ABSTRACT
We speak; we gesture. A variety of gestures occur naturally when people talk to each other. First, self-adaptors are self-touching movements which can be meaningful in interaction. For instance, a simple touch of the nose could mean that someone was not being truthful. Such movements do not bear a direct semantic relationship with the utterance. Emblematic gestures, on the other hand, are meaningful in their own right. They have socially agreed-upon standards of well-formedness and are produced in much the same way across the users of a particular language, like waving the hand for ‘goodbye’ or making the okay gesture for ‘approval’. The emblematic meaning may or may not be associated with speech (Ekman and Friesen, 1969; Goldin-Meadow, 1999; Kendon, 1984, 1995, 2004; McNeill, 1992, 2005). Beat gestures, however, are bound to utterance. They are typically small up and down or back and forth flicks of one or both hands that occur along with the rhythm of speech (McNeill, 1992; McClave, 1994). Beat gestures have no semantic association with speech, but can be used to emphasize portions of the speech content (Efron, 1941, 1972; Wagner et al., 2014). McNeill (1992: 15) found that in narrative discourse, “the occurrence of beats is related to discourse structure, when there are shifts among the narrative, metanarrative, and paranarrative levels of discourse”. Next, deictic gestures have to do with pointing to linguistic referents in the immediate speech environment. Spatial gestures are used to allocate gesture spaces symbolically to the linguistic referents. Finally, iconic gestures bear a direct semantic relationship with speech (McNeill, 1992, 2000). The meaning conveyed by iconic gestures mainly rests upon context. Consider Figure 16.1. The speaker on the left, who first had the arms crossed under the chest, moved the hands to the front; then, the hands in lightly formed fists, the left one slightly above the right, moved in a curve from the center to her right periphery. It is difficult to comprehend what such gesture means in the interaction without the presence of speech, despite the fact that the hand movements are conspicuous, noticeable, and produced in the center space (see the Gesture Space in McNeill, 1992).
