Laura M. Ahearn - Living Language

Sometimes “what is going on” is not so congruent, however. As Barbara LeMaster demonstrates in her study of preschoolers, their nonverbal behaviors often contradict their verbal assertions. In the case of one girl named Alice, who does not agree with her teacher’s choice of another student to speak next, she carries on her resistance nonverbally: “By remaining silent, Alice complies verbally with the teacher’s ultimate right to choose Adam as next speaker, but she simultaneously uses her body to both reject the teacher’s move and to reinforce her right to be called on next” (LeMaster 2010:170). And another student, named Herman, does the same thing: he “verbally complies with the teacher’s assessment but continues the conflict nonverbally, through his posture, facial expressions, and eye gaze” (LeMaster 2010:172).

Mark Sicoli (2013, 2020) calls this type of mismatch between verbal and nonverbal messaging “intermodal discord.” He provides an excellent example from a Zapotec village in Oaxaca, Mexico, where a woman who was visiting another family’s home offered to do the dishes after dinner. This situation placed the hosts in a quandary because on the one hand, visitors are not supposed to do chores, and on the other hand, guests’ offers are supposed to be accepted. Through a close analysis of a videotape of the interaction, Sicoli shows how the family members’ verbal statements contradicted their embodied movements with regard to the dishes, enabling them to navigate this tricky social situation.

The Buddhist monks that Michael Lempert (2012) studies have a related challenge, though the context is completely different. In the Sera Monastery in India, traditional Buddhist practices surrounding monastic discipline and debate are quite pugilistic, if not outright violent. These sorts of practices can be seen to clash with “modern” Western liberal values that emphasize the language of rights, as well as with the Tibetan Buddhists’ own language emphasizing universal compassion. Lempert analyzes the theatrical embodied debates alongside other data to derive a more comprehensive understanding of these monks’ practices.

Eve Tulbert and Marjorie Harness Goodwin analyze intermodal discord in their comparison of several families’ toothbrushing routines in the US. They identify what they call a “conjoined directive” (2011:83) – when physical and verbal actions work together to create a sense of force – for example, when a mother’s series of commands (to go, brush teeth, get dressed) are in alignment with her actions (she turns off their monitor and music video). This is in contrast to a “disjunctive directive” – when the parent’s posture and actions do not align with the command to begin a new task, but rather contradict it; the force of the directive is therefore weakened (2011:84). Tulbert and Goodwin present a vivid example of the conjoined directive in one family, in which an older sister helps her 18-month-old little sister as they both brush their teeth in the bathroom while standing nestled against one another at the sink. In another family, in contrast, the disjunctive directive is illustrated when the father enters the living room holding a toothbrush. His children are watching television there, but instead of turning off the television, he puts the toothbrush in front of them on the couch and tells them to brush. A complex negotiation involving bribery and divided attention ensues, as the children refuse to brush their teeth – at least not without a reward of a cookie or piece of gum. “Clearly different types of moral actors are co-constructed through displays of reluctance and resistance, in contrast to willingness, to carry out routine courses of action” (2011:85). The processes through which children are socialized in and through language to become competent members of their cultures will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 4, but for our purposes here, it is important to note that Tulbert and Goodwin’s study relied upon a multimodal analysis, which, they argue, “is absolutely essential to any study of parenting strategies” (2011:90; cf. Goodwin and Cekaite 2018).

We turn now to a different type of multimodal communication, sign languages. This fascinating topic reinforces many of the concepts we have discussed in the book thus far. Unfortunately, misconceptions and negative language ideologies regarding sign languages abound, so it is necessary to debunk some common myths that people often hold about these languages (cf. LeMaster and Monaghan 2004).

Myth #1 – Sign languages are not “real” languages but instead are pidgin forms of communication with no grammar of their own . William Stokoe and other researchers have convincingly put this myth to rest. Sign languages have all the components we mentioned in Chapter 1 in the section, “So, What Do You Need to Know in Order to ‘Know’ a Language?” Also, sign languages do not consist merely of finger-spelling or of crude iconic gestures that resemble that which is being described. In the case of American Sign Language (ASL), in the place of phonemes (bits of sound that make a difference in meaning), users draw upon these five parameters involving gesture and other nonverbal modalities:

Handshape

Location of the hand relative to the body

Movement of the hand (or lack thereof)

Palm orientation (up or down)

Non-manual markers, such as facial expressions. Here we see that the whole body is important for signers, not just the hands. ASL is truly a multimodal form of expression.

A shift in any one of these parameters can change the meaning of a sign in subtle or dramatic ways. All full-fledged sign languages are just as complex grammatically as spoken languages and just as capable (or incapable) of expressing anything a user wishes to convey. The only sign languages that are exceptions to this rule are the few signing modalities that are used by hearing people under special circumstances, such as Walpiri women’s signing, which they use when they are mourning (Haviland 2004:212; Kendon 1988) or Plains Standard Sign Language, which is a set of signing practices in decline but still used by some Native American groups such as the Nakota, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho (Farnell 1995). These are rich linguistic practices, but unlike ASL and other sign languages, most are not equipped with a comprehensive set of syntactic and semantic features.

Myth #2 – Sign Languages are basically iconic; that is, they are made up of gestures that look like what they are representing . While some signs have iconic elements, they are also combined with conventional (or symbolic) aspects – just like spoken languages, which have iconic signs in the form of onomatopoeic words such as “choo choo” or “cockadoodledoo” that are conventionally understood within particular speech communities. (In Nepal, for example, roosters say “kukhurikwa-” instead of “cockadoodledoo.”) Now that people generally do not view signers anymore as simply “painting pictures in the air” but rather as expressing themselves via a fully formed human language, more scholars are beginning to study the complex types of iconicity and multimodality found in sign languages (e.g., Cates et al. 2013). This kind of research has the potential to teach us a lot, not just about sign languages but about linguistic interactions in general.

Myth #3 – Sign language is universally shared by all deaf people in the world . This is simply untrue. Many deaf people do not use any sign language at all, either from choice or from lack of access. Ethnologue.comlists 144 deaf sign languages in the world as of February 2020, but these are only the ones that have been documented by scholars, and many of these are endangered (e.g., Nonaka 2014). It is estimated that there are several hundred sign languages in total, and there are most likely many more registers or dialects, such as Black ASL (The Language and Life Project 2020). While the domain of a sign language will often coincide with a particular spoken language or nation, there need not be any linguistic relationship between the sign language and a geographical area’s spoken language. For example, ASL is much closer linguistically to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language because of the history of how it was developed – and it is very different grammatically from spoken English. As another example, in Nepal, there is one national sign language and at least three “village” sign languages (cf. Hoffman-Dilloway 2008).