Expressivity and gestures
Cornelia Ebert, Sebastian Walter
September 2024 

This chapter explores the relationship between speech-accompanying gestures and expressivity, an area that has not been systematically studied. The focus is on comparing emblematic and iconic gestures. Emblematic gestures are highly conventionalized (Kendon 1988), while iconic gestures are not. Within the class of iconic gestures, a distinction between gestures encoding viewpoint (character and observer viewpoint gestures, cf. McNeill 1992) and gestures which do not encode viewpoint is made. It is investigated to which extent these gesture types fulfill the criteria for expressives as proposed by Potts (2007). It is argued that emblematic gestures qualify as expressive items, unlike iconic gestures, suggesting a strong link between conventionalization and expressivity in the visual modality. Additionally, the findings might be attributed to the observation that emblems – in contrast to iconic gestures – can express entire speech acts.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008604 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in Gutzmann, Daniel & Katharina Turgay (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity
keywords:	iconic gestures, emblematic gestures, conventionalization, speech acts, viewpoint, expressivity, semantics
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