Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  If I am correct, then, the gestures that accompany all human speech reveal an intersection of culture, individual apperception, intentionality, and other components of dark matter as we have been discussing it until now. According to many gesture researchers, dynamic human gestures interact in complex ways with static human grammars to produce human language—neither grammar nor gesture is language apart from the other. Gestures, as principal components of the multimodal behavior of language, are themselves intricate in structure, meaning, and use. David McNeill (1992, 2000, 2005, 2012) and others’ research on gestures make it clear that gesticulations are as analytically challenging and as intricate in design and function as syntax, phonology, morphology, discourse, and other aspects of language that some linguists consider “language proper.” But gestures are not simply add-ons to language. There is no language without them.1 And there are no gestures without dark matter. Although some gestures can be explained by their users (unspoken), most are beneath users’ conscious awareness (ineffable). Moreover, though gestures themselves are crucial components of language, like words and phrases or intonation, they are shaped by the needs of the language they enhance and the cultures from which they emerge.

  Kenneth Pike—the first person to ever discuss gestures in my linguistic training—saw them as evidence for his proposal that language should be studied in relation to a unified theory of human behavior:

  In a certain party game people start by singing a stanza which begins Under the spreading chestnut tree . . . Then they repeat the stanza to the same tune but replace the word spreading with a quick gesture in which the arms are extended rapidly outward, leaving a vocal silence during the length of time which would otherwise have been filled by singing. On the next repetition the word spreading gives place to the gesture, as before, and in addition the syllable chest is omitted and the gap is filled with a gesture of thumping the chest. On the succeeding repetition the head is slapped instead of the syllable nut being uttered . . . Finally, after further repetitions and replacements, there may be left only a few connecting words like the, and a sequence of gestures performed in unison to the original timing of the song. (Pike 1967, 25)

  From this example, Pike raises a question and draws a conclusion. The conclusion is that gestures can replace speech (in this case, with “language-slotted gestures”; see below) in the song above because both speech and gestures are aspects not merely of language but of human behavior more generally.2 Unfortunately, Pike oversimplifies by drawing this conclusion from a very particular type of gesture, but his basic point is valid: language and its components are human behavior guided by individual psychology and culture (i.e., dark matter).

  Human behavior, including communication, is the working out of intentions. Language is the best tool for communicating those intentions (D. Everett 2012a, 160ff). Or, as Giorgolo (2010, 8ff) puts it, “Communication has evolved into a cooperative behavior guided by principles of rational interaction,” all entailing tacit knowledge, values, and other components of dark matter.

  The question Pike raises is an interesting one. I will call it “Pike’s problem,” one that should be addressed by a theory and typology of gestures. The problem is just this: Why is it that only sounds made by our mouth can be used in syllables and speech more generally? Why couldn’t slap be [sla#], where [#] would represent the sound of someone slapping their chest? Why isn’t this a possible word or syllable in anyone’s language? As a student in Pike’s introductory class, in which he asked this question, I thought it was interesting but did not appreciate adequately the degree to which the question impinges on the core of the linguistics enterprise.

  Before proceeding to more detail on gestures, however, we might address the obvious question of whether speech itself is but a set of gestures. If so, then gesture research would encompass all of linguistics. And it is easy enough to see why speech could be a form of gesture—it involves movement of body parts (articulators to points of articulation) for the purpose of communication. However, there are nevertheless two principal motives for excluding the movements of the articulatory apparatus from the gesture continuum. First, speech gestures are generally unseen, happening behind the lips. Second, articulatory movements and manual gestures contrast functionally. Manual gestures add information that syntax and speech alone do not carry.3 These then exclude both movements of the vocal apparatus and the static grammar of hand movements in sign language (though sign language, like non-signed speech, also has different types of gestures) from the theory of gestures we discuss here.

  Gestures aim toward perlocutionary effects, such that if some information is not part of speech proper, the speaker will try to express it in gestural terms in order to help the hearer use or react to the information in the way intended. In this way, they are like intonation and other prosodies.

  To more fully illustrate the need for a single theory of culture and language—indeed, all human behavior—Pike asked his audience to contemplate the following scene: Two men are watching other men move some heavy furniture down the stairs in their apartment building. One man passing on the stairway landing is huffing and puffing and concentrating solely on his heavy load. His wallet is hanging loosely from his back pocket, about to fall out. He clearly wouldn’t notice if someone relieved him of this burden. The first observer looks at the second observer with raised eyebrows, looking at the wallet. The second one sees him and simply shakes his head to indicate no. What kind of communicative act is this? Is it language? Is it parasitic on language? Is it a communicative act of a different nature? Should such acts fall under a theory of gestures? Certainly there is a shared dark matter necessary for this kind of act, including gestures, language, grammar, and so on, to take place to begin with. A basic principle is that gestures enlarge to fill the communicative space shared with speech. As speech is diminished—as in Pike’s example of the contemplation of robbing the overworked mover, or in the substitution song we mentioned earlier—gestures will take on a larger role to keep communication as effective as possible. This larger role is illustrated in delayed auditory feedback experiments (discussed below) or the use of gestures to communicate in the absence of speech while hunting or fishing. Other examples are discussed directly.

