Piotr Konderak, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin
1. Language and polysemiotic communication
Cognitive semiotics explores the notion of polysemiotic communication understood as intertwined use of two or more semiotic systems. Language – in its various forms – can be treated as a paradygmatic example of a semiotic system (Zlatev et al. 2020). However, human everyday communication involves more than just language. In actual communicative situations, language is a component of more complex polysemiotic system, where speech is integrated with a number of other bodily activities including body posture, head movements, face expressions, gaze and manual gestures of a kind. These extra-linguistic semiotic resources gain their importance in the context of “embodied turn” in studies on cognition and communication.
2. Embodiment
In my presentation, I focus on the phenomenon of co-expression of speech and two other bodily activities. The first one is called spontaneous gesticulation (McNeilll 1992) or singular gestures (Müller, 2018), i.e. gestures that are spontaneously created, that are global-synthetic, holistic (McNeilll 1992) which are not explicitly planned or monitored. There are situations (stuttering, memory losses, blindness) which suggest deep interdependence between speech and gesticulation. The second semiotic resource to be discussed is the phenomenon of extended body posture and bodily movement (Mondada 2016). In this case, entire “walking bodies” and speech are coordinated and interdependent as elements of one action. As I argue, in both cases integration of speech and these activities can be observed. In other words, I claim that language together with these two semiotic resources constitute one, broader polysemiotic system of communication. I will supplement the above findings with my own study on meaning-making activities during educational (teaching-learning) interactions.
3. Phenomenology
It is not a coincidence that spontaneous gesturing, bodily movements are synchronous and co-expressive with speech. An account of integration of language (speech) and embodied activities can be found in phenomenology, especially within Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) philosophy of embodiment. In this view, our various activities (including verbal and manual ones) are different facets of the same activity: of the whole organism in its environment. In particular, co-expression of speech and gestures are seen as co-emergence of two aspects of the same phenomenon: immersion of an embodied subject in intersubjective and meaningful world. In this context, subjects experience various forms of expressing (gesturing, speech) as activity of one body.
References
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: Language and the body in social interaction. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20 (3), 336–366.
Müller, C. (2018). Gesture and Sign: Cataclysmic Break or Dynamic Relations? Frontiers in Psychology 9:1651.
Quaeghebeur, L., Duncan, S., Gallagher, S., Cole, J. & McNeill, D. (2014). In: Müller, C. Cienki, A. Fricke, E. Ladewig, S.H. McNeill, D. & Teßendorf, S. (eds.) Body – Language – Communication (HSK 38.2), pp. 2048–2061. De Gruyter-Mouton.
Zlatev, J., Żywiczyński, P. & Wacewicz, S. (2020). Pantomime as the original human-specific communicative system. Journal of Language Evolution 5(2), 156–174.