The body between meaning and form: kinesiological analysis and typographical representation of movement in Sign Languages

Most of the research on Sign Languages (SLs) and gesture is characterized by a focus on hands, considered the sole body parts responsible for the creation of meaning. The corporal part of signs and gestures is then blurred by hand dominance. This particularly impacts the linguistic analysis of movement, which is described as unstable, even idiosyncratic. Boutet’s Kinesiological Approach (KinApp) repositions the speaker’s body at the core of meaning emergence: how this approach considers and conceptualizes movement is the subject of this article. First, the reasons that led SLs researchers to neglect the analysis of the sign signifying form, focusing on the hand, are exposed. The following part introduces KinApp which, through a radical change of point of view, allows revealing the simplicity and stability of movement: understanding the cognitive and motor reasons for this stability is the subject of research whose methodology is described. Setting the body at the center of analysis requires a descriptive model capable of accounting for the SLs signifying form, thus going beyond existing transcription systems. The last part is devoted to the presentation of Typannot, a new transcription system, aimed not only at a kinesiological description of SLs but also at assisting researchers to modify how they understand and analyze movement.