This paper describes the contexts of use of four conventional 'pragmatic' gestures, drawing from video-recorded Southern Italian natural conversations. Two of them, termed illocutionary marker gestures and recognized as 'quotable gestures', express the illocutionary force of the utterance of which they are part. The other two, termed discourse unit marker gestures, describe function to indicate the status of units within a discourse. Further discussion concerns the conventionalization of gestures and the implications for their status in relation to language.