Sign + Gesture = Speech + Gesture? Comparing aspects of simultaneity in Flemish Sign Language to instances of concurrent speech and gesture

In signed languages, the manual channel ‘takes over’ from the oral modality – with the result that language ‘moves’ from the mouth to the hands. Theoretically, this may result in the gesture being ‘pushed aside’ and disappearing. Indeed, in an important part of the signed language literature, it seems to be taken for granted that there is no room for gesture in signed language use. We would like to argue here that gesture does not disappear. Again in theory, there are three possible outcomes that arise when the hands take over from the mouth: (1) gesture and sign come to co-exist in the manual modality; (2) gesture and sign are integrated into one structure; (3) gesture and ‘speech’ trade places, resulting in the manual articulators producing the linguistic component and the mouth producing the gestural component of a message. In Flemish Sign Language, these three theoretical possibilities seem to be realised. In part 2 of this paper we will begin by briefly discussing both the integration of sign and gesture and provide some examples of a ‘gesturing mouth’. Most of the chapter will however be devoted to the first of the above-mentioned possibilities, i.e. the possible co-production of sign and gesture in signed language use. In line with the focus of this volume we will concentrate on the simultaneous use of the two manual articulators. Three different simultaneous constructions that frequently occur in VGT and other signed languages, will be considered in part 3 of this chapter: (1) simultaneous constructions involving the use of a numeral sign; (2) simultaneous constructions involving pointing signs, and (3) examples where a lexical sign is ‘held’ on one hand, while the other hand produces gesture. In all three cases we first extensively discuss VGT examples in order to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison with data presented elsewhere in this volume. After that, these constructions are compared to speech+co-speech gesture combinations which at first sight seem similar. The aim here is to explore whether some examples of manual simultaneity might be (to some extent) equated to speech-with-gesture as produced by speakers of oral languages and whether these then can be analysed as combinations of a linguistic (sign) component and a gestural component.status: publishe