(Salle F05)
Sandler, Wendy
(University of Haifa, Haifa)
Iconic Mouth Gestures in a Sign Language
The discipline of sign language research has fostered a schizophrenic
attitude toward the relationship between sign language and gesture.
Many of the more formal linguistic approaches have eschewed
reference to gesture in studying sign language, in an effort to demonstrate
the primacy of grammatical properties in these languages,
irrespective of their gestural origins. Some investigators have taken
the opposite approach, looking for explicitly gestural explanations of
the synchronic organization and structure of sign languages.
The theoretical context of the present paper ascribes to sign languages
many modality-independent universal properties that are
explicitly linguistic. Within that context, the paper provides new
evidence for the existence of a component that is strictly gestural.
Specifi cally, the study extracts from the panoply of complex nonmanual
signals found in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) a particular category
of mouth gestures that corresponds to the iconic co-speech hand
gestures described by McNeill (1992).
As in other sign languages, articulations of the face in ISL perform
many roles, some of them conventionalized into a grammatical system
such as facial intonation, and adverbial morphemes articulated
on the face. Other nonmanual behaviors, however, are not part of
the linguistic system per se. One is emotional facial expressions, and
another is the iconic mouth gestures that make up the core of the
present study.
The mouth gestures convey physical properties or sensations, such
as dimension, weight, contact between objects, and vibrations or
sounds. Like their counterparts in co-speech hand gesture, and unlike
the units of the linguistic system, these co-sign mouth gestures are
global in form and idiosyncratic in use, and their interpretation is
context-dependent. And like the iconic subset of co-speech gestures,
the form of a mouth gesture bears a clear and direct relationship to
its meaning. Each of these properties is exemplifi ed with data from
four ISL signers retelling an animated cartoon story.
Two conclusions can be drawn from these fi ndings. First, human
communication is universally comprised of two components operating
simultaneously and complementarily. One is a formal system of standardized, discrete, combinatoric, hierarchically organized units,
and the other component is idiosyncratic, imagistic, gradient, and
global. The second conclusion is that we have evolved to convey one
of these systems with our hands, and the other with our mouths.
