Do gesture communicate? Thirty years after Kendon (1994)

Do gestures communicate? While the obvious answer from a semiotic perspective is yes, a more restricted definition of communication and meaning could lead to a negative response. This paper presents a philosophical argument within the framework of cognitive pragmatics to support the claim that co-speech gestures form an integrated system with speech and are, therefore, linguistic. This position is contrasted with the most influential theoretical approach in cognitive pragmatics, namely Relevance Theory (RT). According to RT, non-verbal cues support linguistic communication by aiding in the derivation of propositional content without being part of it. In contrast, I argue – using examples from semi-controlled face-to-face interactions – that meaning, in a pragmatic sense as speaker’s meaning, emerges from the interplay between propositional and non-propositional content. This interplay is dynamically organized through the involvement of multiple modalities in spoken communication, with gestures often playing a crucial role in shaping both the explicit and implicit meanings of an utterance.