The inner workings of recurrent gestures can now be distilled from almost three decades’ worth of fine-grained studies into gesture form variants, kinesic organization with speech, core semantic themes, and discourse-interactive functions. Yet several questions about this gesture category have… read more | Article
In gesture studies, the adjective ‘recurrent’ has developed to distinguish a range of semiotic and conceptual phenomena concerning the nature of meaningful bodily movements. This article begins with a brief and recent history of recurrent gesture studies. We raise ongoing debates concerning the… read more | Article
This study examines the form and function of gestural depictions that develop over extended stretches of concept explanation by a philosopher. Building on Streeck’s (2009) explorations of depiction by gesture, we examine how this speaker’s process of exposition involves sequences of multimodal,… read more | Article
This paper investigates metaphor use in a heavily industrialized context. Using
video recordings collected at a salmon factory in France as data, I study metaphor
in the gestures that workers perform in technical specialist communication
along a noisy production line. Within a framework for… read more | Article
This paper describes the organisation of kinesic ensembles associated with negation in speech through a qualitative study of negative utterances identified in face-to-face conversations between English speakers. All the utterances contain a verbal negative particle (no, not, nothing, etc.) and the… read more | Article
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… read more | Article