Words as gestures

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Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 953-972

W o r d s as g e s t u r e s * Richard W. Janney* Institute for English Philology, University of Munich, Schellingstrasse 3, D-80799 Munich, Germany

Abstract This paper suggests that, in looking toward a future pragmatics, we would be wise to consider the implications of current work on metaphor and iconiciy, and start paying more attention to questions related to how paradigmatic stylistic and rhetorical choices function as figurative gestures in speech and writing. We need pragmatically feasible approaches to studying the stylistic and rhetorical forms and functions of language, the paper argues, because it is largely through these that speakers create frames of reference. The underlying point is that a linguistic reference always appears in a frame that influences how it is perceived and interpreted in a context. This framing effect is a natural function of style. In any context, it is invariably some unique how that particularizes a generic what into an individually meaningful pragmatic performance. Pragmatic accounts of linguistic events remain emotively and motivationally opaque if the frame of reference provided by gestural uses of language is not included in the analysis. For this reason, it is argued, pragmatics can no more do without systematic approaches to style than it can do without systematic approaches to propositional content and context. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction: Speech as a mode of action

The word word is rooted in the Indo-European base *wer-, 'to say, to speak', and the word gesture goes back to the Medieval Latin gestura, 'mode of action'. 1 Putting the two etymologies together, we could say that the theme of this paper will be speech as a mode of action. Notions of speech as action are found in different forms throughout pragmatics: in Aristotle's Rhetoric (ca. 330 B.C.), in the works of early twentieth century forerunners of pragmatics like Anton Marty (1908), Charles Bally

I would like to thank Horst Arndt, Claudia Caffi, Bruce Fraser, Rachel Giora, Andreas Jucker, Leonhard Lipka, and Winfried N6th for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. The responsibility for the results naturally remains my own. Also, I would like to thank Jacob Mey for helping rediscover the publications in which he made the statements attributed to him here. * E-mail: [email protected] l There is also the earlier classical Latin gestus, from the verb gerere, 'to accomplish', which has a much broader meaning than simply 'pantomimed' (cf. res geste, 'actions', 'enterprise', etc.). 0378-2166/99/$ - see front matter © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(98)00102-7

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(1909), Bronislaw Malinowski (1923), and Karl Biihler (1934), in the writings,of Roman Jakobson (1960), J.L. Austin (1962), Paul Watzlawick et al. (1967), John Searle (1969), H.P. Grice (1975), Stephen Levinson (1983), and Geoffrey Leech (1983), and last, but by no means least, in the writings of Jacob Mey, whose life's work is being honored in this Special Issue. Jacob Mey (1993a: 123) has said on many occasions that if we want to study speech as a mode of action in its own right, it is necessary to lower the level of idealization, shift the focus of analysis away from abstract speech acts, and start looking more closely at acts of speech themselves. This implies a shift from the idea of the Sprechakt to the idea of Sprachhandlung, in Karl Biihler's terminology (1934: 49), or a shift from the French notion of the (nonc~ ('that which is uttered') to the notion of ~nonciation ('the act of uttering'). A theory of speech as a mode of action is a quite different type of pragmatic theory than a theory of speech acts, and one that can potentially explain quite different types of facts about what words do, and about how we do things with them, than speech act theory does. Generic speech acts like 'requesting' and 'commanding' exist independently of the utterances from which they are inferred and from the contexts in which the utterances are interpreted. Acts of speech, on the other hand, like 'Can I come in, please?' or 'Get lost' are individual occurrences. They are produced by particular speakers, for particular partners, in particular ways, places, and times, and most importantly, in particular contexts that both influence, and are influenced by, how they are performed. 2 We could say that the subjective how of their performance, in a sense, is what gives their objective what its full significance in the context of their production. Playing games, dancing dances, making music, and producing utterances are all actions performed by people. If we view them this way, we notice almost at once that, regardless of differences between types of acts, acting itself - the production of individual tokens of a type - is guided by some shared principles. One of these is that, in almost every instance, it is how an act is performed that particularizes and differentiates what it generically 'is' into an individually meaningful event in the context. A tango, for example, becomes a meaningful dancing event only by being performed in a particular way, by a particular couple, in a particular situation. 'Requesting' and 'commanding', similarly, become meaningful acts of speech only by being performed in particular ways, by particular speakers, in particular contexts. It is precisely this important 'how' dimension of acts of speech - realized by the different ways they are performed - that is left out of focus in speech act theory. In speech act theory, one could say, the explanation of how words do things, and how we do things with them, tends to be sacrificed in advance to an interest in explaining what it is that they logically do in the first place. Hence, there is little action in speech act theory, and no actors; and because of this, it is difficult within a speech

2 Here,it must be admitted that speech acts are not always exclusivelyanalyzed as abstract units from a context-freeperspective.There are also approaches to speech acts as active units producedby particular speakers in contexts (or co-texts). Moreover,as Claudia Caffi (personal communication),points out, there is actually a considerable amount of action in Austin's theory, although it is true that the stylistic object is not topicalized.

