The role of gesture and pragmatics in human communication development : 
evidence for phylogeny ?

Michèle Guidetti
Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail - France

guidetti@univ-tlse2.fr


Children gesture before beginning to speak and go on using gestures as
they grow up and when they become adults (e.g.  when they use
conventional gestures).  They will combine them with speech but they
also can use them alone (i.e.  without speech).  From the beginning,
these gestures accompagnied or not with vocalizations such as pointing,
shaking or nodding express pragmatic functions like requesting or
asserting as will be shown from data collected from children under
three.  The pragmatic aspects of language and communication are based on
the social functions and extra-linguistic conventions which govern their
use.  One pragmatic theory, the speech act theory, allows us precisely
to define the communicative context and to link the forms and the
functions of communication.  The data presented focus on the forms and
functions of conventional gestures and their variations in forms across
functions and ages. 

My position is that to understand the continuity in pragmatic
competencies both in ontogenesis and phylogenesis, we must take into
account the role played by conventional gestures in human communication
development and to refer both to interactionist theories of development
such as Vygotsky's (1934), Bruner's (1975) and to pragmatic theories
such as the speech act theory (Searle & Vanderveken, 1985). 

I will discuss in this paper the questions of continuity in pragmatic
competencies between the prelinguistic and linguistic period and put
forward the hypothesis that if gestures and pragmatics play a so
important role in the emergence of human communication, they could also
have played an important role in the history of our species.  Actually,
concerning gestural communication and regarding the continuity between
the prelinguistic and the linguistic period, ontogenesis and
phylogenesis are linked : if one thinks in terms of discontinuity,
language is a characteristic of homo sapiens only; in this case, the
phylogenetic research of language origins has no sense as other species
don't use it.  If one thinks in terms of continuity, one can speculate
that language may have evolved from manual gestures, this is the
hypothesis of the gestural origins of language (Corballis, 1999).  The
question of the continuity of communication from the phylogenetic point
of view can also be considered through gestural communication and
pragmatics in apes.  These questions are part of the new field of
psychology of evolution but have been noted a long time ago by Vygotsky. 

Through the study of the forms and functions of conventional gestures
and their variations, we see the merits of addressing the issue of
pragmatic skill emergence in the development of communication and
language from both an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic point of view.