1113. This week, we talk with linguist Lauren Gawne about her book "Gesture: A Slim Guide." We look at how different cultures gesture about abstract concepts like time and space, and how we unknowingly gesture from our left-to-right writing system. We also look at why pointing is often rude, how different cultures point in different ways, and whether animals gesture on their own.
1113. This week, we talk with linguist Lauren Gawne about her book "Gesture: A Slim Guide." We look at how different cultures gesture about abstract concepts like time and space, and how we unknowingly gesture from our left-to-right writing system. We also look at why pointing is often rude, how different cultures point in different ways, and whether animals gesture on their own.
This episode was originally a bonus episode released in June for people who support the show, the Grammarpaloozians. If you'd like to support the show, and get ad-free podcasts and bonuses right away, visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus for more information.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today’s show was originally released in June as a bonus segment for the people who support the show, our Grammarpaloozians. If you would like to be a Grammarpaloozian and get in on the fun, including getting ad-free episodes and these bonus episodes when they first come out, visit quickanddirtytips.com/bonus to learn more. And now, on to the show.
Mignon: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for your support for the show. We just finished the main segment with Lauren Gawne about her new book “Gesture: A Slim Guide,” and you know, all sorts of fascinating stuff. If you haven't listened to that yet, go listen; you'll enjoy it. There was so much more to talk about. We're just going to continue the discussion here.
If you didn’t miss that, Lauren Gawne is a senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and she's the co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast. Lauren, thanks again for being here.
Lauren: Thanks, Mignon. Sorry, just making a note about one of the gestures that you did. We'll come back to that.
Mignon: Oh, no. Say it now.
Lauren: So, when you were talking about—we've just finished chatting—you were pointing out to your left. And that is for very good reasons, which is that as English speakers, we have a left-to-right writing system. We think of the left as in the past, and we think of the right as in the future.
Mignon: Absolutely. And that was one of the topics I wanted to talk about, is the cultural differences in space and the time. The time thing.
Lauren: Yeah. So this is a metaphoric gesture. Time famously is different from or related to space. But because time is so abstract, we try to make sense of it by trying to pin it down to the physical world. As I said, one of the metaphors that we have is that the past is in the left and the future's in the right.
If you ask someone to plan out their week, you can usually get a really great visual gesture timeline. If someone has a particularly busy…find a busy person. I'm sure they'll love you taking up more of their time, and ask them about their busy week. And hopefully, you'll get a lot of things moving on a left-to-right timeline.
It's also why the FedEx logo points to the right, because they're getting things to you in time. So there's lots of this left-to-right gesturing, but there's also a different metaphor that we have where the future is in front of us. So this left-to-right one is kind of a modern writing system artifact.
But this one, where we are physically moving through space as a whole-bodied person, is slightly different because we have words for this one too. So I can talk about, you know, putting things behind me, or I'm moving forward, or I'm looking forward to spring break. Because we have, as a culture, this sense of the future being in front of us.
Now, if you want to start a discussion at brunch one day, ask people if they think they are moving through time or if they are still and time is flowing past them. Because even though we share this metaphor, we actually have a lot of variation on the detail.
Mignon: Hmm. That's fascinating. So, in cultures where they write from right to left, or write or read from right to left, they just gesture differently. Would they say the past is on the right then and hold out and gesture to the right?
Lauren: So there's less work there. The work I know of is in Chinese writing systems, which are vertical, and there does seem to be more of a vertical past is at the top and the future is moving downward gesture. And this one is in the speech as well as the gesture. What I find so interesting about the left-to-right one is we don't talk about putting that difficult relationship to the left.
And we don't talk about, I mean we talk about summer being right ahead, but we don't mean that right. So I think it's because it's something that is so innate to the writing system. Whereas when you think about yourself moving through time, you're much more likely to use those as words.
So we have these two systems, but we treat them very differently. And you only know about the left-to-right metaphor that we have if you pay attention to gesture; you can't get that from the speech.
Mignon: Yeah, as you said, writing is so much newer than speech, so we have just had more time to develop those metaphors, I guess.
