The communicative import of gestures

Gesture ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisette Mol ◽  
Emiel Krahmer ◽  
Fons Maes ◽  
Marc Swerts

Does gesturing primarily serve speaker internal purposes, or does it mostly facilitate communication, for example by conveying semantic content, or easing social interaction? To address this question, we asked native speakers of Dutch to retell an animated cartoon to a presumed audiovisual summarizer, a presumed addressee in another room (through web cam), or an addressee in the same room, who could either see them and be seen by them or not.
We found that participants produced the least number of gestures when talking to the presumed summarizer. In addition, they produced a smaller proportion of large gestures and almost no pointing gestures. Two perception experiments revealed that observers are sensitive to this difference in gesturing. We conclude that gesture production is not a fully automated speech facilitation process, and that it can convey information about the communicative setting a speaker is in.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renáta Longauerová

Gestures play an important role in communication, but for populations with atypical language development, gestures are often an area of significant difficulty, especially for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Research on younger children with ASD show a significant delay in gesture production, as well as a complete absence of certain types of gestures. However, previous work leaves open the question of whether the frequency and variation of gesture production is impaired also in adolescents with ASD. Moreover, very little is known about the semantic integration of speech and gesture in this population. In the present study, 5 adolescents with ASD and 5 typically-developing adolescents completed a narrative task, in which they were asked to retell a story of 4 animated cartoon clips. The results show that while there is no significant difference between the two groups in the frequency of gesture production and the types of gestures they produce, the frequency of gesture production in the individuals with ASD significantly depends on their verbal working memory skills. Moreover, it seems that many impairments that were confirmed by earlier studies for ASD children in early and late childhood seem to be mere delays that get resolved over time, such as the usage of supplementary gestures.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-262
Author(s):  
Svetlana S. Vasilenko

The paper discusses possibilities and ways of studying concepts in teaching foreign languages to students-interpreters. The author notes that modern didactic research has interdisciplinary nature, analyzes the theory of the concept from the point of view of linguistics, cultural studies and psycholinguistics. The author also notes the fact of creation of linguo-conceptodidactics as a new scientific direction. The paper presents a linguodidactic understanding of the concept, analyzes its structure and semantic content. The author describes in detail the process of foreign language concepts acquisition and presents it as a sequence of several stages. The acquisition of foreign language concepts is associated with the development of concept competence. The paper notes that the acquisition of foreign language concepts should go in parallel with the acquisition of foreign language lexis. In addition, it is necessary to use authentic materials in teaching foreign languages that allows forming a conceptual picture of the world of native speakers. Acquisition of foreign language concepts is especially important for students-interpreters who study several foreign languages and are faced with the problem of translating foreign concepts and phenomena of foreign language reality. The paper presents how conceptuality can be realized in teaching foreign languages. The author gives a practical example of studying the English concept Travel, offers examples of exercises and tasks for mastering it, as well as mnemonic techniques for memorizing lexemes that represent the concept. In the paper is stressed, that the concepts should be included in the content of foreign language teaching to students-interpreters. This contributes to the development of correct ideas about foreign language reality, understanding the facts of the native and foreign language culture, i.e. cultural reflection development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-140
Author(s):  
Siaw-Fong Chung

Abstract “*I am not agree with you” is an incorrect use of agree frequently seen in the writing of Taiwanese learners. Yet, not many studies have discussed the use of agree and disagree in the literature. Many studies are concerned more about the politeness of (dis)agreement, especially in detailing the relationship between speaker and hearer. We took a lexical semantic approach to compare the use of agree and disagree in essays written by native English speakers and Taiwanese learners in the ICNALE (International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English). The essays were based on two topics concerning societal issues collected in the corpus – (a) whether smoking should be completely banned in restaurants and (b) whether college students should take a part-time job or not – the writers were asked to respond to each issue by agreeing or disagreeing. Our results showed that when given clear instructions to agree or disagree, both native and learners tended to state (dis)agreement in the very first sentence in their essays, but Taiwanese learners relied more on the uses of agree and disagree more often than the native speakers did. The errors committed by learners on the use of agree (not for disagree) were between 25–35% in our data. The results will bring significant comparisons of the lexical semantics of related verbs (verbs of social interaction) in future studies.


2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-637 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nan Jiang

The mapping of lexical form to meaning is an important part of vocabulary acquisition in a second language (L2). This study examines the proposition that L2 lexical forms are often mapped to the existing semantic content of their first language (L1) translations rather than to new semantic specifications of their own. Native and nonnative English speakers were asked to perform two semantic judgment tasks in which they had to determine the degree of semantic relatedness of English word pairs (experiment 1) or to decide whether two English words were related in meaning (experiment 2). The nonnative speakers, but not the native speakers, were found to provide higher rating scores on or responded faster to L2 word pairs sharing the same L1 translations than to L2 word pairs that do not. The finding is interpreted as strong evidence in support of the presence of L1 semantic content in L2 lexical entries.


