Camille Debras | Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense
The shrug is a widely shared gesture ensemble with several different components. These include: lifting the shoulders; rotating the forearms outwards with extended fingers to a “palm up” position; with mouth firmly closed, pulling the lips downwards (the “mouth shrug”), which may or may not be combined with raising the eyebrows and tilting the head to one side. It comprises a rich yet consistent network of forms (a single component or a combination of components can index the whole enactment). These components, together or in various combinations, are shown to express incapacity, powerlessness, indetermination, indifference, obviousness which, we suggest, are unified by a common semantic theme of personal disengagement. Since the shrug expresses pragmatic meanings and its formational and semantic core remains stable across different contexts and speakers, the shrug also qualifies as a recurrent gesture. Based on empirical evidence gathered from a videotaped corpus of dyadic interactions between native speakers of British English, this study proposes a qualitative-yet-systematic method to provide a unified account of shrugging.
(1968) Redundancy and coding. In Thomas A. Sebeok (Ed.), Animal communication (pp. 614–626). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Baude, Olivier
(Ed.) (2006) Corpus oraux: Guide des bonnes pratiques. Paris & Orléans: Editions du CNRS & Presses Universitaires d’Orléans.
Benus, Stefan, Agustín Gravano, & Julia Hirschberg
(2007) Prosody, emotions and … ‘whatever’. International Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2007, Antwerp, Belgium.
Boutet, Dominique
(2008) Une morphologie de la gestualité: structuration articulaire. Cahiers de Linguistique Analogique, 51, 81–115.
Boutet, Dominique
(2010) Structuration physiologique de la gestuelle: modèle et tests. LIDIL, 421, 77–96.
Bressem, Jana & Cornelia Müller
(2014a) A repertoire of German recurrent gestures with pragmatic functions. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teβendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication, Vol. 21 (pp. 1575–1591). Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
(2012) Some uses of head tilts and shoulder shrugs during human interaction, and their relation to stancetaking. International proceedings of the ASE 2012 International Conference of Social Computing. Amsterdam, Netherlands 3–5September 2012.
Debras, Camille & Pauline Beaupoil-Houdel
in press). Developing communicative postures: the emergence of shrugging in child communication. LIA.
De Jorio, Andrea
(2000) Gesture in Naples and gesture in classical antiquity. A translation of La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (1832), and with an introduction and notes, by Adam Kendon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Du Bois, John W.
(2007) The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (Ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (pp. 139–182). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Efron, David
(1972 [1941]) Gesture, race and culture. Preface by Paul Ekman. The Hague: Mouton.
Ekman, Paul & Wallace V. Friesen
(1969) The repertoire of nonverbal behaviour: Categories, origin, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 11, 49–98.
Ekman, Paul & Wallace V. Friesen
(1972) Hand movements. Journal of Communication, 221, 353–374.
Ekman, Paul & Wallace V. Friesen
(1974) Nonverbal behaviour and psychopathology. In Raymond J. Friedman & Martin M. Katz (Eds.), The psychology of depression: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 203–232). Washinton, DC: J. Winston.
Ekman, Paul, Wallace V. Friesen, and Klaus Scherer
(1976) Body movement and voice pitch in deceptive interaction. Semiotica, 16 (1), 23–27.
Elfenbein, Hillary A. & Nalini Ambady
(2002) On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 1281, 203–235.
Fuchs, Yann
(2013) Les quotatifs en interaction en anglais contemporain. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.
(2000) Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 321, 1489–1522.
Goodwin, Charles
(2007) Participation, stance and affect in the organization of activities. Discourse and Society, 18 (1), 53–73.
Graziano, Maria, Adam Kendon, & Carla Cristilli
(2011) ‘Parallel gesturing’ in adult-child conversations. In Gale Stam & Mika Ishino (Eds.), Integrating gestures: The interdisciplinary nature of gesture (pp. 89–101). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Gumperz, John J.
(1982) Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holler, Judith
(2010) Speakers’ use of interactive gestures as markers of common ground. In Stefan Kopp & Ipke Wachsmuth (Eds.), Revised selected papers from the 8th International Gesture Workshop, GW 2009, 59341, 11–22.
Kärkkäinen, Elise
(2012) I thought it was very interesting. Conversational formats for taking a stance, Journal of Pragmatics, 441, 2194–2210.
Kendon, Adam
(1981) Geography of gesture. Semiotica, 371, 129–163.
(2011) Putting the cycling gesture on a cognitive basis. CogniTextes, 61. [URL]
Ladewig Silva H.
(2014a) Recurrent gestures. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teβendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication, Vol. 21 (pp. 1558–1574). Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Ladewig Silva H.
(2014b) Creating multimodal utterances: The linear integration of gesture into speech. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teβendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication, Vol. 21 (pp. 1662–1677).
