Living Language. Laura M. Ahearn

around the world.⁴ For example, my daughter told me several years ago that in her fifth-grade class the rabbit-ears sign meant “Turn around, I want to kiss you” – but she assures me that the recipient of the action never actually complied with this request! (See Figure 2.1.)

       Metaphorics are gestural representations of more abstract concepts, such as a cupped hand to represent a question. As Keith Murphy (2003:34) notes, however, these sorts of gestures also have an iconic component. For this reason, both iconics and metaphorics are sometimes grouped together and called representational.

       Deictics are pointing gestures – they often use the index finger and are therefore easily identified as indexical signs.

       Beats have no discernible meaning, according to McNeill, but instead might involve pounding of the fist or flicking of the finger to count off participants, emphasize a point, or separate sections of a narrative, for example.

      Figure 2.1 A gesture with many possible meanings: “Peace,” “V for victory,” or “Turn around, I want to kiss you”.

      Source: Courtesy Laura Ahearn.

Increasingly, gestures are analyzed as part of an overall embodied participation framework, revealing insights about how gestures, talk, touch, eye gaze, body movements, and the material environment all interact to create meaning. This is the approach we will take in this book – a practice-based approach, in other words, one that is in keeping with our view of language as a form of social action. Jürgen Streeck is one of the leading theorists advocating this way of studying of gesture, which, he argues, should be conceived of “as a family of human practices: not as a code or symbolic system or (part of) language, but as a constantly evolving set of largely improvised, heterogeneous, partly conventional, partly idiosyncratic, and partly culture-specific, partly universal practices of using the hands to produce situated understandings” (Streeck 2009:5; emphasis in the original; cf. Farnell 2012; Goodwin and Cekaite 2018; Kataoka 2013).

      When one uses this approach to study interactions, one of the main accomplishments in any linguistic interaction becomes quite clear: the establishment of a joint attentional frame and a common understanding of what the interaction is “about.” Often this understanding will come not from any words that are spoken but rather from unspoken movements, gestures, or spatial configurations. It can be challenging to arrive at this joint understanding of what sort of interaction is taking place, especially when the backgrounds of participants differ – but even when they do not. Small gestures, eye gazes, or body movements can help to cue the interactional frame and appear to speed up rather than slow down the recipient’s response time (Holler and Levinson 2019).

Misao Okada analyzes exactly how this sort of joint attention and understanding are arrived at in an analysis of how a Japanese boxer and his coach come to understand each other by coordinating their talk, eye gaze, gesture, body movements, and surrounding material objects (Okada 2013:391). First, as the boxer and his coach work together, they carefully track each other’s movements and develop a “joint attentional frame.” Then, through a complex series of words, gestures, and movements, they proceed through the session successfully because they both understand how to communicate using the multiple semiotic modalities available to them. Our ability to understand one another is based on much more than abstract knowledge of grammar, or even the ability to speak, Okada argues: “Communicative competence encompasses participants’ ability to use, understand and coordinate not only talk but also a combination of other resources, such as hand gestures or body movements … A hearer’s ability to attribute meaning to a speaker’s intricate combination of vocal and nonvocal behaviors is necessary to attain a congruent understanding of what is going on” (Okada 2013:400).

      Sometimes “what is going on” is not so congruent, however. As Barbara LeMaster demonstrates in her study of preschoolers, their nonverbal behaviors often contradict their verbal assertions. In the case of one girl named Alice, who does not agree with her teacher’s choice of another student to speak next, she carries on her resistance nonverbally: “By remaining silent, Alice complies verbally with the teacher’s ultimate right to choose Adam as next speaker, but she simultaneously uses her body to both reject the teacher’s move and to reinforce her right to be called on next” (LeMaster 2010:170). And another student, named Herman, does the same thing: he “verbally complies with the teacher’s assessment but continues the conflict nonverbally, through his posture, facial expressions, and eye gaze” (LeMaster 2010:172).

      Mark Sicoli (2013, 2020) calls this type of mismatch between verbal and nonverbal messaging “intermodal discord.” He provides an excellent example from a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico, where a woman who was visiting another family’s home offered to do the dishes after dinner. This situation placed the hosts in a quandary because on the one hand, visitors are not supposed to do chores, and on the other hand, guests’ offers are supposed to be accepted. Through a close analysis of a videotape of the interaction, Sicoli shows how the family members’ verbal statements contradicted their embodied movements with regard to the dishes, enabling them to navigate this tricky social situation.

      The Buddhist monks that Michael Lempert (2012) studies have a related challenge, though the context is completely different. In the Sera Monastery in India, traditional Buddhist practices surrounding monastic discipline and debate are quite pugilistic, if not outright violent. These sorts of practices can be seen to clash with “modern” Western liberal values that emphasize the language of rights, as well as with the Tibetan Buddhists’ own language emphasizing universal compassion. Lempert analyzes the theatrical embodied debates alongside other data to derive a more comprehensive understanding of these monks’ practices.

Eve Tulbert and Marjorie Harness Goodwin analyze intermodal discord in their comparison of several families’ toothbrushing routines in the US. They identify what they call a “conjoined directive” (2011:83) – when physical and verbal actions work together to create a sense of force – for example, when a mother’s series of commands (to go, brush teeth, get dressed) are in alignment with her actions (she turns off their monitor and music video). This is in contrast to a “disjunctive directive” – when the parent’s posture and actions do not align with the command to begin a new task, but rather contradict it; the force of the directive is therefore weakened (2011:84). Tulbert and Goodwin present a vivid example of the conjoined directive in one family, in which an older sister helps her 18-month-old little sister as they both brush their teeth in the bathroom while standing nestled against one another at the sink. In another family, in contrast, the disjunctive directive is illustrated when the father enters the living room holding a toothbrush. His children are watching television there, but instead of turning off the television, he puts the toothbrush in front of them on the couch and tells them to brush. A complex negotiation involving bribery and divided attention ensues, as the children refuse to brush their teeth – at least not without a reward of a cookie or piece of gum. “Clearly different types of moral actors are co-constructed through displays of reluctance and resistance, in contrast to willingness, to carry out routine courses of action” (2011:85). The processes through which children are socialized in and through language to become competent members of their cultures will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4, but for our purposes here, it is important to note that Tulbert and Goodwin’s study relied upon a multimodal analysis, which, they argue, “is absolutely essential to any study of parenting strategies” (2011:90; cf. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018).

      Sign Languages

      We turn now to a different type of multimodal communication, sign languages. This fascinating topic reinforces many of the concepts we have discussed in the book thus far. Unfortunately, misconceptions and negative language ideologies regarding sign languages abound, so it is necessary to debunk some common myths that people often hold about these languages (cf. LeMaster and Monaghan 2004).

Myth #1 – Sign languages are not “real” languages