The Orchestration of Bodies and Artifacts in French Family Dinners

Despite de Saussure’s (1959) visionary writings as to the importance of parole (speech) as well as langue (the language system), the linguistics he founded have focused on the system rather than on use. As a result, language has long been studied out of its ecological context, first through written forms characterized by their linearity, then through invented sentences, and finally with a focus on speech, in experimental studies or semi-guided interactions. Even when gestures are integrated into the analyses, environments are most often stripped of objects or other activities whose affordances have a multitude of impacts on their use. Those limits can be viewed as strengths as they have conducted to fruitful research on langue. However, we believe that in order to capture the full complexity of language, new approaches are needed in which all our semiotic resources can be analyzed as they are deployed in their natural habitat involving the orchestration of bodies engaged in a variety of situated activities with a diversity of artifacts. In this paper, we will focus on the use of “manipulative” and “communicative” gestures in an ecological environment. We will first present some of the biases, categorizations, and possible continuities in past analyses of gestures, introduce our theoretical framework and methods and illustrate our approach through detailed analyses of a sequence of video extracts to capture the coordination of speech, gesture, and actions of family members as they are eating and conversing during their daily dinner.