From Gesture In Conversation To Visible Action As Utterance

Language use is fundamentally multimodal. Speakers use their hands to point to locations, to represent content and to comment on ongoing talk; they position their bodies to show their orientation and stance in interaction; they use facial displays to comment on what is being said; and they engage in mutual gaze to establish intersubjectivity. This volume brings together studies by leading scholars from several fields on gaze and facial displays, on the relationship between gestures, sign, and language, on pointing and other conventionalized forms of manual expression, on gestures and language evolution, and on gestures in child development. The papers in this collection honor Adam Kendon whose pioneering work has laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for contemporary studies of multimodality, gestures, and utterance visible action.

Publisher Description

Humans produce utterances intentionally. Visible bodily action, or gesture, has long been acknowledged as part of the broader activity of speaking, but it is only recently that the role of gesture during utterance production and comprehension has been the focus of investigation. If we are to understand the role of gesture in communication, we must answer the following questions: Do gestures communicate? Do people produce gestures with an intention to communicate? This Element argues that the answer to both these questions is yes. Gestures are (or can be) communicative in all the ways language is. This Element arrives at this conclusion on the basis that communication involves prediction. Communicators predict the behaviours of themselves and others, and such predictions guide the production and comprehension of utterance. This Element uses evidence from experimental and neuroscientific studies to argue that people produce gestures because doing so improves such predictions.

This collection highlights diverse epistemological perspectives in original research on the important role of multimodality in second language contexts. The volume explores a wide range of theoretical and methodological traditions toward foregrounding the notion that bodily action is not merely an add-on to the modality of talk but an integral part of second language teaching, learning, and interaction. Following an introductory chapter, 18 empirical chapters feature either classroom or non-classroom research, which shed light on different dimensions of multimodality in second language contexts, including learning reflected in gesture, learning gesture across languages, the role of bodily action in language teaching, and the role of movement in configuring space for effective communication. Each empirical chapter follows a consistent structure detailing the research focus, the background to each study, methodology, and findings. A concluding synthesis chapter braids the insights of these chapters, drawing parallels across different methods, and pointing toward crosscutting areas for future research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in applied linguistics, multilingualism, bilingualism, gesture studies, cognitive science, and psychology. Chapter 10 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International license.

Gestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans. Consequently, the modern field of gesture studies has attracted researchers from a number of different disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive science, communication, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, primatology, psychology, robotics, sociology and semiotics. This volume presents an overview of the depth and breadth of current research in gesture. Its focus is on the interdisciplinary nature of gesture. The twenty-six chapters included in the volume are divided into six sections or themes: the nature and functions of gesture, first language development and gesture, second language effects on gesture, gesture in the classroom and in problem solving, gesture aspects of discourse and interaction, and gestural analysis of music and dance.

This book investigates how language, embodiment, objects, and settings in historically shaped communities combine, and form human actions.

This book presents a repertoire of conventionalized co-speech gestures used by Hausa speakers from northern Nigeria.