The Semiotics of French Gestures by Geneviève Calbris, and: Gestures and Speech: Psychological Investigations by Pierre Feyereisen, Jacques-Dominique de Lannoy (review)

REVIEW: The Semiotics of French Gestures. Genevibve Calbris (Translated by Owen Doyle). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. (Advances inSemiotics, T. A. Sebeok, general Editor)1990. ISBN 0-253-312973 .xx &236 pp. Gestures and Speech: Psychological Investigations. Pierre Feyereisen & Jacques-Dominique de Lannoy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Studies in Emotion &Social Interaction, P.Ekman & K.Scherer, General Editors). 1991. ISBN 0-521-377625 .viii &210 pp. These two recent works on gesture remind us treating as language only the portion of human interaction that can be represented in phonemic symbols ignores so much interaction that it risks sterility. Even so, both Calbris (C) and Feyereisen and de Lannoy (FL), who do focus on gestures, are capable of making the kind of statement usually made by writers who lack even a nodding acquaintance with sign language. Let us get this reservation-important in a journal about sign language-out of the way before exploring the very positive things both books contain. Calbris, in her conclusion, includes this short paragraph: While they are intimately linked, gestural and verbal signs differ in the way they operate. This difference is flagrant ifone compares the operation of a complex, coverbal gesture with that of a compound gesture in sign language, which is intended to replace verbal language. (208f) And FL begin their third chapter with this statement: Gestures may substitute for words, as demonstrated by the creation of sign languages, ... (49). The implications of these slips of the pen may be excused, because both studies are full of evidence that gesture cannot be cognitively, semiotically, or pragmatically separated from speech-that both are language-and that the study of human communication should not be overcompartmentalized. But both Cand FL fall victim to what Bacon called the idol of the cave. Hearing people, who make up all but one one-thousandth of most populations, know language only as what they speak and @1992, Linstok Press, Inc. See note inside front cover ISSN 0302-1475 183 WCS SLS 75 hear (and what some of them write and read). Consequently, to them, if it is not spoken, it is not language. To deaf people mainly in the company of other deaf people, language is not "spoken;" it is gestured or "signed." A primary sign language is neither "intended to replace verbal language" nor created to "substitute for words," although those who devise gestural sign codes for English and other languages do borrow the signs of primary sign languages, arbitrarily reshape them, and propose that they be used as exact equivalents of specific words (see e.g. Wilbur 1979). The gestures of a primary sign language (Kendon 1990) arewords or combinations of words. And there is abundant evidence for inferring that pre-language or proto-language was much more gestural than vocal. If the term verbal is allowed to keep its meaning derived from its Latin origin (verbum 'a word'), then "verbal language" is redundant and "vocal language" or "spoken language" would be more correct, and, when the context is description of human interaction, these terms deal with all languages equitably. FL's comprehensive and penetrating review cites nearly nine hundred studies of gesture. Of these, only a very few treat as open the question whether signing and speaking may equally be primary expressions of language.Almost all the studies they cite, on the contrary, begin with the premise-an unexamined assumption-that only spoken sounds can be the meaningless elements of which the words of languages are composed. Conversely, many writers on language and on gesture subscribe to a view that language, as a system of universal and abstract rules, must fashion its primary expressive symbols of nothing except activity in the human vocal tract. In this view the phrase "spoken language" is redundant, although it does serve to contrast speech with written language, which is parasitical on speech and many millennia younger. Holders of this prejudicial view also refuse to grant gesture and other semiotic systems the status of language-not because rules for gestures homologous 1 Its users' first or only language, as contrasted with a sign language used occasionally by those who have a spoken language at their disposal. Review: Calbris &Feyereisen &de Lannoy with rules for generating spoken syntactic structures have...