the ‘circumstances’ of gestures: proto-interrogatives and private gestures

New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 288–303

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The ‘circumstances’ of gestures: Proto-interrogativesand private gestures

Cintia RodrıguezUniversidad Autonoma de Madrid, Facultad de Educacion, Cantoblanco 28049, Madrid, Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 4 June 2008

Keywords:GesturesObjectsLanguageInfantsPragmatic turn

E-mail address: [email protected]

0732-118X/$ – see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Ltdoi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2008.04.002

a b s t r a c t

The later Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the social usage of languagehas been very influential in psychology, particularly in languageacquisition research. This move toward a pragmatic positionshould also be applied to gestures in pre-linguistic children andto objects in the everyday contexts of use. The shared ‘forms oflife’ presupposed by language involve pre-linguistic gestures andmaterial ‘things’.Research on early communication has focused on proto-declarativeand proto-imperative gestures. I extend this focus and proposefurther types of gestures: ‘proto-interrogatives’ – in which children‘‘ask’’ for help or regulation from adults, and three types of ‘privategestures’ – ostensive, indexical and symbolic – in which childrenregulate their own behaviour. This diversity of gestures becomesapparent when objects are taken seriously. Wittgenstein’s‘language-games’ necessarily apply to games with objects andgestures as well: social meaning in all cases is emergent withinthe context of these ‘sign games’ and ‘circumstances.’

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1. Introduction

The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity andfamiliarity..One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.we failto be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful (Wittgenstein, 1953/1958,para. 129).

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C. Rodrıguez / New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 288–303 289

Following Wittgenstein and Austin, many psychologists accept the maxim that we ‘‘do things withwords’’ in our everyday life and insist that language cannot be reduced to an ensemble of formal rulesas Chomsky had suggested. To understand how children produce their first words it is necessary toobserve the contexts in which they are used. Primatologists interested in caregiver–ape interactionsin everyday (i.e., non-laboratory) contexts appropriate to both species – also stress the link betweenuse and emergence of linguistic meanings in development:

Linguistic expressions have their uses in the culture, and a close familiarity with the culture mustdevelop in the child or ape before she starts using linguistic means herself within these contexts.What would ‘‘Yeah!’’ mean uttered by someone unacquainted with the human practice of askingand answering questions? What would ‘‘Hi!’’ mean uttered by someone who lacks the experi-ence of greeting each other in human ways, for instance, in the street (Mintz, Segerdahl, &Savage-Rumbaugh, 2007, p. 167).There are no demarcation lines between an ape or child’s language development and their life.Acquiring new words is indistinguishable from being initiated into the domains of life where thewords have their uses (Mintz et al., 2007, p. 174, emphasis in original).

In fact, in the classic text, Apes, language and the human mind, Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, andTaylor (1998) wonder how it is possible for an ape to communicate with humans. To answer thisquestion they draw on the ‘‘social constructionism’’ influential in the UK in the 1970s deriving fromWittgenstein’s (1953) language-games, Bruner work on joint attention, and Andrew Lock’s (1980)work on the guided reinvention of language. According to them, ‘‘a perspective shift becomes inevita-ble when one attempts to look at the processes of language acquisition and enculturation in a develop-ing organism that is an ape rather than a child’’ (Savage-Rumbaugh et al., 1998, p. 199).

A similar perspective shift becomes inevitable if we extend the study of the shared ‘forms of life’involved in the development of linguistic meaning to non-verbal signs and to the objects used ineveryday life around which these signs emerge. Wittgenstein’s influence on developmental studiesof the acquisition of language must, I argue, be extended to pre-linguistic interactions where objectsare very much a part of the infant–adult’s everyday forms of life and have cultural, normative meaningsand human functions. ‘Language-games’ necessarily and importantly involve the use of objects. It is notcommonly accepted in psychology that materiality constitutes a fundamental aspect of the contexts inwhich meanings and expressions emerge; nor is it accepted that, when we speak of words or gestures,their form and function are often inextricable from their material cultural contexts.

I suggest that in Wittgenstein’s assertion (very much in agreement with Vygotsky and partly withPeirce): ‘‘When I think in language, there aren’t meanings going through my mind in addition to theverbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought’’ (1953/1958, para. 329), ‘‘language’’could be read as ‘‘signs’’, as signs are themselves vehicles of thought. Reading Wittgenstein in thismanner would allow us to include the material context in the analysis of joint action with pre-linguisticchildren; that is, it would allow us to develop a framework for approaching the issue of thepre-linguistic child’s relation to things.

Elsewhere (Rodrıguez, 2007a), I pointed out that if any idea has migrated between disciplines in theHuman Sciences, it is the one espoused by Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘‘For a large class of cases –though not for all – in which we employ the word ‘‘meaning’’ it can be defined thus: the meaning ofa word is its use in the language’’ (1953/1958, para. 43). The meaning of this phrase and the limitsthat ‘‘a large class of cases’’ imposes on the relationship between meaning and use (given that themeaning of a word is defined by the use we make of it) has been much debated. It might well bethat, as the Spanish philosopher Jose Hierro (1986) claims, the end of the phrase (‘‘the meaning ofa word is its use in the language’’) has been over-emphasised (p. 276). Part of the answer was givenby Wittgenstein himself when he concluded that ‘‘[.] the meaning of a name is sometimes explainedby pointing to its bearer’’ (1953/1958, para. 43). In my view, this issue has frequently been misunder-stood, especially in discussions of early development before language. It is not enough to assert that themeaning of a name is (sometimes) explained by pointing to what is named. It might be enough in thecase of adults who, from the same cultural parameters, share knowledge about that which is pointed at.If I face an adult who does not speak my language, but is part of the Western world, and say ‘‘cup’’ whilepointing to a cup, it will probably not be hard for this adult to understand what it is that I am pointing

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to and to understand that that is called a ‘‘cup’’. This is because she shares with me a universe of knowl-edge about the conventional uses of this object, a knowledge that is ‘‘underneath’’ words. That is, eventhough this adult may not know that cups are called ‘‘cups’’, he or she lives in a world where cups exist,and hence knows what a cup is for; given this knowledge, an educated adult finds it quite easy to placea name. Therefore, pointing to a cup solves the meaning of the word ‘‘cup’’. Wittgenstein’s affirmation,‘‘the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer’’ (1953/1958) is easily appliedto this situation.

However, it would not be enough to point and name what is being pointed to, if the subject withwhom I am communicating does not even partially segment the world meaningfully in the way thatI do. This is precisely what happens to children during their first year of life – they do not segmentreality in the way adults do. Hence, in order to grasp the public meaning of objects, it is not enoughto just point and name the object. Nor is it sufficient to identify the object pointed at, since the objectis still far too complex. In order for the child to come to understand the function of what we are pointingat, language is not enough. We need to go along with other semiotic systems, such as ostensivegestures, conventional and symbolic uses of objects, etc. That is, we need to take into account alsonon-linguistic semiotic systems that include the use of objects.