Lauren: Yeah, and then we have—I have to give a shout-out to my favorite metaphor for time, which is in Aymara, a language of the Amazonian highlands where the past is in front of you and the future is behind you, which you hear in words, but you also see in the gestures of people.
And I love this one because it does make a lot of sense. If you think about the fact that like, I know what happened last week, if I was looking at a timeline, I could see last week laid out before me and be like, "Oh yes, that was that really fun party, and that was that day that was really busy at work."
I don't know what's happening next week. Having it right over your shoulder where you can't see it actually makes a lot of sense as a metaphor.
Mignon: Oh yeah. Like it's sneaking up on you, actually. That’s fascinating.
Lauren: Who knows what's happening tomorrow?
Mignon: It’s there. It’s behind me.
Lauren: It's there out of sight.
Mignon: Amazing. And so, another thing that surprised me is that about, I want to talk about pointing. So first of all, it makes me think of the, in medieval manuscripts, how the finger is always pointing at in the margins.
The marginalia has the finger that points at what you're supposed to look at. But then, actually you said pointing can be seen as rude and aggressive, which of course it can. You know, if you point at someone, that isn't always a good thing. So, and then there are cultural differences. So I thought we should just talk a little bit about pointing.
Lauren: Let’s talk about pointing. I love pointing because I sound like I'm losing the plot when I talk about pointing. Because I'm like, the thing you have to understand is you are basically doing cognitive magic when you point, because the fact that you extend your finger or your whole hand, or you move your head in a direction—and again, there's so much variation—but the fact that you do this and then the person that you're talking to knows to not just look at your finger, but to look at the invisible magic line that is radiating out of your finger and make, most of the time, an incredibly good guess at which thing in this very busy field of vision you are pointing at is super impressive.
Mignon: Yeah. And why do we point in different ways, like different cultures point in different ways? And for different reasons we point differently.
Lauren: Yeah. So some of that is cultural. We are in a culture where you point with your index finger, and there does seem to be some evolutionary and child language evidence that your index finger is a finger that is particularly evolved to do this task. But there’s lots of cultures in which it might be the middle finger. In Lao, there is a real tendency to use the lip as the default form of pointing in a lot of contexts. So there's lots of variation in terms of what hand you use.
Also, just variation as an English speaker, if I want to point at a specific thing ahead of me, I'll use my index finger. But if I want to point to a general location, I might use an open hand. And if I want to point behind me, it's actually very awkward to turn my whole body around and point at that thing, whereas I could just flick my thumb backwards and achieve the same end. So you get a lot of thumb pointing behind people.
Mignon: That's definitely how I would do it. And because I mentioned it in the main episode, I find I tend to fixate on the, these fun facts always jump out at me from people's books. It’s not the main point at all. But you said there are 124 culture groups who have a taboo against pointing at rainbows. Do you know why?
Lauren: I know why. And the reason is that we simply know this because Robert Blust, who was a historical linguist, just found repeatedly in his work that people mention this odd fact, and then he started actively collecting examples of this taboo. It's not always exactly the same; or there are some cultures where it's a prohibition against pointing at rainbows, but also other celestial phenomena or rainbows and then other objects or locations associated with particular deities.
But rainbows keep cropping up again and again. And his theory, I mean, that's why we know it, because of this excellent work that Bob did for many years. His explanation for why is that rainbows are a strange, ephemeral kind of quasi-mystic experience, especially in a kind of pre-Newtonian physics world.
We know how rainbows work now. We've kind of taken some of the mystique out of them. And he has also suggested that maybe this is some kind of vestige of some larger kind of deep history human taboo that was created and has been maintained in all, because the number of cultures in which this turns up is just too diverse.
But also the consistency of this taboo seems too much like a coincidence. But it kind of shows the, you know, I talked about it as being, you know, weird magic coming out of your finger. But the prohibitions on pointing that we see and even, you know, being scolded as a kid that it's rude to point at people and draw attention to them seems to also tap into this understanding of pointing as a powerful form of calling attention to something.
