Sign language linguistics has largely focused on lexical, phonological, and morpho-syntactic structures of sign languages, leaving the facets of interaction overlooked. One reason underlying the study of smaller units in the initial stages of development of the field was a pressing concern to ground sign languages as linguistic. The interactive domain has been sidestepped in gesture studies, too, where one dominant approach has been rooted in psycholinguistic models arguing for gesture’s tight relationship with speech as part of language. While these approaches to analyzing sign and gesture have been fruitful, they can lead to a view of language as abstracted from its natural habitat: face-to-face interaction. Such an understanding of how language manifests itself—one that takes for granted the conversational exchange—cannot account for the interactional practices deployed by deaf and hearing individuals within and across various ecological niches. This paper reviews linguistic research on spoken and sign languages, their approaches to gesture that have tended to posit a divide between what is linguistic vs. non-linguistic and sign vs. gesture. Rather than opposing the two, this paper argues for seeing the dynamics between gesture and sign as intimately intertwined both intra- and inter-personally. To ground this claim, we bring evidence from four languages: ASL—American English and French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB)-Belgian French across modalities (signed and spoken) to offer a view of language as situated, dynamic and multimodal. Based on qualitative corpus analyses of signers’ and speakers’ face-to-face interactional discourses of two communicative actions, viz. palm-up and index pointing, it is exemplified how deaf ASL-LSFB and American English-Belgian French hearing individuals mobilize their hands to continuously contribute to both linguistic meaning and the management of their social actions with addressees. Ultimately, exploring the interactional synergies arising within and across different communicative ecologies enables scholars interested in the fields of gesture and sign language research to gain a better understanding of the social, heterogeneous nature of language, and as to what it means for spoken and sign languages to be embodied languages.

This study explores moments in signed and spoken conversation when manual production is on hold and its resulting interactive ramifications. Typically, the temporal structure of gesture and sign can be decomposed into a stream of distinct manual phases. There are moments, however, when this activity is stopped. This may happen for various reasons, e.g., when seeking attention, holding the floor or during overlaps. Holds have mostly been examined in sign languages regarding prosody, syntax, and corresponding to vowel lengthening in spoken languages. In gesture studies, they have been overlooked for not deemed relevant in the gesture-speech interface. By combining contrastive and multimodal analyses, this paper examines the relevance of holds as potential meaning-making practices deployed by LSFB signers and its comparison to Belgian French speakers. In 3 hours of video-recorded material drawn from 3 multimodal corpora, the following question is addressed: what are the roles of holds in the management of interaction within and across languages/modalities? While most of linguistic work considers manual movements to express referential content, the observations here push to reconsider the common boundary set between what constitutes gestural/linguistic phenomena in one language and what does not.

A large body of research has highlighted the tight, carefully organised temporal coordination of interaction. When taking turns, people tend to minimise the occurrence of gaps and overlaps (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). Within the field of signed language linguistics, however, there is an ongoing debate: while some researchers claim that signers orient to a ‘one-speaker-at-a-time’ principle (McCleary and Leite 2013) as found in spoken conversation, others argue that signed language interactions allow for more overlapping turns, displaying a more collaborative floor in their turn-taking mechanics (Coates and Sutton-Spence 2001). The current paper aims at contributing to this discussion by providing a first cross-linguistic, systematic account of the manifestation of overlap in two signed languages, namely LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language) and VGT (Flemish Sign Language). We analysed simultaneous signing in 2 hours of dyadic face-to-face conversations. This paper combines a quantitative account of the turn timing and thus frequency counts of overlap in VGT and LSFB interactions with a more fine-grained qualitative analysis of the interactional, i.e., sequential environment, in which overlap occurs and the strategies deployed to accomplish overlap resolution by deaf participants. In doing so, this paper sheds further light on the orderliness of signed conversation, and ultimately contributes to a better understanding of the semiotic complexity of multimodal interaction management across language ecologies (Ferrara and Hodge 2018).

Language is complex in many respects. When conceived as a system that is to be analysed at all levels of linguistic structure, it is interpreted as a static and abstract phenomenon in which the rules are disconnected from their context of use. However, the ability to do language, construed as a fundamentally social practice grounded in our in situ face-to-face interactions, does not exclusively rely on knowing the rules that govern the grammatical principles in a given language, nor does it limit itself to understanding the lexical content of utterances. Language is more than that; it is fundamentally social and inherently multimodal in that it enables all humans to create, express, and construe meaningful utterances through their bodies. For a long time, however, linguistic theories have neglected to consider the diverse and rich ways humans do language using their bodies. In this introduction, particular attention is paid to the different roles the body plays across a range of distinct sign languages and contexts. In that respect, a short historical detour into the evolutive stages of sign language research is provided first. Next, the aims and the different contributions of this volume are outlined. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.