Silent Gesture

The story of the most famous protest in sports history, written by one of the men who staged it.

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.

Landmark study on the role of gestures in relation to speech and thought.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The origins of theatre date back to 500 b. C. with religious rituals of ancient Greece. Mime drama dates back to Theocritus, to performances of folk life, to gatherings in honour of the God Dionysus, during which the use of a mask was introduced. The Romans used to mime political situations inventing satirical pantomimes. A silent genre developed in the town of Atella, the Atellan Farce, with fixed characters, ancestors of the stereotypes of the Commedia dell’Arte or theatre of the Zanni. The father of the family of the Zanni was the servant Arlequin. In the Commedia dell’Arte of the Sixteenth Century, the face was covered by a mask that would define the nature of the character. Created by Deburau in 1665, the melancholic Pierrot will step on stage and as his ancestors, he will be forever in love and rejected. With Molière, the use of the mask will start to change until it will disappear leaving space to the expressiveness of the face and nature of the character. With Carlo Goldoni the “Commedia di carattere” will flourish. In the Twentieth Century it’s Charlie Chaplin’s turn to write an important chapter of the art of mime with the romantic hero Charlot who wanders up and down the streets in the city of London in the Twenties, desperate and alone. In his gestural grammar, Etienne Decroux covers the face of the actors with a veil to leave only the body mass to speak. On the contrary, according to his pupil, Marcel Marceau, the face and the hands represent the backbone to gestural eloquence as in Oriental techniques with the aristocratic Noh and the commoner Kabuki. Starting from Graeco-Roman Statuary, retracing the phases of gestural art, remembering the myths of gesture and, working side by side with Decroux, Marceau will decide to generate the last heir of this imaginary dynasty, the merchant of illusions, Bip, leaving him free to live and dream in the temporal space of a performance. Transforming the invisible into visible, bringing into the theatres all around the world his pantomimes, the French Master has made palpable the art of emotions.

A boldly innovative study of nonverbal communication in the poetry and prose of Hellenic antiquity When a Gesture Was Expected encourages a deeper appreciation of ancient Greek poetry and prose by showing where a nod of the head or a wave of the hand can complete meaning in epic poetry and in tragedy, comedy, oratory, and in works of history and philosophy. All these works anticipated performing readers, and, as a result, they included prompts, places where a gesture could complete a sentence or amplify or comment on the written words. In this radical and highly accessible book, Alan Boegehold urges all readers to supplement the traditional avenues of classical philology with an awareness of the uses of nonverbal communication in Hellenic antiquity. This additional resource helps to explain some persistently confusing syntaxes and to make translations more accurate. It also imparts a living breath to these immortal texts. Where part of a work appears to be missing, or the syntax is irregular, or the words seem contradictory or perverse—without evidence of copyists' errors or physical damage—an ancient author may have been assuming that a performing reader would make the necessary clarifying gesture. Boegehold offers analyses of many such instances in selected passages ranging from Homer to Aeschylus to Plato. He also presents a review of sources of information about such gestures in antiquity as well as thirty illustrations, some documenting millennia-long continuities in nonverbal communication.

This book demonstrates the vital connection between language and gesture, and why it is critical for research on second language acquisition to take into account the full spectrum of communicative phenomena. The study of gesture in applied linguistics is just beginning to come of age. This edited volume, the first of its kind, covers a broad range of concerns that are central to the field of SLA. The chapters focus on a variety of second-language contexts, including adult classroom and naturalistic learners, and represent learners from a variety of language and cultural backgrounds. Gesture: Second Language Acquisition and Classroom Research is organized in five sections: Part I, Gesture and its L2 Applications, provides both an overview of gesture studies and a review of the L2 gesture research. Part II, Gesture and Making Meaning in the L2, offers three studies that all take an explicitly sociocultural view of the role of gesture in SLA. Part III, Gesture and Communication in the L2, focuses on the use and comprehension of gesture as an aspect of communication. Part IV, Gesture and Linguistic Structure in the L2, addresses the relationship between gesture and the acquisition of linguistic features, and how gesture relates to proficiency. Part V, Gesture and the L2 Classroom, considers teachers’ gestures, students’ gestures, and how students’ interpret teachers’ gestures. Although there is a large body of research on gesture across a number of disciplines including anthropology, communications, psychology, sociology, and child development, to date there has been comparatively little investigation of gesture within applied linguistics. This volume provides readers unfamiliar with L2 gesture studies with a powerful new lens with which to view many aspects of language in use, language learning, and language teaching.