  There is a broad popular interest in gestures. For example, in a much commented-on article in the New York Times, Rachel Donadio (2013) wrote about how “When Italians chat, hands and fingers do the talking.” But all languages have gestures. So is there any scientific sense in which Italian gestures are noteworthy? For example, can gestures vary from language to language or from culture to culture? Or are they innately prespecified? Or could it be that all gestures are different in every utterance by every speaker? Italians’ gestures are frequently caricatured on television and in movies. Are such caricatures based in fact?

  PIONEERS OF GESTURE RESEARCH

  What appears to draw attention to Italians’ gestures is their extravagance. Even in the seventeenth century, Northern European Protestants disapproved of Italians’ “flamboyant” gestures (Kendon 2004, 21ff). The first person to study these gestures from a scientific perspective was David Efron, a student of Franz Boas, who wrote the earliest modern anthropological linguistic study on cultural differences in gestures (focusing on gestures of recent Italian and Jewish immigrants) more than seventy years ago.

  Efron’s ([1942] 1972) study, Gesture, Race, and Culture, is at once a reaction against Nazi views of the racial bases of cognitive processes, a development of a model for recording and discussing gestures, and an exploration of the effects of culture on gesture. The core of Efron’s contribution is his description of the gestures of unassimilated Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews (“traditional” Italians and Jews), recently emigrated to the United States and mainly living in New York City (though some of his subjects came from the Adirondacks, Saratoga, and the Catskills). According to Efron (330ff), Italians use gestures to signal and support content (e.g., a “deep” valley, a “tall” man,
“no way”), of illustrating what was just said, with many signs (“emblems” in McNeill’s sense) among the gestures. The Jewish immigrants of Efron’s study, on the other hand, use gestures as logical connectives (to indicate changes of scene, argumental divisions, etc.). These conclusions underscore and support the Boasian perspective that language is shaped by culture.

  The questions that Efron set out to investigate were (i) whether there were standardized group differences in gestural behavior between the two different “racial” groups and, if so, (ii) to determine what becomes of these gestural patterns in members and descendants of the same groups under the impact of social assimilation. He found a strong cultural effect—“Americanization” of gestures—in each group over time, minimizing their initially strong differences, thus illustrating the idea that at least some aspects of gestures are individual dark matter, group-developed cultural productions, another part of the social contract.

  Working with the artist Stuyvesant Van Veen, Efron produced an effective methodology for studying and recording gestures, as well as a language for providing what Geertz (1973, 3–30) would have called “thick descriptions” of gestures (see chap. 4). Abstracting away from the long anti-Nazi-science section, the book continues to be of interest for contemporary scientists.4 Efron’s work was a pioneering one in many senses, but by no means the first work on gesture. Kendon (2004, chap. 3–5) provides a detailed overview of the history of gesture studies, going back to classical antiquity.

  For example, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) discouraged the overuse of gestures in speech as manipulative and unbecoming. Cicero (106–43 BCE), on the other hand, argued that the use of gestures was important in oratory and encouraged their education. In the first century, Marcus Fabius Quintlianus (Quintilian, 35–after 96 CE) received a government grant (perhaps a linguistic first) for a book-length study of gesture. For Quintilian and most of the other classical (and some later) writers, however, gesture was not limited to the hands but included general orientation of the body and facial expressions, so-called body language. There are a couple of lessons to draw from these older findings: (i) communication is holistic, so we should not be surprised to learn that, for example, blind people gesture; (ii) gesture varies just as any kind of culturally articulated unconscious knowledge would, just as any other convention.

  As the Renaissance rediscovered the work of Cicero and other classical scholars, Europeans became interested in gesture and rhetoric, as in the sixteenth-century work of Peter Ramus (1515–1572) of Paris on gesture in the style and delivery of oratory. Giovanni Bonifacio’s (1547–1645) published the first book in Europe on gesture, L’Arte de’ Cenni (1616). The first book in English on gesture was John Bulwer’s (1606–1656) 1644 book Chirologia: or the Naturall Language of the Hand.

  The sixteenth-century studies often looked a good deal like actual science, not merely prescriptive offerings for improving public discourse delivery. In the seventeenth century, some researchers moved on to question explicitly whether gesture might be developed to serve as a possible universal language. By the eighteenth century, some began to wonder whether gesture might have served as the original source for language (some researchers, such as Arbib [2005, 2012] and Corballis [2002], still think so), though most contemporary gesture researchers strongly discourage this view. Although these studies were to some degree misguided (as McNeill points out in his work), they do fit with the idea (also pointed out in D. Everett 2012a, 171ff, among other places) that speech as we know it almost certainly was evolutionarily secondary to the development of some sort of language, whether this were gestures and whistling or gestures and much less clear speech (lacking the vowels which are the hallmark of the speech of all humans—i, a, and u, for example). Gesture is fundamentally part of communication, and according to the logic and history of evolutionary development of language, communication precedes language.

