Gestures and Signs Are Phrases Not Words: A High Definition Account

Traditional linguistic analysis segments gestures and signs into discrete morphemes—handshape, location, movement—treating these as combinable building blocks. This segmentation, however, reflects analytical resolution rather than ontological structure. At coarse-grained analysis, continuous trajectorial dynamics \textit{appear} segmented because fine distinctions fall below the analytical thresholds of the model's toolkit. This paper argues that gestures and signs function as complete phrasal units whose meaning emerges through navigation rather than morphemic assembly. The supposed ``atoms'' of manual-visual communication are observational artifacts generated by insufficient analytical resolution. We posit that the fundamental unit of gesture and sign is not the morpheme but the trajectory—a continuous navigational arc through informational space guided by conventional traces. Our high-definition approach refers not to perceptual refinement but to analytical granularity: developing theoretical tools capable of tracking trajectorial dynamics at finer informational scales without imposing artificial segmentation. Conventional traces saturate through repeated navigation into specialized attractors (gestural configurations, modal semantics, conceptual prototypes) that emerge as differentiated regions within pre-representational informational space, analogous to stem cell specialization into distinct tissues. This trajectorial approach resolves persistent paradoxes in classifier-predicate analysis, verb segmentation, and gradient iconicity by recognizing them as resolution-dependent phenomena. The analysis extends beyond manual-visual modalities: spoken utterances reveal trajectorial character when examined at sufficient spatiotemporal resolution, challenging written-language models that artificially atomize continuous phonetic-semantic flow. Gestures and signs, precisely because they resist orthographic reification, provide exceptionally clear windows into the trajectorial dynamics underlying all human meaning-making.