The impulse to gesture: a linguistic approach to gesture in spoken discourse
by Dr Simon Harrison
What determines, shapes and organises our impulse to gesture with speech? We can answer this question with experiments in the psycholinguistics lab or with fine-grained analyses of talk-in-interaction. But a decade ago I set off down a different path. I focused on one specific collection or 'family' of gestural forms associated with the expression of negation. As all the linguists will know, negation involves lexical and grammatical patterns that determine word order, semantics, and pragmatic function, such as not/no in English, ne pas in French and 不/没 in Mandarin. What is less well-known, but will become clear in my talk, is that speakers of these languages also express negation with gestures that exhibit an open hand shape either raised vertically or turned palm down and swept along the horizontal axis. This 'multimodal' expression of negation is what I have been studying for the past ten years and the basis for my new book. I will introduce this work and share some concepts that might be useful - the 'grammar-gesture nexus', 'grammatical affiliation for gestures', and 'gestural genres' all result from this linguistic approach to gesture.
Simon Harrison joined the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong in September 2018. He brings interests in a range of topics in the interdisciplinary field of gesture studies, including the connection between grammar and gesture, the role of gesture in collaborative discourse (e.g. in teaching and learning), and the relationship between gesture and sign language. He has published on these topics in the journals Pragmatics and Cognition, Social Semiotics, Lingua, Text & Text, and Gesture, and he is author of The Impulse to Gesture: Where language, minds, and bodies intersect (published by Cambridge University Press). Simon previously worked at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, where he collaborated on the Corpus of Chinese Academic and Written Spoken English (https://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/english/research/cawse/cawse-corpus.as…).
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