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act approach to deal with questions that were once at the very heart of studies of language use (especially in the early writings of Aristotle, 330 B.C.; Marty, 1908; Bally, 1909; Malinowski, 1923; and Btihler, 1934), but which were later idealized out of the picture: namely, questions related to where the evocative power, emotive complexity, appellative force, and poetic beauty of speech come from, and how these important suggestive features of acts of speech are related to figurative stylistic and rhetorical choices (cf. Friedrich, 1986). The point here is that if we are looking for where pragmatics is going to be moving in future years, or at least to where it ought to be moving if it is to continue to deepen our understanding of how words do things and how we do things with them, it might be wise to pick up where current work on metaphor and iconicity leaves off (cf. Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Turner, 1991; Hiraga and Radwanska-Williams, 1994), and start paying more attention to the doing dimension of acts of speech: to questions related to why stylistic and rhetorical choices are made in speech, and to how they function as figurative gestures in everyday communication. Assuming that stylistics and rhetoric were originally studies of gestural dimensions of language use, I will argue that we need a modem, systematic, pragmatically feasible approach to studying the stylistic and rhetorical forms and functions of acts of speech in order to re-integrate these two former pillars of pragmatics back into the field. Pragmatics can no more do without the notion of style, I believe, than it can do without notions of context and propositional

content.

2. Gesture The term gesture is used in two ways :3 in a narrower sense, to refer to movements of parts of the body to express ideas, as in (1): (1) She made a pointing gesture toward the door. or to emphasize emotions, as in (2): (2) Gesturing wildly, he cursed and left the room. And in a broader, more figurative sense, to refer to characteristics of utterances intended to convey states of mind, attitudes, and intentions, as in (3):

3 Actually, as a topic of research, gesture is a much more complex phenomenon than I will be suggesting in the following discussion. One of the most comprehensive present treatments of theories of, and research on, gesture is in Winfried NSth's Handbook of semiotics (1990:392 ff.). In the second edition of the handbook, which will soon be in print, there is an expanded section on gesture. Ntith points out (personal communication) that my thesis that stylistics and rhetoric were originally studies of gestural dimensions of language is problematical if we consider the fact that, of the five original areas of ancient rhetoric, only one of these (pronuntiatio) was related to gesture (cf. NtRh, 1990: 340, 397).

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(3) This paper is a gesture of my friendship to Jacob Mey. I would like to start out with the narrower view of gestures as simply expressive movements of the body, and then go on to discuss the broader, more figurative view of them as utterance characteristics conveying states of mind. I will argue, somewhat in the spirit of Edward Sapir (1949: 105), Dwight Bolinger (1982: 529), and Paul Friedrich (1986), that there is constant interplay between gesture and 'language proper' (Sapir's term) in all acts of speech. And I will suggest that gesture, in the latter broader sense, in fact, permeates almost all levels of paradigmatic choice in speech and writing. Verbal gestures, I will claim, somewhat like voice and body gestures in face-to-face speech, operate iconically, producing 'likenesses' or 'pictures' of speakers' states of mind, feelings, and intentions. The difference between verbal and nonverbal gestures, however, is that the former are performed at a higher level of abstraction than the latter. Verbal gestures are figurative gestures.

3. Interplay between words and gestures The interplay between words and physical gestures is seen easily in face-to-face conversation, where the stream of speech is accompanied by changing facial expressions, gazes, hand movements, postural shifts, and so forth that signal how speakers relate to what they are talking about and who they are talking to, as well as to their own roles as speakers in the conversation. Interplay between words and vocal gestures, on the other hand, is somewhat less obvious, but still discemable, in telephone conversations and voice recordings (cf. Bolinger, 1982; Amdt and Janney, 1987, 1991), for example, where changing intonations, stress patterns, pauses, and paralinguistic voice qualities gesturally orchestrate and emotively modulate the speaker's verbalizations. And we may hardly notice the subtle, indirect, almost invisible, figurative stylistic and rhetorical gestures of a written letter, a novel, a poem, or even an e-mail note, which inform us, almost between the lines, of writers' attitudes about their topics, about us, and about their own roles as writers. Nevertheless, as Sapir said, we respond to gestures of all kinds "with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all" (1949: 566). And, in fact, we rely so heavily on gestures to interpret each others' thoughts and intentions that if what someone literally 'says' is contradicted what they gesturally 'show', we almost always interpret the former through the filter (or within the frame of reference) of the latter to get the 'true' reading, and not the other way around. Because gestures speak louder, and tell more, than words, we believe them. And we tend not to believe someone who, during a heated argument, angrily shouts (4). 4 (4) I'm NOT excited! 4 Notice that it is necessary to characterize (4) as 'angrily shouted', and use capital letters and an exclamation point to capture the gestural performance features of the utterance.

