Negative structures are a characteristic of all human languages. One such structure is ‘node’ and ‘scope’ of negation. In an utterance, the node is the location of a negative form, and the scope is the stretch of language to which the negation applies. In this paper, I examine a gesture that English speakers perform when they negate and show how speakers organize the different phases of gestural action in relation to the negative structures in speech. In this gesture, speakers first bring one hand across their body (preparation phase). Then, with the palm turned down, they move their hand rapidly along the horizontal axis (stroke phase). Often, they hold their hand in space for a short period after the stroke (post-stroke hold phase), before returning it to rest (recovery phase). In several negative utterances, drawn from a corpus of audiovisual recordings of conversations in everyday settings, speakers prepared this gesture in advance of the node of negation, synchronized the stroke of the gesture with the node, and performed a post-stroke hold throughout the scope. I suggest that the grammatical concepts of node and scope can also account for the way speakers gesture when they negate. This study refines understanding of how gesture phrase structure functions and suggests a multimodal view of grammatical phenomena.
2024. Scope of Negation, Gestures, and Prosody: The English Negative Quantifier as a Case in Point. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 53:4
Patel-Grosz, Pritty, Matthew Henderson, Patrick Georg Grosz, Kirsty Graham & Catherine Hobaiter
2024. Primate origins of discourse-managing gestures: the case of hand fling
. Linguistics Vanguard 9:1 ► pp. 63 ff.
Manero, Elvira, Laura Amigot & Inés Olza
2023. Fraseología del desacuerdo en un corpus multimodal de televisión: un estudio multinivel. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 95 ► pp. 163 ff.
Bressem, Jana, Nicole Stein & Claudia Wegener
2022. Multimodal language use in Savosavo. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)► pp. 173 ff.
Holler, Judith
2022. Visual bodily signals as core devices for coordinating minds in interaction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377:1859
Laparle, Schuyler
2022. The Interaction Space. In Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management. Anthropometry, Human Behavior, and Communication [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 13319], ► pp. 243 ff.
Boutet, Dominique, Marion Blondel, Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel & Aliyah Morgenstern
2021. A multimodal and kinesiological approach to the development of negation in signing and non-signing children. Languages and Modalities 1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Gawne, Lauren
2021. ‘Away’ gestures associated with negative expressions in narrative discourse in Syuba (Kagate, Nepal) speakers. Semiotica 2021:239 ► pp. 37 ff.
Brown, Amanda & Masaaki Kamiya
2019. Gesture in contexts of scopal ambiguity: Negation and quantification in English. Applied Psycholinguistics 40:05 ► pp. 1141 ff.
Li, Feifei, Joan Borràs-Comes & M. Teresa Espinal
2019. Mismatches in the interpretation of fragment negative expressions in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 152 ► pp. 28 ff.
Piccoli, Vanessa
2019. (Re)transmettre la souffrance émotionnelle : une analyse interactionnelle de consultations entre soignants, demandeurs d’asile et interprètes en France. Langage et société N° 167:2 ► pp. 175 ff.
Johnston, Trevor
2018. A corpus-based study of the role of headshaking in negation in Auslan (Australian Sign Language): Implications for signed language typology. Linguistic Typology 22:2 ► pp. 185 ff.
Lopez-Ozieblo, Renia
2018. Disagreeing without a ‘no’: How teachers indicate disagreement in a Hong Kong classroom. Journal of Pragmatics 137 ► pp. 1 ff.
Lopez-Ozieblo, Renia
2018. Can gestures help clarify the meaning of the Spanish marker ‘se’?. Lingua 208 ► pp. 1 ff.
2018. Indicating verbs as typologically unique constructions: Reconsidering verb ‘agreement’ in sign languages. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1
Bressem, Jana & Cornelia Müller
2017. The “Negative-Assessment-Construction” – A multimodal pattern based on a recurrent gesture?. Linguistics Vanguard 3:s1
2023. Pina Boggi Cavallo and My “Southern Italian Gesture Project”. In Humanity in Psychology [Theory and History in the Human and Social Sciences, ], ► pp. 189 ff.
Schoonjans, Steven
2017. Nonmanual downtoning in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 5:1
Schoonjans, Steven
2017. Multimodal Construction Grammar issues are Construction Grammar issues. Linguistics Vanguard 3:s1
Ginzburg, Jonathan & Massimo Poesio
2016. Grammar Is a System That Characterizes Talk in Interaction. Frontiers in Psychology 7
Harrison, Simon & Pierre Larrivée
2016. Morphosyntactic Correlates of Gestures: A Gesture Associated with Negation in French and Its Organisation with Speech. In Negation and Polarity: Experimental Perspectives [Language, Cognition, and Mind, 1], ► pp. 75 ff.
Abner, Natasha, Kensy Cooperrider & Susan Goldin‐Meadow
2015. Gesture for Linguists: A Handy Primer. Language and Linguistics Compass 9:11 ► pp. 437 ff.
Esteve-Gibert, Núria, Pilar Prieto & Ferran Pons
2015. Nine-month-old infants are sensitive to the temporal alignment of prosodic and gesture prominences. Infant Behavior and Development 38 ► pp. 126 ff.
2024. On Grammar–Gesture Relations: Gestures Associated with Negation. In The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies, ► pp. 446 ff.
Harrison, Simon
2024. ‘This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before’: initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures. Language and Cognition► pp. 1 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.