Insights on the nature of language from the study of gesture units

Abstract

Gesture categories and gesture units are characterized according to both formal and functional criteria. The resultant functional types fall along a continuum according to the degree to which their tokens have conventionalized symbolic status. The more conventional the form/meaning pairing, the more straightforward it is to identify gestures as units. Most types of gesture categories are best viewed as having prototype structures, rather than a category structure with strict boundaries. This view on gesture aligns with some contemporary thinking about linguistic categories, which also espouses a prototype approach. The result is a coherent picture of how gesture interactions with different categories and units of spoken language, taking human audio-visual communication as dynamic and polysemiotic in nature.