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4. What's in a glance? An example The importance of interplay between words and physical gestures is seen in exchange (5), from a transcript of a televised debate between George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot, during the 1992 presidential elections in the USA: (5) Interplay between words and physical gestures in a political debate (1992 Congressional Quarterly Almanac: 142-A): Moderator: As a practical matter, Mr. President, do you agree with the governor when he says that ... the taxes on the middle class have gone up during the l a s t [interrupting] I think everybody's paying too much taxes. He refers Bush: to one increase. Let me remind you it was a Democratic tax increase, and I didn't want to do it, but I went along with it. And I said I made a mistake. If I make a mistake, I admit it. That's quite different than some [looking at Clinton]. But I think that's the American way. [followed by a long comment] Moderator: Mr. President, when you said just then that you admit your mistakes and you looked at Gov. Clinton and said - what mistake is it that you want him to admit to? Well, the record in Arkansas. I mean, look at it, and that's what Bush: we're asking America to have? [followed by another long comment] From the moderator's second question, we can see that he interpreted Bush's glance toward Clinton, while uttering 'That's quite different than some', as a gesture (in the narrow sense, as a movement of the eyes figuratively 'pointing' at Clinton). And from Bush's answer, we can see that this - or something like it - was also what was intended. So here, spontaneously, without recourse to complicated inferences, we see that for both partners, the gazing gesture in this situation narrowed the contextual meaning of the indefinite pronoun some to Clinton. This is to say, how the utterance was performed (i.e., together with the gaze) was an integral part of what it meant in the situation. John Gumperz (1982) would probably call the gaze a contextualization cue; Karl Biihler (1934) would have called it a relational steering signal. And George H. Mead (1970 [1934]) would have perhaps said that it is a classical example of the use of a gesture as social signal of intent. Whatever it is called, this type of gestural modification of meaning occurs constantly in speech - and it happens in different modes. A simple instance of vocal gestural modification of an utterance is when we give a syntactic statement the force of a question by producing it with a rising intonation, as in (6): (6) She's your sister ,7 or when we give a syntactic question the force of a statement by producing it with a falling intonation, as in (7):

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(7) Is that right ",~ The nonverbal gestural modification of words in speech seems to depend on our ability to produce and process different types of information in different visual and acoustic modes simultaneously, 5 and, equally importantly, on our ability to perceive cross-modal associative connections between words and vocal and kinesic gestures in speech and interpret their contextual significance (cf. Arndt and Janney, 1987).

5. From gestures to words A few years ago, a book entitled Gesture and the nature of language (1995), written by David Armstrong (physical anthropology), William Stokoe (sign languages), and Sherman Wilcox (linguistics), was published by the Cambridge University Press, and hailed by the publishers in the cover blurb as presenting the 'radically new' view that oral language is rooted in gesture. In fact, the idea has a long history. As early as the first century, Quintilian argued that gestures precede language and wrote a treatise entitled 'The rhetorical uses of mimic and gestures' on the importance of the gestus accompanying speech. 6 At the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine noted that infants learn to associate speech sounds with objects through nonverbal gestures performed by their parents in naming things and intending to point them out (Augustine, 1968 [397 A.D.]: 45): "Their intention was shown by their bodily movement: ... the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something." At the turn of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Wundt devoted the first two chapters of his monumental Die Sprache (1978 [1900]) to 'expressive movements' and 'gesture language'. And in the nineteen thirties, George H. Mead (1970 [1934]) developed his theory of the gestural basis of social processes. At the simplest level, he claimed, social action is gestural, and all social adjustment is effected by means of gestures. He concluded that (1970 [ 1934]: 13): "The rise and development of human intelligence has taken place through the process of the symbolization of experience which gestures - especially vocal gestures - have made possible. The specialization of the human animal within this field of ... gesture has been responsible, ultimately, for the origin and growth of present human society and knowledge." Later, Charles Morris was to claim that this was one of Mead's most important contributions: "to show that mind and the self are ... social emergents; and that lan-

5 Naturally, when speaking, we can also signal information in tactile, olfactory, and other modes as well. 6 Karl Biihler included a translation of this essay as an appendix to his book Ausdruckstheorie (1933).

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guage, in the form of vocal gestures, provides the mechanism for their emergence" (cf. Morris' introduction to Mead, 1970 [1934]: xii [emphasis added]).

6. On learning to 'make a point' Mead's claim that the symbolization of experience depends on the mediating power of gesture is echoed by Armstrong et al. (1995: 27), who regard gesture as "the critical link between our conceptualizing capacities and our linguistic ability", and the key to the intelligibility of language. But how do movements develop into kinesic gestures, and how, from these, do vocal gestures emerge, and then words ? Studies of language acquisition show that it is difficult to separate language from gesture in interaction between mothers and infants. Infant speech perception and speech production seem to be cross-modal phenomena (cf. Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1982). Pointing at objects, an early interpretable activitiy of infants, for example, appears to occur at first independently of any intention to communicate. Initially, infants simply grasp things within reach and put them in their mouths. From grasping, they begin to actively reach for things, and from reaching for things beyond their grasp, they begin 'pointing' at them. The extended hand and the reaching finger become ostensive communicative gestures. Hereafter, in quick succession, vocalizations accompanying pointing gestures become stabilized into word-like sounds like 'da! ', which, in turn, evolve into words of language, and are refined, following the pattern described by John Lyons (1977: 651), into increasingly differentiated proximal and distal deictic categories like 'this' and 'that', 'here' and 'there', and so forth. Wilhelm Wundt's (1973 [1900]) explanation for this, at the turn of the century, was that we must postulate a time in the development of natural communication when the relationship between physical gestures and their objects is relatively concrete, as in the case of infant pointing gestures, then, later, with the onset of increasingly complex accompanying vocal activities, the further emergence of what he called parallel, metamorphosed forms, in which the early indexical and iconic meanings of gestures are transformed by stages into the conventional symbolic meanings of language, and the gestures are transformed by stages into the conventional symbolic meanings of language, and the gestures that originally signaled these meanings are gradually incorporated into the language as words. Roughly, he envisioned a progression from indexical and iconic gestures to symbolic gestures, on the one hand, and a parallel progression from kinesic and vocal expression to verbal expression, on the other. According to this theory, the body, in a sense, is thus transformed by a series of figurative metamorphoses into the structures of language and cognition. 7

