Pragmatics Utterance Meaning And Representational Gesture

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.

How do we understand what others are trying to say? The answer cannot be found in language alone. Words are linked to hand gestures and other visible phenomena to create unified 'composite utterances'. In this book N. J. Enfield presents original case studies of speech-with-gesture based on fieldwork carried out with speakers of Lao (a language of Southeast Asia). He examines pointing gestures (including lip and finger-pointing) and illustrative gestures (examples include depicting fish traps and tracing kinship relations). His detailed analyses focus on the 'semiotic unification' problem, that is, how to make a single interpretation when multiple signs occur together. Enfield's arguments have implications for all branches of science with a stake in meaning and its place in human social life. The book will appeal to all researchers interested in the study of meaning, including linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists.

TABLE OF CONTENT TOWARDS A LEXICOGRAPHY OF GESTURES MASSIMO SERENARI: The structure of dictionary entries - results of empirical investigations REINHARD KRÜGER: Fare le corna and the invention of a novel. Théophile Gautiers Gettatura (1857) and De Jorio's Mimica degli antichi (1832) or, problems of a gesture-etymology GRIGORII E. KREIDLIN: Russian gestures and Russian phraseology I. Types of lexical information and the structure of lexical entries in a dictionary of Russian gestures ISABELLA POGGI: The Italian gestionary. Meaning representation, ambiguity, and context PIO ENRICO RICCI BITTI / SILVANA CONTENTO: Symbolic gestures and gesturing in communication LLUÍS PAYRATÓ: Notes on pragmatic and social aspects of everyday gestures PETER COLLETT: Problems and procedures in the study of gestures TOWARDS A DOCUMENTATION OF GESTURE USES PENNY BOYES BRÄM / THÜRING BRÄM: Expressive gestures used by classical orchestra conductors GENEVIÈVE CALBRIS: Déixis représentative DAVID MCNEILL / KARL-ERIK MCCULLOUGH / SUSAN D. DUNCAN: An ontogenetic universal and how to explain it ADAM KENDON: Contrasts in gesticulation: A Neapolitan and a British speaker compared MONICA RECTOR / SALVATO TRIGO: Body signs: Portuguese communication on three continents MANDANA SEYFEDDINIPUR: Meta-discursive gestures from Iran: Some uses of the 'Pistol Hand' RAGNHILD NEUMANN: The conventionalization of the Ring Gesture in German discourse CHRISTINE KÜHN: Body and soul: Gestures as mediators in communication CORNELIA MÜLLER: Forms and uses of the Palm Up Open Hand: A case of a gesture family?

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.

This Element tries to discern the known unknowns in the field of Pragmatics, the 'Dark Matter' of the title. The authors can identify a key bottleneck in human communication, the sheer limitation on the speed of speech encoding: Pragmatics occupies the niche nestled between slow speech encoding and fast comprehension. Pragmatic strategies are tricks for evading this tight encoding bottleneck by meaning more than you say. Five such tricks are reviewed, which are all domains where the authors have made considerable progress. The authors can then ask for each of these areas, where have the authors neglected to push the frontier forward? These are the known unknowns of pragmatics, key areas, and topics for future research. The Element thus offers a brief review of some central areas of pragmatics, and a survey of targets for future research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element investigates the role that inference plays in pragmatic models of communication, bringing together a range of scholarship that characterises inference in different ways for different purposes.

This Element shows the basis for pragmatics/(im)politeness to become intergroup-oriented to be able to consider interactions in which social identities are salient or are essentially collective in nature, such as Cancel Culture (CC). CC is a form of ostracism involving the collective withdrawal of support and concomitant group exclusion of individuals perceived as having behaved in ways construed as immoral and thus displaying disdain for group normativity. To analyze this type of collective phenomenon, a three-layered model that tackles CC manifestations at the macro, meso, and micro levels is used. At the meso/micro levels, problematize extant conceptualizations of CC -mostly focused on the macro level and describe it as a Big C Conversation, whose meso-level practices need to be understood as genre-ecology, and where identity reduction, im/politeness, and moral emotions synergies are key to understand group entitativity and agency.