Mignon: Amazing. And so now thinking about animals, so you know, definitely certain animals can learn to understand our gestures. You know, you can give hand signals to dogs and things like that.
Lauren: Yeah.
Mignon: But do animals gesture on their own?
Lauren: So one of the reasons I was like, it's so weird that we point is chimpanzees can't do it, where a lot of the things humans do communication-wise, we can see some of the origins for this in other primates. So even if primates don't have the same capacity to do really grammatical communication, they do a lot of that kind of social bonding. You know, Robin Dunbar has talked a lot about how the grooming processes in chimps kind of lead to the mechanisms to do conversation and chit-chat in humans. But there hasn't been any evidence, except for a handful of chimpanzees who grow up with humans where they kind of get it, but they definitely can't do pointing. Whereas dogs and cats and other domestic animals that have spent tens of thousands of years alongside humans do have this capacity to understand human pointing. And, you know, pointer dogs, as per their name, are very good at drawing human attention to stuff. It doesn't seem to be that same kind of distance necessarily that humans can point at.
But what's really interesting is that if you look at all the animals that can understand pointing—just to stick with pointing, because I find it so interesting—it’s a whole bunch of domesticated animals, definitely not related to humans. All of the animals that are related to humans or the primates can't do it.
And then in terms of evolution, there's just this weird blip where we have some data that dolphins can understand human pointing. And they're known for their sophisticated group culture and sophisticated communication. And so there's some inkling that, like, there is something about complex communication that gives you the cognitive skills to do pointing.
Mignon: Amazing. So is the idea that dogs, for example, have learned to point because it benefits them because we point?
Lauren: It does seem to be the case with the domesticated animals that they've figured this out.
Mignon: Very cool. Well, to wrap up, there's also, there's a grammar angle, you know, for Grammar Girl podcast. There are, you talked about how there are different kinds of verbs in different languages and how that can influence how people gesture about those actions. I thought that was really interesting.
Lauren: Yes. So, English is a language where all of the forms of motion verbs that we have include the way in which we do the moving. So we talk about running or rolling or jumping or swinging or something that involves the way we do something, but not necessarily the direction that we're doing it in.
Whereas there are languages where the way that you do something is less important, and whether you are moving towards something or away from something, the direction becomes more important. And in English, we do that with those extra words like "rolling down the hill." The "down the hill" is the extra bit. The way we do it is really tied up in the verb.
For languages that go the other way. So, Spanish is one, Japanese is one, and Turkish. So, this distinction crops up across language groups. You have the "we go downhill," "go uphill." This motion is really central, and then you add "rolling" or "jumping" as the extra bit of information with an extra word.
And there is a tendency for English speakers, because the motion is so tied up in the verb, we tend to do a lot more of these motions tied into the way that the direction is going. Whereas for Japanese speakers and Turkish speakers, what you find is that in the same way the language breaks the way you do something out, you get this "they go downhill," and they do the motion without that extra way the motion is being done. And then they add the "rolling" at the end because it's outside of the main verb.
Mignon: So for— I'm sorry, for the listeners who can't see the video, so when we're talking— when, so when "rolling" is the primary, you make like a rolling motion with your finger, and when the "down," the downward part is the primary from the language, the motion is more like steadily down. And then you'll add the other part at the end, the sort of the part that's viewed as not primarily about the verb.
Lauren: Again, these are, that is a perfect description. And again, these are tendencies. It's not that every speaker does this every time, but it does seem that the language that you speak is shaping the way that you represent an event. And to, I think one example from a 2004 paper by Kita and Özyürek that captures this really nicely is that they use a video that is classic in gesture studies, which is a Tweety Bird and Sylvester animated video. This just comes up; it's used all the time as a stimulus, and so I'm very familiar with the events from this animation now. There's one scene where Sylvester and Tweety are in two separate buildings, and Sylvester manages to find a rope and swing across to the other building where Tweety Pie is. He gets in there and, of course, everything backfires and goes terribly. I really come out of this feeling very bad for Sylvester every time. The English speakers—every single one of them—did the kind of swinging gesture you would expect. You start at one end, you go down, you come back up. Because that is a way of doing something, we have that as a single verb. Turkish speakers and Japanese speakers don't have a single verb that is "to swing." They would say something like "they go across." Because they don't have that manner tied up in it, and they're not used to talking about swinging, all of their gestures were more likely to be a flat, straight-across representation.
