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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 27:2 (2017) ► pp.173–206

Multimodal language use in Savosavo

Refusing, excluding and negating with speech and gesture

| Chemnitz University of Technology
| European University Viadrina
| University of Cologne

Departing from a short overview on pragmatic gestures specialized for the expression of refusal and negation, the article presents first results of a study on those gestures in Savosavo, a Papuan language spoken in the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific. The paper focuses on two partly conventionalized gestures (sweeping and holding away) and shows that speakers of Savosavo use the gestures in a very similar way as speakers of German, English or French, for example. The article shows how a linguistic and semiotic analysis might serve to uncover proto-morpho-semantic structures in a manual mode of communication and contributes to a better understanding of the conventional nature and cross-linguistic distribution of gestures. Moreover, by examining partly conventionalized gestures in a small, little known and endangered language, it presents a particular approach to the analysis of multimodality in the field of language documentation.

Keywords: multimodality, pragmatic gestures, negation, Savosavo, language documentation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Savosavo: A language of the Solomon Islands
  • 3.Identifying recurrent gestures in Savosavo: Methods and database
  • 4.Sweeping and holding away gestures and their context variants in Savosavo
    • 4.1Sweeping away gesture
    • 4.2Holding away gesture
    • 4.3Hybrid away gesture: Blending sweeping and holding away
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 13 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.27.2.01bre
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