Gesture - Volume 20, Issue 2, 2021

In gesture studies, the adjective ‘recurrent’ has developed to distinguish a range of semiotic and conceptual phenomena concerning the nature of meaningful bodily movements. This article begins with a brief and recent history of recurrent gesture studies. We raise ongoing debates concerning the position of recurrent gestures on the so-called Kendon’s continuum, the relation between gestures and practical actions, and the interplay between gesture’s cultural specificity and universality. A selection of findings from previous research on recurrent gestures then acquaints readers with characteristics of these gestures: their form-function pairings and context-variation, linguistic organization and multimodal constructions, and community-specific typologies (from cultural, situational, as well as individual perspectives). Proposing to help build recurrent gesture theory, the paper then recognizes that recurrency goes hand-in-hand with diversity – both in the ways these gestures exist for members of a community and their role in the styles, habits, and creations of individuals.

This paper presents a multimodal and form-based approach to language development grounded in situated practices and focuses on the longitudinal analysis of a composite gesture, the shrug, in two datasets of mother-child interactions in French and British English. The shrug in its full-fledged form can combine a palm-up, lifted shoulders, a head tilt, raised eyebrows and a mouth shrug (Kendon, 2004; Streeck, 2009). All formal components and functions of the two children’s shrugs between the ages of 1 and 4;2 were coded within the multimodal ongoing discourse. Multiple correspondence analyses were combined with detailed qualitative analyses. Despite differences in the two children, interesting similarities in the development were observed over three periods: (1) absence is mainly expressed with palm-ups; (2) both children start using head tilts and shoulder lifts to express epistemicity and interpersonal positioning; (3) head tilts increase, and each body part is more clearly associated with one function.

This paper discusses how a particular type of recurrent gesture, the holding away gesture, highlights and structures spoken utterances in German and Savosavo, a Papuan language spoken in Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific. In particular, the paper poses the following questions: What kinds of discursive functions of this gesture are observable in these speech communities? How do they map onto the two speech communities? Are there cross-linguistic similarities and differences detectable? What motivates similarity and variation across speech communities? Utilizing Fraser’s (1999) pragmatic classification of discourse markers, it is shown that the holding away gesture shows the connection of topics and messages. For both languages, we explore the functional diversity of the gesture. Some functions are found in both data sets, though the proportions differ, while others are exclusively found in one or the other. Finally, we discuss how differences in discourse type and interactional setting may facilitate specific forms and uses of the holding away gesture.

The inner workings of recurrent gestures can now be distilled from almost three decades’ worth of fine-grained studies into gesture form variants, kinesic organization with speech, core semantic themes, and discourse-interactive functions. Yet several questions about this gesture category have remained in the background. How do such gestures relate to the behavioral activities within which they occur, their wider embodied and intercorporeal context, and the relations between the people performing them? These questions are addressed by adopting an enactive approach to human relating and by analysing how the Vertical Palm gesture form materializes during an episode of gift-giving between two friends in China, where the practice involves elaborate embodied maneuvers resulting in a visibly affective ‘seesaw battle’. Treating gift-giving as a situation for participatory sense-making spun from a complex web of sensorimotor schemes, this seesaw battle provides a natural ecology for exploring understudied dimensions of the Vertical Palm recurrent gesture as embodied, embedded, and enacted during a practice with culturally-specific dimensions.

This paper introduces the Slapping movement as an embodied practice of dislike or meta-commentary recurring in conflictive situations between German children aged four to six (Hotze, 2019). Children move this way primarily in stopping a co-participant’s action and protesting against the action to be stopped. The Slapping movements documented showed different manners of execution. Some forms appeared to be very expressive, others were more schematic. Inspired by a phenomenological approach to gestures our analysis shows that the movement qualities show different degrees of communicative effort and affective intensity which respond to the inter-affective dynamics unfolding between the participants of a situation. This means that the affective intensities unfolding in an interaction not only give rise to the Slapping movement, but they also influence how the hands are moved. In more detail, we observed that the higher the affective intensities become the larger and more vigorous the Slapping movements are.