Mignon: Amazing. And so when people learn a second language, do their gestures change?
Lauren: They do. Using English and Japanese speakers again, a subset of this team and some others have done further studies looking at how Japanese speakers learning English start to build more of this swinging manner or rolling manner into the main gesture. So it does seem to influence the way that they gesture, and we know that this is something that is happening because of the grammar, and it's not something that's happening as a result of, say, just watching other people tell stories and gesture because we've talked about how there's this big cultural influence.
But we know that this is the influence of the grammar of the language. Because blind Turkish speakers gesture the same way as cited Turkish speakers, and they don't always include that manner information in the verb. So it's something about the grammar of Turkish and the way Turkish verbs work that is leading to people gesturing in this way.
Mignon: Oh wow. Wow. Very cool. No, and then it reminds me, you know, I'm trying to learn Spanish, and sometimes when I can't remember the meaning of a word, if I pair it with a gesture, it’s easier for me to remember. So for some reason, I could never remember the difference between the words for open and close. But then when I made a gesture, when I go abrir, cerrar, like now I can remember it. Now that I've assigned it to a hand motion, I imagine that's been studied too.
Lauren: It is such a lovely anecdotal example of how language is embodied. And when we speak, we are always speaking as people that have bodies and are always bringing our gestures along for the ride. And it's so great to see how you've made use of gesture in this way.
Mignon: Well, wonderful. That's so fascinating. So now let's wrap up with my favorite part of the show. Let's get your book recommendations.
Lauren: Sure. My first is “Because Internet,” by Gretchen McCulloch, because it's a great book, and it's on your bookshelf. It's a great book, but it's also the reason “Gesture: A Slim Guide” exists in a lot of ways. In the emoji chapter, when Gretchen was trying to figure out exactly how emoji were like gesture, I was like, if only I had a short and to-the-point introduction to a field of study that is so dear to my heart. I was just like “Wait! Isn’t there one of those?” And then I realized with great dismay and delight, actually, that I was going to have to be the person who wrote that. So, “Because Internet.” It's Gretchen's fault that this book exists.
My second is “All Systems Red” by Martha Wells, which is the first in the “Murderbot Diaries.” I believe Apple are in the process of turning this into a TV show, and I'm so excited. This is one of my favorite sci-fi series of all time. “Murderbot” is very dear to my heart, so.
Mignon: I love “Murderbot” too. Can't wait for the TV show!
Lauren: Yes. I'm sure I can't recommend “Murderbot.”. Everyone recommends “Murderbot.” And then I was like, nah, it's my favorite. I'm going to do it anyway.
Mignon: No, I think you're the first one to, you're the second one at least to recommend Gretchen's book. But you're the first, I believe, to recommend “Murderbot.”
Lauren: Oh well, absolute must-read. And then, one of my favorite sci-fi authors who's doing something very interesting, looking at how humans communicate and how different that might be to alien communication is Sue Burke. Now I know I'm saying that as an Australian, but it's B-U-R-K-E, and she has a trilogy of books that starts with “Semiosis,” and it is essentially what if humans ended up on a planet where plants were sentient and how might we communicate with each other? While also just being a really great story.
Mignon: Oh, that sounds amazing. It's called “Semiosis.”
Lauren: Yes. That is the first book, and it's the “Semiosis” trilogy.
Mignon: I'm going to have to check that out. That sounds cool. Great. Well, Lauren Gawne, author of “Gesture: A Slim Guide,” and co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you?
Lauren: Thanks, Mignon. It's been such a delight. People can find me on the Lingthusiasm podcast with Gretchen McCulloch, and on my blog, Superlinguo.
Mignon: Wonderful. Thanks again. Thanks so much, and thank you to the Grammarpaloozians for supporting the show. We really appreciate you. That's all. Thanks for listening.