Gesture - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2002

This paper describes a possible formal organizational device that serves to bound episodes of body movement such as gestures, fidgets, instrumental moves and the like. It involves a spate of movement — whether a single move or a series of moves — being completed by returning the moving body part to the position from which it departed at the outset. A series of specimens are examined which display this organizational device across a number of dimensions of variation — in the body part being moved, the characteristics of the mover, the amplitude of the move, etc., underscoring the formality and adaptability of the device.The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.

A context-of-use study is reported of the ‘head shake’. A large number of examples are described and compared, drawn from video recordings of naturally occasioned interactions in the circumstances of everyday life, made in Campania, Italy, central England and the Eastern United States. Eight different kinds of uses for the head shake are illustrated. It is concluded that the head shake is not to be understood simply as the kinesic equivalent of a unit of verbal expression. It appears as an expression in its own right which, furthermore, the speaker uses as a component in the construction of an utterance which, it seems, is so often a multimodal construction in which the different modalities of expression available are deployed by the speaker in the course of building a unit of expression according to the rhetorical needs of the interactive moment.

Linguistic analyses of Mandarin Chinese and English have detailed the differences between the two languages in terms of the devices each makes available for expressing distinctions in the temporal contouring of events — verb aspect and Aktionsart. In this study, adult native speakers of each language were shown a cartoon, a movie, or a series of short action sequences and then videotaped talking about what they had seen. Comparisons revealed systematic within-language covariation of choice of aspect and/or Aktionsart in speech with features of co-occurring iconic gestures. In both languages, the gestures that speakers produced in imperfective aspect-marked speech contexts were more likely to take longer to produce and were more complex than those in perfective aspect speech contexts. Further, imperfective-progressive aspect-marked spoken utterances regularly accompanied iconic gestures in which the speaker’s hands engaged in some kind of temporally-extended, repeating or‘agitated’ movements. Gestures sometimes incorporated this type of motion even when there was nothing corresponding to it in the visual stimulus; for example, when speakers described events of stasis. These facts suggest that such gestural agitation may derive from an abstract level of representation, perhaps linked to aspectual view itself. No significant between-language differences in aspect- or Aktionsart-related gesturing were observed. We conclude that gestural representations of witnessed events, when performed in conjunction with speech, are not simply derived from visual images, stored as perceived in the stimulus, and transposed as faithfully as possible to the hands and body of the speaker (cf. Hadar & Butterworth, 1997). Rather, such gestures are part of a linguistic-conceptual representation (McNeill & Duncan, 2000) in which verb aspect has a role. We further conclude that the noted differences between the systems for marking aspectual distinctions in spoken Mandarin and English are at a level of patterning that has little or no influence on speech-co-occurring imagistic thinking.

What happens to linguistic deixis theory if co-speech gestures are considered? In this paper I will argue for a redefined concept of origo. It allows us to eliminate a contradiction inherent in the origo instantiation of local deixis between the verbal and gestural levels. The contradiction demonstrated in my example is that, for the same conceptual relation, the origo of the verbal level is allocated to the addressee, whereas the origo of the gestural level is allocated to the speaker himself.The electronic edition of this article includes audio-visual data.

John Bulwer (1606–1656) published five books on the semiotics of the human body, with most attention given to gesture. His ideas on gesture have previously been studied from the standpoint of rhetorical theory, but hardly at all in relation to language and cognition. With regard to the cognitive aspects of gesture, Bulwer was a conscious disciple of Francis Bacon, who characterized gesture as a “transient hieroglyphic” in the same passage of De Augmentis Scientiarum (1605) in which he discussed the possibility of a “real character” — a sort of rationalized, non-figurative hieroglyphic intended to bypass natural language by directly symbolizing things and notions. Bulwer, however, completely ignored the real character and concentrated solely on gesture. This was in part because he retained older views on the inherent ontological harmony between man and the universe, but also because, for Bulwer the physician, the underlying neurophysiological basis of gesture confirmed it as the universal “language” of humanity. In this respect his ideas foreshadow recent scientific work on gesture, language and cognition, such as that of Lakoff, Bouvet, and Armstrong, Stokoe & Wilcox.

In his Institutio (11.3.85–88), Quintilian divides all human gestures into “imitative” and “natural,” with natural gestures forming a symbolic code comparable to spoken language. This language of gesture would have included hand movements equivalent to adverbs, pronouns, nouns, and verbs. Such symbolic gestures, spontaneously accompanying words, were the only ones that Quintilian recommended for the orator.The actor’s gestures, dependent as they were on the lines spoken — and not on the actor’s thoughts and feelings — could not be spontaneous. The gestures made on stage were imitative of the various categories of the natural (i.e. symbolic) gestures, or of actions of everyday life.