Cover not available

Article published In: Signed and spoken language contrastive research: A multimodal approach
Edited by Sílvia Gabarró-López and Laurence Meurant
[Languages in Contrast 22:2] 2022
► pp. 290–321

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB

When hands stop moving, interaction keeps going

A study of manual holds in the management of conversation in French-speaking and signing Belgium

ORCiD logo with link | University of Namur, Belgium
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

This article was made Open Access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license through payment of an APC by or on behalf of the author.

Published online: 3 June 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00021.lep
Abstract
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Gesture and Sign in Interaction: The case for manual holds
    • 2.1Manual holds as part of the gesture and sign structure
    • 2.2Defining moments of gestural holds
    • 2.3Holds in signed discourse
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data Presentation
      • 3.1.1Corpora
      • 3.1.2Participants
      • 3.1.3Tasks
    • 3.2Data annotation
      • 3.2.1Annotation procedure
      • 3.2.2Formal identification of holds
      • 3.2.3Functional annotation of holds
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overview of the data
    • 4.2Interactive functions of holds in LSFB and BF conversations
      • 4.2.1Holds for turn-holding
      • 4.2.2Holds for turn suspension
      • 4.2.3Holds during collaborative word searching activities
      • 4.2.4Holds for monitoring addressees
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (52)
References
Baker, Ch. 1977. Regulators and Turn-Taking in American Sign Language Discourse. In On the Other Hand, L. A. Friedman (ed.), 215–236. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bavelas, J. B. 1994. Gestures as Part of Speech: Methodological Implications. Research on Language and Social Interaction 27(3): 201–221. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bavelas, J. B., Chovil, N., Lawrie, D. and Wade, A. 1992. Interactive Gestures. Discourse Processes, 151: 469–489. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beukeboom, C. 2009. When Words Feel Right: How Affective Expressions of Listeners Change a Speaker’s Language Use. European Journal of Social Psychology 391: 747–756. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bolly, C. T., and Crible, L. 2015. From Context to Functions and Back Again: Disambiguating Pragmatic Uses of Discourse Markers. Paper presented at the Fourteenth International Pragmatics Conference (IPra): Anchoring Utterances in Co(n)text, Argumentation, Common Ground. Antwerp, Belgium, 26–31 July 2015.
Bolly, C. T. and Boutet, D. 2018. The Multimodal CorpAGEst Corpus: Keeping an Eye on Pragmatic Competence in Later Life, Corpora 13(2): 1–39. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cibulka, P. M. 2015. On How to Do Things with Holds: Manual Movement Phases as Part of Interactional Practices in Signed Conversation. Sign Language Studies 16(4): 447–472. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. and Krych, M. A. 2004. Speaking while Monitoring Addressees for Understanding. Journal of Memory and Language 501: 62–81. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
De Stefani, E. 2005. La Suspension du Geste comme Ressource Interactionnelle. Proceedings of the Second International Society for Gesture Studies Conference (ISGS 2005) – Interacting bodies. Lyon, France, 15–16 June 2005. Available at [URL]
de Vos, C., Torreira, F. and Levinson, S. C. 2015. Turn-Timing in Signed Conversations: Coordinating Stroke-to-Stroke Turn Boundaries. Frontiers in Psychology 6(268): 1–13. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Duncan, S. Jr. 1972. Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 23(2): 283–292. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Emmorey, K. 1999. Do Signers Gesture? In Gesture, Speech, and Sign, L. Messing and R. Campbell (eds), 133–159. New York: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Enfield, N. J. 2009. The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Esposito, A., McCullough, K. E. and Quek, F. 2001. Disfluencies in Gesture: Gestural Correlates to Filled and Unfilled Speech Pauses. Proceedings of IEEE International Workshop on Cues in Communication. Kauai, Hawaii, 9 December 2001.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ferrara, L. 2020. Some Interactional Functions of Finger Pointing Actions in Signed Language Conversations. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 5(1):881. 1–26. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Floyd, S., Manrique, E., Rossi, G. and Torreira, F. 2016. The Timing of Visual Bodily Behavior in Repair Sequences: Evidence from Three Languages. Discourse Processes 521: 1–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Girard-Groeber, S. 2015. The Management of Turn Transition in Signed Interaction through the Lens of Overlaps. Frontiers in Psychology 6(741): 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, S. and Brentari, D. 2017. Gesture, Sign, and Language: The Coming of Age of Sign Language and Gesture Studies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 391: 1–60. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, C. 2007. Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse & Society 181: 53–73. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, M. H. and Goodwin, C. 1986. Gesture and coparticipation in the activity of searching for a word. Semiotica 62(1/2), 51–75.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Graziano, M. and Gullberg, M. 2018. When Speech Stops, Gesture Stops: Evidence from Developmental and Crosslinguistic Comparisons. Frontiers in Psychology 9(879):1–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Groeber, S. and Pochon-Berger, E. 2014. Turns and Turn-Taking in Sign Language Interaction: A Study of Turn-Final Holds. Journal of Pragmatics 651: 121–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kendon, A. 1978. Differential Perception and Attentional Frame in Face-to-Face Interaction: Two Problems for Investigation. Semiotica 24(3–4): 305–316. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2004. Gesture. Visible Actions as Utterances. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kita, S., van Gijn, I. and van der Hulst, H. 1998. Movement Phases in Signs and Co-Speech Gestures, and their Transcription by Human Coders. In Gesture and Sign Language in Human-Computer Interaction, I. Wachsmuth and M. Fröhlich (eds), 23–35. Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kosmala, L., Candea, M. and Morgenstern, A. 2019. Synchronization of (Dis)fluent Speech and Gesture. Proceedings of the Sixth Gesture and Speech in Interaction Conference (GESPIN 2019): A Multimodal Approach to (Dis)fluency. Paderborn, Germany, 11–13 September 2019. 56–61.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lepeut, A. 2020. Framing Language Through Gesture: Palm-Up, Index Finger-Extended Gestures, and Holds in Spoken and Signed Interactions in French-Speaking and Signing Belgium. PhD Thesis, University of Namur.
Lepeut, A. and Shaw, E. 2022. Time is Ripe to Make Interactional Moves: Bringing Evidence from Four Languages across Modalities. Frontiers in Communication 71: 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liddell, S. K. 2003. Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Manrique, E. and Enfield, N. J. 2015. Suspending the Next Turn as a Form of Repair Initiation: Evidence from Argentine Sign Language. Frontiers in Psychology 6(1326):1–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McNeill, D. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mesch, J. 2016. Manual backchannel responses in signers’ conversations in Swedish Sign Language. Language & Communication 501: 22–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meurant, L., Lepeut, A., Vandenitte, S. and Lombart, C. (submitted). Spoken and Sign Languages Hand in Hand. Building and Using Parallel and Directly Comparable Corpora of LSFB and Belgian French. Corpora.
Meurant, L. 2015. Corpus LSFB. First Digital Open Access Corpus of Movies and Annotations of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB). University of Namur, LSFB-Lab. Available at [URL]
Meurant, L. and Sinte, A. 2013. Towards a Corpus of French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) Discourses. In Across the Line of Speech and Writing Variation, Corpora and Language in Use, C. T. Bolly and L. Degand (eds), 199–212. Louvain-La-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mondada, L. 2007. Multimodal Resources for Turn-Taking: Pointing and the Emergence of Possible Next Speakers. Discourse Studies 9(2): 194–225. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, C. 2018. Gesture and Sign: Cataclysmic Break or Dynamic Relations? Frontiers in Psychology 9(1651):1–20. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Navarretta, C. 2015. The Functions of Fillers, Filled Pauses and Co-Occurring Gestures in Danish Dyadic Conversations. Proceedings of the Third European Symposium on Multimodal Communication. Dublin, Ireland, 17–18 September 2015. 55–61.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Notarrigo, I. 2017. Les Marqueurs de (Dis)Fluence en Langue Des Signes de Belgique Francophone (LSFB). PhD Thesis, University of Namur.
Özyürek, A. and Woll, B. 2019. Language in the Visual Modality: Co-Speech Gesture and Sign Language. In Human Language: From Genes and Brain to Behavior, P. Hagoort (ed.), 67–83. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Parisot, A.-M. 1998. Description de l’Organisation du Système des Tours de Parole en Conversation LSQ. Master’s Dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal.
Park-Doob, M. A. 2010. Gesturing through Time: Holds and Intermodal Timing in the Stream of Speech. PhD Thesis, University of California, Berkeley.
Shaw, E. 2013. Gesture in Multiparty Interaction: A Study of Embodied Discourse in Spoken English and American Sign Language. PhD Thesis, Georgetown University.
2019. Gesture in Multiparty Interaction. Washington: Gallaudet University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stokoe, W. C. 1960. Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf. New York: University of Buffalo.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vermeerbergen, M. and Nilsson, A.-L. 2018. Introduction. In A Bibliography of Sign Languages, 2008–2017, A. Aarssen, R. Genis and E. van der Veken (eds), 9–24. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vermeerbergen, M. and Demey, E. 2007. Sign + Gesture = Speech + Gesture? Comparing Aspects of Simultaneity in Flemish Sign Language to Instances of Concurrent Speech and Gesture. In Simultaneity in Signed Languages: Form and Function, M. Vermeerbergen, L. Leeson and O. Crasborn (eds), 257–282. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vermeerbergen, M. 2006. Past and Current Trends in Sign Language Research. Language & Communication 261: 168–192. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wittenburg, P., Brugman, H., Russel, A., Klassmann, A. and Sloetjes, H. 2006. ELAN: A Professional Framework for Multimodality Research. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC ’06). Genoa, Italy, 22–28 May 2006.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (8)

