Gesture - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2018

Kinship plays a central role in organizing interaction and other social behaviors in Indigenous Australia. The spoken lexicon of kinship has been the target of extensive consideration by anthropologists and linguists alike. Less well explored, however, are the kin categories expressed through sign languages (notwithstanding the pioneering work of Adam Kendon). This paper examines the relational categories codified by the kin signs of four language-speaking groups from different parts of the Australian continent: the Anmatyerr from Central Australia; the Yolŋu from North East Arnhem Land; the Kuuk Thaayorre from Cape York and the Ngaatjatjarra/​Ngaanyatjarra from the Western Desert. The purpose of this examination is twofold. Firstly, we compare the etic kin relationships expressed by kin signs with their spoken equivalents. In all cases, categorical distinctions made in the spoken system are systematically merged in the sign system. Secondly, we consider the metonymic relationships between the kin categories expressed in sign and the various parts of the body at which those signs are articulated.

In this paper I examine the use of the ‘rotated palms’ gesture family among speakers of Syuba (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal), as recorded in a video corpus documenting this language. In this family of gestures one or both forearms are rotated to a supine (‘palm up’) position, each hand with thumb and forefinger extended and the other fingers, in varying degrees, flexed toward the palm. When used independently from speech this gesture tends to be performed in a relatively consistent manner, and is recognised as an interrogative gesture throughout India and Nepal. In this use it can be considered an emblem. When used with speech it shows more variation, but can still be used to indicate the interrogative nature of what is said, even when the speech may not indicate interrogativity in its linguistic construction. I analyse the form and function of this gesture in Syuba and argue that there are a number distinct functions relating to interrogativity. These can therefore be considered as a family of gestures. This research lays the groundwork for a better understanding of this common family of gestures across the South Asian area, and beyond.

Using a repetition paradigm, in which speakers describe the same event to a sequence of listeners, we analyze the degree of reduction in representational gestures. We find that when listener feedback, both verbal and non-verbal, is minimal and unvarying, speakers steadily reduce their motoric commitment in repeated gestures across tellings without regard to the novelty of the information to the listener. Within this specific condition, we interpret the result to coincide with the view that gestures primarily serve as a part of speech production rather than a communicative act. Importantly, we propose that gestural sensitivity to the listener derives from an interaction between interlocutors, rather than simple modeling of the listener’s state of knowledge in the mind of the speaker alone.

Conversational facial gestures are not emotional expressions (Ekman, 1997). Facial gestures are co-speech gestures – configurations of the face, eyes, and/or head that are synchronized with words and other co-speech gestures. Facial gestures are the most frequent facial actions in dialogue, and the majority serve pragmatic (meta-communicative) rather than referential functions. A qualitative microanalysis of a close-call story illustrates three pragmatic facial gestures in their macro- and micro-context: (a) The narrator’s thinking faces (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1986) occurred as the narrator was getting started, and they accompanied verbal collateral signals of delay, such as “uh” or “um”. (b) The narrator pointed at his hand gestures with his head and eyes (Streeck, 1993), drawing the addressee’s attention to depictions that would later be crucial to the close call. (c) The meta-communicative functions of smiles included marking the narrator’s description of danger as ironic or humorous, hinting at key elements, and acknowledging errors.

In this paper, we examine the conceptual pedagogical value of representational gestures in the context of teaching halving to first graders. We use the concept of the ‘polysign’ as an analytical tool and introduce the notion of a ‘mathematics gesture sequence’ to assess the conceptual role gestures play in explicating mathematical concepts. In our study of four teachers each teaching a lesson on halving, they produced representational polysign gestures that provided multiple layers of information, and chained these gestures in mathematical gestural sequences to spatially represent the operation of halving. Their use of gestures and their ability to use gestures accurately to convey mathematical concepts varied. During the lesson, learners, whose teachers used few representational gestures or used gestures that were conceptually incongruent with the mathematical concept, expressed more confusion than learners whose teachers used conceptually appropriate gestures. While confusion can be a productive part of the learning process, our analysis shows that producing conceptually appropriate gestures may be important in mediating concepts and the transition from concrete and personal symbolic processes to institutional mathematical signs.

Events with a motor action component (e.g., handling an object) tend to evoke gestures from the point of view of a character (character viewpoint, or CVPT) while events with a path component (moving through space) tend to evoke gestures from the point of view of an observer (observer viewpoint, or OVPT). Events that combine both components (e.g., rowing a boat across a lake) seem to evoke both types of gesture, but it is unclear why narrators use one or the other. We carry out two manipulations to explore whether gestural viewpoint can be manipulated. Participants read a series of stories and retold them in two conditions. In the image condition, story sentences were presented with images from either the actor’s perspective (actor version) or the observer’s perspective (observer version). In the linguistic condition, the same sentences were presented in either the second person (you…) or the third person point of view (h/she…). The second person led participants to use the first person (I) in retelling. Gestures produced during retelling were coded as CVPT or OVPT. Participants produced significantly more CVPT gestures after seeing images from the point of view of an actor, but the linguistic manipulation did not affect viewpoint in gesture. Neither manipulation affected overall gesture rate, or co-occurring speech. We relate these findings to frameworks in which motor action and mental imagery are linked to viewpoint in gesture.

The study investigates the consistency and divergence between language and gesture in the expression of spatial orientations in the metaphorical conceptualization of sequence time, and the influence of the diversity in the reading and writing practices used in Taiwan on the spatialization of earlier and later events across modalities. The study was based on Chinese conversational data in face-to-face communication. The spontaneous gestures occurring along with speech reveal real-time metaphorical conceptualization in the context of use. It was found that the spatial orientations that are consistent between the two modalities bear out the online activation of the universal front-back and the culture-specific up-down concepts in the source domains. When speech and gesture are not redundant, the divergence reflects the more complex temporal spatialization involving two timelines or different orientations on the same timeline. The most preferred cross-modal combination of two timelines is the co-occurrence of lateral gestures and the front-back spatial words. Finally, the two different directions in which Chinese characters can be read and written were found to affect people’s conceptualization of the earlier or later event as being rightward or leftward.

The mathematical concept of function is an essential underpinning for advanced study in mathematics, such as calculus, and influences success in higher mathematics. Teaching about functions is challenging as many students find it difficult to understand. Effective teaching strategies are reliant on a teacher’s knowledge of the current understandings of their students. The gestures of the twenty-three middle-secondary Australian students (14–15 years old) in this study clarified the meaning of their words as they were interviewed whilst viewing two different computer simulations. Five ways in which students used their hands when providing multiple representations of mathematical functions are presented, which provide insights into students’ thinking about functions not available in their words alone.