TWO ‘SHOWING–MEANING’ CONTINUA

An ongoing concern in this book has been to draw parallels between the ‘showing–meaningnn’ continuum presented in Chapter 3 and the other continua introduced at various points: Goffman's continuum between response cries and words, Gussenhoven's continuum between natural and linguistic prosody and Kendon's continuum between gesticulation and sign-language. However, as I have also pointed out, there are differences. The aim of the following discussion is to focus on these. For while the continua reflect similar underlying intuitions, in key regards they are actually quite distinct. To be more precise, we are dealing with two different types of continua. My conclusion will be that while continua of the kind proposed by Goffman, Gussenhoven and Kendon are useful descriptive tools, and capture the intuition that there is a continuity of some sort between display and language proper, they lack real explanatory power. By contrast, I will argue that the showing–meaningnn continuum developed in this book is useful in both descriptive and explanatory terms.

Continua of the kind proposed by Goffman and Kendon are based entirely on the role played in communication by coding: in semiotic terms, the nature of the ‘sign’ and the type of relationship that links signals to messages.