• Citer

How iconic signals contribute to sentences

par De Brabanter, Philippe
Référence 2nd International AFLiCo Conference (10-12 May 2007: Lille, France)
Publication Non publié, 2007-05-12

Communication à un colloque

• Détails
• Contenu

Résumé :

How iconic signals contribute to sentencesWhen linguists or philosophers of language study communication, they are naturally biased towards linguistic communication. This has resulted in a situation in which very little attention is being paid to the fact that many of our daily utterances are actually a mixture between linguistic and other expressive means, such as noises, gestures and facial expressions. Thus, I agree with Robyn Carston that the “fact that most verbal utterances are a complex of linguistic, paralinguistic, facial and vocal gestures, which appear to function as a signal receiving a unified interpretation” remains “rather under-explored” (2004, p. 8 online version).In this paper, I try to make a modest contribution to the study of multi-modal signalling. I show how Clark & Gerrig’s notion of demonstration (iconic ostensive signal) can be usefully applied to apparent ‘intrusions’ of non-linguistic material into spoken or written utterances. The examples I deal with are of the following kind:(1) I didn’t see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week?(2) Of course he made a point of looking very [IMITATION OF HUMBLENESS].(3) I got out of the car, and I just [DEMONSTRATION OF TURNING AROUND AND BUMPING HIS HEAD ON AN INVISIBLE TELEPHONE POLE]The square-bracketed strings are meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing is that these instances of ostensive mimicry are not a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; they appear to take the place of that stimulus.It is clear from the work of Carston and of psychologists and semioticians studying gestures (e.g. Goldin-Meadow, McNeill) that the all-out linguistic bias should be abandoned. Still, I am led to put forward an account of the non-linguistic demonstrations in the above examples as linguistic constituents. In (1) to (3), I contend, non-linguistic demonstrations are linguistically recruited to fulfil various syntactic functions. This way, I extend François Recanati’s account of so-called ‘closed quotations’ by exploiting the essential similarities between quotations and non-linguistic demonstrations. Although I end up proposing a linguistic account of (some cases of) non-verbal mimicry, I also argue against an ellipsis-based account (as inspired by Merchant 2004) which would deny the multi-modal dimension of (1) to (3): the structure of these sentences does not contain unrealised adjectives or adjective phrases.ReferencesCarston, R. 2004. “Explicature and semantics”, in S. Davis & B. Gillon (eds), Semantics: A Reader, Oxford, OUP.Clark, H. H. & Gerrig, R. J. 1990. “Quotations as Demonstrations”, Language 66, 764-805.Merchant, J. 2004. “Fragments and ellipsis”, Linguistics and Philosophy 27, 661-738.McNeill, D. 2002. “Gesture and language dialectic”, Acta Linguistica Hafniensa.Özçaliskan, S. & Goldin-Meadow, S. 2005. “Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development”, Cognition 96, B101-B113.Recanati, F. 2001. “Open Quotation”, Mind 110, 637-87.