In keeping with Ortega’s popular Spanish phrase ‘‘I am myself and my circumstances’’, I will argue inthis paper that all pre-linguistic gestural communication is related to its contexts of use and that the‘circumstances’ of this communication necessarily include the concrete and the material world ofobjects. This means that material objects are not only ‘‘physical’’ (as often assumed in psychology)but also ‘‘social’’ products and a part of social traditions, conventions and uses in everyday life. Objectsare included within normative practices and their uses in everyday life involve not merely ‘‘naturalmeanings’’, but the outcome of shared agreements for use. Wittgenstein ‘‘language-games’’ have tobe extended to ‘‘sign games’’ which include both gestures and objects especially when dealing withpre-linguistic development.

I will first discuss the need for a ‘pragmatic turn’ in relation to objects, including the concrete natureof objects as well as their normative features in cultural use. This pragmatic perspective necessitatesthe re-consideration of children’s pre-linguistic gestures in their actual material social contexts andyields more than the limited number of early intentional gestures hitherto discussed in the literature.I show that there can be several functions in early gestures and argue for the important role of earlyproto-interrogative gestures (where the child seeks adult regulation) and for three types of privategestures (where the child regulates her own behaviour) – ostensive, indexical and symbolic. In privateostensive gestures, the child directs the object toward himself to think about a problem in his ongoingactivity with this same object. A private indexical gesture, involving pointing, does not have a commu-nicative function, but is used to ‘‘think’’ about how to solve a problem (Rodrıguez & Palacios, 2007).A private symbolic gesture is used to think about how to solve a problem with a symbol, that is witha ‘signifier’ representing an absent ‘signified’.

2. Objects in everyday contexts

The logic of the ‘‘linguistic turn’’ adopted by Bruner, which places linguistic meanings in theirpractical contexts of use as products of convention and social rules, is rarely applied to the use ofobjects. The notions of use, consensus and convention remain in the periphery when objects (andsubject–object interaction) become the centre of interest. In mainstream studies of early cognitivedevelopment, objects remain in a ‘‘syntactic’’, culture-free, position, isolated from any form of commu-nication between people, and isolated from any convention of use (see discussion in Rodrıguez, 2006,2007a). Umberto Eco’s (1997, p. 21) complaint that analytic philosophy has not been concerned withour pre-linguistic relation to things applies also to psychology where objects or artefacts are seennot as products of cultural relation or tradition (Costall, 2007), but as merely ‘physical’, directly captur-able, reality. As Costall and Dreier (2006, p. 1) point out:

[A] dualism between people and things has certainly been institutionalised in the very distinc-tion between the natural and human sciences [.] there is great diversity among the humansciences in their focus on objects. At one extreme, archaeology would seem obliged by its


very nature to take into account human tools and artefacts. At the other extreme, mainstreampsychology with its emphasis upon internal mental structures, and commitment to stimulus-response thinking, has presented us with a world not just devoid of things but also of agents.

That is, studies in early child development explicitly or implicitly exclude the material world (theobject) from the ideas of use, of convention, communication and agreement; as if object use wasparadoxically not considered as being part of their social agreements of use (see also Racine, 2004).This omission – the failure to include the object – leaves the status of the relationship betweenlanguage and its circumstances in a very vulnerable position. Language cannot emerge from ‘nowhere’;it is inevitably rooted in practical, normative and cultural practices. By excluding the object from thepragmatics of language, the feasibility of the entire Wittgensteinian project of the ‘‘language-game’’becomes difficult to understand. The later Wittgenstein was probably more concerned by whathappens around language than is usually recognised in the literature. Costall suggests that Wittgen-stein’s argument is that the historical and individual development of language presupposes the priorexistence of shared ‘forms of life’, even if these forms of life are transformed with the advent oflanguage, and new forms of life come into being thanks to it (Alan Costall, personal communication).And things (objects, artefacts), gestures, actions, figure importantly in such forms of life. As Shotterpoints out ‘‘It is their particular and precise living relation to the practical circumstances of their usethat give our words their precise meaning in practice’’ (1995, p. 3).

This pragmatic perspective on objects nicely fits to Wittgenstein notion of ‘‘language-games.’’Wittgenstein is, in fact, often concerned with the polysemy and complexity of ‘‘simple’’ objects andwith the functions of objects (tools) in analogy with the function of words:

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot,glue, nails and screws.- The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects(1953/1958, para. 11).

And also with gestures and words as they relate to normative objects in teaching contexts:

I am explaining chess to someone; and I begin by pointing to a chessman and saying: ‘‘this is theking; it can move like this,.and so on’’. – In this case we shall say: the words ‘‘This is theking’’.are a definition only if the learner already ‘knows what a piece in a game is’. That is, ifhe has already played other games, or has watched other people playing ‘and understood’ –and similar things. Further, only under these conditions will he be able to ask relevantly in thecourse of learning the game: ‘‘What do you call this?’’ – that is, this piece in a game.We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly aska name (1953/1958, para. 31, emphasis in original).

From a semiotic (see Vygotsky, 1934/1984) and pragmatic (Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005) perspective onobjects, signs or semiotic systems are first tools of communication and later on in development becometools of thought. Following this approach, objects are defined through their functions, that is to say, interms of their uses in everyday life, as ‘‘something that is of use for something’’ (Barthes, 1985, p. 251).Conventions are at work not only in dyadic communicative contexts of subject–subject interaction, butalso in relation to objects and their uses in the complexities of everyday life. From this perspective, inorder to understand the development of gestures – ostensive, indexical and symbolic – and in order tounderstand conventional and symbolic uses of objects, we need to understand the material world andhow objects become ‘‘signs of their use’’, that is, signs of their normative uses. Objects are not, as isoften assumed (e.g., in ‘theory of mind’ research) exempt from consensus and convention and simplytransparent (Rodrıguez & Moro, 2008).

Sometimes psychologists accept, at a certain level of discourse, that objects (artefacts) are social, butin practice objects are usually treated as part of the ‘‘non-social’’ world, as being outside of theboundary of the dyadic ‘‘social world’’. Recently we pointed out this paradox to Michael Tomasello(see Rodrıguez, 2006). His position about objects as social products is well-known. Specifically, hesuggests that the tools and artefacts of a culture have an ‘‘ideal’’ dimension that produces a:

set of affordances for anyone with the appropriate kinds of social-cognitive.skills..the childcomes to see some cultural objects and artefacts as having, in addition to their natural


sensory-motor affordances, another set of what we might call intentional affordances based onher understanding of the intentional relations that other persons have with that object orartefact – that is, the intentional relations that other persons have to the world through theartefact (Tomasello, 1999, p. 84–85).

