The Visible and the Vocal: Speech and Gesture on a Continuum of Communicative Actions

Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance by Adam Kendon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 400 pp. Hardcover, £50. ISBN 0521835259; paperback, £22.99, ISBN 0521542936).

It so happened that the time set aside for reading Adam Kendon’s Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance coincided with a period that required me to sit around on a beach all day. While this work would not perhaps be considered a classic “beach book,” I must say that I did not have occasion to wish for anything else. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance is both extremely informative and highly engaging. The book will have broad appeal for scholars from numerous fields, ranging from psychology to art, and will serve as a valuable resource for anyone interested in a survey of the study of gesture.

Before addressing the content of the book, I would like to provide a very global sketch of Kendon’s position on the nature and function of gesture. This outlook is made admirably clear throughout the book but is worthy of special attention because the sorts of gesture and speech-gesture integration in which he is most interested are shaped by his perspective. To some extent, the various themes of the book can be framed as an attempt to advance the thesis that the manual and vocal modalities represent a continuum of communicative behavior and that the ways in which they combine vary as a function of the resources available to a user. Similar claims can be found in the work of other gesture and sign researchers (Goldin- Meadow, McNeill, and Singleton 1996; Liddell 2003; McNeill 1992), and a continuum-based model still permits plenty of flexibility in terms of how “linguistic” certain gestural phenomena are perceived. Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance represents a relatively “linguistic” approach to gesture.

Kendon views gesture as a “partner” to speech—a gesture joins with the verbal component of an utterance to convey additional information (which may be parallel to, complementary to, or an elaboration of the meaning present in speech). Gesture can take on this kind of communicative value in part because Kendon restricts his definition of gesture to actions that are intentionally produced and overtly communicative. This definition may seem at odds with the research that indicates that speakers are not always aware of their gestures (McNeill 1985, 1992), but, as Kendon points out, these “unwitting” gestures may occupy a place on a continuum of manual behavior.

Kendon’s focus, however, is elsewhere. The reader should thus bear in mind the scope of this definition, but, more important, be mindful of the degree to which the examples offered are appropriately categorized. That is, is it equally clear for all cases that the speaker produced the gesture with full conscious awareness? Based on the topics covered in the volume and also on the fact that Kendon does not devote any effort to demonstrating that a particular gesture really was “intentional,” it appears evident that he does not think this distinction of much consequence. If the reader does, however, Kendon’s approach may prove disconcerting. Setting aside this particular detail, Kendon is undoubtedly correct that gesture contributes to comprehension in different ways at different times, and he argues very effectively that gesture is one kind of behavior occupying a place on a postulated cline of communicative actions, encompassing both the manual and the vocal.

Given the assumption that gesture has a communicative value that contributes to the overall meaning of an utterance, it is not surprising that the discussion throughout Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance displays a general orientation toward exploiting the terminology and analytic methods of linguistics. For example, Kendon describes certain gestural phenomena in terms of spatial inflection, or morphosemantics, borrowing from analyses of sign languages. Gestures are also described as having referential or pragmatic functions, or functioning as operators, performatives, evidentials, or discourse markers (109). It is unclear...