Uttering sentences made up of words and gestures1

In several places, Robyn Carston warns the student of utterance interpretation against neglect of the “fact that most verbal utterances are a complex of linguistic, paralinguistic, facial and vocal gestures, which appear to function as a signal receiving a unified interpretation”, a fact which, she writes, remains “rather under-explored ” (2004, p. 824). Such neglect is unjustified because, she writes, “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive (=communicative) stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated ” (2002, p. 129; see also Carston & Powell, p. 16 of online version). This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system ” at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In a more radical vein, Herb Clark (1996 and 1997, passim) contends that theories o