Current conceptions of human language include a gestural component in the communicative event. However, determining how the linguistic and gestural signals are distinguished, how each is structured, and how they interact still poses a challenge for the construction of a comprehensive model of language. This study attempts to advance our understanding of these issues with evidence from sign language. The study adopts McNeill's criteria for distinguishing gestures from the linguistically organized signal, and provides a brief description of the linguistic organization (...) of sign languages. Focusing on the subcategory of iconic gestures, the paper shows that signers create iconic gestures with the mouth, an articulator that acts symbiotically with the hands to complement the linguistic description of objects and events. A new distinction between the mimetic replica and the iconic symbol accounts for the nature and distribution of iconic mouth gestures and distinguishes them from mimetic uses of the mouth. Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth is a salient feature of human language, regardless of whether the primary linguistic modality is oral or manual. Speakers gesture with their hands, and signers gesture with their mouths. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical multimodal analysis of the representation of robots and work in recent commercials. Commercials were selected that represented robots not as tools of industry but as workers. Robots are increasingly endowed with the ability to not only take on the work of human workers engaged in productive, material forms of labour but immaterial, affective forms of labour as well. Rather than being represented as dead capital, the robots instead function within the narratives as living labour and (...) therefore capable of producing value. What is most notable in these commercials is how the demands and conditions of ‘employment’ for the robots echoes neoliberal transformations of work from individuated Fordist forms of production to post-Fordist team-based forms in which workers must increasingly participate in their own management and, therefore by extension, their own subordination. (shrink)