Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
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Wendy Sandler
Abstract
Current conceptions of human language include a gestural component in the communicative event. However, determining how the linguistic and gestural signals are distinguished, how each is structured, and how they interact still poses a challenge for the construction of a comprehensive model of language. This study attempts to advance our understanding of these issues with evidence from sign language. The study adopts McNeill's criteria for distinguishing gestures from the linguistically organized signal, and provides a brief description of the linguistic organization of sign languages. Focusing on the subcategory of iconic gestures, the paper shows that signers create iconic gestures with the mouth, an articulator that acts symbiotically with the hands to complement the linguistic description of objects and events. A new distinction between the mimetic replica and the iconic symbol accounts for the nature and distribution of iconic mouth gestures and distinguishes them from mimetic uses of the mouth. Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth is a salient feature of human language, regardless of whether the primary linguistic modality is oral or manual. Speakers gesture with their hands, and signers gesture with their mouths.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- The biosemiosis of prescriptive information
- Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
- Modeling semiosis in Roentgen diagnosis
- The semiosis of stone: A “rocky” rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Charles Sanders Peirce
- Disability in African films: A semiotic analysis
- Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
- Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
- Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
- Double binds, triadic binds
- Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
- Picture, text, and imagetext: Textual polylogy
- Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder
- Comments concerning the artist in a Peircean perspective
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