It is not clear, however, what Tomasello means by the cultural dimension of objects when he separatesthe child’s learning ‘on their own’ about objects from learning under the influence of others:

the individual line of cognitive development (what Vygotsky calls the ‘‘natural’’ line) concernsthose things the organism knows and learns on its own without the direct influence of otherpersons or their artefacts, whereas the cultural line of cognitive development concerns thosethings the organism knows and learns that are derived from acts in which it attempts to seethe world through the perspective of other persons (including perspectives embodied inartefacts). I must emphasize that this is a somewhat idiosyncratic way of conceptualisingcultural inheritance and development, much narrower than the conceptualizations of mostcultural psychologists. I am not counting as cultural inheritance those things that the organismknows and learns on its own from its particular cultural setting or ‘‘habitus’’, for example, the childindividually learning about the ways houses are laid out in her local environment. (Tomasello,1999, p. 51–52, emphasis added).

It is difficult to understand why Tomasello excludes from the cultural heritage what an organismknows from his particular ‘‘habitus’’, such as the distribution of houses in the street (see discussionin Rodrıguez, 2006). Nicole Everaert-Desmedt’s (2000) interpretation seems preferable. FollowingHjelmslev and Greimas on topological semiotics, she considers space as a meaningful system thatcan be analysed in terms of human activity. Space is defined by the use that people make of it or bythe ‘‘doing’’ that takes place in it, all of which is influenced by social logic and relationships(Everaert-Desmedt, 2000, p. 240). Houses and their distribution are part of all that ‘‘human doing’’.Perhaps Wittgenstein would also agree with this given his interest in architecture and in design(Monk, 1990/1994).

Object permanence is another good example of the neglect of culture–object relations in psychol-ogy. Since Piaget (1937) considered this important issue in early development – without permanencethere is no thought – many studies have dealt with it. The real object, on which the child had to act inthe classic Piagetian studies, has, more recently, often been substituted by a moving or even ‘jumping’image of an object, abstracted from a context and projected onto a screen. Spelke’s studies areexamples of this substitution. The object is substituted by the representation of an object or evena dot. This is far from what we would normally consider to be an object (see Gibson & Pick, 2000;Rodrıguez, 2006), and far from how objects behave in real contexts in everyday life. It is temptinghere to say of objects projected onto screens: ‘‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’’ (this is not a pipe), recallingMagritte’s reaction to seeing his painting of a pipe (Everaert-Desment, 2006). After all, you can smokewith the object pipe, but not with its representation. Rather than calling jumping dots ‘‘objects’’, weshould at least have the wisdom of calling things by their names. The importance of the contextualand canonical aspects of objects for object permanence tasks (Sinha, 1983) suggests that such abstrac-tion is ill-conceived.

3. Gestures in their contexts of use

We are focussing here on gestures from the point of view of their functions in their contexts of use,that is to say, taking into account their circumstances. Taking into account the circumstances of a gesturemeans to see it together with the part of the world (object, concrete situation) to which the gesturerelates. Communication never takes place in a vacuum. If this is true of adult communication, it iseven truer of communication that involves children in their first or second year of life because ofthe dominant role of gestures (ostensive, indicative, symbolic), objects and actions in their communi-cation. Gestures, especially when produced by children before the acquisition of language, take place ina concrete world. They cannot be understood outside of the concrete circumstances surrounding theirproduction, outside the normative properties of the objects toward which they are directed, by


ignoring the everyday uses of objects (Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005; Rodrıguez & Moro, 1998; Wilkins,2003). The meaning of a gesture is a function of (a) the gesture itself (which can be ostensive, indexical,symbolic, etc.), (b) the concrete object or situation involved with the gesture and (c) the circumstances ofthe gesture linked to the precise object use. Whether the object is a spoon or a pencil, for example,makes a big difference to the pragmatic consequences of an ostensive or indexical gesture, and whethera point is directed to the moon or to a glass of wine affects the meaning of the intention as well as theintention that the other can grasp. Recognition of the intimate connection between gesture, object andcircumstances is what I call a pragmatic turn to the object.

These different uses of gestures related to objects fit very well with my reading of Wittgenstein’sstatement, ‘‘When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’,.and try to grasp theessence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in thelanguage-game which is its original home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphys-ical to their everyday use’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953/1958, para. 116). Darwin’s reference to his one-year oldson’s use of gestures to ‘explain his wishes’ demonstrates nicely the necessary interconnection betweengesture, object and its current and previous circumstances: ‘‘he picked up a bit of paper and giving it tome pointed to the fire, as he had often seen and liked to see paper burnt’’ (1877, p. 293, emphasis added).

Gestures are complex cultural products, and the world being indicated by them (as with indexicalsigns), or shown (as with ostensive gestures), or represented (as with symbolic gestures/uses ofobjects) is also cultural and has necessarily to be taken into account when trying to understand theirmeanings. Gallagher (2004, p. 211) takes this line in the following statement:

If, for example, you see my right arm, with open hand, drop through the air, but nothing else thatwould provide the context for what it means, then it could mean many different things. It mightbe part of a gesture that means hello or goodbye; it might mean get out of here [.] Without thecontext, my intention is simply not clear to anyone who would be watching me, or trying tointeract with me (quoted by Racine & Carpendale, 2007, p. 6).

If this is true when dealing with adults, this is true even more so in the case of early communicationprior to the acquisition of language (Guidetti, 2003), at a point when children use non-linguistic semioticsystems. We understand, come to know things going on in the world, through the social practices inwhich we are embedded. These social practices are not only Wittgenstein’s ‘‘language-games’’, butthey are also ‘‘sign games’’. That is, other semiotic systems and their circumstances are also involved(see Rodrıguez & Moro, 1998). Canfield (1995) arrives at a very similar conclusion. Building on Wittgen-stein’s idea that language is an extension of action, he proposes that there are ‘‘action patterns thatunderlie the earliest uses of language’’ (Canfield, 1995, p. 197). He refers to these patterns as ‘‘proto-language games,’’ thereby putting Wittgenstein’s ideas into a developmental context. Furthermore,he asks an extremely important question: ‘‘How does the child learn those patterns?’’ (Canfield, 1995,p. 197). According to him, a proto-language game is no language-game; it is a stage that precedeseven the simplest symbol use. The proto-language game stage which consists of ‘‘those routines ofinteraction out of which develop, by modification, the simple language-games’’ (Canfield, 1993, p.173), is easily ‘‘overlooked, and its importance easily underestimated’’ (Canfield, 1995, p. 198). Includedin ‘‘proto-language games’’ must also be the objects involved in these communicative routines.

