Rafael Núñez | University of California, San Diego
This article describes a previously undocumented deictic facial gesture of Papua New Guinea, which we call nose-pointing. Based on a video corpus of examples produced by speakers of Yupno, an indigenous language of Papua New Guinea’s Finisterre Range, we characterize the gesture’s morphology — which involves an effortful scrunching together of the face, or S-action, in combination with a deictic head movement — and illustrate its use in different interactive contexts. Yupno speakers produce the nose-pointing gesture in alternation with more familiar pointing morphologies, such as index finger and head-pointing, suggesting that the gesture carries a distinctive meaning. Interestingly, the facial morphological component of nose-pointing — the S-action — is also widely used non-deictically by Yupno speakers, and we propose that such uses provide crucial clues to the meaning of nose-pointing. We conclude by highlighting questions for further research, including precisely how nose-pointing relates to non-deictic uses of the S-action and what cultural and communicative pressures might have shaped the gesture.
2023. Just visual context or part of the gesture? The role of arm orientation in bent pointing interpretation. Acta Psychologica 241 ► pp. 104062 ff.
Li, Heng
2023. Personality in your hands: How extraversion traits influence preference for pointing in Chinese people. Australian Journal of Linguistics 43:2 ► pp. 121 ff.
Li, Heng & Yu Cao
2019. Hands occupied: Chinese farmers use more non-manual pointing than herders. Lingua 222 ► pp. 1 ff.
Lücking, Andy, Thies Pfeiffer & Hannes Rieser
2015. Pointing and reference reconsidered. Journal of Pragmatics 77 ► pp. 56 ff.
Mesh, Kate, Emiliana Cruz & Marianne Gullberg
2023. When Attentional and Politeness Demands Clash: The Case of Mutual Gaze Avoidance and Chin Pointing in Quiahije Chatino. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 47:2 ► pp. 211 ff.
2020. Deixis, Meta-Perceptive Gaze Practices, and the Interactional Achievement of Joint Attention. Frontiers in Psychology 11
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