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Article published In:
Gesture
Vol. 21:2/3 (2022) ► pp.264–295

The Raised Index Finger gesture in Hebrew multimodal interaction

ORCID logo | University of Haifa
The present study examines the roles that the gesture of the Raised Index Finger (RIF) plays in Hebrew multimodal interaction. The study reveals that the RIF is associated with diverse linguistic phenomena and tends to appear in contexts in which the speaker presents a message or speech act that violates the hearer’s expectations (based on either general knowledge or prior discourse). The study suggests that the RIF serves the function of discourse deixis: Speakers point to their message, creating a referent in the extralinguistic context to which they refer as an object of their stance, evaluating the content of the utterance or speech act as unexpected by the hearer, and displaying epistemic authority. Setting up such a frame by which the information is to be interpreted provides the basis for a swifter update of the common ground in situations of (assumed) differences between the assumptions of the speaker and the hearer.
Keywords: Raised Index Finger, recurrent gestures, Israeli Hebrew, contrastive focus, epistemic authority, pointing
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.RIF as a recurrent gesture with pragmatic functions
  • 3.Corpus and methodology
  • 4.Linguistic contexts
    • 4.1Propositional level
      • Opposition
      • Contrastive negation constructions
      • Epistemic certainty
      • Scalar implausibility
    • 4.2Discourse level
      • Discourse shift
      • Punchlines
      • Discourse suspension
      • Emphatic rhetorical questions
      • Importance markers
      • Estimation of the appraisal as surprising or interesting
      • Verbal resources co-expressive with the RIF: Summary
  • 5.Abstract pointing and discourse deixis
  • 6.Discourse deixis and stance
  • 7.Pointing, knowledge possession, and authority
  • 8.Summary and concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.21001.inb
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