4. Gestures, objects and intentional communication

Since the work of Bates, Camaioni, and Volterra (1975), two communicative functions of gesturesthat emerge prior to the acquisition of language have been established in the literature: the imperativefunction and the declarative function. When a child produces a proto-imperative gesture he solicits theintervention of an adult to get something done in the world. When a child produces a proto-declarativegesture (by showing an object to the adult, for instance) he is communicating to the other informationabout the world, but is not trying to act upon the world. Bates et al. summarized their findings (withina Piagetian framework) as follows:

.three kinds of tools develop during cognitive stage 5, the use of objects to operate on objects,the use of human agents to obtain or operate on objects, and the use of the object itself to


operate on human attention. In Piagetian terms, then, we suggest that stage 5 causal develop-ments are the prerequisites for what we have called the illocutionary stage of communication(Bates et al., 1975, p. 219).

We recognize here the solitary Piagetian child (Piaget, 1936). Piaget introduced conventions only atthe very end of sensorimotor development, with language. He never introduced conventions withother pre-linguistic signs such as symbols. This emphasis on the solitary child is evident also in Bateset al.’s conceptualisation: even when these authors are exploring the precursors of language their focusis on the individual infant’s actions and intentions (Bruner, 1983; Rodrıguez, 2006). This emphasis onthe individual infant is at odds with their emphasis on the social nature of Speech Acts:

Austin stressed the inadequacy of traditional analyses of sentences into propositions which musteither be true or false. Instead, he suggested that some sentences are not descriptions of events,but events in themselves – acts that are carried out when a sentence is used (e.g. a promise ismade, a marriage is performed). In fact, Austin claimed, every time any sentence is used, threekinds of speech acts are carried out: locutions, illocutions and perlocutions (Bates et al.,1975, p. 205).

When both the proto-imperative and the proto-declarative functions emerge at the end of the firstyear it means that children are capable of communicating intentionally with others about something inthe world. Very often this is seen as the beginning of triadic interactions. Before that, communicationinvolves only two terms: subject-subject; it is only dyadic (Hobson, 2007; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call,Behne, & Moll, 2005; Trevarthen, 1982, 1990). However, I have stressed (Rodrıguez, 2006, 2007a)that triadic interactions cannot be reduced to situations in which the child is already capable of inten-tional communication. The reason is simple: when looking at development, things have to be put intoa developmental (historical) perspective. If the ‘‘first’’ triadic context considered as such is the onewhere the child is capable of intentional communication, then, from where does this complex abilitycome? From which previous joint actions – adult–baby–object – (not only joint attention) does theability to communicate with others intentionally at the end of the first year arise? When dealingwith development, we need always to try to understand where things come from (in keeping withCanfield’s (1993, 1995) question regarding proto-language games). For that reason, we have beenworking with ‘‘the magic number three’’, that is with triadic interactions. The unit of analysis isadult-baby-object and it is the adult who introduces the child into a world of complex practiceslong before the child is able to take the initiative in sharing the same level of meanings with others(Rodrıguez, 2006; Rodrıguez & Moro, 2008).

Some time ago (Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005; Rodrıguez & Moro, 1998), we pointed out a paradox inthese social approaches. Despite the ‘‘countless different kinds of use of sentences’’ proposed byWittgenstein (1953/1958, see below), or the 17 uses of language proposed by Austin (1962/1990), Bateset al. (1975) concluded that the first intentional gestures produced by children (at the end of the firstyear) could be reduced to two: proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives. Our interpretation of thisreduction focused on the strong solitary flavour (strongly influenced by Piaget) of their position, theirneglect of bi-directional triadic communication (adult–child and child–adult) as well as the failure toinclude the object in all the complexity of its cultural use (see discussion in Rodrıguez, 2006). In otherwords, Bates et al.’s involvement with the pragmatics characteristic of the ‘‘linguistic turn’’ (promotedby Wittgenstein in Cambridge and by Austin in Oxford) did not include the object. Bates et al.’s objectwas simply the ‘‘physical world’’, evident, culture-free, separate from communication and from anyform of culture, convention or public rules of use. And since then, little has changed in early develop-ment with respect to these issues. However, it is crucial that we do in fact consider the object if we wantto understand what happens in ontogenesis.

In the next two sections, I will discuss four types of gestures which accomplish several functionsother than proto-declarative and proto-declarative. I will argue that it is impossible to understandthe meaning of these gestures if the object and its circumstances are not seriously taken into account.

First, I will discuss a communicative gesture involving an object with an interrogative function: theproto-interrogative. Then, I will discuss three kinds of private gestures involving the uses of objects:ostensive, pointing and private symbolic gestures. These private gestures, I suggest, appear once theinitial external communicative functions of gestures become internally oriented (when they become


tools of communication with the self, i.e., tools of thought). Except for private pointing gestures (seeDelgado, Gomez, & Sarria, 2006), there is no reference to these gestures in the literature.

5. Gestures with a communicative function: the proto-interrogatives

When a child produces a proto-interrogative gesture, he ‘‘asks’’ with his ostensive gesture ina concrete context or circumstance. He provides the adult with a regulatory function (see Moro &Rodrıguez, 1991; Rodrıguez, 2006, p. 231; Rodrıguez, 2007b). The answer given by the adult influences,in one way or other, his ongoing concrete activity, his ongoing concrete use of the object.

If we look again at Darwin (1877), we find that he was interested in the interrogatives produced by hisson: ‘‘I was particularly struck with the fact that when asking for food by the word mum he gave to it [.]a most strongly marked interrogatory sound at the end’’ (p. 293). He says later on: ‘‘The interrogatorysound which my child gave to the word mum when asking for food is especially curious; for if anyonewill use a single word or a short sentence in this manner, he will find that the musical pitch of his voicerises considerably at the close’’. He concludes these considerations by saying ‘‘I have elsewhere maintainedthat before man used articulated language, he uttered notes in a true musical scale [.]’’ (1877, p. 293).

When the child uses a proto-interrogative, that is, ‘‘asks’’ the adult something with an ostensivegesture (see below, Observation 1) or through raised vocal pitch, as in Darwin’s example, the regulatoryfunction offered to the adult is far more evident than in the case of proto-declaratives or proto-imperatives. In the latter (at least as described in the literature), the child’s interaction with the adultemerges from a mature place, from a position ‘already taken’. With proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives, the ongoing interaction is not negotiated: the child is simply seen to give to the adulta place as agent to operate on objects (proto-imperative), or to use objects in order to operate on adultattention (proto-declarative). With proto-interrogatives the communicative situation is very different.When the child is ‘‘asking’’ with a gesture, it is because he wants and expects to get a regulation orguidance back from the adult in relation to his ongoing unfinished action, use, or practice. What isstressed here is the ongoing activity, the process. A proto-interrogative gesture is a question in action;it is only a step in a communicative situation related to a certain practice upon the object. Depending onthe answer given by the adult, the child does this or that. The answer provided by the adult depends onthe type of thing being ‘‘asked’’ by the child. This means that is not possible to ignore this aspect of thecircumstances, that is, the type of object about which the ‘‘question’’ is being ‘‘asked’’, nor the precisemoment in the interaction which concerns the use being made of the object. The child is seeking in-terpersonal regulation about the use of objects and the material world. This then leads to greater clarityabout others’ intentions for the child’s actions and for the use and meaning of objects. The materialworld then has to be taken into account seriously in its cultural complexity, in its polysemy of everydayuse. To define objects as ‘‘the physical world’’ implies a form of reductionism that ignores the specificityand the extreme complexity of their forms of use. When we ‘‘read’’ objects in the complex contexts ofcommunication between people, we realize that even with a single object many different things can beunderstood and meanings conveyed. Objects have public rules of use. Without this normative view, itwould be impossible to understand others’ intentions; it would be impossible to communicate.

