Pragmatic gestures at the gesture-sign interface. Nonmanuals and palm-up gestures among older Belgian French speakers and French Belgian Sign Language signers

It is now assumed that both speakers and signers use gestures in language interaction, as these units are an integral part of linguistic communication (Sweetser 2009). In order to compare spoken and signed communication, Vermeerbergen & Demey (2007) recommend confronting sign languages with speech in combination with gestures. It is also admitted that, in contrast with spoken languages (SpLs), sign languages (SLs) offer the unique property to grammaticalize both manual and nonmanual gestures (Herrmann & Steinbach 2013). This paper aims to foster the knowledge on these issues by studyin... Mehr ...