Week 12 - Noth, Tuite

This was full of helpful definitions.

A couple of things came to mind that might be of interest to you. One is the Sutton Sign Writing notation system for ASL and/or her dance writing system. If you are interested in kinesic notation systems, you can check out the web pages at:

http://www.SignWriting.org/

http://www.dancewriting.org/index.html

The second thing I thought of is an article by Brenda Farnell (1996) titled "Metaphors we move by," in Visual Anthropology, vol. 8, p.311-335. You might be interested in this article. She is responding to Lakoff and Johnsons "Metaphors we live by." If you are interested, I could loan you the copy I have.

The production of gesture

I recently observed two interpreters whose parents are deaf each tapping their right foot, rhythmically while interpreting. [The reason that I indicate that the parents are deaf is because I havent noticed other interpreters doing this.] One of the interpreters was standing, and the other sitting. The one sitting, tapped her foot much more frequently than the one standing. As I was reading about beats and rhythmic components, I wondered if these foot tappings could be considered beats. As I understand, beats are small movements that are performed more rapidly than gesture at or near the rest positions of the hands and are often produced by the speakers non-dominant hand. Under rhythmic components, Tuite writes that: "Even when speakers are not gesticulating, in most cases the pulse continues to find a kinesic outlet: head, leg, or foot movements, twitching of the hand or fingers, raising of the eyebrows, etc." Since the hands of the interpreter are busy, perhaps the foot has taken on the continuous pulse in the form of the production of beats.

Under "Physiographic (iconic) gestures," Tuite mentions type I and type II iconics. Type I iconics is pretty clear to me, but I am not understanding what type II iconics are. Could you provide a clearer explanation of what Type II iconics are?

I am very interested to see how you pull the notion of metonymy into the discussion of these two articles.

I tend to write questions and comments as I read. Then often later the answer comes up in the article. In reading about universality of gesture, I thought about the relationship to body and getural activity. Example -- something takes you by surprise and you widen your eyes, raise your eyebrows, straighten or tense your body, maybe even move backward. This is an automatic reaction -- ready to respond in some way. These movements through repetition come to lose some of their initial meaning and become more general -- Jim's work on eyebrow raise in yes/no questions, topics, etc. in ASL.

The section on rituals and ceremonies also brought to mind a couple 'grammaticized' actions that many people perform in everyday life: 1. the action of 'making a sign like a cross' toward another person (whether present or absent) meaning, I feel sorry for them or good luck, etc. I assume that has origins in the Catholic Church, but it has spread into the general population. 2. using crossed index fingers to 'ward off' something. Example, someone tells you they have the flu and you make that sign toward them to 'prevent catching it'. There are probably others, but these are the 2 that I thought of immediately.

The semiogenesis theory is quite interesting and relates directly to topics we are covering in Sherman's evolution of communication class. I recommend that class for EVERYONE!!!!

On page 400 -- Kinesics -- WOW! That stuff looks pretty compositional to me -- and hierarchical. Have to think how that relates to spontaneous gesture. Think I can make a case????

Tuite:

Well, this stuff pre-dates McNeill's Hand and Mind book, so I don't think I really have any comments on it. The model in Figure 1 is interesting, but pretty simplified. I have to go back and read Vygotsky more in depth. The quotes in the article were good -- but Vygotsky has a lot more to say about inner speech than was brought out in the article.

I think this is interesting stuff for people who haven't read any of the Kendon and McNeill research.

This article was helpful in providing an overview of what McNeil says about gestures. Tuite described in detail the various classes of non-verbal gesture. His analysis of the function of gesutre was very interesting. I particularly enjoyed the section where he hypothesises that gesture is more easily called upon thatn speech. (pp.101)

Also, his hypothesis that gestures are vestiges of earlier communication is intriguing. In particular, the claim that early gesture probably was more like home sign than gesture.

In response to your interests, I can definiely see why you are interested in this paper. Particularly if you are interested in making a typology of gesture that also included metonymy. The forms of emblems, illustrators, regulators, affect displays, and adaptors provide a good starting point for this study. Later, I assume, you will divide those up into metaphoric in nature ( such as it flips back and forth represented by a hand flipping back and forth), and those which are metonymic in nature. I will be interested to hear what kinds of gestures ytou believe are metonymic in nature.