I will now describe an observation of triadic interaction (child–adult–object) to illustrate the use ofproto-interrogative gestures by children. Julia, a 13-month-old girl, is ‘‘answering’’ her mother’s questionwith another question. What seems striking is the moment of her action upon the object when she seeksfrom her mother a regulatory function. This happens in the context of a conventional use of a complexobject which Julia sometimes accomplishes very well. When the task becomes difficult, she producesthe proto-interrogative gesture toward her mother with the object about her unfinished action.

Observation 1 Julia (1;1). Duration: 13 s. Julia produces a proto-interrogative gesture with an objecttoward her mother (i.e., she ‘‘asks’’ her mother to regulate her ongoing activity withan object) when it becomes evident to her that (1) she knows the conventional useof the object she is using, but (2) she has difficulties in accomplishing it.

Julia is sitting on the floor. Her mother is sitting behind her. This is why, if Julia wants to look ather mother, she has to turn back her head deeply. Before them there is a van and 6 differentlysized blocks that have to be inserted into the van. Each block can be introduced only into its


particular hole. This feature makes the use difficult for a 13 month old child even if she knowsthat ‘‘the blocks go into the van through the holes’’. The difficulty consists in knowing whichblock goes into which hole.

Julia changes the block from one hand to the other, her mother says ‘‘now, this one, come on!’’ Julialooks to her mother, then to the block she is holding, and next directs the block toward the van,trying to put it in an incorrect hole. Her mother says: ‘‘where does it go this one?’’, while Julia keepstrying to put the block into an incorrect hole. Then Julia stops her activity and holds up the block inthe air indicating toward the hole (an ostensive gesture with the block she was trying unsuccessfullyto introduce into the hole), turns her head back toward her mother behind her, looks toward her, says‘‘taaa’’. Then her mother says ‘‘not theeere. Where, where does it go this one?’’ Julia then changesthe block from place to place several times until she finds the right hole. At the same time her mothersays ‘‘there, there, there, there, there, there, there’’ (Rodrıguez, 2006; Rodrıguez & Moro, 1998).

We interpret Julia’s ostensive gesture with the block as having an interrogative function because sheshows the object to her mother when she has a problem and knows that she has got a problem. Herdifficulty is linked to the cultural use of this particular object. She is giving her mother regulatory powerover her ongoing, unfinished activity with this particular object. She holds the block in the air just beforetrying to introduce it through the hole in the van. If, say, instead of showing the block at this precisemoment, she had shown it without any link to this particular use, then our interpretation of her gesturewould have been very different. From our point of view, it is very important to consider the pragmaticsof the object – with its peculiarities and particular moments of use – to be able to conclude anythingabout the child’s communicative intentions when producing a particular gesture. If we had notconsidered all these concrete, specific circumstances, the interrogative function of Julia’s gesture wouldprobably not have appeared to us as an interrogative.

Concerning the status of the interrogation in linguistics, Umberto Eco (1973/1988) says that linguis-tics has not classified interrogative intonations as signs. These forms are studied as prosodic signs orsuprasegmental traits (p. 68). Maybe this ‘‘lack of status’’ of the interrogative in mainstream linguisticshas also led to its ‘‘invisibility’’ in studies of the gestures produced by pre-linguistic children. Manyimportant topics in pre-linguistic communication have migrated from the field of linguistics (thetradition begun by Bates, Camaioni and Volterra being an excellent example). In any case, there hasbeen a lack of attention to this extremely important issue. After all, as Vygotsky (1984/1996) wouldsay, adults regulate and guide children’s behaviour from birth, so it is important to determine whenthe child ‘‘knows’’ and ‘‘actively seeks’’ this regulatory role of guidance from the adult.

In previous work (Rodrıguez, 2006), I considered the possibility that children’s behaviour in the well-known visual cliff situation (when children cross a cliff once they have checked the expression of theirmothers, Gibson & Pick, 2000; Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985) was in fact a proto-interrogative.Maybe the difference between the behaviour in the cliff situation and our observation (1) is that in thelatter Julia takes the initiative and actively ‘‘asks’’ the adult to adopt a regulatory position concerning herongoing practice with a particular object, whereas in the cliff situation the child is checking but notexplicitly asking the adult to regulate her actions. But this is precisely what happens: the adult takesa regulatory function concerning the ‘‘safety’’ of the cliff and the child responds to it.

Wittgenstein, once again, was not indifferent to similar issues about language, as is reflected in hisquestion, ‘‘how many kinds of sentence are there?’’ His well-known answer is, ‘‘Say assertion, question,and command? – There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘‘symbols’’,‘‘words’’, ‘‘sentences’’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types oflanguage, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and getforgotten’’ (1953/1958, para. 23, emphasis in the original). He makes clear what he means by language-game: ‘‘Here the term language-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking oflanguage is part of an activity, or of a form of life’’ (1953/1958, para. 23, italics in the original).

5.1. Private gestures have a self-regulatory function

In socio-cultural psychology, there is a long tradition that has dealt with the reflexivity of signs aspsychological tools once they are interiorized (Smolka, 2004). The case of language is paradigmatic.


Language has a double function: first, it is a tool of communication, and later on it is a tool of thought.Once language is interiorized from its external manifestation, then it becomes a tool of thought witha self-regulatory function. Nevertheless, it is less popular in the socio-cultural tradition to considerpre-linguistic signs as tools of thought with a self-regulatory function. The reason for this is verysimple: consciousness is semiotically mediated (Vygotsky, 1934/1985), but most of the time, languageis considered to be the semiotic system par excellence in the socio-cultural tradition.

