The classical approach to gesture and sign language analysis focuses on the forms and locations of the hands. This constitutes an external point of view on the gesturing subject. The kinesiological approach presented in this chapter looks at gesture from the inside out, at how it is produced, taking a first-person perspective. This involves a physiological description of the parts of the body that are moving (the segments) and the joints at which they can move (providing the degrees of freedom of movement). This type of analysis allows for such distinctions of proper movement of segments from displacement caused by movement of another segment. Movement is distinguished according to muscular properties such as flexion versus extension, abduction versus adduction, exterior versus interior rotation, and supination versus pronation. The propagation of movement in the body is considered in terms of its flow across connected segments of the body, from more proximal to more distal segments or vice versa. These distinctions distinguish different functions of gestures (e.g. showing that you don’t care vs. expressing negation) and different meanings of signs in a sign language.

Iconic aspects of postures and hand movements have long been a central issue in gesture research. A speaker’s body may become a dynamic, viewpointed ‘icon’ (Peirce 1960) of someone or something else, or hands may create iconic signs. Recent research on iconicity in spoken and signed languages has (re)established its constitutive role in language (e.g. Jakobson 1990) and more broadly in multimodal interaction, which naturally includes iconic manual gestures and full-body enactments. Peircean semiotics are combined with cognitive linguistic accounts to demonstrate the role of iconicity in embodied conceptual and linguistic structures and to account for modality-specific manifestations of iconicity in gesture. We provide an overview of gestural modes of representation and techniques of depiction and exemplify the ways in which iconicity interacts with other semiotic principles, such as indexicality, viewpoint, and metonymy. The chapter also highlights empirical research into gestural iconicity as it relates to language acquisition, development, and processing, language and cognition, and the fields of computation and robotics.

Chapter 4 looks at the concepts of iconicity and image schemas. Iconicity refers to a phenomenon that illustrates natural resemblance between language and concepts and demonstrates direct correspondence between the linguistic form and the meaning to be conveyed. For instance, we tend to state events based on the temporal sequence of their actual occurrence. And linguistic distance often corresponds to conceptual distance. We use longer utterances iconic of “distance” to show politeness when talking to new acquaintances. Image schemas, as the bridge between sensorimotor experience and concepts, are the preconceptual structures derived from our sensorimotor experiences, through which we can structure abstract concepts and carry out inferences. This chapter discusses through a variety of examples how iconicity and image schemas can be useful in facilitating language learning.

Does the iconic status of a highly stigmatised linguistic variant like negative concord (e.g., I didn’t do nothing) more tightly constrain the social meanings associated with it? In exploring how we infer social meaning about negative concord, this chapter reveals that its precise syntactic configuration (the presence of two negative elements - n’t and nothing in the example above) may convey pragmatic meaning associated with emphasis, stress, surprise or remarkability. However, its highly stigmatised status constrains the extent to which these subtle meanings are perceived. For most of the young people at Midlan high, its stigmatised social associations are antithetical to their persona style and this inhibits their use of negative concord in any circumstances. However, some, in particular, the Townies, exploit both the pragmatic and social functions of negative concord to enrich the social meaning of their utterances. Importantly, this chapter emphasises how different speakers engage differently with the same grammatical variable, arguing that indexical fields need to reflect a range of social evaluations.

Sign languages, the languages used by and among deaf people, have long been misunderstood and undervalued. Chapter 13 shows what they really are: human languages. First, we have to rid ourselves of various misconceptions about sign languages. I then formulate the sign language argument for the Innateness Hypothesis, which is based on various parallelisms between signed and spoken languages that strongly suggest that, despite operating in completely different sensory channels, both are likely instantiations of the same mental language system. Both types of languages are processed in the same brain areas and show similar developmental patterns during acquisition and language breakdown. This supports the idea of a genetically anchored default language function for these brain areas. In support of this idea, sign language studies also provide us with examples in which grammatical structure emerges spontaneously when deaf children grow up without being exposed to a sign language. These so-called home sign systems can even give rise to new sign languages. This adds the argument from spontaneous emergence to our list of arguments that potentially support the Innateness Hypothesis.

This chapter introduces the topic of expressivity and outlines the contributions to the book.

This chapter provides an organized ranking and a discussion of expressives in Breton. Expressives are defined as expressions whose morphophonology is not entirely arbitrary, but partly iconic. I provide an inventory of them in Breton, a Celtic modern language spoken in Western France in a bilingual context with French. I discuss the productivity of the operations of expressive morphology, their exclusive use for expressive means, and their degree of iconicity. I show for each category in turn what operations or structures might be exclusive to expressive words.

Basque possesses a large, distinctive class of iconic elements known as ideophones (onomatopoeia in traditional terms). This chapter succinctly describes the main typological characteristics of these words, and argues that, due to their prominent status in Basque and in linguistic typology in general, they should be considered one of the main typological traits of Basque, alongside other linguistic features specific to this language such as ergativity, case alignment, and double marking.

This chapter surveys various types of reduplicative word formation in German and discusses their morpho-phonological regularities as well as their use conditions and the iconically-expressive meanings attributed to them. It is argued that the repetitive, formally redundant forms pose strict conditions on their use, making reduplication prone to familiar and non-standard language use. At the same time, reduplications are phonologically conspicuous markers for expressive meaning dimensions. Reduplication in German especially evokes semantic flavours related to smallness, playfulness, lack of seriousness, and jocular depreciation. The survey suggests that, in spite of the foregrounding of the expressive and poetic function, the various types of reduplication are morphologically quite regular. Previous accounts on reduplication in German that deem these words to be “extra-grammatical” are therefore rejected.

The chapter analyses a small corpus of twelve Catalan folk tales voice-dramatised and radio broadcast in Majorca in 1959. Most of the lexical material studied here is elicited from the same source and from Diccionari Català-Valencià-Balear, a master work of 20th-century romance lexicography. The expressive resources used in the recordings can be analysed as actual resources in the language for they are shared by both speakers and listeners and they successfully convey a part of the meaning. Along with voice-attached resources as pitch, intensity, or speech rate, other more conventional means such as those preserved in writing (morphological, lexical, syntactic) are also analysed. The findings by Dingemanse and Akita (2017) on the (inverse) relation between expressiveness and grammatical integration are used. The chapter demonstrates the degree to which expressives can be marked by means of phonetic cues in Catalan, initially setting the border between ideophones and unconventional spoken iconicity. By comparing oral and written versions of the same tales it is proposed that fixability by writing is a good test of grammatical integration, at least a necessary condition.

The chapter ’Meowlogisms’ explains morphological processes by using meowlogisms, which are a typical linguistic feature of cat-related digital spaces. These are created with cat-inspired morphemes and lexemes – called ’meowphemes’ here – with which people create new words to give their communication a feline spin. The chapter also looks at the reasons we consider certain words funny and discusses the concepts of humour, iconicity, and funniness in relation to meowlogisms. Denoting the feline perspective, meowlogisms are also present in the linguistic landscapes and are, thus, a feature that can be studied when it comes to the public spaces around us.