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- Volume 12, Issue, 2012
Gesture - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2012
Volume 12, Issue 2, 2012
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Nose-pointing: Notes on a facial gesture of Papua New Guinea
Author(s): Kensy Cooperrider and Rafael Núñezpp.: 103–129 (27)More LessThis article describes a previously undocumented deictic facial gesture of Papua New Guinea, which we call nose-pointing. Based on a video corpus of examples produced by speakers of Yupno, an indigenous language of Papua New Guinea’s Finisterre Range, we characterize the gesture’s morphology — which involves an effortful scrunching together of the face, or S-action, in combination with a deictic head movement — and illustrate its use in different interactive contexts. Yupno speakers produce the nose-pointing gesture in alternation with more familiar pointing morphologies, such as index finger and head-pointing, suggesting that the gesture carries a distinctive meaning. Interestingly, the facial morphological component of nose-pointing — the S-action — is also widely used non-deictically by Yupno speakers, and we propose that such uses provide crucial clues to the meaning of nose-pointing. We conclude by highlighting questions for further research, including precisely how nose-pointing relates to non-deictic uses of the S-action and what cultural and communicative pressures might have shaped the gesture.
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Gesture and imagination: On the constitution and uses of phantasms
Author(s): Ricardo Nemirovsky, Molly L. Kelton and Bohdan Rhodehamelpp.: 130–165 (36)More LessThis study examines the role of gesture in collective imagining, the embodied process of bringing objects and events into quasi-presence during social interaction. Drawing on the phenomenological tradition, we argue in favor of an alternative to the gestures-as-simulated-action account proposed by Hostetter and Alibali (2008). Specifically, we suggest viewing gestures as key constituents of phantasms, quasi-present objects that are produced through multi-modal utterances. This perspective highlights the ways in which gestures mark profound transformations of participants’ experiential histories, transformations that open up, for the speakers, new insights into the matters they strive to imagine. The study of these insights led us to emphasize not the simulative, but the creative roles of gestures. Our account of gesture in collective imagining is illustrated by a microanalysis of an episode from an interview with a mother-child dyad following their interaction with a mathematics exhibit in a science center.
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Holding gestures across turns: Moments to generate shared understanding
Author(s): Rein Ove Sikveland and Richard Ogdenpp.: 166–199 (34)More LessIt is widely supposed that speakers only gesture while speaking. In this paper, we consider how participants in Norwegian conversation use gestures held beyond the end of a turn-at-talk as a way to handle issues of shared understanding. Analysis combining the techniques of conversation analysis, linguistic, phonetic and visual analysis, demonstrates how participants use and orient to such held gestures as displays of occasions where participants do not (yet) have a shared understanding. The paper discusses how understanding is explicitly brought forward in a sequence of turns, and how shared understandings are reached and marked through a combination of spoken and gestural elements. The paper emphasizes the temporal progressivity of talk, the delicate timing of speech and gesture relative to one another, and the participants’ collaboration in successfully achieving and maintaining intersubjectivity.
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How language evolved from manual gestures
Author(s): Michael C. Corballispp.: 200–226 (27)More LessSeveral lines of evidence suggest that human language originated in manual gestures, not vocal calls. These are the ability of nonhuman primates to use manual action flexibly and intentionally, the nature of the primate mirror system and its homology with the language circuits in the human brain, the relative success in teaching apes to communicate manually rather than vocally, the ready invention of sophisticated signed languages by the deaf, the critical role of pointing in the way young children learn language, and the correlation between handedness and cerebral asymmetry for language. A gradual switch from manual to facial and vocal expression may have occurred late in hominin evolution, with speech reaching its present level of autonomy only in our own species, Homo sapiens.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 22 (2023)
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Volume 21 (2022)
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Volume 20 (2021)
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Volume 19 (2020)
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Volume 18 (2019)
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Volume 17 (2018)
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Volume 16 (2017)
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Volume 15 (2016)
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Volume 14 (2014)
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Volume 13 (2013)
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Volume 12 (2012)
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Volume 11 (2011)
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Volume 10 (2010)
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Volume 9 (2009)
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Volume 8 (2008)
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Volume 7 (2007)
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Volume 6 (2006)
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Volume 5 (2005)
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Volume 4 (2004)
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Volume 3 (2003)
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Volume 2 (2002)
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Volume 1 (2001)
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