In this paper, I will challenge this assumption, as I consider that self-regulation is not only a charac-teristic of language, but also of gestures. Private gestures are half-way between their original commu-nicative function and an interiorization of thought. When gestures (which are intentional signs)become private, they shift their orientation: although they take place outside, they are not externallyoriented toward action or communication, but internally oriented, oriented to the self. They havea function of self-regulation, a function of thought. In this paper we will focus on three private gesturesbefore language: ostensive private gestures, indexical private gestures (Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005;Rodrıguez & Palacios, 2007) and symbolic private gestures. Private gestures are public – they take placein the world, can be seen and their roots in ontogenesis are social. However, they have a self-regulatoryrather than an other-regulatory function. Perhaps Wittgenstein would accept the analogy betweenchildren producing private gestures and his thought experiment about people, who ‘‘[.] could onlythink aloud. (As there are people who can only read aloud)’’ (Wittgenstein, 1953/1958, para. 331).

As is commonly known, the later Wittgenstein is explicit in his rejection of the ontogenetic primacyof ‘‘private language’’. The reader might be wondering, therefore, what exactly I mean by privategestures and how this relates to Wittgenstein’s criticism of private language. Racine and Carpendale(2007) point out that Wittgenstein’s private language argument ‘‘is a critique of the possibility ofa language that is necessarily private because the words in the language acquire their meaning throughreferring to private inner sensations that are not accessible to others’’ (p. 5). I agree. What I mean by‘‘private gestures’’ involves, within a Vygotskian framework, a ‘‘second’’ level of construction, whengestures with a public meaning and having been learnt in contexts of joint action, start to becomeinteriorized. In this sense, I follow Vygotsky’s suggestion that signs are first external tools of commu-nication and only after that, once they have become interiorized, are they tools of thought. Maybe thereis no need to refer here to the classical debate between Vygotsky (1934/1985) and Piaget (1923/1976)concerning the place and the developmental meaning of what they called ‘‘egocentric language’’ (seeMontero, 2006). Wittgenstein’s writings are more consistent with Vygotsky’s position. In fact, severalinterpreters of Wittgenstein have suggested that his approach to language is consistent with Vygot-sky’s (see discussion in Shotter, 1995; Williams, 1999).

5.1.1. Private ostensive gesturesImportantly different from the proto-interrogative gestures where the child gives the adult

a regulatory function (see Observation 1 above) are private ostensive gestures in which the childgestures toward herself. In certain contexts, when the child is familiar with a particular conventionaluse of a complex object but has problems achieving it, instead of continuing to act upon the object, shestops her ongoing activity and directs the object toward herself in order to think about how to solve theproblem (Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005, 2008; Rodrıguez, 2007a; Rodrıguez & Palacios, 2007). With privategestures the child is trying to solve the problem herself. The regulation is not external anymore butinternal. The object is used as signifier and as signified: the child uses the object as a signifier to under-stand its ‘‘problematic’’ meaning (signified).1 The object itself is used to think about the public practiceof the object (see Observation 2 below), about how to solve the problem that is an obstacle to itsconventional use. The child directs her action not toward the world, but toward herself to providea solution when ‘‘something does not work properly’’. What is striking here is that the meanings the

1 In the already classical example given by Eco (1992), the situation is much more complex than that which I am describinghere with pre-linguistic children. Think of an adult showing (an ostensive gesture) a cigarette box of ‘‘Gauloises’’ (as signifier fora class of objects to which it itself belongs) to a friend when the latter is going out to buy something. This gesture may have themeaning of ‘‘buy some cigarettes’’, or ‘‘buy some Gauloises’’. In the second case the person would need to add some denotativeconvention such as pointing to the trademark. If the circumstances were different, he might need to clarify whether showingthe box means ‘‘box of cigarettes’’ or simply ‘‘cigarettes’’.


child is using are analogous to those previously enacted in communicative contexts of use. Theseprivate gestures are paradigmatic and extremely interesting because thought, something that essen-tially happens inside, can be seen outside, in action. It takes place in an external space.

To examine the emergence of private ostensive gestures, we followed Nerea, a girl with Downsyndrome, from when she was 12 months old to when she was 18 months old. We videotaped herat home in a context of triadic interaction (girl–object–mother). We were interested in the acquisitionof the conventional use of a complex object by the girl. A commonly used toy served as the object.Specifically, the toy consisted of six rings of different sizes that can be placed over and around a verticalpost. The biggest ring goes at the bottom, the smallest at the top.

I am not going to develop in detail what we found in this study as it has been reported elsewhere(see Rodrıguez & Palacios, 2007). When Nerea was 18 months old, the ostensive gestures emerged insituations in which she had a good understanding of the conventional use of the object but was facingpractical difficulties. Instead of asking for help with a proto-imperative gesture, or delegating a regula-tory function to her mother, as happens with the proto-interrogative gestures, she used private osten-sive gestures to regulate her own behaviour. These gestures, in turn, are related to the everydaypractices of the object. In this sense, being private implies a ‘‘second level’’, something that emergesonce the child possesses knowledge of the public and social meaning of the object. It is in relation tothat social practice that she produces the gestures with the object, to help herself to achieve a goalpreviously achieved either by her mother or by both of them acting conjointly. Here is an example:

Observation 2 Nerea, 18 months. Duration: 10 sc. Private use of the object (ostensive gesture) witha self-reflexive function. Nerea studies the position of the object before using the objectconventionally.

The mother says: ‘‘I’m not clapping until you do it properly’’, pointing toward the place on the postwhere the rings have to be placed. Meanwhile, Nerea, who has taken the ring, keeps it in her hand,looking at it very attentively while turning it around as she manipulates it, exchanging it betweenhands 7 times. After 5 seconds of these private ostensive intentional gestures of self-reflexivemanipulation, she finally places the ring onto the post. The mother applauds and so does Nereawhile looking to both parents for approval. Yet although she lets go of the ring she has placedonto the post, she takes it off again when she applauds (Rodrıguez & Palacios, 2007, p. 188).

In this observation, Nerea produces a private ostensive gesture, indicated by the stopping of her ownaction. She is separating the ‘‘figure’’ of her own private ostensive gesture from the ‘‘ground’’ of theprocess of her conventional use of the object, and in doing so she presents it toward herself as an‘‘object of reflection’’. She thinks with the ring, about the ring. The private ostensive gesture is intentionaland must be included within the larger context of the conventional use that she cannot entirelymanage. The conventional use is the level expected by the mother when she evaluates the result:and she does not consider Nerea’s action finished (‘‘I’m not clapping’’) until the goal is completelyaccomplished (‘‘until you do it properly’’). Here, the self-reflexive nature of the gesture is stressedbecause she turns the ring around seven times. Nerea thinks with the ostensive signs she hassegmented (‘discretised’). This constitutes a true act of becoming aware, a grasp of consciousnessthat emerges from the signs related to object uses she has previously learnt with adults.

