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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. 195–226

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The interface between grammar and bodily enactment in ASL and English

ORCiD logo with link | University of Texas at Austin, USA
ORCiD logo with link | Case Western Reserve University, USA
ORCiD logo with link | University of Texas at Austin, USA
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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 authors.

Published online: 15 June 2022
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00023.qui
Abstract
Users of signed and spoken languages regularly engage bodily enactment (commonly referred to as constructed action [CA] for signers and character viewpoint gestures [CVPT] for speakers) for the creation of meaning, but comparatively few studies have addressed how linguistic grammar interfaces with such gestural depictive devices across language modalities. CVPT gestures have been shown to co-occur with spoken language transitive verbs, and when a reference is definite or more accessible in the discourse. In sign, CA often alternates sequentially with fully conventionalized signs. In both CVPT and CA demonstrations, syntactic and pragmatic factors appear to be important. In this work, we consider these patterns by examining short retellings of video-based elicitation stimuli (silent-movie segments) from 10 deaf users of ASL (American Sign Language) and 20 hearing speakers of English. We describe examples of signs and words that co-occur with or precede specific instances of CA and CVPT. We also examine distributions and degrees of enactment across participants in order to consider the question of gesture threshold (Hostetter, A. and Alibali, M. W. 2008. Visible Embodiment: Gesture as Simulated Action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 15(3): 495–514. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 2019. Gesture as Simulated Action: Revisiting the Framework. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 261: 721–752. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). We provide various examples of how gestural material interfaces with linguistic grammar, which has implications for syntactic theory and possible grammatical constraints on such communicative devices.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Enactment in signed language and co-speech gesture
      • 1.1.1Constructed Action
      • 1.1.2Character viewpoint gesture
    • 1.2The gestures as simulated action model
    • 1.3Summary
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Materials and participants
    • 2.2English + gesture coding
    • 2.3ASL coding
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Quantity and degree of enactment across co-speech gesturers and signers
    • 3.2English + gesture patterns
    • 3.3ASL patterns
  • 4.Summary and discussion
    • 4.1Comparison of where enactment occurs across modalities
    • 4.2Implications of the data for the GSA
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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