"Gesture "body language" and Kinesics"

I found this article bvery interesting. I have never really studied Kinesics and I felt that this article gave a nice introduction to the topic.

I do take some issues with the author. First, on page 394, s/he says that only weakly coded messages can be coded by body languages? I'm not so sure I agree with this. For example, if someone smirked at me while I was talking, I would feel that message very strongly. In fact, sometimes words don't do a very good job of conveying a message, think of 'je rie' or 'very funny' as lexicalizations of laughter. These are much more strongly communicated if the person that says it is laughing or smiling. In this sense, I think that body language has a very strong communicative message.

Another section that I picked up on right away is on page 399. The author discusses the evotlution of eyebrow movement from a signal associatied with widening of the eyes for better vision. I think that this hypothesis is stong support for gestural origins of language. It seems natural that we widen our eyes when we are interested in something. This is perhaps why we widen our eyes when we are interested in someone's linguistic message (usually verbal). Because widening our eyes and raising our eyebrows is a remnant of our gestural origins of language. We certainly don't need to see better to hear someone's message.

In addition to the topic discussed above, I found the Darwinian perspective or head-nodding of interest as well, It is certainly tempting to accept this hypothesis.

I was amused by how easily he was able to assert a definition for gesture and body language, while we in class are constatnly at odds over terms. I'll be interested to see if others in class accept his definitions or want to "discuss" them!

I thought his writing was very clear and you (Andrew) were right, it's very easy reading (THANK YOU)

I did think it was a bit of a stretch in section 1.2.4 where he establishes and underlying (hkinemic) representation of movement. Is that the mental planning of a movement?

Reading his 1.3 and 2.1 sections gave me horrid foreshadowing to the class and confusing 'signs' with "signs" maybe Andrew should do a little refresher that the terms are ackwardly the same yet worlds apart.

Tuite:

OKay this is the stuff that usually makes my head spin trying to keep beats and specific KINDS of gesture seperate in my head. I have too often lumped them together in one pile. Perhaps Andrew could give a brief review with soem VISUAL examples for those of us who where acting this article out as we were reading!!!

I'm most interested to hear discussion of physiographic and symbolic gesture and how the two could have been precursors to signs (ASL signs).

I look forward to your talk!

p. 101-102. The discussion on the possible roles of gesture with speech is a nice segue into my topic which is a discussion of the theories of relationship of speech and gesture and some studies which explore the various theories.

I enjoyed the discussion about types of gestures: it was basic, but gave me a framework to think from. Overall, the article was clearly written and easy to understand, which I appreciate. Thank you!

The idea about gesture being production-centered (p. 94), not reception-oriented is interesting -- I wouldn't have picked that up casually.

p. 95: speech and gesture generated at the same time gives an advantage to the serial nature of speech, which is its main disadvantage (I think) compared to signed languages.

I like the idea that language is an attempt to describe images, thought forms; although I wonder if every person works from internal images, or if there are other paradigms that people work from. I think in our visually-oriented culture, most of us probably work from images. Do all cultures have internal thought forms that are specifically imagistic? Or do some have auditory or kinesthetic thought forms?

Noth:

I had no idea that there sere such things as "kinemes." It's fascinating. It seems weird to me to develop all those terms which parallel language terms, such as kines, kineme-phoneme, kinemorphs, etc. The ideas in this chapter are a whole new world to me. It's very interesting. Most of it is descriptive rather than proposing theories, although I guess different authors classify differently. Speech-related gestures (p. 397) is given only one sentence. I would like to have more info there.

I'm not sure what is meant when we say something like: "Gestures are forms which are incapable of stading alone." What constitutes a morphlogical context? For that matter, what is meant here by "morphology"?

As someone who is interested in representational systems for gestural language, I would love to see Birdwhistell's kinegraphy.

If I understand this correctly, the difference between metaphor and metonymy is one of domain. Both can be used to explain diachronic changes in language.For example, the change of meaning in the word "hypocrite" (from an actor on the Greek stage, to a person who pretends to be something they're not) may be described metaphorically. Calling a corporate employee a "suit" is an example of metonymy. I also understand that many gestures and signs can be described as metonymic. Question: what does that distinction buy us? Since you claim that an essential distinction has become blurred, what do we gain by its restoration?