Finding a Place for Body Movement in Grammar

ABSTRACT

Keevallik’s impressive survey of how body movements affect grammatical choices is a timely reminder that language use in social interaction does not occur in a vacuum. Yet although body movements can be intercalated in complex ways with the grammatical structure of utterances, I argue here that they are not part of grammar in a strict sense of the word. In “composite” utterances they fill slots that grammatical structures create, without being grammatical elements themselves.