7 Although first formulated in the 1880's, Wundt's views, in this repect, are remarkably similar to those of Lakoff(1987) and Turner (1991) today.

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How this 'metamorphosis of forms' actually takes place remains a mystery, but most scholars believe that it is related to the human capacity to produce and understand analogies (cf. Antilla, 1989; Itkonen, 1994). There is what Armstrong et al. (1995: 196) call a "transfer from literal visible gesturing to metaphorical vocal gesturing", and a transfer from vocal gesturing to symbolic verbalization. Going back to pointing, we note that a reaching movement is transformed into a pointing gesture by analogy. Pointing is 'like' reaching; hence, a pointing movement can be regarded as a kind of icon or 'picture' of a reaching movement, or as a figurative representation of reaching. The act of pointing itself remains indexical, as there is a direct connection between the pointer, the point, and the object pointed to in the context, but the quality of the act changes. 8 Vocalizations accompaying infant pointing seem to follow a roughly similar pattern. They begin as what a psychologist might call 'spontaneous outbursts of global arousal' (e.g., ' d a ! ' as an index of excitement), but when the child starts intentionally making pointing gestures at things as icons of reaches, the accompaying vocalizations, by analogy, begin to operate differently as well: as icons of mental states (e.g., interest, attention, desire, etc.) that are connected by the pointing gesture to specific objects. In this phase, the ' d a ! ' need no longer necessarily be simply an index of arousal; it can be a means of calling attention to the object pointed to, a means of expressing interest in the object pointed to, and so forth. 9 It becomes a vocal gesture with the functional status, we could say, of a protoword. And when vocal gestures become further differentiated into words like 'this', 'that', ' h e r e ' , 'there', etc., we can begin to speak of them as symbolic stand-ins for earlier ' d a ' s , and again, by analogy, for even earlier pointing gestures and reaching movements. The infant has learned to ' m a k e points' in different ways. The implication of this line of reasoning is that complex symbolic uses of signs develop out of, and depend on, simpler iconic and indexical uses of signs. As the infant moves from indexical to iconic to symbolic expression (and in the process, from gesture to language), the newer sign functions are added on to the basis of the older ones. Hence, words never fully lose their connections, by analogy, to their vocal and kinesic gestural roots. The idea that more complex uses of signs are derived from less complex ones makes it possible to argue that words emerge from gestures. 1° And by the opposite logic, the idea that indexical and iconic functions are carried over into symbolic uses of signs makes it possible to argue that words can function figuratively as gestures.

8 Following Armstrong et al, (1995: 24), it can be reasoned that even such simple infant gestures as pointing to things are embryo sentences, with a subject (S), verb (V), and object (O), or, in semantic terms, an agent, action, and patient. 9 Moreover, a relation to the object is established which has a particular emotional quality. This is signaled, among other things, by how the pointing gesture is performed, and by how the 'da!' is articulated and intoned. ~0 WilhelmWundt (1973 [1900]: 100) argued that we can infer that a particular gesture is 'symbolic' "only in so far as artificial gestures proceed from natural ones".

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7. Words as gestures

Cognitive linguistic research on metaphor is often said to have begun with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's (1980: 3) claim that "our ordinary conceptual system ... is fundamentally metaphorical in nature". 11 Studies of metaphor based on this notion have contributed importantly to our understanding of interplay between language, cognition, and the body (cf. Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Turner, 1989; Turner, 1991). Nevertheless, almost since the beginning of work toward a cognitive theory of metaphor, there have been calls for a broader approach. Many scholars believe, as Paul Friedrich (1986: 4) does, that "metaphor is only one kind of analogy, and a part of a much larger context of analogical devices and associational thinking" in language and cognition. Others, going further, claim, like Raimo Antilla (1989: 105), that language itself is but "one manifestation of the innate faculty of analogizing" (cf. also Itkonen, 1994). An interesting further development is recent research on iconicity (cf. Hiraga and Radwanska-Williams, 1994; Hiraga, 1994; Radwanska-Williams, 1994; Waugh 1994), which re-interprets Lakoff's position from a Peircean semiotic point of view, and adds the analysis of various additional types of figurative phenomena in language to earlier analyses of metaphor (e.g., image iconicity, proximity iconicity, quantity iconicity, etc.). And in addition, as already said, there is the interesting comparative research on oral languages and sign languages (cf. Armstrong et al., 1995), which argues, even more pointedly than the other two approaches, for the natural origins of language in gesture, and places the capacity to analogize - especially the ability to conceptualize and to communicate about analogous concepts and relations by means of analogous forms - squarely in the foreground, as a basic feature of both

