Post_5 Interactive gestures

In Interactive gestures, using data produced by experiments, Bavelas, Chovil, Lawrie & Wade (1992) have distinguished a subclass of gestures (the illustrators) that is intended to make a reference to the interlocutor rather than to the topic of discourse. With the common function of including the listener and thereby counteracting the beginning of a drift toward monologue that is necessarily created every time one person has the floor, such gestures have the properties consistent with the role they play in maintaining conversation as a social system. This is undoubtedly a significant finding. The researchers make a point of differentiating the two types of gestures in order to stress the notion that it is the illustrators, gestures to include the interlocutor, that help accentuate the social aspect of conversation, while the semantic and syntactic aspects of conversation are nevertheless expressed by the topic gestures. With support from the research findings in aphasia, the authors further argue that the social and semantic and syntactic aspects of language are “hard-wired.” This reminds me so much of the linguistic vs. communicative competence as I discussed earlier.

Instead of seeing the dichotomy of conversations and the auxiliary roles played by gestures in interaction, I would like to venture to see the relation between gestures and utterances in a different light, and to choose to focus on the synchronization of conversation and gestures, and not only gestures but various other means of interaction. I would like to argue that language is after all, one of the many embodied meaning-making devices adroitly and strategically employed by human beings to get themselves across to each other. These means, or modes of communication (a linguistic term) /interaction (a sociological term), are all historically, socially, and culturally shaped and specific. They are not separate entities, but are skillfully orchestrated by the interlocutor in a holistic and economical way in response to the concrete context in which the interaction occurs.

I will use an observation to illustrate my point. I had been conscious of my own use of gestures in speaking English as a second language. It was obvious that I used gestures more often than I did when I spoke Chinese, my native language. I was curious whether this was the case with others who speak English as a second language. So, I observed some of my colleagues in class when they speak English and later tried to follow their talk in their native language with their fellow countrymen. My casual finding proved my hypothesis (Hope I can someday prove it by experiments as the authors did). Here I would like to make a very tentative interpretation, or an assumption.

First of all, language is not an independent system of rules and structures, it is as much an embodied entity as any other modes of communication: gestures, winks, postures, facial expressions, the physicality of speech (pitch, volume, speed, etc.) and so on. This idea is not new. Bourdier considered language to be a whole body activity: “Language is a body technique” (Language and Symbolic Power, 1991, p.86) and our body is a text that is connected by an inscribed semiotic entity called habitus to the social and cultural fields in which it was formed. In second language acquisition, Kramsch (The Multilingual Subject, 2009) asserts that to learn to speak another language is a matter of appropriateness: “Appropriateness here is not just an adherence to pragmatic or social norms, but a deep coordination of body and mind, self and other. A better term might be relationality or synchronicity, in which the organism feels in sync with itself, its language, its environment and others (p. 76).” Here I would beg to disagree with Kramsch a little bit in that in speaking a second/foreign language, the synchronization will sometimes fail because a second language can hardly be as fully embodies as the first language. As a result, there seems to be an asymmetry between language and other handy means of interaction readily available, such as gestures, when the language is weak while the gestures are strong. When a second language speaker has experienced verbal difficulty, it is more likely for him/her to coordinate among the various modes of expression and choose the more efficient one to foreground.

These are wild thoughts at the moment. But I would like to go back to conversation analysis to make a point. Conversation analysis merits our attention in so far as it signals an effort to challenge the Saussurian-Chomskyan notion of linguistic proper, which perpetuated a fragmented, incomplete understanding of humanity, and in so far as it is committed to the view that the physical aspects of language are not as mundane as they seem to be, but instead, they form the basis of predictability that allows meaning-making to occur.