Lapaire, Jean-Rémi
(2011) Grammar, gesture and cognition: Insights from multimodal utterances and applications for gesture analysis. Вісник Львівського університету. Серія філологічна, 521, 87–107.
Lê, Sébastien, Julie Josse, & François Husson
(2008) FactoMineR: An R Package for Multivariate Analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, 25 (1), 1–18.
LeBaron, Curtis & Jürgen Streeck
(2000) Gesture, knowledge and the world. In David McNeill (Ed.), Language and gesture (pp. 118–138). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Marzano, Michela
(2008) L’éthique appliquée: De la théorie à la pratique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
McNeill, David
(1992) Hand and mind. What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McNeill, David
(2005) Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mondada, Lorenza
(2006a) Participants’ online analysis and multi-modal practices: projecting the end of the turn and the closing of the sequence. Discourse Studies, 8 (1), 117–129.
Mondada, Lorenza
(2006b) Video recording as the preservation of fundamental features for analysis. In Hubert Knoblauch, Jürgen Raab, Hans-Georg Soeffner, & Bert. Schnettler (Eds.), Video analysis: Methodology and methods (pp. 51–68). Bern: Peter Lang.
Mondada, Lorenza
(2011) Understanding as an embodied, situated and sequential achievement in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 431, 542–552.
Morgenstern, Aliyah
(2014) Children’s multimodal language development. In Christiane Fäcke (Ed.), Manual of language acquisition (pp. 123–142). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter.
Morgenstern, Aliyah, Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel, Dominique Boutet, & Marion Blondel
(2016) A multimodal approach to the development of negation in signed and spoken languages: Four case studies. In Lourdes Ortega, Andrea Tyler, Hae In Park, & Mariko Uno (pp. 15–36), The usage-based study of language learning and multilingualism. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.
Morris, Desmond
(1994) Bodytalk: A worldguide to gesture. London: Jonathan Cape.
Morris, Desmond, Peter Collett, Peter Marsh, & Marie O’Shaughnessy
(1979) Gestures: Their origins and distribution. London: Jonathan Cape.
Müller, Cornelia
(2004) Forms and uses of the Palm Up Open Hand: A case of a gesture family? In Cornelia Müller & Roland Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures, Proceedings of the Berlin conference, April 1998 (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag.
Müller, Cornelia
(2008) Metaphors dead and alive, sleeping and waking: A dynamic view. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.
Müller, Cornelia
(2010) Wie Gesten bedeuten. Eine Kogniti-linguistische und sequenzanalytische Perspektive. Sprache und Literatur, 41 (1), 37–68.
Müller, Cornelia, Silva H. Ladewig, & Jana Bressem
(2013a) Gesture and speech from a linguistic perspective: A new field and its history. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teβendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication, Vol. 11 (pp. 55–81). Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Müller, Cornelia, Jana Bressem, & Silva H. Ladewig
(2013b) Towards a grammar of gestures: A form-based view. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teβendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication, Vol. 11 (pp. 707–733). Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Palmer, Frank Robert
(2001) Mood and modality (Second edition). Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pascual, Esther
(2014) Fictive interaction. The conversation frame in thought, language and discourse. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Payrató, Lluís
(1993) A pragmatic view on autonomous gestures: a first repertoire of Catalan emblems. Journal of Pragmatics, 201, 193–216.
(1984) Agreeing and disagreeing with assessments: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 57–101). Cambridge & Paris: Cambridge University Press & Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Poyatos, Fernando
(1981) Gesture inventories: Fieldwork methodology and problems. In Adam Kendon (Ed.), Nonverbal communication, interaction, and gesture. Selections from Semiotica (pp. 371–400). The Hague: Mouton.
Priesters Matthias A. & Irene Mittelberg
(2013) On the spherical nature of gesture spaces: Insights from visualized kinetic action. Oral presentation, Mapping Multimodal Dialogue (MaMuD) Workshop, RWTH Aachen, Germany.
Ruusuvuori, Johanna & Anssi Peräkylä
(2009) Facial and verbal expressions in assessing stories and topics. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 42 (4), 377–394.
Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff, & Gail Jefferson
(1974) A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation. Language, 50 (4, 1), 696–735.
Schegloff, Emanuel
(1984) On some gestures’ relation to talk. In J Maxwell Atkinson & John Heritage (Eds.), Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis (pp. 266–296). Cambridge & Paris: Cambridge University Press & Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Schiffrin, Deborah
(1987) Discourse markers. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie, & Karin Aijmer
(2007) The semantic field of modal certainty: A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Stivers, Tanya
(2008) Stance, alignment, and affiliation during storytelling: When nodding is a token of affiliation. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 41 (1), 31–57.