language and gesture (cf. also Itkonen, 1994). In this approach, iconicity - resemblance of some kind between signed and signified - is regarded as a precondition for all kinds of communicative behavior, both linguistic and nonlinguistic (cf. Armstrong et al., 1995: 22). But how do words function by analogy as gestures? Assuming, with Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987), Turner (1991), Varela et al. (1991), and others, that language is deeply rooted in its bodily basis, it is possible to reason that if physical gestures in gesture languages (including ASL, the American sign language of the deaf) can function like words of natural oral language, then the reverse must also be plausible: namely, that words of natural language can have at least some functions that are analogous to those of physical gestures. 12 This is most evident, of course, in deixis, where adverbs of place like 'here' and 'there', and demonstrative pronouns like 'this' and 'that', operate analogously to physical pointing gestures. But there are 11 Leonhard Lipka (1996: 53) points out that the notion that metaphor is an essential part of the language system was, in fact, proposed much earlier by Harald Weinrich (1958), and extended by Ernst Leisi ( 1985 [1973]). Lipka's article offers a very good summary of the cognitive view of metaphor, and a carefully reasoned critique of the cognitive linguistic approach, from a contrastive and diachronic linguistic point of view. 12 Hence, the relevance of Karl Biihler's (1934) use of Zeigwrrter as an explicit term for these (Leonhard Lipka, personal communication).

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also many less obvious forms of lexical and syntactic iconicity in language - e.g., image iconicity, linear iconicity, proximity iconicity, quantity iconicity, categorical iconicity, etc. - in which words and word arrangements operate like imitative or descriptive gestures, displaying certain (imagistic, diagrammatical, metaphorical, etc.)figurative 'likenesses' to their objects (cf. Hiraga, 1994; Waugh, 1994). 13 In the following sections, I will give some examples.

8. Verbal gestures As early as 1873, Charles Darwin described animal gestures of positive and negative affect; and since then, a large amount of animal communication research has been done on gestures of attention and disinterest, dominance and submission, approach and withdrawal, and so forth. Naturally, as human beings, we too produce nonverbal gestures that signal these sorts of things; but in addition, thanks to the virtually unlimited paradigmatic possibilities of language for expressing ideas in different ways, we perform a variety of subtle verbal emotive gestures as well. And we respond to verbal emotive gestures with extreme alertness, especially when the stakes are high, as in excerpt (8), from a debate during the 1988 American presidential elections. In this excerpt, Peter Jennings (a television journalist), George Bush, and Michael Dukakis are discussing Bush's frequent references to Dukakis during the presidential campaign as 'a card-carrying member' of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). (8) A negative verbal gesture and its consequences in a political debate (Congressional Quarterly, Oct. 1, 1988: 2743). Bush:

Last year in the primary, he [Dukakis] expressed his passion. He said, "I am a strong, liberal Democrat" - August 1987. Then he said, "I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU". That was what he said ... My argument with the Governor is, do we want this country to go that far left? [extended comment follows] Jennings: I'd just like to follow up, if I may, on this mention you have made of his [Michael Dukakis's] card-carrying membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. Now, you've used the phrase "card-carrying" so many times since Governor Dukakis first acknowledged that he was a ... member of the ACLU, that some people - some people have come to believe that you have used it in - to brand him in some way, to identify him as people were identified in the 1950's, as less than patriotic. I'd like to know why you keep repeating the phrase ... What is so wrong with the Governor being a member of [the ACLU] ? ~s Andreas Jucker (personal communication)suggests an interesting connectionhere between the idea of 'figurative likenesses' and ideas of sense association and associative meaning in linguistics (cf. also Bolinger and Sears, 1981).

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Bush:

Nothing ... Peter, please understand - the liberals do not like ... it when I say that he says he's a card-carrying member. Now, if that quote was wrong ... and if I've done him an injustice, and he didn't say it, I'm very, very sorry. [extended comment follows] All I'm trying to do is put it in focus. And I hope people don't think that I'm questioning his patriotism when I say he - use his words to describe his participation in that organization. Dukakis: Well I hope this is the first and last time I have to say this. Of course the Vice President [Bush] is questioning my patriotism. I don't think there's any question about that. And I resent it. [extended comment follows]

