Gesture - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2017

In the eighteenth century and before, gesture was considered from the point of view of how it should be used in oratory, as a part of the art of engaging in persuasive discourse. This contrasts with the interest pursued in modern gesture studies where, for the most part, the hand movements that people make when they speak have been studied as representations of the substantive or propositional content of the utterance, seen as providing clues about the mental or cognitive processes governing speaking. Speaking is also a form of social action, however, and gestures play an important role in this. An historical perspective on the study of gesture from a pragmatic point of view is provided, followed by a summary of the main features of the pragmatic functioning of gesture.

Do speakers intend their gestures to communicate? Central as this question is to the study of gesture, researchers cannot seem to agree on the answer. According to one common framing, gestures are an “unwitting” window into the mind ( McNeill, 1992 ); but, according to another common framing, they are designed along with speech to form “composite utterances” ( Enfield, 2009 ). These two framings correspond to two cultures within gesture studies – the first cognitive and the second interactive in orientation – and they appear to make incompatible claims. In this article I attempt to bridge the cultures by developing a distinction between foreground gestures and background gestures. Foreground gestures are designed in their particulars to communicate a critical part of the speaker’s message; background gestures are not designed in this way. These are two fundamentally different kinds of gesture, not two different ways of framing the same monolithic behavior. Foreground gestures can often be identified by one or more of the following hallmarks: they are produced along with demonstratives; they are produced in the absence of speech; they are co-organized with speaker gaze; and they are produced with conspicuous effort. The distinction between foreground and background gestures helps dissolve the apparent tension between the two cultures: interactional researchers have focused on foreground gestures and elevated them to the status of a prototype, whereas cognitive researchers have done the same with background gestures. The distinction also generates a number of testable predictions about gesture production and understanding, and it opens up new lines of inquiry into gesture across child development and across cultures.

This paper lays out the foundations of a frame-based account of gesture pragmatics through detailing how frames and metonymy interact not only in motivating gestural sign formation, but also in guiding crossmodal processes of pragmatic inferencing. It is argued that gestures recruiting frame structures tend to profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of scenes (in the Fillmorian sense of the term), that is, of the motivating context of frames. Two kinds of embodied frame structures situated at different levels of abstraction, schematicity, and entrechment are proposed: (A) Basic physical action and object frames understood as directly experientially grounded frames involving physical action and interaction with the material and social world; (B) Complex, highly abstract frame structures that are more detached from the motivating contexts of experience. It is further suggested that gestures exhibiting a comparably low degree of iconicity and/or indexicality are likely to assume pragmatic rather than referential functions. Finally, potential avenues for further research into the relation of scenes, frames, and (multimodal) constructions are outlined.

Gestures that are used by interlocutors to manage the gist of their ‘discourse interactions’, namely content exchange and floor taking, can have one of two very different pragmatic functions: to signal inclusion and cooperation in friendly conversation, or to establish control in more argumentative conversation. While inclusive-cooperative gestures have been extensively studied (e.g., Bavelas, Chovil, Lavrie, & Wade, 1992 ; Kendon, 1995 ; Müller, 2004 ; Sweetser, 1998 ), control gestures received little attention (although see Kendon, 1995 , 2004 ) until a recent spark of interest in their form and function (e.g., Calbris, 2011 ; Müller, 2017 ; Wehling, 2010 , 2012 , 2013 ). However, even though research has detailed important aspects of such discourse managing gestures, to date no comprehensive account of their conceptual foundations and pragmatic functions exists. The present paper fills this gap in the literature. Building on prior analyses of control gestures in argumentative discourse (e.g., Wehling, 2010 ) and inclusive-cooperative gestures in friendly conversation (e.g., Bavelas et al., 1992 ; Müller, 2004 ), it details a typology of discourse management gestures that distinguishes inclusive-cooperative and control gestures as separate pragmatic types and accounts for their forms and functions in terms of their conceptual foundations in primary metaphoric, space-motion schematic, and force dynamic reasoning.

Drawing upon corpus analyses of recurrent gestures, a pragmatics perspective on gestural meaning and conventionalization will be developed. Gesture pragmatics is considered in terms of usage-based, embodied and interactively emerging meaning. The article brings together cognitive linguistic, cognitive semiotic and interactional perspectives on meaning making.

How the interrelation between different types of context (interactional, semantic/pragmatic/syntactic, distribution across a corpus) with the embodied motivation of kinesic forms in actions and movement experiences of the body might play out in the process of conventionalization is illustrated by discussing three recurrent gestures: the Palm-Up-Open-Hand, the Holding Away, and the Cyclic gesture. By merging conventional and idiosyncratic elements recurrent gestures occupy a place between spontaneously created (singular) gestures and emblems as fully conventionalized gestural expressions on a continuum of increasing conventionalization (cf. Kendon’s continuum: McNeill, 1992 , 2000 ).

Recurrent gestures are an interesting case to study how processes of conventionalization may involve emergent de-compositions of gestural movements into smaller concomitant Gestalts (cf. Kendon, 2004 , Chapters 15 & 16). They are particularly revealing in showing how those de-compositional processes are grounded experientially in contexts-of-use and remain grounded in conventionalized, yet still embodied, experiential frames.

This article examines the social and interactional foundations of sign-creation among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington. Linguists studying signed languages have proposed models of sign-creation that involve the selection of an iconic gestural representation of the referent which is subjected to grammatical constraints and is thereby incorporated into the linguistic system. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork and more than 190 hours of video recordings of interaction and language use, I argue that a key interactional mechanism driving processes of sign-creation among DeafBlind people in Seattle is deictic integration. Deictic integration restricts the range of contextual values that the grammar can retrieve by coordinating systems of reference with patterns in activity. This process brings language into alignment with the world as it is perceived by the users of that language, making a range of potentially iconic relations available for selection in the creation of new signs.

This article focuses on a signed performance by a deaf Nepali man who communicates in natural sign, which is similar to home sign but with greater cross-signer conventionality. The signer skillfully employs pantomimic (“gestural”) and lexical (“linguistic”) repertoires for distinct pragmatic purposes. In the narrative frame, he uses pantomime to vividly enact his morning routine; in the metanarrative frame, he utilizes lexical signs to directly address the audience. By examining the two repertoires’ formal characteristics and their relationship to different frames, this analysis showcases the signer’s communicative competency, demonstrates the relevance of pragmatics and genre to studies of all signed communicative modes, and challenges the idea that gesture is what language leaves behind.