RSSReview: The Anatomy of Meaning: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances
Jul 20
AUTHOR: Nicholas J. Enfield
TITLE: The Anatomy of Meaning
SUBTITLE: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances
SERIES TITLE: Language Culture and Cognition 8
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Katharine Parton, University of Melbourne
SUMMARY
This book analyzes utterances which occur using both speech and gesture.
Enfield argues that speech and gesture can be, in his examples, understood as
co-occurring signs which, in that co-occurrence, become composite utterances,
and as such, carry new, composite meanings. Enfield explores this perspective
on gesture and speech composite utterances through examples from speakers of
Lao, focusing first on pointing gestures with speech, and then examining
illustrative gestures with their co-occurring talk. He argues that in order to
understand social interaction and the meanings that people create with and for
one another in each interaction, it is the composite utterance (i.e. the
gesture plus speech) that needs to form the basis of interactional analysis.
In the book’s opening chapter Enfield argues that meaning’s genesis, following
a neo-Peircean semiotic and neo-Gricean pragmatic perspective, is not
language. Rather, language forms one part of the complexity of signs that
create meaning between people. Enfield first lays out examples of composite
utterances across a variety of modalities. He posits that meaning across
examples from artwork, such as paintings, requires an examination of visual
aspects and titles of paintings to understand the meaning the artist intends.
A photograph of a historically significant moment demonstrates that the
meaning of the photographic semiotic whole only becomes apparent when the
complexity of the photograph’s historical and social context is identified,
and thus, that meaning itself is composite in nature. Enfield goes on to
position his analysis of speech and gesture as signs within both gesture and
semiotic research.
The remaining chapters are grouped into two parts: the first deals with
deictic components of moves and the second with illustrative components of
moves. Enfield examines demonstratives, lip-pointing and hand-pointing as
deictic components and includes modeling, diagramming and editing in the
illustrative moves he discusses.
Chapter 2, on demonstratives, uses data from video-recorded interactions
between Lao speakers in a variety of face-to-face, naturally occurring
situations, from market places to riverside discussions. Enfield focuses on
the Lao system of spatial proximity description, arguing that, through an
examination of the speaker’s gestures, the two-term system ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’,
previously defined as ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’, should be seen as
context-dependent and descriptive of social interactional space relations
rather than as a binary, static distinction. He argues that these
demonstratives rely on both semantic and pragmatic meaning for interactional
deployment, and as such, are composite utterances. Chapter 2 argues that the
meaning of ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’ can be seen as constructed by interactants,
through the use of demonstratives, to create ‘engagement areas’ and
‘here-spaces’, which form the basis of Enfield’s analysis. He further argues
that these areas/spaces and ‘co-constructing’ uses of ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’ are
conventionalized and predictable and that they are locally constructed with
fluid meaning, depending on the interaction and interactional space.
In opening Chapter 3, Enfield problematizes the labeling of so-called
‘lip-pointing’. He shows that it is a widely occurring phenomenon studied in
linguistics and gesture studies across a number of languages and geographical
locations. Chapter 3 surveys a number of lip-pointing examples from a variety
of languages, allowing Enfield to argue that lip-pointing rarely, if ever,
involves only the lips. Interactions between Lao speakers are again shown
using stills from video of speakers’ interactions, with a focus on the
relationships between lip-pointing and co-occurring hand-pointing and gaze
direction (both matched and mismatched with lip-pointing directionality).
Enfield concludes that the lip-pointing practice in Lao is used to describe
the location of referents, and, when combined with other deictic practices,
can result in varying interactional purposes.
Following the chapter on lip-pointing, Chapter 4 provides an account of an
empirical study of hand-pointing across Lao speakers. Here, the data comes
from both Lao interactions and semi-structured interviews eliciting pointing
gestures. Enfield argues that Big and Small (i.e. B-point and S-point)
gestures have different functions within Lao social interactions, but that
both types of gestures and the gestures’ co-occurring speech should be
considered as fundamentally composite utterances.