5.1.2. Private indexical gesturesThe observation we describe next (3) takes place in the same session as observation 2. Nerea has been

using a series of private ostensive gestures. She then starts to produce a series of private indexical gestures.In this observation, these gestures are immediate (e.g., touching the thing being indicated), and multiple(more than a single instance) pointing gestures occur in the same context (that is, in the context of havingdifficulty in accomplishing the conventional act of putting the rings onto the post).

Observation 3 Nerea 18 months. Duration: 17 s. Private pointing gesture with a self-reflexive function.Nerea indicates to herself the place on the post where the ring should be put when beingconventionally used

2 Delfunctiofrom Bavious c

3 In hwith hicould bwhich


For the first time Nerea points with one hand towards the post while keeping hold of the ring inthe other. She points to the post without making any eye contact with her mother or father. Herfather says, ‘‘drop it, come on.’’ She starts a movement to bring the ring to the post. ‘‘Come on,put it on, put it on,’’ says her father again. Nerea withdraws the ring, and then points to the postagain 9 times and touching the post as she points (thus the pointing gesture is multiple andimmediate). At the same time, she keeps the ring in her other hand ready to be used in a canonicalway. While Nerea is insistently pointing to the post, both her mother and father say almost inunison ‘‘there, there, well done, there you have to put it on, well done, yes’’. The mother alsopoints to the post once only with Nerea, thereby emphasising the series of private pointinggestures that Nerea was making. Once she has finished her own pointing gesture, Nerea directsthe ring towards the post, places it correctly, but does not finish by letting it drop onto it. Finally,with her mother’s help, she drops it when it is above the post. Then all of them, Nerea, motherand father, applaud (Rodrıguez & Palacios, 2007, p. 190).

When Nerea points toward the post before placing the ring over it, she is self-regulating her own be-haviour, using the same semiotic mediators previously employed by her mother. The difference is thatwhen she was younger, before 18 months of age, the regulation was always external, whereas now sheproduces her own pointing gestures which have a self-regulatory function.2 She provides herself withthe objectives as well as the means to reach them. Here, we clearly see the path from external regula-tion, in which the relevant adjustments are made by the adult, toward self-regulation where the childemploys the same semiotic instruments which were previously used by the other person. Immediatelyfollowing this observation, Nerea produces a series of eight sequences similar to observation 3 in whichprivate pointing gestures (immediate and multiple) are particularly evident. These are always related tothe conventional use of the object, which she then tries to carry out. That is, the pointing gestures shedirects to the post anticipate her subsequent conventional use of the object; Nerea seems to know whathas to be done, but has problems with how to do it.

5.1.3. Private symbolic gesturesA third category of private gestures used with a self-regulatory function can be called private

symbolic gestures. Once again these private gestures, in the symbolic modality, are tools used by thechild to think about a situation. A symbolic private gesture is neither an ostensive sign (see Observation2) nor an indexical sign (see Observation 3 with the pointing gesture), but a symbolic sign where thething being symbolized is absent. In our case, these private symbolic gestures involve a symbolic use ofan object.

One thing must be clarified here. When I refer to symbolic uses of objects (or to symbolic gestures) Ido not mean symbolic play (as is most common in the literature, see Rodrıguez, 2006; Rodrıguez &Moro, 2002 for discussion). Bonnet (1983) in her classic work refers to symbols as ‘‘the ability toknow facts that are not registered by the senses’’ (p. 329). She distinguishes different levels of symbolicdevelopment: 8–9 months; 12–13 months and 17–18 months (Bonnet, 1980). Some of her examplescan be seen as precursors of what we call private symbolic gestures.3

Private symbolic gestures (similar to ostensive and private pointing gestures) take place in theexternal world although they are directed toward the self, showing their origin in communication.They have the function of thought. The novelty now is that the thing signified is absent, the symbolserves as its substitute in the present, and becomes the (external) tool of thought. It might be saidthat with the help of these symbolic gestures children are able to think ‘‘externally’’ when they do

gado et al. (2006), very much in agreement with Vygotsky, also argue that pointing gestures have first a communicativen and only later when they become private, accomplish a self-regulatory function. These authors distance themselvestes et al. (1975) as regards the origins of the first private pointing gestures, a distancing that is in keeping with our pre-

riticism of Bates et al.’s strong Piagetian roots (Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005).er beautiful book L’enfant et le symbolique (1980), Bonnet reinterprets many of the classical observations made by Piaget

s three children. She introduces refreshing examples in an interesting longitudinal analysis of symbols, some of whiche reinterpreted as private symbolic gestures. However, the normative (Wittgensteinian) view of objects and their usesI am arguing for is absent – or at least not explicit – in Bonnet’s work.


not have yet words to use. Later in development, children use gestures in addition to speech. Accordingto Susan Goldin-Meadow (1999), ‘‘gesture provides speakers with another representational format inaddition to speech, one that can reduce cognitive effort and serve as a tool for thinking’’ (p. 428, empha-sis added).

Observation 4 illustrates what we mean by private symbolic gestures.

Observation 4 Alejandro (1;4). Duration: 25 s. Alejandro produces a private symbolic gesture witha cigarette lighter when he blows toward an absent flame as a means of thinking ofthe lighter’s conventional use – i.e., to produce a flame.

Alejandro is at home with his father and an older cousin. Although they are together, each one isconcentrating on different activities. Then Alejandro takes a lighter and blows at where the flamewould be if the lighter were lit. He then looks attentively at the absent flame – i.e., the place wherethe flame should be. Alejandro then repeats the same actions, both blowing and looking attentivelyat the absent flame. His father sees what Alejandro is doing with the lighter, then takes it fromAlejandro’s hand, saying to him: ‘‘let’s see, blow here, blow’’, holding the lighter up to the child.Alejandro then looks at the flame, blows it and it goes off. The father lights the lighter once againsaying: ‘‘blow’’ and Alejandro blows again. The father says ‘‘well done, you have done it verywell’’ (Rodrıguez, 2006).

When I first interpreted this behaviour, I concentrated on the symbol production of the child and onhow symbols are grounded in rules related to communication, conventional uses of objects, and soon (Rodrıguez, 2006). Without this link, it seemed to me, it was difficult to interpret and understandwhat the child was doing. With this interpretation, I distanced myself from Riviere’s classic interpre-tation of his 18-month-old son Pablo’s well-known symbol, where he blows at an absent flame show-ing his desire for his father to light the lighter for him (see Riviere, 1984, 1990, 1997). According toRiviere (following Piaget’s views on symbols), Pablo’s symbol was a truly individual production (seediscussion in Rodrıguez, 2007b). At the time, I did not see that Alejandro’s symbolic use of the lighterhad first of all a private function: he was self-directing the symbolic use of the object, ‘‘to tell himselfwith a signifier what can be done with a lighter, i.e., how a lighter is used’’, bringing into the present,with his blowing, the absent flame. Now it becomes clear that this symbol has neither an imperativefunction (as Alejandro is not looking to his father for help) nor a declarative function. The same can besaid concerning an eventual interrogative function. This lack of contact with the two other personspresent in the situation suggests to us that he is thinking externally about something absent withthe help of a private symbol. The fact that he concentrates and looks into the direction of where theflame would have been is another sign of its internally directed function.