Without going into the semantics of being called 'a card-carrying member' of the ACLU (but for a very good treatment of the semantics of metaphor, see Lipka, 1996), we can note the following: first, Bush's use of the expression card-carrying member has highly negative, politically aggressive connotations in the context of an American presidential campaign. It amounts to figuratively calling Dukakis a Communist. All three speakers know this, but none is willing use the even more negatively-laden word Communist in talking about it. Bush, in his first comment, settles for asking rhetorically if the country is willing to go 'that far left', Jennings asks if the expression doesn't represent Dukakis as 'less than patriotic'; and Dukakis complains that Bush is obviously 'questioning my patriotism'. The vagueness of the figurative allusions to Communism in this context, I would argue, is significant. Also, from the beginning, Bush hedges on his responsibility for using the expression 'card carrying member', while, at the same time, emphasizing it by repeating increasingly weak versions of it. He begins by stating, 'he said I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU ... That was what he said'. Then, he apologizes if he is wrong 'when I say he says he's a card-carrying member'. And finally, he claims not to be questioning Dukakis' patriotism 'when I say he - use his words to describe his participation in that organization'. 14 Each reformulation is gesturally less assertive than the one before. An interesting thing about gestures, said earlier, is that when what is literally 'said' is contradicted by what is gesturally 'shown', the figurative gestural message almost always overrides the literal one in people's interpretations of acts of speech. Interestingly, although in this case, what is 'said' and what is 'shown' are in the same (verbal) mode and (linguistic) medium, the principle still holds. Bush can hedge on the original gesture as much as he wants, but Dukakis will continue to understand the intentions behind it and resent it. Dwight Bolinger once said that "we are more conscious of the difference between language and gesture when they are physically separated" (1982: 259). This is true. Nevertheless, just as we are aware of paralinguistic and prosodic vocal gestures in 14 Thereare interestingrhetorical gestural differencesbetweenquoting someonedirectly, 'saying what someone says', and 'using someone's words to describe' something,but there is no time to go into these here.

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speech (see examples 6 and 7), Dukakis is aware of the figurative verbal gesture in this excerpt, even though it is not separated from 'language proper'. That is, we depend heavily on how things are said to interpret what they mean; and we all know that even a very small stylistic gesture in speech can potentially have a big impact on our partner - and we act accordingly (cf. Caffi and Janney, 1994). This sensitivity to the gestural dimension of speech is apparent in people's frequent self-corrections, and in their frequent corrections of each other, in everyday conversation. We see it, for example, in subtle shifts of deictic proximity, as in (9): (9)

Shifting proximity markers in a political debate (1992 Congressional Quarterly Almanac: 125-A): A: Do you think that's true Mr. Perot? B: I'd like to just talk about issues, and soA: (interrupting) You don't think this is an issue?

In shifts of specificity, as in (10) and (11): (10) Contrasting specificity markers in a psychological counseling session (Schegloft et al., 1990: 40): A: Why did I turn out this way. B: You mean homosexual? A: Uh, Yes (11) Contrasting specificity markers in a bookstore conversation (Schegloff et al., 1990: 43--44): A: Uh ... will somebody pass the paperbacks ... and the B: (interrupting) Is that somebody me? A: Mm hmm. In shifts of evidential assertiveness, as in (12), (13), and (14): (12) Shifting evidentiality markers in a telephone conversation (Sacks, 1987 [1973]: 58): A: You coming down early? B: Well, I got a lot of things to do before getting cleared up tomorrow. I don't know. I wo-- probably won't be t o o early. (13) Shifting evidentiality markers in a police interview (Harris, 1995: 127): Officer: Suspect:

Were you there when he fell down? No I was not. I was in bed - uh - I must have been in bed.

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(14) Contrasting evidentiality markers in an argument between two linguists (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980: 179): Papert:

You said there is no hope for the possibility that one will find in nonlinguistic domains the kind of formal properties one finds in language. Chomsky: I didn't say that; I said that I d i d n ' t see any hope for that. In shifts of ego-identification with topics, as in (15): (15) Contrasting volitionality markers in an argument between Fodor and Papert (Piattelli-Palmarini, 1980: 276): Papert:

F o d o r wants to deny its newness; he wants to say that it was already

Fodor:

there, in a sense. The a r g u m e n t doesn't say that; the claim about indefinability is made on independent grounds.

In shifts of interpersonal identification with partners, as in (16) and (17): (16) Shifts of self-other orientation in a political debate (1992 Congressional Quarterly Almanac: 125-A): Moderator: I have to - we have to talk about Ross Perot now or he'll get mad at me. Moderator: Well, then, let's phrase - I'll phrase it differently. He said the other night in his closing words in Richmond that ... (17) Shifts of self-other orientation in a doctor-patient conversation (Frankel, 1990: 243): Doctor:

I think we can let you stay on just the Digoxin. You can stop that every eight hour stuff.

And in various everyday techniques for changing the implied quantity, degree, measure, duration, or amount of references to topics, as in (18) and (19): 15 (18) From a political debate (1992 Congressional Quarterly Almanac: 125-A): A: So my question to you - we're going to talk about you in a minute - my question to you B: [interrupting] I thought you'd forgotten I was here. A: No, no, no, no, no. But my question to you is ... 15 For a longer discussion of this topic, see Caffi and Janney (1994).

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(19) From an argument between two linguistis (PiatteUi-Palmarini, 1 9 8 0 : 1 1 7 ) : C h o m s k y : That's true, but the semantics has n o t h i n g to do with it! Wilden: The semantics has e v e r y t h i n g to do with it!

