Gesture - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2009

In “Depicting by gestures” (Gesture, 8 (3)), I have explored the methods by which hand gestures depict the world. Here I explore how gestures themselves are depicted. Many paintings and sculptures show human bodies in motion or showcase traces of body movements, including gestures of the hand. The issue is how the artists succeeded in depicting or insinuating movement in media that are inherently still, and how such arrested gestures function in pictures of social life so that these are perceived as “legible interactions” (Gombrich). By scrutinizing the changing logic of representation of embodied communication in the visual arts, gesture researchers can gain insights into the relationships between movement, form, meaning, and context, and recontextualize their own analytic methodologies within the broader discourse in the humanities on human behavior and its interpretation (Streeck, 2003).
 In the following, I examine a number of characteristic attempts, made during different periods of Western art-history, to solve this problem: in Egyptian, Greek, and Hellenistic art; in some medieval illuminations; in the early and late Renaissance; and in the 20th century styles of “écriture automatique” and Abstract Expressionism. Each of the strategies involved is predicated on three types of analysis: of ways in which body motion communicates meaning, of visual perception, and of the nature of pictorial representation.

One group of signs in French Sign Language (LSF) is described in the Dictionnaire des sourds-muets at the end of the 18th century as having in common the form of a cross, placed in front of the face. All of these signs have negative connotations. We identify the etymon of the signs as an emblematic gesture of hostility used by hearing people since the 15th century. Inherited from the hearing milieu, the gesture evolved into an important lexical family in use by the deaf in both LSF and its sister language, American Sign Language (ASL). At each step in the gesture’s evolution, two conceptual mechanisms explain changes in both form and meaning: economy of articulation and metaphorical abstraction. We show that latent meanings have been invested in the signs’ handshapes, placements, and movements, all of which were inherited from gestures of the hearing world.

This study addresses two questions. The first question is about how children integrate linguistic, prosodic and kinesic resources into organised discourse behaviour such as oral narratives. Three event reports produced spontaneously by 9- to 11-year-old French children during interviews with an adult were extracted from a video corpus. A detailed analysis of these on four dimensions (discourse construction, voice and prosody, co-speech gestures and facial expressions, gaze direction) reveals a remarkable ability in children of this age to use prosodic and kinesic resources to frame and structure their narrative, to dramatise and enliven the recounted events, and to comment on them or on the narration. The second question stresses the developmental aspect of multimodal narrative behaviour. 32 event reports extracted from the same corpus and produced by French children aged from 6 to 11 years were analysed in a similar way and rated by two independent coders. This second study leads us to distinguish between three levels of narrative performance which appear to coincide by age. The multimodal study of oral narratives thus shows how and when children gradually become genuine narrators.

Does gesturing primarily serve speaker internal purposes, or does it mostly facilitate communication, for example by conveying semantic content, or easing social interaction? To address this question, we asked native speakers of Dutch to retell an animated cartoon to a presumed audiovisual summarizer, a presumed addressee in another room (through web cam), or an addressee in the same room, who could either see them and be seen by them or not.
We found that participants produced the least number of gestures when talking to the presumed summarizer. In addition, they produced a smaller proportion of large gestures and almost no pointing gestures. Two perception experiments revealed that observers are sensitive to this difference in gesturing. We conclude that gesture production is not a fully automated speech facilitation process, and that it can convey information about the communicative setting a speaker is in.