Part II of “The Anatomy of Meaning” focuses on the illustrative components of
moves using longer extracts of interaction (again, video-recorded) along with
transcriptions, including images taken from the recordings. The examples in
Chapter 5 are descriptions of the fishing equipment used locally and the
examples in Chapter 7 are explanations of kinship systems and marriage
practices within those kinship systems. Chapter 6 uses both kinship and
fishing examples.
In Chapter 5, Enfield discusses examples of descriptions of fishing equipment,
showing that the gestures which co-occur with the verbal descriptions model
the actual, physical equipment and its use. Supporting one of the main thrusts
of the book, the verbal description alone is insufficient to understand the
appearance and functionality of the fishing equipment, and therefore, the
speech and gesture must be understood, Enfield argues, as composite to access
the full meaning of the utterance. Further, he shows that these modeling
gestures are both combinatoric and linear in interactional uses. He argues for
a predominance of two handed symmetry in the first stage of the gesture
sequence, followed by one hand taking over the representation of the first
stage, while the other hand is able to manipulate what the first hand is now
‘standing for’. As such, Enfield argues that meaning from the composite
utterance is built over several gestural moves in a linear fashion.
Enfield builds on the modeling examples to put forward an argument that Lao
speakers use the body and gestures as cognitive artifacts. In Chapter 6, he
first gives a comprehensive overview of Lao kinship systems and the rules
governing marriage within that community. He then uses the examples of kinship
diagramming over both speech and gesture to argue that not only are the bodies
and gestures cognitive artifacts, but that they are, in fact, separate
cognitive artifacts because the gestures have existence, in these examples,
which outlasts their physical performance.
An argument Enfield continues in the next chapter (Chapter 7), on ‘Editing’,
is that the gesturers can return to the site of earlier gestures in order to
manipulate the diagrams as they were ‘drawn’. Enfield gives a limited typology
of the types of editing that gesturers perform (p. 220) and calls for further
research on the editing practices of gestures that interact with gestural
diagrams in this way.
EVALUATION
Enfield’s book positions itself as research on meaning, specifically, the
‘unification of meaning’, and he argues for understanding component signs
within interactional moves as parts of wholes which must taken together when
analyzing interaction. As such, “The Anatomy of Meaning” is an invaluable
resource for anyone working on how interactants create, maintain or change and
transmit meaning within interactions, whether these are face-to-face, heavily
gestural, or otherwise. However, given the book’s focus on the gestural, it
would potentially be helpful to readers of this research if videos of the
interactions analyzed were made available by the publishers, perhaps online,
to complement the transcriptions and images in the printed book.
Enfield’s book has obvious relevance for gesture studies as a whole; first,
because it argues for the importance of gesture in any interactional analysis,
and second, because of the specific types of gestures described and analyzed
across several chapters. The chapters on diagramming and editing hold
particular interest for researchers in cognition, whether it be from a social
or distributed perspective. The in-depth analysis of the previously-called
proximal/distal ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’ system shows a fascinating insight into how
descriptive linguistics could use gesture to more accurately delve into the
meanings of various linguistic features in all languages.
Obviously, “The Anatomy of Meaning” gives significant insight into Lao
speakers’ cultural practices in its discussion of kinship and fishing
practices, and as such, would be of great relevance to anthropologists and
linguists working in that area. Its focus on kinship diagramming opens a line
of inquiry into the describing of kinship practices across linguistic (and
cultural) variation, which should be of interest to anyone studying kinship
terms, organization, and marriage practices, both within communities of Lao
speakers and cross-culturally.
Enfield’s book calls for further research on a number of points he raises
within his analysis and argumentation and this call needs to be answered from
researchers across semiotics and meaning, gesture studies, anthropology,
typology and descriptive linguistics, as well as those engaging in the study
of interaction and cognition.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Katharine Parton is a PhD candidate in the School of Languages & Linguistics
at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines interaction in
orchestral rehearsal, focussing on gesture. Her broader research interests
include epistemics, social cognition, gesture and social interaction.
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