Sign-Gesture Symbiosis in Brazilian Sign Language Narrative

Abstract

In sign language linguistics, the tendency to maintain a categorical distinction between the gestural and the verbal has made it difficult to solve persistent problems in the description of sign language grammar and discourse. Discourse coherence and often syntactic relations appear to be at least as much a result of gestural contributions as of purely verbal structures, such that no analysis of the strictly verbal elements can fully account for the construction of text. Liddell (2003) broke new ground by showing how the blending theory of Fauconnier and Turner (2002) can account for signing resources that are neither wholly verbal nor wholly gestural. Our study contributes to this approach by highlighting the complex array of integrated resources that signers make use of in producing richly informative, grammatically cohesive, and artful texts. By analyzing a scene in a signed pear story narrative and comparing it to the filmed original (Chafe 1980), we show how gestures and verbal elements of varying degrees of conventionality work tightly together to mutually catalize their expressive potentials. Neither gesture alone nor lexical signs alone would be able to produce the kind of discourse sophistication that we find in naturally-occurring texts. More of the burden of conceptualization of events and of discourse coherence in signed narrative is carried by the expressive and scene-creating possibilities of the signer's body in space. On this view, verbal and syntactic elements can be understood as cues to referential categories within an enacted scene.