Body - Language - Communication. Volume 2

Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, Sedinha Tessendorf

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110395099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Volume II of the handbook offers a unique collection of exemplary case studies. In five chapters and 99 articles it presents the state of the art on how body movements are used for communication around the world. Topics include the functions of body movements, their contexts of occurrence, their forms and meanings, their integration with speech, and how bodily motion can function as language. By including an interdisciplinary chapter on 'embodiment', volume II explores the body and its role in the grounding of language and communication from one of the most widely discussed current theoretical perspectives. Volume II of the handbook thus entails the following chapters:

VI. Gestures across cultures,
VII. Body movements: functions, contexts and interactions,
VIII. Gesture and language,
IX. Embodiment: the body and its role for cognition, emotion, and communication,
X. Sign Language: Visible body movements as language.

Authors include: Mats Andrèn, Richard Asheley, Benjamin Bergen, Ulrike Bohle, Dominique Boutet, Heather Brookes, Penelope Brown, Kensy Cooperrider, Onno Crasborn, Seana Coulson, James Essegby, Maria Graziano, Marianne Gullberg, Simon Harrison, Hermann Kappelhoff, Mardi Kidwell, Irene Kimbara, Stefan Kopp, Grigoriy Kreidlin, Dan Loehr, Irene Mittelberg, Aliyah Morgenstern, Rafael Nuñez, Isabella Poggi, David Quinto-Pozos, Monica Rector, Pio Enrico Ricci-Bitti, Göran Sonesson, Timo Sowa, Gale Stam, Eve Sweetser, Mark Tutton, Ipke Wachsmuth, Linda Waugh, Sherman Wilcox.

VIII. Gesture and language

116. Pragmatic gestures

1. Introduction
2. The notion of pragmatic gestures: Features and functions
3. Families of pragmatic gestures
4. Gaps, trends, and new issues in the study of pragmatic gestures
5. References

Abstract

This article summarizes research on gestures that are mainly used for pragmatic purposes and that reveal a tendency toward codification or conventionalization. They have been described as interactive, speech-handling, performative and recurrent, pragmatic and meta-pragmatic gestures, as pragmatic markers, and gesture families. Their functions are manifold: They frame the conversational situation, provide interpretation clues, they help maintain the conversation as a social system, they refer to and include the listener. They function as performatives, as parsers, and with modal functions. Following Streeck (2005: 73), they are those gestures that display and highlight “aspects of the communicative interaction” itself. As an illustration, we present examples of so-called gesture families (Kendon 2004; Müller 2004), as the Grappolo family, the Ring family, the Palm Up Open Hand, and the Brushing Aside Gesture, showing how their members differ from one another, what function (s) they take up, and how they interact in coordination with the spoken part of the utterance. Their clustering reveals certain systematizations that certainly require further elaboration, and we conclude that at this point an exchange between detailed empirical in-depth studies and pragmatic linguistic theorization is needed.

1. Introduction

Gesture studies, as a linguistic research area, are usually embedded within the wider area of pragmatics, although pragmatic perspectives on gestures are rather scarce within the field (see the Cooperrider-Wharton debate in Gesture 2011a, b). Exceptions are, inter alia, the studies from a interactional perspective by Bavelas et al. (1992, 1995), Goodwin and Goodwin (1986), and Goodwin (1986, inter alia), the conversation analytical studies by Heath (1992) and Mondada (2006, volume 1 for a summary), Bohle (2007), Schmitt (2005), Streeck (1995), and Müller (e.g., with Paul 1999), and analyses of the pragmatic functions of emblems (Brookes 2004, 2005; Kendon 1981; Payrató 1993, 2003, 2004, this volume; Poggi 2004; Poggi and Zomparelli 1987; Sherzer 1991). See also the recent volume (46, 2013) of Journal of Pragmatics edited by Deppermann, devoted to conversation analytic studies of multimodal interaction.

On the one hand, this must be due to the enormous impact that psychological and psycholinguistic research traditions have had within the field. Another explanation is the fact that gestures are multidimensional and multifunctional and therefore hard to get a hold of in their day-to-day usage (see Müller 1998, volume 1). Similar to words in an utterance they fulfill various functions at a time, and they are multidimensional, because each dimension of their performance (size of the gesture, gesture dynamics, their local position in gesture space, and their temporal position within the verbal utterance) brings in certain semantic and pragmatic properties that all lead up to the final meaning and function of the gesture. This implies that each gesture performance has a pragmatic aspect, and the attempt to categorize all these aspects has hitherto not been undertaken. In a lato sensu, any gesture is a pragmatic gesture, i.e., it can be analyzed through its semiosis as a (pragmatic) sign.

2. The notion of pragmatic gestures: Features and functions

Stricto sensu, when, in the following, we write about pragmatic gestures, we mean gestures that seem to be most suitable for pragmatic purposes. Although emblems are thoroughly pragmatic, we will not discuss them here for reasons of space and redundancy (see Payrató this volume; Teßendorf volume 1). Here, we will concentrate on the so-called gesture families (Fricke, Bressem, and Müller this volume; Kendon 1995, 2004; Müller 2004), recurrent gestures (Ladewig 2010, 2011, this volume; Müller 2010), and speech-handling gestures (Streeck 2005, 2009).