9. How do verbal gestures 'mean'? "The objective meaning of a text can only be understood by appealing to the subjective conditions of its production." (Mey, 1991: 245) H o w do choices like those just illustrated have meaning in acts of speech, and what are their significance for pragmatics? From research on the American sign language o f the deaf (ASL), we know that, viewed in isolation, m a n y o f the hand and arm signs that make up the vocabulary o f A S L are functionally indeterminate. Many can be understood as nouns or verbs; and, when used as verbs, they can be understood as referring to the past, present, or future. Moreover, by themselves, m a n y of them can potentially symbolize either words or sentences (cf. Armstrong et al., 1995: 21). 16 Nevertheless, as m a n y writers have pointed out, the meanings o f gestured signs are often quite clear in context, and there seems to be something in their performance that creates their grammatical and pragmatic functions. As Wilhelm Wundt said earlier, "the category into which a gesture fits can sometimes be determined simply by the way it is executed" (1973 [1900]: 102 [emphasis added]). M o d e m research on A S L shows that m a n y important signals o f syntactic function and communicative intent in A S L sentences are related to movements performed in getting from one sign to the next. That is, whether a sign is a statement, command, or question can often only be inferred from hand movements between signs, gazes, changes o f facial expression, postural shifts, and so forth (cf. Armstrong et al., 1995: 189). 17 The implication o f this is that the syntactic and pragmatic nuances of A S L are not primarily functions of the 'signs o f the language' themselves but, in fact, functions of gestures performed in producing them (cf. Liddell, 1980; Baker-Shenk, 1983). There is complex interaction between the gesturing that supplies the simple

,6 In this connection, at the turn of the century, Wilhelm Wundt remarked that gestural language seems almost to dispense with grammatical categories: "it has neither inflection nor any other trait to distinguish a given sign as noun, adjective, or verb. [And] we cannot talk of particles, because the more abstract conceptual relationships inherent in these words are totally absent in natural gestural systems" (1973 [1900]: 101). Moreover, "when one would at least expect the aid of ... categories such as prepositions, conjunctions, and abstract adverbs, one finds them completely lacking" (1973 [1900]: 102). ~7 For example, whereas the conclusion of a statement in spoken English is generally signaled by a drop in pitch, followed by a silence, in ASL, the signer lowers the hands at the end of the utterance or conversational turn, and the gaze moves down as well. Whereas a question in English is generally signaled by a rise in pitch, followed by a silence, in ASL, the signer keeps the hands in place at the end of the final sign, or even pushes them forward toward the partner, at the same time intensifying the gaze to the partner and lifting it from the face-neck area to the partner's eyes (cf. Baker-Shenk, 1983).

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SVO structure of the basic idea and the signer's facial expressions, postures, gazes, arm movements, and so forth, which add adjectival and adverbial material to the idea (cf. Klima and Bellugi, 1979). It is said that these activities provide important information that helps the partner interpret how the idea expressed is intended to be understood (cf. Armstrong et al., 1995: 188). In phonology, we find a similar idea. Proponents of gestural models of the phonetic code (e.g., Liberman, 1982; Mowrey and Pagliuca, 1988), for example, claim that the key to the phonetic code is not the fmal states of the vocal tract traditionally associated with the 'sounds of language', but rather muscular activities moving the articulators along trajectories toward these final-state targets. Hence, Liberman (1982: 166) says that "the key to the phonetic code is its production": the muscular transitions between the targets. And by analogy, in intonation, we notice that although a 'falling pitch' is a movement between two acoustically distinct 'places', or distinct 'states' of the vocal tract, it is interpretable independently of where it begins and where it ends. That is, the movement itself is significant as a vocal gesture. Similarly, in speech, as Dwight Bolinger points out in his book Degree words (1972), many types of words figuratively imply 'degrees' of things on gradient, more/less scales. Hence, in making a descriptive statement like (20), for example, we can choose between more 'positively', 'neutrally', or 'negatively' weighted noun characterizers, e.g.:

respected classicist strong traditionalist (20) The leader of the ethics commission was a [...] staunch conservative radical conservative right-wing reactionary In making an introduction like (21), we can choose between socially 'nearer' or 'farther' terms of address to refer to the person introduced, e.g.:

Jacob Jacob Mey (21) Mary, I'd like you to meet [...] Mr. Jacob Mey Prof Jacob L. Mey Prof. Dr. Jacob Louis Mey, III In making a request for help like (22), we can choose between 'clearer' or 'vaguer' personal pronouns for referring to who should help, e.g.: you

(22) Can [...] help me? somebody anybody In making a predictive statement like (23), we can choose between more 'confident' or 'doubtful' modal verbs for expressing what is expected to happen, e.g.:

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will can (23) They [...] come tonight may could might

And in making evaluative statements like (24), we can choose between more or less 'emphatic' indicators of the magnitude of the evaluation, e.g.: a little sort o f rather (24) She was [...] unhappy about it. really very extremely completely

These are all gestural choices. And in all such choices in speech, it is not so much words in vacuo that are significant from the gestural point of view, as words in relation to other words that could have been chosen in the situation. That is, in order to interpret title + last name as a figuratively more 'distant' term of address than first name, we have to know in advance that it is possible choose the latter - as well as various other terms of address - and we have to know why this is done, and what it means if it is done. This, in part, I believe, is what Jacob Mey was once getting at when he referred to pragmatics as 'the art of the unsaid' (1991 : 245).

