Ch 2 - Gestures, Sign Languages, and Multimodality Notes

Gestures, Sign Languages, and Multimodality

  • Linguistic interactions operate on multiple levels through multiple channels, known as multimodality.
  • Multimodal discourse involves co-constructing meanings through various modes like gestures, gazes, facial expressions, body movements, written texts, computers, and material objects.
  • The "#Hashtag" skit exemplifies multimodality by displacing the hashtag from social media to face-to-face conversation, creating humor through the transgression of communication conventions.

Bakhtin’s Double-Voiced Discourse

  • Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia refers to the multiplicity of socially tinged ways of speaking in any given society.
  • Double-voiced discourse involves embedding others’ voices into one’s own, through direct or indirect quotation, mimicry, or tone.
  • Double-voiced discourse is internally dialogized, incorporating a potential dialogue between two voices, world views, or languages.
  • The "#Hashtag" skit uses double-voiced discourse by alluding to and quoting snippets from songs, slogans, and popular culture sources.
  • Speakers using double-voiced discourse take up echoes, associations, and moral connotations from the source of the quotation and present them in a refracted way, commenting upon the borrowed words without explicitly stating it.

Goffman’s Participation Framework and Production Format

  • Erving Goffman rejected common notions about conversations between speakers and hearers, emphasizing participation as an analytical concept.
  • Goffman distinguished between ratified and unratified hearers, including addressees, bystanders, overhearers, and eavesdroppers.
  • He separated the role of speaker into different roles:
    • Animator: The voice box, animating the words.
    • Author: The person who composed the words.
    • Principal: The person who stands behind what is said; The person whose opinions are expressed.
  • Goffman's initial insight is that the dominant ideology concerning conversations that they involve one unified speaker and one unified hearer – is a model that is, at best, too simple and, at worst, simply incorrect.
  • Shifts in footing are changes in the alignment we take up to ourselves and others, expressed in how we manage the production or reception of an utterance.
  • Shifts in footing offer clues about the multifunctionality of utterances, indexing social identities, cultural values, attitudes, stances, or relationships.

Speech and the Analysis of Conversation

  • Linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists study “talk-in-interaction,” emphasizing its socially situated and jointly constructed nature.
  • Conversation Analysis (CA) focuses on the sequential organization of talk, where each utterance is the context for the next.
  • Turn-taking is a central concept in CA, achieved through subtle pauses, intonation, and prosodic features.
  • Adjacency pairs are sequences of two utterances by different speakers, such as question/answer or offer/acceptance.
  • Dispreferred responses and conversational troubles are also investigated in CA.
  • Criticisms of CA include its lack of interest in larger contexts, omission of nonverbal interactions, and disinterest in speakers' explanations of their utterances.
  • Linguistic anthropologists often combine CA with other methods and contextualize conversations more comprehensively.
  • There are three phases in the relationship between CA and anthropology:
    1. a period of sharing during the 1960s and 1970s
    2. a second period during the 1980s and 1990s when CA came into its own as a discipline and grew apart from linguistic anthropology
    3. a third period beginning in the early 2000s and extending to the present of reinvigorated “interdisciplinary convergence”

Gestures and Other Forms of Embodied Communication

  • Linguistic anthropologists analyze gestures, body movements, facial expressions, and interactions with objects alongside speech as an integrated, multimodal event.
  • Stivers and Sidnell (2005) distinguish between “vocal/aural” modalities and “visuospatial” modalities but some researchers prefer to focus on the integration and coordination of multiple modalities of communication within the material world rather than separating modalities apart from one another.
  • Meaning-making involves multiple modalities, the material environment, knowledge of personal histories, cultural norms, and social relations.
  • McNeill’s typology of gestures:
    • Iconics: Gestures that resemble what is being described, such as tracing the shape of a tree in the air.
    • Emblems: the subset of iconics; Stand-alone gestures with conventional meanings, like the thumbs-up sign.
    • Metaphorics: Gestural representations of abstract concepts, such as a cupped hand for a question.
    • Deictics: Pointing gestures, using the index finger.
    • Beats: Gestures with no discernible meaning, used to emphasize or separate narrative sections.
  • Gestures are analyzed as part of an embodied participation framework, revealing how gestures, talk, touch, eye gaze, body movements, and the material environment create meaning.
  • The establishment of a joint attentional frame and a common understanding of the interaction is a key accomplishment.
  • Misao Okada analyzes how a Japanese boxer and his coach coordinate talk, eye gaze, gesture, body movements, and surrounding material objects to understand each other.
  • Barbara LeMaster demonstrates that preschoolers' nonverbal behaviors often contradict their verbal assertions.
  • Mark Sicoli calls the mismatch between verbal and nonverbal messaging “intermodal discord,” providing an example where family members' verbal statements contradicted their embodied movements with regard to the dishes.
  • Eve Tulbert and Marjorie Harness Goodwin analyze intermodal discord in families’ toothbrushing routines, identifying “conjoined directives” and “disjunctive directives”.

Sign Languages

  • Sign languages are complex and have all the components of spoken languages.
  • Myths about sign languages:
    • Myth #1 – Sign languages are not “real” languages but instead are pidgin forms of communication with no grammar of their own.
    • Myth #2 – Sign Languages are basically iconic.
    • Myth #3 – Sign language is universally shared by all deaf people in the world.
    • Myth #4 – There are no distinctive social or cultural practices associated with speaking particular sign languages.
  • American Sign Language (ASL) uses five parameters involving gesture and nonverbal modalities:
    • Handshape
    • Location of the hand relative to the body
    • Movement of the hand (or lack thereof)
    • Palm orientation (up or down)
    • Non-manual markers (facial expressions)
  • 90% of deaf people are born to hearing parents, typically learning sign language in school environments.
  • Distinctive social and cultural practices have developed within ASL communities.
  • New sign languages continue to emerge in deaf communities and families, providing insights into language acquisition and interactions between deaf and hearing people.

Poetry, Whistled Languages, Song, and Images

  • Poetry contains features like alliteration, parallelism, rhythm, and prosody.
  • Ethnopoetics sheds light on the underlying poetic features of all discourse.
  • Whistled languages convert local languages into whistled forms of communication.
  • Many whistled languages are endangered due to lack of young people learning them.
  • Song can accompany or replace speech and is related to poetry and performance.
  • Musical modalities deserve close analysis alongside talk, gesture, and other embodied communication.
  • Illustrations and images can supplement talk, such as in Aboriginal sand stories.
  • Different modes of communication can convey messages in and of themselves.
  • Media ideologies are ideas people have about various semiotic modalities.
  • Language is not just multifunctional but also multimodal, and interactions should be analyzed as integrated and embodied multimodal practices.
  • Meanings are conveyed and co-constructed by participants through speech, gesture, touch, eye gaze, prosody, song, poetry, whistling, whispering, and illustration.
  • Language ideologies influence which modes are used and how they are combined.
  • Semiotic modalities can index social identities, moral stances, or opinions.