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22 - Gesturing for the Addressee

from Part V - Gestures in Relation to Interaction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2024

By
Janet Bavelas
Edited by
Alan Cienki
Alan Cienki
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
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Summary

Face-to-face dialogue and the cospeech gestures that occur within it are social as well as cognitive. Cospeech gestures are microsocial. Some of these gestures provide information that directly advances the topic of a dialogue. Others inform addressee about the state of the dialogue at that moment. Efron distinguished between objective and logical-discursive gestures. McNeill distinguished between propositional gestures and beats. Bavelas et al. distinguished between topical and interactive functions of gestures. Gerwing documented changes in form that marked gestures that were part of common ground. Seyfeddinipur identified discursive and meta-discursive gestures. Kendon described a variety of social, pragmatic gestures. Holler and Wilkin showed that mimicking a gesture conveyed understanding of that gesture. Galati and Brennan noted metanarrative functions of gestures. Kok et al. separated semantic and metacommunicative gestures. We focus on Clark’s distinction between track 1 and track 2 functions in dialogue. Track 1 conveys the basic communicative acts (i.e. topical content) whereas track 2 conveys the metacommunicative acts that ensure successful communication.

Keywords

microsocialdiscursiveinteractivemetacommunicativesocial
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies , pp. 579 - 598
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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