In Gesture in multiparty interaction, Emily Shaw complicates what she sees as a false distinction between hearing and nonhearing bodies as they take on the burdens of communication. The ablest contrast in much linguistics literature, she writes, wrongfully suggests that hearing and deaf persons necessarily gesture differently (or not at all) due to modality, yet it is clear that expressive burden manifests in co-occurring manual and nonmanual features, making typologies of gestural signs insufficient for fully explaining gesture as it functions in signed talk. Shaw provides an alternative approach to gesture's intimate interface with language, thus, through American pragmatist C. S. Peirce's tri-partite theorization of second-order sign relations—an innovation, she contends, that accounts for how interlocutors manage symbolic information as events unfold. Following Jurgen Streeck, N. J. Enfield, and Charles Goodwin, she argues that communication is achieved, creative, and ever (re)calibrated to some social action; following Peirce, she shows us how. The result is a book committed to questions of body as fully integrated within streams of talk in and across speech events, not just in terms of local or global interactional demands, English, or ASL, but as a theory of embodied language and the corporeal resources necessary for signification.
Shaw's interactional event of interest is a game night between two groups of friends. Not unlike charades, the game Guesstures requires participants to pantomime clues to others in a set amount of time without using conventionalized codes. That is, hearing groups must use their bodies without speech, and Deaf groups without ASL. Players draw from a semiotic repertoire of visual articulators in their turn at play, which Shaw systematically coded and quantified using conversation analysis as a framework. Comparing the hearing and Deaf game-play events, Shaw shows how ‘performance gestures’ necessarily co-occur with indexical signs that manage the unfolding turn, not only in validating audience uptake; but in pointing to a re-presentation of gestural form that may be abbreviated or expanded in response to local interactive pressure. Sensitive to a project of mutual understanding, expressive force lies in these flexible gradations of iconic to highly abstract bodily movements.
It is the nestedness of signs—the embeddedness of icons within indices within symbols—that makes Peirce attractive to Shaw. Indeed, she remarks extensively on pragmatic acts of stance-taking, specifically in cases of gestural mirroring, to show that indexical and iconic dimensions of symbolic signs can be strategically foregrounded to accomplish alignment. Which is to say, bodily co-expression is integrated into talk in such a way as to shift with and make essential contributions to the saliency of information as interaction unfolds. Through extra-gameplay data, Shaw argues that this is not unique to play, but crucial to accomplishing coherence in quotidian interaction. If their communicative burdens are similar, what would it look like to categorize ASL and English as gestural languages? Shaw presses us, as sociolinguists, to think of co-speech and talk as symbiotic, mutually elaborating dimensions of the same thing: language.
