Modally hybrid grammar?: Celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú

Abstract

From the study of sign languages we know that the visual modality robustly supports the encoding of conventionalized linguistic elements, yet while the same possibility exists for the visual bodily behavior of speakers of spoken languages, such practices are often referred to as 'gestural' and are not usually described in linguistic terms. This article describes a practice of speakers of the Brazilian indigenous language Nheengatú of pointing to positions along the east-west axis of the sun's arc for time-of-day reference, and illustrates how it satisfies any of the common criteria for linguistic elements, as a system of standardized and productive form-meaning pairings whose contributions to propositional meaning remain stable across contexts. First, examples from a video corpus of natural speech demonstrate these conventionalized properties of Nheengatú time reference across multiple speakers. Second, a series of video-based elicitation stimuli test several dimensions of its conventionalization for nine participants. The results illustrate why modality is not an a priori reason that linguistic properties cannot develop in the visual practices that accompany spoken language. The conclusion discusses different possible morphosyntactic and pragmatic analyses for such conventionalized visual elements and asks whether they might be more crosslinguistically common than we presently know.*

Language as Description, Indication, and Depiction

“…Within a different language community, the Nheengatú of Brazil, Floyd (2016) found a quite conventional multimodal pattern used to reference time. In this community, speakers produce an auditory articulation coupled with a point to the sun’s position to refer to different times of day.…”

“…For example, the use of co-speech pointing actions to symbolically index physical and abstract referents – and very often their simultaneous temporal and semantic alignment with speech – have been described for diverse language ecologies such as the Cuna people of Panama (Sherzer, 1972), the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea and speakers of American English (Cooperrider et al, 2014), Murrinhpatha in Northern Australia (Blythe et al, 2016), Kreol Seselwa in the Seychelles (Brück, 2016), and speakers of Nheengatú in Brazil (Floyd, 2016). Across these ecologies, pointing is both a plurifunctional and multimodal referential strategy (integrating bodily actions, posture orientations and eye gaze either with or without speech) that patterns along formal, semantic, and spatiotemporal lines.…”

Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages

“…Once joint visual attention is engaged (e.g., by a pointing gesture or eye gaze towards the object), then bu or o is used instead (roughly equivalent to proximal this and distal that in English, respectively). Lastly, to indicate a specific time of the day, speakers of Nheengatú point to a position along the east-west axis of the sun (Floyd 2016). This pointing behaviour not only co-occurs with spoken verb phrases consistently, it can provide more precise information than what is spoken (i.e., a time of the day) and Nheengatú speakers appear to be sensitive to incorrect variations in form and meaning pairs (e.g., when presented with other possible interpretations in an elicitation task).…”

A formal analysis of lip-pointing in Latin-American Spanish

“…The discussion provides evidence for Jouitteau's (2004Jouitteau's ( , 2007 multichanneled syntax hypothesis, which claims that even in oral languages syntactic categories, projections, etc., such as expletives or Q particles relevant to clause typing, might be realized by gestures. For an overview of the debate on multichannality and relevant data, e.g., celestial pointing for time-of-day reference in Nheengatú, see Floyd (2016)'s modally hybrid grammar and references therein. This article is structured as follows: Section 2 presents a basic overview of deictic gestures in Spanish, including but not restricted to lip-pointing.…”

“…It has been shown that on top of hand-pointing, certain LatinAmerican varieties use lip-pointing and that, most importantly, these gestures are grammaticized as gestural or visual pronominals which are part of the morphosyntax of these dialects. This entails that the syntax of oral languages may make use of more than one externalization channel, in particular, the oral channel and the gestural channel (see Jouitteau 2004and Floyd 2016.…”