. Retrieved from http://www.salc-sssk.org/pages/andren.mats/refs/andren2010thesis.pdf
Bressem, J. 2012. Repetitions in gesture: Structures, functions, and cognitive aspects. PhD
dissertation. Europa-Universität Viadrina, Germany.
3 Bressem, J., & Müller, C. (2014). The family of AWAY gestures. Negation, refusal and
negative assessment. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. H. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & J.
Bressem (Eds.), Body – Language – Communication. An International Handbook on
Multimodality in Human Interaction. (Vol. 38.2, pp. 1592-1605). Berlin/Boston: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Calbris, G. 2003. From cutting an object to a clear-cut analysis: Gesture as the representation
of a preconceptual schema linking concrete actions to abstract notions. Gesture 3(1): 19–
46.
Duncan, S. D. 2002. Gesture, verb aspect, and the nature of iconic imagery in natural
discourse. Gesture 2(2): 183–206.
Harrison, S. 2010. Evidence for node and scope of negation in coverbal gesture. Gesture
10(1): 29– 51.
Fricke, E. (2012). Grammatik multimodal. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ladewig, S. H. (2014a). Creating multimodal utterances: The linear integration of gestures
into speech. In C. Müller, et al. (Eds.), (Vol. 38.2, pp. 1662-1677). Berlin, Boston: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Ladewig, S. H. (2014). Recurrent gestures. In C. Müller, et al. (Eds.), (Vol. 38.2, pp. 15581575). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Langacker, R. W. (1991). Concept, image, and symbol : the cognitive basis of grammar.
Berlin ; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Müller, C. (2013). Gestures as a medium of expression: The linguistic potential of gestures. In
C. Müller, et al. (Eds.), (Vol. 38.1, pp. 202-217). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Wilcox, S. (2004). Gesture and language. Gesture, 4(1), 43–73.
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