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  • The anatomy of meaning: Speech, gesture, and composite utterances
  • Paul Kockelman
The anatomy of meaning: Speech, gesture, and composite utterances. By N. J. Enfield. (Language culture and cognition 8.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 252. ISBN 9780521880640. $112.99 (Hb).

This book focuses on composite utterances, where the meaning of a single communicative move turns on the interrelation between multiple signs, partaking of both verbal and gestural modalities. Based on over ten years of linguistic and ethnographic research with speakers of Lao (a language of Southeast Asia), each of its six chapters presents a detailed case study of a cross-linguistically relevant domain. The first half treats the deictic component of moves, focusing on composite utterances that incorporate demonstratives, lip-pointing, and hand-pointing. The second half treats the illustrative components of moves, focusing on composite utterances that involve modeling artifacts, diagramming social structures, and editing such models and diagrams. While all of the chapters involve painstaking analysis of speech-plus-gesture in interaction, itself grounded in the author’s extensive knowledge of the language and culture of his field site, it is theorized from a broadly comparative and typological stance. It thereby provides not only rich case examples to think through (whatever one’s theoretical commitments), but also a sophisticated analytic framework to apply (whatever one’s empirical focus). Enfield’s book constitutes an outstanding contribution to the literature on gesture, language, and interaction.

The analytic framework is explicitly neo-Gricean (grounded in inference and intentionality) and neo-Peircean (grounded in indexicality and context). This fact distinguishes it from much work on language and gesture that has minimal sophistication with respect to meaning; and it distinguishes it from much work on meaning that takes its inspiration from neo-Saussurean semantics (focused on context-free types). Moreover, it is empirically grounded in detailed, multimodal analysis of video-recorded interactions in situ (versus experimental settings, elicitation sessions, or imagined situations), which distinguishes it from much work in relevance theory, semiotics, gesture studies, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. Finally, it also takes some inspiration from key ideas, topics, and methods in conversational analysis and linguistic anthropology, and thereby weaves together the sequencing of moves in situated interaction and the social relations and cultural values of a speech community. Notwithstanding its topical and areal focus, then, the analysis is meant to be general: how signs and minds emerge from and contribute to code, context, and culture.

The first part of the book, ‘Deictic components of moves’, consists of three chapters on deictic signs (or ‘symbolic indexicals’). The key function of these signs is to link conventional and nonconventional signs: demonstratives, lip-points, and hand-points. These chapters thereby offer descriptions of the variety of forms underlying joint-attentional processes as well as the multiple functions served by such processes. They should be broadly relevant to psychologists working on shared intentionality, linguists investigating the pragmatics-semantics interface, ethologists interested [End Page 196] in the origins of primate communication, and linguistic anthropologists researching referential practice and stance-taking. Particularly compelling are the author’s analyses of the implicatures that such signs invite by their paradigmatic relations with contrasting signs; the fine-tuning of meaning that is possible via their cooccurrence with each other; the quasigrammatical properties of their distributional patterns; their relation to the topic-focus structure of the ongoing interaction; their interaction with gaze; the tension they reveal between informational and affiliational imperatives; and the steadfastly comparative perspective with which they are framed.

The second part of book, ‘Illustrative components of moves’, consists of three chapters that treat illustrative signs (or ‘indexical icons’). Their primary function is to create virtual objects that may then be talked about and pointed to: modeling, diagramming, and editing. Such signs occur in communicative contexts in which speakers are trying to describe the form and function of complex artifacts (like fish traps), or elaborate structures (like kinship relations). Ch. 5 deals with symmetry-dominance constructions (also known as ‘buoys’ and ‘gestural layering’ in the literature) in which, after making a two-handed symmetrical gesture (for example, the shape of a fish trap), one hand then executes a new gesture that provides focal information relative to...

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