Time Is Ripe to Make Interactional Moves: Bringing Evidence From Four Languages Across Modalities

Abstract

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.

A corpus-based study of ‘Away gestures’ across four signed languages

“…In conclusion, our findings support the growing body of research on contrastive spoken-signed language research (e.g., Cooperrider, Abner, and Goldin-Meadow 2018;Fenlon et al 2019;Ferrara 2020;Lepeut 2020Lepeut , 2022Lepeut and Shaw 2022) which is against posing a strict gesture-sign distinction. On the contrary, much more can be learnt from comparing gesture and sign than from opposing them (Lepeut 2022).…”

“…Small-scale studies of these forms have also been carried out for German Sign Language (DGS) (Volk 2016), Russian Sign Language (RSL) (Bauer 2019) and Polish Sign Language (PJM) (Kuder 2022). Preliminary comparative corpus-based studies in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) and Catalan Sign Language (LSC) were also undertaken (Gabarró-López 2020), as well as analyses exploring the origin and relations of the gesture in signed and spoken communication (Cooperrider, Abner, and Goldin-Meadow 2018;Lepeut and Shaw 2022).…”

Interactional infrastructure across modalities: A comparison of repair initiators and continuers in British Sign Language and British English

“…This study complements recent cross-modal comparisons (Lepeut 2020;Lepeut and Shaw 2022;Shaw 2019) by demonstrating similarities in the minimal features of discourse management in interaction across modalities. We demonstrated striking similarities in the form of continuers and repair initiators in English speakers and BSL signers.…”

“…Our parallel study applies the same method and the same close coding with the same criteria to two different datasets. As such, it complements recent cross-modal comparisons (Lepeut 2020;Lepeut and Shaw 2022;Shaw 2019) by demonstrating similarities in the minimal features of discourse management in interaction across modalities.…”

“…2 While there has been increasing descriptive work on individual signed languages, crosslinguistic comparisons that include signed languages alongside spoken languages remain uncommon (Okrent 2002;Taub, Galvan, and Piñar 2009). Nevertheless, a handful of recent studies have examined discourse management strategies among signers and speakers from the same culture, revealing striking similarities (Lepeut and Shaw 2022). For example, French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) signers and Belgian French speakers use manual holds in similar ways to manage turn taking (Lepeut 2020).…”