![]() ![]() Gesture (as we use the term here, but see Ekman and Friesen 1969) also does not include the body language or affective facial expressions or reactions that often reveal a person’s attitude or emotional state, such as moving away from one’s interlocutor, wincing in pain, or laughing. Listeners seem to intuitively distinguish gestures from the stream of other motor actions performed in the course of communication ( Kendon 2004), including fidgeting and functional interaction with objects, such as drinking from a glass. Our focus here is on gestures produced during the course of spoken language production – co-speech gesture – but there are also interesting cases of hearing individuals using gesture in place of speech because of taboos (e.g., Kendon 1988) or noise (e.g., Meissner and Philpott 1975). So what, then, is gesture? Kendon (2004:7) defines gesture as “visible action when it is used as an utterance or as part of an utterance.” Such visible actions are diverse and include: points, shrugs, and nods illustrations of the size, shape, and location of objects demonstrations of how to perform actions depictions of abstract ideas and relationships and many other everyday communicative actions of the body. Gesture is not just for Italians (though their gestures do stand out in certain respects, as we discuss below) it’s not what mimes do (that is what is called pantomime) it’s not the same as the signs of sign languages (though there are interesting connections between the two, which we touch on later) and, finally, it’s not generally impolite (though sticking your finger in someone’s face still, in many cases, is). Defining, identifying, and classifying gesturesįirst, it may be helpful to dispel some myths about what gesture is and what it is not. In this review, we describe what is known about these relationships and about the properties and patterns of gesture itself.Ģ. At almost every level of analysis that linguists are interested in – from prosody to discourse structure – research has recently uncovered systematic and sometimes surprising relationships between language and gesture. Gesture is universal, just as universal as language, and, as we will see, gesture and language go hand in hand. (Or is it?) But from another perspective, omitting gesture is puzzling simply because wherever people use language – any language – they use gesture too. After all, gesture is not part of the language proper. From one perspective, this omission makes sense. One topic likely to be in the latter category is gesture, the focus of this article. There are some topics covered in every grammar, and other topics that are rarely, if ever, included. ![]() Each of these works characterizes in great detail the words and rules of a particular language – the stuff speakers know when we say they know Seri, Georgian, or English. In pursuing this aim, linguists often create “grammars” for individual languages. The main aim of modern linguistics is to document and analyze the grammatical patterns of human language. ![]()
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