FOREWORD

During the last few decades, the interest of researchers, linguists, ethnologists, psychologists and semiologists has been increasingly drawn to the nonverbal aspects of communication, especially to gesture and facial expression. In fact, it would be more correct to say that their attention has returned to these subjects. As far back as the Greco-Roman period, rhetors were interested in coverbal gesturing. The great many manuals of declamation published from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries focused above all on gesture. Von Seckendorff’s lectures, published in two volumes (Braunschweig, 1816) under the title Deklamation und Mimik, anticipate current research in that they deal with the relationship between gesture, facial expression, and speech. Cognitive theories of visual and vocal expression draw inspiration from Darwin’s classic work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which presents a philogenetic and biological theory of emotive behavior. Even the electrophysiological analysis of facial muscles has a forerunner in the research of the Abbé Duchenne (Paris, 1862).

It was only in the 1950s however that gesture and facial expression became the subject of numerous and varied analyses, both qualitative (functional) and quantitative. No aspect of visual communication has since escaped the attention of researchers. The spatial behavior of speakers, bodily posture and contact, the organization of face-to-face behavior, pointing, hand gestures, nods, gaze, and the facial expression of emotive attitudes, as well as sequences of body positions and the role of gesture in organizing discourse have all been analyzed under natural and experimental conditions in different social and ethnic groups. The distributional study of conventional gestures (through 1200 informants, by Morris et al. 1979) reveals the types of convergence and divergence.

Methods for recording bodily movements, facial expression, and gaze—and systems of notation for describing them—have become more and more detailed and sophisticated. A group of researchers in Berne (see Winkler, ed., 1981) has proposed and used a system in which the position and orientation of the head, hand, arm, torso, legs, and feet can be specified in the vertical and horizontal dimensions at given time intervals. This system distinguishes, for example, at least forty-one ways of touching a part of the body with the hand (without, however, being able to describe the ‘forearm jerk’).

The evolution of gestural communication in infants, toddlers, and children, as well as their understanding of bodily expressions, have been the subject of a great many follow-up studies. Historical studies of gestures, based on verbal descriptions (in epic literature and chansons de geste) and illustrations (e.g., those in the Sachsenspiegel, an early thirteenth-century German manuscript which presents an exhaustive list of gestures associated with jurisprudence) open up a new diachronic dimension in the study of gestures (see De Jorio 1832, Reinach 1924, and Morris et al. 1979).

There have also been studies, though very few, of the relationship between gestural and verbal communication, such as the parallel analysis of gesture, facial expression, and intonation which we owe to Dwight Bolinger (1986).

One would like to ask historians of science the question ‘How can this lull in nonverbal communication research between the end of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century be explained? Is it due to some internal logic in the evolution of linguistics, or can this period of latency be related to more general social tendencies?’

In light of the numerous and significant research results already obtained, it can rightly be asked what justifies my assertion that Geneviève Calbris’s book constitutes an original and very valuable contribution.

This book encapsulates a four-volume, 1478-page dissertation, which I had the pleasure of supervising. Without any excessive reduction in the amount of information contained, it remains pleasantly readable. This is quite a feat and was possible only by exploiting the conventional and motivated nature of gestures, that is, the isomorphism between gestural movements and the mental contents represented. Thus, the precise and systematic description of expressive bodily movements in the third chapter prepares and anticipates the semantic analysis of the contents expressed, which is the subject of the fourth chapter.

This book is original on several grounds. It contains a systematic description of the gestures that accompany speech in contemporary French. Giving a precise description of the gestural signifiers, the author does not limit herself to an approximate description of their meaning. Instead, she delves deep into the realm of the signified, giving a detailed and convincing analysis of the semantic structure of the gestures analyzed. The book also incorporates experimental work in which films of conventional French gestures were shown to Hungarian and Japanese viewers. In this way, it was possible to quantify degrees of iconicity (or arbitrariness). Partial views of the same gestures were used to measure the importance of different parts of the body, or ‘vehicles,’ in transmitting the message.

The strictly functional treatment, ‘emic’ in Pike’s terminology (1967), of coverbal gestures constitutes in itself an original and important contribution. The book gives a comprehensive analysis of ‘allo-gestures,’ distinguishing between simple and complex gestures and between gestural homonymy and polysemy. It also deals with the question of multiple motivation. The author analyzes gestures in the framework of dynamic synchrony, and proposes challenging concepts such as ‘gestural metaphors’ and ‘etymological gestures.’

The coverbal nature of gesture is revealed not only on the physical level, but above all in the dialectic of verbal and gestural messages. The author points out the complementarity of the two types of message, and shows how a speaker’s gestures can strengthen, nuance, or contradict what he or she says.

Through an analysis of the typical semantic spheres of gesture, the author outlines the characteristics of gestural conceptualization. In doing so, she opens up a new perspective, that of a linguistic paleontology going back to preverbal communication in both its expression and its specific content. The identity between the spatial (contiguous) and temporal (sequential), and between the temporal and the causal, are distinctive features of a paleontological conceptualization also found in lexical and grammatical metaphors (Cassirer 1922).

From this philogenetic perspective, it is interesting to see that—according to the observations of Geneviève Calbris—a gesture precedes its verbalization, reproducing in the span of a few seconds the millennial evolution of human communication. These observations will hopefully stimulate experiments and measurements to test such an important hypothesis.

The author systematically introduces gestures in their co-text—gesture, facial expression, and utterance—in order to illustrate the multidimensional nature of verbal communication. It becomes clear that isolated analyses, visual or auditive, must henceforth give way to global analyses (see Cosnier et al., eds., 1987), even if one is interested only in a single aspect, such as intonation. The meaning of a given tonal curve may depend on the facial expression that accompanies it. Phoneticians are thus encouraged to back away at times from the laryngeal, pharyngeal, and oral cavities.

Among other things, a multidimensional (i.e., acoustic and visual) analysis should make it possible to aesthetically interpret artistic use of gesture, facial expression, and voice, notably in drama.

In short, readers can follow the author with confidence as she takes them, via gestural usage in Parisian circles, toward the heights of semiological theory.

IVÁN FÓNAGY