Gesture - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2002

This experiment expanded the visual availability paradigm by subsuming it under the broader principle of recipient design. We varied recipient design by asking speakers to describe a picture to someone who would see a videotape of their description or only hear an audiotape. Second, speakers described pictures that varied in verbal encodability. Finally, in addition to gestural rate, we analysed the redundancy of gestures with words. The results (N = 40) confirmed our predictions that speakers gesture at a higher rate and use a higher proportion of nonredundant gestures when their recipient would see their videotape; that they also use more nonredundant gestures when describing a picture for which they have a poor vocabulary; and that these two factors interact to produce the strongest effects when vocabulary is limited and the recipient would see the videotape. These effects support the hypothesis that speakers design their gestures to communicate to recipients.

This paper is about gestures made by a car-mechanic during a single extended episode of work. Some of these gestures are recurrent and appear to be parts of a repertoire of communicative forms with which this man responds to understanding tasks that routinely occur in his work; others appear to be abstracted from instrumental actions that he has recently completed. Both types of gesture reveal the specific stance and knowledge that the body making them has acquired in its day-to-day coping, the body’s being-in-the-world. Gestures thus articulate the grasp that hands have of their life-worlds.

Gestures have been investigated primarily as pictorial representations intended to communicate information to their perceivers visually. This paper argues that affiliative gestures, the gestures affiliated with words, are neither visual nor communicative. They are kinaesthetic apprehensions directed by gesturers to themselves. Perceivers do glean information from the gestures but this is not their primary intent. Gestural practices in a somatic therapeutic session provide a unique opportunity to examine the way gestures can be used to influence the gesturer. Specifically, gestures invest the gesturer in the narrative realm she conjures up on the therapeutic occasion, in this instance, a dream world. The somaticist then uses embodiments from the virtual space of the dream narrative to effect change on the therapeutic occasion. This practice illuminates the philosophical problem of free will: how we are able to influence our own embodied processes volitionally.

The paper describes some aspects of symbolic gestures, by providing examples from the Italian symbolic gestures, the autonomous culturally codified gestures used by Italian hearing people in everyday communication. It shows how the signal, the meaning and the norms of use of each gesture can be analyzed. The semantic aspects of symbolic gestures (context of use, synonyms, verbal formulation, meaning, grammatical and pragmatic classification) are illustrated in detail, a semantic typology of Italian symbolic gestures is presented, and it is shown how rhetorical figures are at work in their meanings as a source for synchronic polysemy and diachronic evolution. The paper finally presents the structure of the Italian gestionary, a dictionary in progress of Italian symbolic gestures.

The aim of this article is to show how the creative literatures of the different cultures offer kinesic researchers a reliable and virtually inexhaustible corpus of documentation which can enrich kinesic research by contributing to a detailed morphological and functional taxonomy of visual behaviors. Furthermore, besides its theoretical and methodological implications, this perspective suggests the interdisciplinary consequences and additional research avenues derived from this use of literature (further susceptible of being complemented by data found in the representational arts, particularly painting and the better book illustrations) in the study of people’s communicative movements and positions within areas like semiotics, anthropology, sociology and psychology.