Visible Verbs Become Spoken

Many movements that humans see naturally suggest something other than themselves. This is a legacy from the remotest time. Among animals, movements of prey and predator give each an indication of what may happen next and a basis for choosing their own actions. As species evolved, the movements that could be made and the meanings that could be suggested in those movements became increasingly sophisticated. Among the higher primates, grooming, aggressive and submissive displays, begging, and other movements regulate complex social interactions. Humans also interpret movements; they inform us of what others do, what happens to things, and how a movement maker feels—all this is instinctive.

It has been understood for a long time that movements, gestures, among them, have semantic interpretations. The argument of these chapters, however, is that syntactic interpretation has also evolved and is also eminently natural. Humans not only make, see, and interpret movement but also discern patterns in it: "Something dropped," "That one leapt," "She took it." Movements, when they become the primary symbols of a sign language, have a syntactic structure that can represent these patterns and many others that grow out of them.

Sounds can alarm, warn, beckon, threaten, and so on; but unaided by convention they cannot represent nounlike or verblike concepts. Powerless to make even this fundamental grammatical distinction, sounds have no natural, direct way to show concepts linked in the relationship called predication or syntax. Only convention can link sounds to word meanings and sentence meanings.