THE CO-INVOLVEMENT OF HANDS AND MOUTH IN UTTERANCE CONSTRUCTION: IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE ORIGINS THEORIES

The idea that language first emerged as a form of visible bodily action, - the "gesture first" view - has attracted supporters since the eighteenth century. Since the modern revival of this idea by Gordon Hewes in 1973, it has gained many adherents with Michael Corballis and Michael Tomasello (2008), among the most recent. It is attractive, perhaps, because we can observe, through such processes as the conventionalisation of pantomime, the emergence of language-like systems, as may be seen when primary sign languages come into being. However, the problem a "gesture first" theory always confronts is that modern languages are spoken and humans are highly specialised for speech. This means that "gesture first" advocates have to account for a switch from gesture to speech. None of the modern "gesture first" theorists offer a satisfactory account of this, while opponents of this position have argued that a "gesture stage" is unnecessary. Advocates of a "speech first" position, on the other hand, overlook or downplay the fact that when speakers engage in utterance, always to some extent, and often to a considerable extent, they produce an ensemble of speech and gesture. Studies of the way in which gesture is involved in utterance construction show that gestures function like partners with speech in the creation of coherently meaningful utterances. Furthermore, gestures enter into the fashioning of utterances in many different ways. They express emphasis and emotion, but they also express concepts, often by means similar to those found in sign languages. They also express meta-discursive and pragmatic aspects of the utterance (Kendon 2004). Neither "gesture first" advocates nor "speech only" advocates have considered seriously this co-involvement of speech and visible bodily action in utterance construction.

In this paper, this partnership of speech and gesture in utterance will be our starting point. Looking at the various forms of gestural expression, we note that referential gestures, whether deictic or representational, and gestures with pragmatic functions can often be seen as derived from manipulatory actions, as if the speaker is acting on, or in relation to, objects in a virtual physical environment, including other animate beings as objects. Appealing to MacNeilage's (2008) suggestion that the actions of speech are exaptions of the mouth actions of chewing and other eating actions, and considering the evidence from many different studies that suggest hand-mouth synergies of great phylogenetic antiquity (Gentilucci and Corballis 2006), we propose that the action systems used in speaking and gesturing are descended by modification from the hand-mouth action ensembles employed as the animal manipulates, modifies or appropriates and ingests parts of its environment, as it seeks for and grasps and processes food, or manages, manipulates and modifies its environment. These systems were recruited to symbolic functions when practical actions acted out in a "vicarious way" (as when an animal must decide between more than one course of action) were recognised by conspecifics as "as if' actions. It was this that made symbolic dialogues possible (Kendon 1991). On this view, important aspects of language are only secondarily communicative in origin and the co-invovlement of hands and mouth in utterance production is accounted for because of the development of shared control networks which originated in strategies that developed in relation to food getting and environmental manipulation. Language emerged, thus, from an ensemble of oral and manual actions, an ensemble still observed in utterance production in modern humans.

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