Using language is a very complex and abstract procedure which is well adapted to a certain degree of sophistication, but which, in a number of trivial circumstances, may economically be replaced by some more direct means of communication such as gesturing, either with the hands or with the shoulders, or with the glottis. In which case, if the use of language is concomitant we speak of intonation. The advantage of intonation ‘gesturing’ is that it removes it at once to the far periphery of the field of language. But of course, no one will accept this, except perhaps as a metaphor, like the 'Lautgebärden' of a former generation of psyco-linguists. A gesture properly so called may be accompanied by noise, a snapping of fingers, for instance, but it cannot be sheer noise. Only a convinced functionalist could accept the view that a noise is not first and foremost a noise.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.28