Functions of three open-palm hand gestures
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Gaëlle Ferré
Gaëlle Ferré is currently an Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics & phonology, but also discourse analysis both at undergraduate and graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English, in a linguistic-oriented approach, which aims at understanding the organization of information from the different modalities in spontaneous speech to form a message. The modalities she is particularly interested in are verbal (semantics and discourse organization / pragmatics), vocal (prosody) and visual (gestures). Her recent research in Multimodality, which is part of a nationally-funded project, has led her to work on the annotation of co-verbal gestures, prosody and discourse structure in conversational French.
Abstract
This study proposes an analysis of some pragmatic gestures with three types of open-palm gestures: beats and two instances of the hand flip, elsewhere called the ‘palm-up open-hand’ gesture (Müller, 2004; Cienki & Müller, 2008). Drawing upon three different corpora (political speeches made at the European Parliament, a television show in which the role of this parliament is presented and a corpus of conversational speech recorded in a lab), it proposes an analysis into prosodic, discursive and modal gestures. The paper - through the discussion of particular examples - will address the issues of the type of prosodic and discourse units which are marked by these gestures. Using the same methodological framework, the type of grammatical modality conveyed by open-palm gestures will also be considered.
About the author
Gaëlle Ferré is currently an Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics & phonology, but also discourse analysis both at undergraduate and graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English, in a linguistic-oriented approach, which aims at understanding the organization of information from the different modalities in spontaneous speech to form a message. The modalities she is particularly interested in are verbal (semantics and discourse organization / pragmatics), vocal (prosody) and visual (gestures). Her recent research in Multimodality, which is part of a nationally-funded project, has led her to work on the annotation of co-verbal gestures, prosody and discourse structure in conversational French.
© 2013 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Articles in the same Issue
- Editor’s introduction
- Functions of three open-palm hand gestures
- Divorce: a visual essay
- Practice-based research: multimodal explorations through poetry and painting
- Double exposure: a critical study of preservice teachers’ multimodal public service announcements
- Can art (powerpoint) lead to social change? a mediated multimodal inquiry
- The cinematic art of teaching university mathematics: chalk talk as embodied practice
Articles in the same Issue
- Editor’s introduction
- Functions of three open-palm hand gestures
- Divorce: a visual essay
- Practice-based research: multimodal explorations through poetry and painting
- Double exposure: a critical study of preservice teachers’ multimodal public service announcements
- Can art (powerpoint) lead to social change? a mediated multimodal inquiry
- The cinematic art of teaching university mathematics: chalk talk as embodied practice