Cited by eight other publications

Gabarró-López, Sílvia
2025. Discourse Markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) Dialogues and Their Translation into French: A Corpus-Based Study. Languages 10:9 ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
Lepeut, Alysson, Clara Lombart, Sébastien Vandenitte & Laurence Meurant
2024. Spoken and signed languages hand in hand: parallel and directly comparable corpora of French Belgian Sign Language (lsfb) and French. Corpora 19:2 ► pp. 241 ff. DOI logo
Lepeut, Alysson, Clara Lombart, Sébastien Vandenitte & Laurence Meurant
2025. Make It a Double: The Building and Use of the LSFB and FRAPé Corpora to Study and Compare French Belgian Sign Language and Belgian French. In How to Do Things with Corpora [Linguistik in Empirie und Theorie/Empirical and Theoretical Linguistics, ], ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Dombrausky, Kailie, Mary Lee Jensvold, Heidi L. Shaw & J. Quentin Davis
2023. Chimpanzees coordinate interrogative markers to ask questions. Gesture 22:2 ► pp. 121 ff. DOI logo
Beukeleers, Inez & Alysson Lepeut
2022. Who’s got the upper hand?. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 36 ► pp. 212 ff. DOI logo
Gabarró-López, Sílvia & Anna Kuder
2022. A corpus-based study of ‘Away gestures’ across four signed languages. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 36 ► pp. 73 ff. DOI logo
Lepeut, Alysson & Emily Shaw
2022. Time Is Ripe to Make Interactional Moves: Bringing Evidence From Four Languages Across Modalities. Frontiers in Communication 7 DOI logo
Lombart, Clara
2022. Prosodic marking of contrast in LSFB (French Belgian Sign Language). Belgian Journal of Linguistics 36 ► pp. 108 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 25 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue