Gesture - Volume 21, Issue 1, 2022

It is well known that signers and speakers routinely produce finger points during interaction. While the referential functions of such finger points have received great attention from researchers, they are also used to manage interactions between interlocutors. These functions are less understood and have received less research focus. The current study helps to redress this gap in the literature by investigating how finger pointing is used to index and coordinate turn-beginnings in a corpus of 11 semi-naturalistic (Norwegian) signed language conversations, involving between two to five signers (3.4 hours of signing). The data was initially annotated in ELAN and then further qualitative analysis was conducted. This investigation revealed that finger pointing effectively indexes previous and upcoming discourse, thereby binding sequences of conversational moves and guiding their trajectory, helping signers to coordinate turn transitions and interaction as it unfolds.

In this paper I posit the use of a spread-fingered hand torque gesture among speakers of Northern Pastaza Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador) as a recurrent gesture conveying the semantic theme of absence. The data come from a documentary video corpus collected by multiple researchers. The gesture prototypically takes the form of at least one pair of rapid rotations of the palm (the torque). Fingers can be spread or slightly flexed towards the palm to varying degrees. This gesture is performed in a consistent manner across speakers (and expressions) and co-occurs with a set of speech strings with related semantic meanings. Taking a cognitive linguistic approach, I analyse the form, function, and contexts of this gesture and argue that, taken together, it should be considered a recurrent gesture that indicates absence.

The article examines naturally-occuring video-mediated breaks from work as social activity and focuses on the use of waving gestures in their openings and closings. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis as a research method and recorded virtual breaks of two work communities in Finland as data, the study shows that, contrary to openings and closings in a physical breakroom at the workplace, waving ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ is a prevalent practice in video-mediated break openings and closings. By waving their hand(s), which is typically accompanied by a verbal greeting or farewell, participants make their own arrival or departure, or their orientation to the arrival or departure of someone else, visible and explicit. Thus, waving facilitates the management of co-presence in technology-mediated encounters. Further, by waving in conjunction with other upgraded features of openings and closings, participants engage in important relationship maintenance work during their encounter.

In collaborative reasoning about what causes the seasons, phases of the moon, and tides, participants (three to four per group) introduce ideas by gesturing depictively in personal space. Other group members copy and vary these gestures, imbuing their gesture spaces with similar conceptual properties. This leads at times to gestures being produced in shared space as members elaborate and contest a developing group model. Gestures in the shared space mostly coincide with conversational turns; more rarely, participants gesture collaboratively as they enact a joint conception. An emergent shared space is sustained by the joint focus and actions of participants and may be repositioned, reoriented, or reshaped to meet changing representational demands as the discourse develops. Shared space is used alongside personal spaces, and further research could shed light on how gesture placement and other markers (such as eye gaze) contribute to the meaning or function of gestures in group activity.