I decided to start a blog for publishing “ideas in progress”. This website is being generated using jekyll, and, since I am not adept at this kind of thing, I decided to post a first blog as a way to practice and to say something about what this blog is for.

This blog is about the different strands of my thinking and to put some of my ideas down in print before I submit them as abstracts.

My research focusses on the relationship between linguistic pragmatics and gesture studies. I typically adopt a cognitive perspective on pragmatics (e.g. Bara 2016 or Relevance Theory). The goal of my research in this area is to engage with the mechanism(s) through which interactants produce and comprehend communicative behaviours. In essence, I am interested in the reasons behind communicative behaviours, and which aspects of communicative behaviours have reasons and which aspects are taken to be incidental.

In the introduction to the 2017 edited collection Why Gesture?, Kelly et al., argue that there are two ways to understand the “why gesture” question. The ambiguity of “why” was first pointed out by Aristotle. The first interpretation relates to the notion of efficient cause, which can be approached by asking the question “what causes a behaviour?”. The second interpretation relates to the notion of final cause which can be approached by asking the question “what is a behaviour for?”. Taking the concept of walking, an efficient cause is a working metabolic and muscular system and a final cause is health. Kelly et al. make the point that much of the literature on gesture has focussed on the first of these two perspectives (i.e. how the communicative system affords gesture production) rather than the second. Kelly et al. argue that we need to distinguish between purpose of gesture and a consequence of it.

A similar point is made by Dan Dennett in Consciousness Explained when he discusses the ambiguity of reasons. Dennett’s uses the following questions to highlight the difference:

  1. Why are marbles round?
  2. Why are planets round?

In answering (1), most people say something like “in order to roll”. Whereas, in answering (2), most people say something like “as a result of gravity”. The answers to questions (1) & (2) reveal that the walking example does not exhaust the list. To me, it seems there is one answer to question (2) and, while that answer can be more complex (I don’t know enough about the physical properties of planet formation to provide a more complex answer), it doesn’t seem that another can be offered. For example, I could provide a question (2) answer to question (1) and say “as a result of the manufacturing process”. However, I could also provide numerous typical question (1) answers:

  • because they need to roll
  • so that they can’t be stacked
  • in order to make a bearing move smoothly

Further, going back the walking example, while “health” may be a consequence of walking it depends entirely on how the activity is framed. If someone asked me “why did you walk to the kitchen”, my response could be “to get some ice cream”. And therefore one of the consequences of walking is unlikely to be health. The point is that purpose in this sense is particular to the intention of the individual producing the behaviour. In other words, there are at least three questions relevant to the study of gesture during communication:

  • By what mechanisms (neurobiological or cognitive) was a gesture produced?
  • For what reason (communicational or incidental) was a gesture produced?
  • With what consequences was a gesture produced?

My research is interested in all three.