Streeck, Jürgen
(1994) ‘Speech-handling’: The metaphorical representation of speech in gestures. A cross-cultural study. Unpublished manuscript, Austin, TX.
(1986) Introducing constructed dialogue in Greek and American conversational and literary narratives. In Florian Coulmas (Ed.), Direct and indirect speech (pp. 311–322). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Teβendorf, Sedinha
(2013) Emblems, quotable gestures, or conventionalized body movements. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teβendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication, Vol. 11 (pp. 82–100). Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter.
Tsui, Amy
(1991) The pragmatic functions of I don’t know. Text and Talk, 11 (4), 607–622.
Weatherall, Ann
(2011) I don’t know as a prepositioned epistemic hedge. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 44 (4), 317–337.
Wittenburg, Peter, Hennie Brugman, Albert Russel, A. Klassmann, & Han Sloetjes
(2006) ELAN: A professional framework for multimodality research. In Proceedings of LREC 2006, Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. [URL]
Cited by
Cited by 29 other publications
Allison, Meredith, Jennifer Gerwing & Cecily B. Gadaire
2022. When the eyewitness to a crime is an English language learner: Identifying and resolving troubles in understanding in interviews. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling 19:3 ► pp. 185 ff.
Arbona, Eléonore, Kilian G. Seeber & Marianne Gullberg
2023. Semantically related gestures facilitate language comprehension during simultaneous interpreting. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 26:2 ► pp. 425 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.
Boutet, Dominique & Aliyah Morgenstern
2020. Prélude et Ode à l’approche kinésiologique de la gestualité. TIPA. Travaux interdisciplinaires sur la parole et le langage :36
Bye, Patrik
2020. Expressive Sibilant Retraction in North Norwegian: morpheme or ‘spoken gesture’?. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 5:1
2022. The study of gesture in cognitive linguistics: How it could inform and inspire other research in cognitive science. WIREs Cognitive Science 13:6
Cooperrider, Kensy, Natasha Abner & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2018. The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign. Frontiers in Communication 3
Debras, Camille
2021. Multimodal profiles of je (ne) sais pas in spoken French. Journal of Pragmatics 182 ► pp. 42 ff.
Debras, Camille
2021. How to prepare the video component of the Diachronic Corpus of Political Speeches for multimodal analysis. Research in Corpus Linguistics 9:1 ► pp. 132 ff.
2018. The multimodal marking of aspect: The case of five periphrastic auxiliary constructions in North American English. Cognitive Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 773 ff.
LEHMANN, CLAUDIA
2023. As if that wasn't enough: English as if clauses as multimodal utterance constructions. English Language and Linguistics 27:1 ► pp. 175 ff.
2023. Leading voices: dialogue semantics, cognitive science and the polyphonic structure of multimodal interaction. Language and Cognition 15:1 ► pp. 148 ff.
Marrese, Olivia H., Chase Wesley Raymond, Barbara A. Fox, Cecilia E. Ford & Megan Pielke
2021. The Grammar of Obviousness: The Palm-Up Gesture in Argument Sequences. Frontiers in Communication 6
Morgenstern, Aliyah, Lea Chevrefils, Marion Blondel, Coralie Vincent, Chloé Thomas, Jean-François Jego & Dominique Boutet
2021. “Of thee I sing”: An opening to Dominique Boutet’s kinesiological approach to gesture. Languages and Modalities 1 ► pp. 3 ff.
Pehkonen, Samu
2021. Coaches’ Self-Initiated Complaints About Referees in Ice Hockey Postgame Press Conferences. Communication & Sport 9:4 ► pp. 670 ff.
Pekarek Doehler, Simona
2022. Multimodal action formats for managing preference: chais pas ‘dunno’ plus gaze conduct in dispreferred responses to questions. Journal of Pragmatics 197 ► pp. 81 ff.
Rekittke, Linn-Marlen
2017. Viewpoint and stance in gesture: How a potential taboo topic may influence gestural viewpoint in recounting films. Journal of Pragmatics 122 ► pp. 50 ff.
Siyavoshi, Sara
2019. Hands and faces: The expression of modality in ZEI, Iranian Sign Language. Cognitive Linguistics 30:4 ► pp. 655 ff.
Siyavoshi, Sara & Sherman Wilcox
2021. Exerting control: the grammatical meaning of facial displays in signed languages. Cognitive Linguistics 32:4 ► pp. 609 ff.
Walton, Chris, Charles Antaki & W. M. L. Finlay
2020. Difficulties Facing People with Intellectual Disability in Conversation: Initiation, Co-ordination, and the Problem of Asymmetric Competence. In Atypical Interaction, ► pp. 93 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 20 may 2023. 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.