Recently Liszkowski, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2007) have argued that children one year of age areable to understand others’ intentions and need for information. They come to this conclusion becausechildren point longer to a doll ‘‘to correct’’ an adult who is looking somewhere else (where nothing ishappening), than when the adult is looking to the doll. They also argue that these children point towardabsent referents. Liszkowski et al. are opening the door to new functions of gestures (as Delgado et al.,2006, with respect to private pointing gestures), splitting the declarative into two (informative as wellas sharing). This interpretation is challenged by Southgate, van Maanen, and Csibra (2007) whosuggest, interestingly, that perhaps the apparent ‘proto-informative pointing’ might have an interrog-ative function. Although it is not possible to make a conclusive argument here, it seems to me that thistype of gesture may not only have interrogative components but also symbolic components as thething being pointed is not present, but instead being represented by the gesture (see discussion on earlysymbolic productions in Rodrıguez, 2006).

Observation 5 (below) is another illustration of a private symbolic gesture. A 13-month-old girl’sopening of her own mouth serves as a signifier of a toy’s mouth that she is looking at and manipulatingat the same time. The difference between the private gesture I am presenting here and the language–gesture relation proposed by Goldin-Meadow (1999) is that in this case the symbolic gesture does notgo along with any language because the girl does not speak yet. She uses her gesture as a tool ofthought on its own when there are no words.


Observation 5 Elisa (1;1). Duration: 15 s. Elisa opens her mouth, representing a toy’s mouth. She usesher own body as a self-directed symbol, a private symbol as signifier, as substitute ofsomething else.

Elisa and her mother are sitting on the floor at home. She is holding and manipulating a toy onher knees. The toy has a face drawn on it: a smiling mouth, two salient eyes and a nose. Themother says ‘‘and the nose, where is the nose? Look at the nose, the nose it’s got’’ pointingtoward the nose with an immediate gesture as she touches the thing being pointed at (in thiscase the nose). Then Elisa, while looking attentively and touching the toy’s face, opens her ownmouth (she is not looking at her mother). Her mother sees Elisa’s gesture, understands whatshe means and says ‘‘Yes, the mouth, the mouth’’, touching it and indicating the line of the toy’smouth (her action being half-way between a pointing and an ostensive gesture).

If we think now of the brilliant observation made by Piaget (1936/1977) of his 16-month-old daughterwhen she opens her mouth while trying to open a matchbox, we find a parallel with the observation ofElisa. Piaget refers to his daughter’s ‘‘opening mouth’’ as a ‘‘plastic reflection’’ given the ‘‘inability of thechild to think out the situation in words’’. According to Piaget, the girl uses a motor indication as ‘‘sig-nifier’’ or symbol (p. 294). With Elisa something very similar happens. She is ‘‘thinking aloud’’, or moreprecisely, she is ‘‘thinking outside’’. By opening her own mouth (signifier), she represents with a symbolthe mouth of the toy on the outside (see above). Her mouth, that is to say, her own body is the substitutefor something else (a part of a material object), something her mother understands quite well. And allthis happens without language! The mother interprets her daughter’s gesture because it happens out-side, as an external thought, but not because Elisa is communicating something intentionally to hermother about the toy’s mouth. If we decide to consider this gesture as a private symbol, it is becauseElisa is not looking at her mother. She is ‘‘thinking outside’’ with a symbolic tool.

6. Discussion

In this paper, I adopted a pragmatic perspective on objects in early development. This perspective isrooted in the works of Vygotsky, Peirce, and the later Wittgenstein (see Moro & Rodrıguez, 2005;Rodrıguez, 2006; Rodrıguez & Moro, 1998). I have argued that to understand others’ intentions incommunicative contexts, it is necessary to link intentions and actions to the meaning of objects andsituations, i.e., to all aspects of their circumstances. There are three reasons for this claim. First, childrenstart to understand our intentional signs in communicative contexts precisely because of the link withthe objects to which these signs refer. Without this link, children could not understand us. Second,when we consider objects as cultural products, we see that intentional gestures cannot simply bereduced to two (or even three) types – i.e., to proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives. Rather, inten-tional gestures can be seen to have various functions even pre-linguistically. In this paper, I havefocused on proto-interrogative gestures where children give a regulatory function to the other (some-thing that will affect the child’s ongoing actions), and on three types of private gestures (ostensive,indexical and symbolic), that are used by children to regulate their own behaviour. Third, all of thesegestures take place with and about objects and their uses in communication with others (proto-interrogative gestures) or with oneself (private gestures). None of these gestures could take placeoutside of the normative, social dimensions of objects.

Further research is needed to explore the communicative function of these gestures (proto-interrogatives) and their private function as tools of thought (private ostensive, indexical and symbolicgestures). We do not know enough about their genesis, the nature of the adult influence on their origin,nor enough about the strong and varied link with their ‘circumstances’. Objects also play an importantrole in the development of intentional communication and they cannot be ignored or trivializedanymore as mere, self-evident, transparent physical reality. Communication is grounded in jointactions through signs in a concrete reality in concrete contexts. If, according to Wittgenstein, languageis grounded in forms of life rather than being something that can be considered in isolation andindependent of the multiple functions it fulfils in the lives of its users (Bouveresse, 1998; Wittgenstein,1953/1958), then pre-linguistic signs with their strong link to objects in everyday contexts are alsogrounded in forms of life. Based on this legacy, it is possible to develop a pragmatic analysis of gestures


and the way objects are used prior to the acquisition of language. This is something that must be done.Through the observations shown in this paper, it appears that many other gestures are at work if wetake seriously into account the cultural and semiotic diversity, the circumstances of the uses of objects.We need also to observe children in more naturalistic situations, not only in strict laboratory contexts.All that has important implications not only for a better understanding of what happens prior to theemergence of language in typically developing children, but also for developing a better understandingof how to improve interventions with atypically developing children.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Vasu Reddy and Alan Costall from Portsmouth University for all theircomments, suggestions, support, help with the English translation, and their wonderful sense ofhumour. I would also thank to Tim Racine and Ulrich Muller, the editors of this Special Issue for encour-aging me to make clear why Wittgenstein has been and is so important in considering the pragmaticdimension of the object. I am very grateful also to Rebeca Puche for inviting me to go to the Universidaddel Valle (Cali, Colombia) because some of the ideas concerning private symbolic gestures were born inthe wonderful discussion we had during my stay.

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the ‘circumstances’ of gestures: proto-interrogatives and private gestures

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