The Meaning and Grammar of Pure Gestures: Theoretical Insights [survey article]
Philippe Schlenker
March 2025 

While studies of gestures generally focus on their co-speech use, gestures can also (more rarely) be produced on their own, with a dedicated time slot. The meaning and grammar of such 'pure' gestures are easier to analyze because they don't co-occur with words. Pure gestures have led to three key findings in recent theoretical linguistics. First, the informational content of an iconic gesture can be divided 'on the fly' among traditional slots of the inferential typology of language, which includes assertions, presuppositions, implicatures, etc. This finding extends to novel gestures, visual animations and open-ended (and highly iconic) classifier predicates in sign language, which suggests that the inferential typology is mostly derived through productive rather than lexical means. Second, some pure gestures (such as pointing and plurals) have a grammar reminiscent of some constructions of sign languages (despite the fact that the latter are not gestural systems). While this could suggest that, within the visual modality, Universal Grammar specifies certain form-to-function mappings, an alternative is that the realization of these elements has deeper cognitive sources. Finally, pure gestures have been found to have a dedicated 'iconic syntax', with a preference for preverbal or postverbal objects depending on whether the object denotation is typically visualized before or after the relevant action; here too, this result dovetails with findings from sign language classifier predicates. Overall, these results highlight the importance of gestural studies for theoretical linguistics, and the fruitfulness of multimodal investigations that include both gestures and sign languages.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008869 (please use that when you cite this article)
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keywords:	gestures, pure gestures, pro-speech gestures, post-speech gestures, co-speech gestures, inferential typology, classifier predicates, gestural grammar, iconic syntax, semantics, morphology, syntax
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