2.1. Interactive gestures

Coming from an interactional background, Bavelas et al. (1992) investigated the so-called illustrators (Ekman and Friesen 1969) on the basis of face-to-face dialog data. They found functional differences within this class and divided it into gestures that are concerned with the topic of the conversation (topic gestures) and interactive gestures. While there already had been a distinction between topic and non-topic gestures (see Kendon 1985), the latter ones were usually restricted to batons (Efron [1941] 1972; Ekman and Friesen 1969), beats (McNeill and Levy 1982), or speech primacy movements (Freedman 1972), that is: quick flicks of the hand without depictive potential. The new category of interactive gestures includes beats and batons, but emphasizes non-topic gestures that convey pictorial meaning by their form (Palm Up Open Hand gestures, Palm Outwards Open Hand gestures, McNeill’s metaphoric conduit gestures, see McNeill and Levy 1982) and “refer […] to some aspect of the process of conversing with another person” (Bavelas et al. 1992: 473). Interactive gestures help maintain the conversation as a social system and make reference to the interlocutor. Their four basic functions are: marking the delivery of the information (the delivery of new versus shared information); citing the other’s contribution (e.g., acknowledgement of the addressee’s contribution, indication of following); seeking a response (e.g., agreement, understanding, help); and turn coordination (e.g., taking or forestalling the turn) (see Bavelas et al. 1995: 397, Tab. 1). Interactive gestures have similar functions like discourse markers as you know?, eh?, the rising intonation on a declarative sentence, and framing statements (well, this aside; so, anyway). They include the listener in the dialog who turns active by back channels, listener responses, and interactive facial displays.

2.2. Pragmatic markers

Kendon emphasizes that gestures that take up pragmatic functions are exactly this: gestures that take up pragmatic functions and not “pragmatic gestures”. These gestures then serve in “any of the ways in which gestures may relate to features of an utterance’s meaning that are not a part of its referential meaning or propositional content” (Kendon 2004: 158).

He summarizes that the “so-called pragmatic gestures […] serve in a variety of ways as markers of the illocutionary force of an utterance, as grammatical and semantic operators or as punctuators or parsers of the spoken discourse” (Kendon 2004: 5). These make up four pragmatic functions: Gestures may serve as performatives, with parsing function, with modal functions (see Müller and Speckmann 2002), and with interactional functions. One gesture can take up several of these functions, depending upon its context-of-use.

2.3. Speech-handling or pragmatic and meta-pragmatic gestures

Streeck (2005: 73) states that pragmatic gesture “encompasses all actions of the hands (and a variety of other body parts, notably the face, head, and shoulders) by which aspects of the communicative interaction are displayed”. Included are recipient gestures (affirmation, negation, rejection, etc.), beats that mark speech units, pronominal referential gestures (mostly with pointing motions that mark acts of reference), pointing-like movements, gestures that express the stance/attitude of the speaker, speech act or pragmatic gestures that act upon the utterance, and finally meta-pragmatic gestures that order or enable transactions and are used to regulate the actions of the interaction participants. Pragmatic and meta-pragmatic gestures often overlap, and one gesture can be functioning in one way or the other.

Pragmatic gestures such as the Palm Up Open Hand gesture, other Open Hand gestures, shrugs, gestures that “push” something back, etc. possess metaphorical qualities that figure aspects of the processes of communicating as handlings of physical actions or as conduit (see Streeck 2009: 182). They are relicts of “ceivings”, a term Streeck (2005: 75) proposes for gestures where the hands help the gesturer think, grasp for concepts, and their world-knowledge helps and constitutes the meaning of the utterance. As “practical metaphorizations” (Streeck 2009: 201) their function is twofold: they provide an interpretational frame for the interlocutor and at the same time provide an experiential frame for the speaker, “in terms of which our own communicative actions are tacitly made meaningful to us” (Streeck 2009: 202). Meta-pragmatic gestures include pointing and touching and other, rather conventional, gestures that attempt to regulate the behavior of others. According to Streeck, it is this function that has led to a codification of gestures for sign systems of traffic cops, musical conductors, etc.

2.4. Dominant pragmatic functions: performative and recurrent gestures

In her functional classification of gestures, Müller distinguishes between gestures that are used primarily referentially, performatively, modally, and discursively (Müller 1998; Müller and Speckmann 2002). When coining the term performative, Müller (1998) emphasizes that in contrast to other gestures, the underlying action is not displayed or referred to but accomplished. The underlying action of the gesture is transferred functionally through processes of metonymy and metaphor into the realm of speech (see Müller 2004, 2010; Müller and Cienki 2009 for details). More recently, Müller and colleagues (Ladewig 2010, 2011, this volume; Müller 2010; Müller and Cienki 2009) have proposed the term recurrent gestures. A gesture is recurrent when “it is used repeatedly in different contexts and its formational and semantic core remains stable across different contexts and speakers” (Ladewig 2010) and, according to Müller (2010), these ges...

Table of contents

• Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• VI. Gestures across cultures
• VII. Body movements – Functions, contexts, and interactions
• VIII. Gesture and language
• IX. Embodiment — The body and its role for cognition, emotion, and communication
• X. Sign language – Visible body movements as language
• Appendix - Organizations, links, reference publications, and periodicals
• Indices
• Subject Index