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 studying the palm-up gesture in combination with nonmanuals (including, among others, facial displays, gaze, head moves, and shoulders’ moves), comparing their use in SpLs and SLs. The comparison will provide new insight into the hypothesized differences between grammaticalized (or, even pragmaticalized – Degand & Evers-Vermeul 2015) gestures and nonmanuals used in SLs, on the one hand, and co-speech gestures and expressive or interactive nonmanuals used in both SpLs and SLs, on the other hand. In SpLs, the palm-up family of gestures (called ‘Open Hand Supine’ in Kendon 2004 and ‘Palm Up Open Hand’ in Müller 2004) comprises gestures with the following kinetic features: an open lax handshape with extended (not spread) fingers, a supine forearm, and an upward facing of the hand. Their shared semantic theme is assumed to be linked, at some point, to a ‘giving/offering’, or ‘readiness to receive’ core meaning (Müller 2004). The three-fold classification of their uses in context (Kendon 2004) includes: (i) the palm presentation gestures; (ii) the palm addressed gestures; and (iii) the lateral palm gestures. These co-speech gestures are said to be pragmatic gestures (Kendon 2004), as they contribute to the meaning of the utterance in fulfilling a modal (e.g. by intensifying the expressive content), a performative (e.g. by highlighting a question), or a parsing function (e.g. by marking the discourse’s ...