An exploration of the other side of semantic communication: How the spontaneous movements of the human hand add crucial meaning to narrative
-
Geoffrey Beattie
and
Heather Shovelton
Abstract
Past research has suggested that those spontaneous movements of the human hand made during talk convey significant semantic information over and above the speech, at least when the unit of speech analyzed is the individual clause. However, no previous research has tested whether this information is represented linguistically elsewhere in the narrative (or is directly inferable from the rest of the narrative). The first study, reported here, uses an experimental procedure to identify which specific imagistic gestures add semantic information to the speech. The second study analyzes whether the specific gestures still do this when respondents hear the whole narrative. It was found that two thirds of the semantic information, thought to be carried by the gestures, is, in fact, represented in the linguistic discourse, or is inferable from it. However, one third of the additional semantic information contained in the gestures is not represented linguistically in the narrative nor is it inferable from it. In other words, a proportion of the imagistic gestures that accompany speech are absolutely critical to semantic communication.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/New York
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Articles in the same Issue
- Nigerian dress as a symbolic language
- Language and brain: Recasting meaning in the definition of human language
- An exploration of the other side of semantic communication: How the spontaneous movements of the human hand add crucial meaning to narrative
- Rethinking gesture phases: Articulatory features of gestural movement?
- Peirce's 10, 28, and 66 sign-types: The simplest mathematics
- Qualitative-quantitative analysis of narrative structures: The narrative roles of immigrants in Spanish television series
- Rethinking our understanding of diagrams
- Old and new covenants: Historical and theological contexts in Scribe's and Halévy's La Juive
- The rod and the crocodile. Temporal relations in textual hermeneutics: An application of Petri nets to semantics
- Transcendence and alterity: On life, communication, and subjectivity
- Analyzing discourse topics and topic keywords
- The fate of semiotics in China
- Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement
