Tracking the distribution of individual semantic features in gesture across spoken discourse: New perspectives in multi-modal interaction
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Doron Cohen
,
Geoffrey Beattie
Abstract
Speakers frequently produce elaborate hand movements during talk that have been shown to serve a communicative function. Nevertheless, two-thirds of the semantic content of these hand movements is encoded linguistically elsewhere in the discourse (Beattie and Shovelton, Semiotica 184: 33–52, 2011). The present experiment demonstrated that while 62.9% of semantic information in gesture was elsewhere, most gestures (81.8%) retained at least one semantic feature that was never represented linguistically. Semantic features were more explicit when they occurred in gesture than when represented linguistically. Even in cases where the imagistic gesture appeared somewhat redundant, gesture at the narrative level preserves a discernable communicative function.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Meaning and interpretation: The semiotic similarities and differences between Cognitive Grammar and European structural linguistics
- Can Saussure's orangery manuscripts shed new light on biosemiotics?
- A choice of emblemes and other devices
- Symbolism in handwriting
- A sociosemiotic interpretation of linguistic modality in legal settings
- Tracking the distribution of individual semantic features in gesture across spoken discourse: New perspectives in multi-modal interaction
- Competitive cities and human scales: The semiotics of urban excess
- Justice unmasked: A semiotic analysis of Justitia
- The subversive agent: Anatomy of personal ideological change
- On theatrical semiosphere of postdramatic theatrical event: Rethinking the semiotic epistemology in performance analysis today
- Poinsot and semiotics
