Pointing in gesture and sign

[opening paragraph] Human communication is composite (e.g., Clark 2016; Enfield 2009; Ferrara and Hodge 2018; Holler and Levinson 2019). It involves the voice, face, hands, and rest of the body. It integrates categorical elements and gradient ones; highly conventional and ad hoc forms; arbitrary symbols and motivated signals. This is true of spoken communication and it is true—in equal measure—of signed communication. Both speakers and signers stitch these different types of components into a seamless whole. Some of these components are historically considered a core part of language, others marginal, and still others are thought to be something else entirely—gestural, expressive, paralinguistic (for discussion, see, e.g., Dingemanse 2018; Goldin-Meadow and Brentari 2017; Müller 2018). Regardless of whether one considers the language/ non-language divide fundamental, fuzzy, or fictitious, there is widespread agreement that certain communicative phenomena haunt the boundaries in ways that prove revealing. Chief among these are cases where both speakers and signers make use of the same bodily raw material, but in putatively very different ways: flashes and furrows of the brow; imitations of actions; depictions of size, shape, and arrangement. Here, we analyze one of these similar- looking forms in detail: pointing. The case of pointing shows, first, how a single semiotic tool can be put to many uses and, second, how speakers and signers use this tool in some ways that are similar and other ways that are different.