10. Conclusion: Gestures as frames of reference

"The simultaneous double function of both referring and suggesting is perhaps the most important of the many functions that constitute the multifunctional nature of language and communication." (Friedrich, 1986: 127) What, finally, is the significance of gestural uses of language for pragmatics? Paul Friedrich (1986) would perhaps say it is their suggestive power. If language, at some level, is indeed "inherently, pervasively, and powerfully poetic", as he claims (1986: 17), then this is largely due, I believe, to our ability to use words as gestures. The gestural use of language, we could say, creates: (1) the subjective frame of reference, (2) within intersubjective context of reference, that (3) gives the objective reference its full relational, motivational, and emotive significance for the interpreter. Because of this important framing function of gestural uses of words, I believe, we need approaches to style in pragmatics that are on a par with our present approaches to propositional content and context. 18 18 Here,Jiirgen Esser's (1993) work on English stylistics provides valuable insights.

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The rationale for this view was already provided at the turn of the century by Anton Marty (1908) and Charles Bally (1909), two forerunners of pragmatics whose works have never received the attention they deserve in the field. ~9 Marty, for example, pointed out that no utterance ever conveys a fully explicit version of what a speaker thinks, or intends to communicate, at the moment it is produced. An utterance, he said, is like a sketch or a stenograph of an idea (1908: 145ff.): while the basic conceptual coordinates for interpreting it are provided by language, the task of filling them out into a meaningful whole is left largely up to the interpreter. Hence, in interpreting utterances, he said, we must assign relative degrees of importance to the concepts referred to, and we must reconstruct most of the meaningful relations between these and the speaker, the topic, and the context ourselves. Nevertheless, he said, our inferences are strongly influenced by the f o r m s of acts of speech themselves: by how utterances are literally performed, and by the specific choices of words and word arrangements made in performing them. 2° For this reason, he concluded, our interpretations of utterances are always steered, restricted, and limited in various ways by the perspectives on events implicitly sketched out in them. 21 Every act of speech, in other words, creates a frame of reference. The point I have been trying to make in this paper, to repeat, is that a reference always appears in a frame that influences how it is perceived and interpreted in a context. And this framing processes, I have argued, is a natural function of style. It arises out of the simple necessity of having to select particular words and word arrangements, out of the infinite paradigmatic possibilities of a given langauge, in order to produce an act of speech in that language. A frame of reference is a product of how a speaker chooses to express him- or herself in a context. And hence we cannot study notions like frame of reference without analyzing acts of speech in context. The power of verbal gestures lies in how they are almost invisibly integrated into the seemingly 'natural order' of symbolic expression without our even sensing their existence much of the time. Their power lies between the lines, as it were, in what Jacob Mey, some years ago, described as that "what is not said but which might have been said" (1993b, 226). This near invisibility of verbal gestures is their most 19 Petra Braselmann (1982), for example, emphasizes the importance for pragmatics of Bally's early pioneering work on linguistic stylistics, but no one, to my knowledge, has pointed out Marty's importance in pragmatics as an early influence on Karl Biahler's work. 20 That is, our inferences about relations both between concepts and speakers' 'inner' states of mind and between concepts and 'outer' realities. 21 In Marty's view, although ideas like, for example, 'You must come at noon', 'I want you to come at noon', 'It would be good if you came at noon', 'I'd be happy if you came at noon', etc. may all potentially be in mind at the moment that a speaker produces an utterance meant to express this general notion, the stenographic nature of the utterance in which this is expressed requires the speaker to select only one version. Insofar as only one version can be conveyed explicitly, the others remain implicit. Marry claimed that for this reason, it is constantly necessary for speakers to reduce their complex thoughts into simplified, explicit verbal sketches. And following the opposite logic, it is also constantly necessary for their partners to expand simplified verbal sketches into complex thoughts. Hence, the literal 'information' passing through the linguistic needle-eye of an utterance is always only a small, selective percentage of what potentially may be meant by the speaker or what potentially may be understood by the partner (cf. Marty, 1908: 168).

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mystifying feature. We are fully aware of their importance perhaps only when reading poetry, where how things are expressed is quite often the key to what they are intended to mean. But everyday speech is also powerfully poetic. This is Paul Friedrich's thesis in The language parallax (1986), Raymond Gibbs' thesis in The poetics of mind (1994), and my thesis in the present paper. What I am asserting is this: content does not precede style, words do not precede gestures, the what does not precede the how, and speech acts do not precede acts of speech. It is time in pragmatics for a general re-evaluation of earlier stylistic and rhetorical approaches to speech as a mode of action. The meanings of utterances in context will continue to remain oddly opaque as long as we fail to include the frame of reference provided by gestural uses of language in our analysis. In any context, it is invariably some unique 'how' that particularizes the generic 'what' into an individually meaningful pragmatic performance. Understanding this, I believe, is an important first step toward understanding how words really do things in speech, understanding how we do things with them, and understanding what these, in turn, ultimately have to do with pragmatics as the science of the use and interpretation of language.

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Richard Janney is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Munich. Earlier he taught at the University of Frankfurt and the University of Cologne. His main present interests are: pragmatics and psychology, verbal and nonverbal communication, language and affect, and pragmatic forensics and psychiatric pathology. He is author (with Horst Arndt) of lnterGrammar: Toward an integrative model of verbal, prosodic and kinesic choices in speech (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987). His new book Language and affect: Emotive uses of English (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter) will appear soon.