The Meaning and Grammar of Pure Gestures: Theoretical Insights

While studies of gestures generally focus on their cospeech use, gestures can sometimes be produced on their own, with a dedicated time slot. Such “pure gestures” have yielded three key findings. First, their iconic content can be divided “on the fly” among traditional slots of the inferential typology of language. This finding extends to novel gestures, visual animations, and (iconically modulated) sign language classifiers, which suggests that the inferential typology is mostly derived through productive rather than lexical means. Second, some pure gestures 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 Universal Grammar specifies certain form-to-function mappings, an alternative is that these mappings have deeper cognitive roots. Finally, pure gestures have a dedicated iconic syntax, which resembles that of sign language classifiers. Overall, these results highlight the importance of gestures for theoretical linguistics and the fruitfulness of multimodal investigations that include gestures and signs.