Where Language Lives and Breathes: A Special Issue Featuring Signed Language Interaction

Where Language Lives and Breathes:A Special Issue Featuring Signed Language Interaction Alysson Lepeut (bio) and Emily Shaw (bio) Preliminary Thoughts: Social Interaction and Signed Language This special issue of Sign Language Studies spotlights where language lives and breathes—in the body during face-to-face interaction. Though we do not often think of it in this way, language emerges from the body, extending across two (or more) individuals (Stivers 2021) during a sheer diversity of daily communicative events and contexts. While written language renders the body invisible, most interactions, including those that transpire through tactile and kinesthetic channels (Mesch and Raanes 2023), require close monitoring of the other's body for cues that permit discourse to unfold (Goodwin 1981). Because there is no written form to transcribe them, signed language (henceforth, SL) interactions, in particular, force the analyst to contend with all aspects of the embodied-ness of face-to-face communication (see Streeck, Goodwin, and LeBaron 2011). It is this aspect of interaction that is explored in this series of articles. In 2006, Levinson put forward the following hypothesis: Human languages are run by an "interaction engine" with certain universal properties which transcend linguistic divisions. Levinson's Human End Page 493 Interaction Engine (henceforth, HIE) hypothesis proposed that practices like taking turns at talking, establishing and maintaining joint attention, and repairing misunderstandings are all part of a "core universal set of proclivities and abilities that humans bring, by virtue of human nature, to the business of interaction" (Levinson 2006, 40). The HIE hypothesis should apply to all languages (and, crucially, modalities) since these interactional underpinnings developed long before the evolution of language. As an example, Levinson cited an extended interaction he had with a deaf man during which they were able to reach some level of common ground despite not having a shared language between them. Comparing across spoken languages (henceforth, SpLs), recent research on crosslinguistic corpora seems to corroborate the HIE hypothesis; remarkable similarities pertaining to repair and turn-timing across diverse (again, primarily spoken) languages have been uncovered (e.g., Dingemanse and Enfield 2015; Dingemanse, Torreira, and Enfield 2013). As concerns SL research, recent forays into crosslinguistic and crossmodal comparisons of interactive phenomena (including in this volume) have proffered some compelling similarities worthy of further investigation (cf., Dingemanse et al. 2015; Lepeut and Shaw 2022). But this line of inquiry is still new, and there remains much work to be done to promote the understanding of this universal core of human interaction and sociality. Indeed, nearly two decades since the introduction of the HIE hypothesis, Levinson (2023) gave a keynote at the International Pragmatics Association conference, urging scholars to focus attention on the next frontier in social interaction research, his so-called "dark matter" of pragmatics (Levinson in press). The dark matter, as he explains, consists of the human capacity to recognize and quickly interpret the meanings of actions in unfolding talk with relative ease. It is, at present, "dark" because analysts are not yet able to account for the speed and accuracy at which meaning is interpreted during emergent discourse. One of the mechanisms that might illuminate our facility in action-recognition, he suggested, is the multichanneled body from which semiotic content can be expressed both simultaneously and sequentially. Though relatively dark, SpL research (and, more particularly, the field of gesture studies) has explored the behaviors of various articulators (such as the torso, eyes, hands, and feet) with respect to End Page 494 embodied signaling of pragmatic meaning for some time (e.g., Goodwin 1981; Scheflen 1973; Schegloff and Sacks 2002; Kidwell 2013). And while we would like to think that SL research has a leg up on both documenting and investigating multichanneled signing bodies, very little is known about the interactional underpinnings of situated communicative events across different SLs and communicative contexts. One advantage SL scholars have is the custom of extending linguistic analysis to incorporate multiple semiotic channels as semantically and syntactically meaningful. Under this research paradigm, it comes as no surprise that language is expressed via various articulators; the eyebrows, mouth, and torso have been implicated in the grammatical structure of SLs (Hill, Lillo-Martin, and Wood 2018). But, when it comes...