  By the medieval period (Kendon 2004, 328ff), thinkers from the early Renaissance were writing about gestural variation across European countries. In the Counter-Reformation period, there were attempts to reform gestures (due to the perceived inappropriateness of some).

  One study that merits mention is the work of Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée (1712–1789), who wrote an eighteenth-century study of deaf education and sign language. L’Épée was ahead of his time because he was not interested in getting deaf people to use spoken language, but rather in helping both deaf and non-deaf people to understand and appreciate sign language.

  Although interest in gesture research declined markedly in the nineteenth century, according to Kendon (2004, 17ff) there were nevertheless two fascinating studies published during this period. In 1832 Andrea de Forio published on gesture and cultural community in Naples, while Garrick Mallery published in 1881, Sign Language among North American Indians Compared with That among Other Peoples and Deaf-Mutes.5 As has been common in North American linguistics and anthropological research, our general understanding of human language improves via studies of America’s first nations.

  After centuries of interest in gesture, from the nineteenth century, significant attention to gesture declined markedly. This was due in part, according to Kendon (2004, 64ff), to the rise of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Both of these movements were interested in those aspects of human behavior that are beyond conscious control. Since gestures seem to be consciously controlled, these two fields had little interest in them. Yet this assumption of conscious control of gestures is incorrect. The average person has at best a vague knowledge that they are gesturing while talking and are not planning their gestures any more than they are their syllable structures. Gestures are controlled by dark matter, via emicization.

  Another factor in the decline of interest and study of gestures was the growing reification of linguistics (Kendon 2004, 65; D. Everett 2013a; chap. 6 above). As methods developed for distributional analysis (e.g., Z. Harris 1951; Wells 1947; Bloomfield 1933) it became harder for some to see how to fit gesture into language, since their distributionalist methods could not readily account for gestures. Bloomfield (1933, vii) says little more of gesture than that it is “governed by social convention.” Zellig Harris (1951)—arguably the leading Bloomfieldian (until his student, Chomsky)—was only interested in gesture to the degree that it was subject to the same kinds of distributional analysis as the rest of language (according to Kendon [2004, 67]). The contrast with Bloomfield, Harris, and others with the views of Sapir and Boas discussed in the next paragraph is striking. To my mind, for example, this contrast shows that Bloomfield really did represent a distinctly non-Boasian, structuralist (vs. descriptivist) tradition that today continues in some branches of linguistics, prolonging the structuralists’ preoccupation with form over function (Sakel and Everett 2012, 152ff).

  The culture-linguistic symbiosis pioneered by Sapir (1921, 1928), on the other hand, took a view of gestures that entailed a perspective of dark matter quite similar to mine. As Sapir said, “The unwritten code of gestured messages and responses is the anonymous work of an elaborate social structure” [emphasis mine]. Sapir seems to mean by “anonymous” something quite similar to my idea of dark matter. Sapir, Boas, and their students in fact understood language differently, as but a single manifestation of human behavior more generally, however specialized some aspects of language might be. Kenneth Pike, heavily influenced by Sapir (Pike 1978 and 1998; pers. comm.), was perhaps the most explicitly concerned of all linguists of the era in understanding language and gestures as components of human behavior more generally. Though Pike never developed a theory of gestures, he was a pioneer in prosodic studies, the functions of which often overlap with gestures (Pike [1943] 1945, 1945).

  Moving beyond the work of Boas’s student Efron, the marked return to and growth in gesture studies did not begin until the 1970s (when Efron’s study was republished). At this time, researchers focused primarily on understanding how speech and gesture were integrated. Are they two distinct systems or parts of a single s
ystem? The interest of researchers in reviving gesture studies was sparked by a renewed interest in the evolution of language and the role of gestures in language development, the crucial role of visible body actions in interaction and communication, the universality of gestures, and understanding more precisely the relationship of gestures and speech as components of language more widely understood.

  GESTURE EMICIZATION IN MCNEILL’S RESEARCH

  In order to appreciate the necessity of emicization (and thus dark matter) in gesture acquisition and how gestures are governed by dark matter rather than (or in addition to) conscious knowledge, it is helpful to look at the classification of gestures. In all his work, McNeill looks at gestures in terms of their dimensions and their relationship to grammar and language. Relative to their relationship to language, McNeill places gestures along the continuum below:

  The Gesture Continuum

  Gesticulation Language-slotted gestures Pantomime Emblems Sign languages

  Gesticulation is the core of the theory of gestures. It involves gestures that intersect grammatical structures at the “growth point” (see below) and which are practiced by all humans so far as we know, even the blind and others with different types of cognitive disorders, such as proprioceptive deficiencies. Gesticulation is in fact what the theory of McNeill, Kendon, and others is mainly about. Some gesticulations, like language-slotted gestures and pantomimes, are not conventional—they may vary widely and have no societally fixed form (though they are culturally influenced).