Author(s):  
Suo Yan Mei ◽  
Suo Yan Ju ◽  
Ayishah Binti Mohd

Cooperative learning is a teaching strategy that can help students to be successful in academic achievement and skills, as well as can assist the students to enhance the social interaction and human relation; however, this research explored the cooperative learning strategy in teaching Arabic for non native speakers, and will show the experiences for Arabic lecturers during their applying this method for teaching Arabic at sultan Idris education university Malaysia. The researchers will depend on the survey research design. The study will use a sample of 10 lecturers who are teaching Arabic language randomly selected from Sultan Idris education University Malaysia . The method will use data collection which included a 10-items questionnaire. Results show that majority of lecturers strongly support to apply the cooperative learning during the classes and outside of classes to help the students to improve their language skills, communication skills and social interaction .


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-83
Author(s):  
Phoevos Panagiotidis

Abstract This paper offers a review of a current understanding of the content and the form of linguistic roots. It first updates and buttresses the case against semantic content of uncategorised roots and for Late Insertion of roots; then it investigates how native speakers identify roots. More specifically, the idea that roots may be polysemous or may encode the shadow of a denotation, namely the common denominator of the denotations of words derived from it, is refuted on the basis of conceptual and empirical arguments from a number of languages. Subsequently, the existence of a spectrum of content to which roots belong, with roots ranging from contentless to semantically specific and concrete, is also shown to be illusory, and to result from the actual productivity, hence diversity, of the words derived from it. Arguments for Late Insertion of roots are then reviewed and updated, divorcing roots from the forms that realise them. These arguments are systematically combined with the semantic contentlessness of roots in support of Acquaviva’s analysis of them as abstract indices, i.e. as the syntax-internal criteria of lexical identity. This account is taken to its logical conclusion in the final section: if roots are indeed abstract indices, then they cannot be identified either by the semantic content they realise within grammatical structures or by their forms. An account is therefore advanced according to which roots are identified just once by native speakers over their lexicon at a given moment and on the basis of three heuristic principles: one form-based, one based on the feature content and the exponence of the structures in which roots are embedded, and one taking care of root suppletion.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 556-578
Author(s):  
Ana MORENO-NÚÑEZ ◽  
Cintia RODRÍGUEZ ◽  
Edgardo MIRANDA-ZAPATA

AbstractWithin developmental psychology, pointing gestures have received a great deal of attention, while ostensive gestures have been overlooked in terms of their emergence and intentionality. In a longitudinal and micro-genetic study with six children at 9, 11, and 13 months of age, we codified gesture production of children within second-by-second data frames. We identified 480 instances of gestures and categorised whether they were of ostensive, ostensive–indexical, or indexical nature. We specified the communicative function of each gesture by analysing the object involved and their circumstances of production. Data analysis include frequencies, binomial tests, proportion comparisons, and repeated measures ANOVA. We identified a phatic function in other-directed gestures, as well as exploratory and private functions in self-directed gestures. This has important implications for child development since ostensive gestures are easier to produce and to understand than pointing. The consideration of objects would be essential for defining the communicative function of gestures.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Tri Septa Nurhantoro ◽  
Novi Wulandari

English has been used widely in almost all international forums. In line with the rapid use of social media, in this case Instagram, English is also widely used as the language of self-expression by most of its users, both native and non-native speakers. At least, this is what happened in Indonesia. Most of Indonesian Instagram users, especially youth, use English to write their caption. This phenomenon is important to explore since there is a belief that by actively using a foreign language, it will reduce the sense of nationality within oneself, and even it will lead to the loss of one’s identity. Identity today becomes a very important issue since it shows the sense of belonging of oneself in his/her social interaction. The thing is that the social interaction model in social media is much more complex than the interaction model in the real life. In social media, most of the users do not merely want to show who they really are. They tend to have certain motive on how they can be accepted and appreciated by other users. In other words, they want to be the subject of attention instead of being themselves. Therefore, the concept of identity becomes blurred. Based on the previous description, through the direct observation method, this research aims to seek whether the use of English influences the identity of Indonesian users.


2022 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Louis Rohrer ◽  
Júlia Florit-Pons ◽  
Ingrid Vilà-Giménez ◽  
Pilar Prieto

While recent studies have claimed that non-referential gestures (i.e., gestures that do not visually represent any semantic content in speech) are used to mark discourse-new and/or -accessible referents and focused information in adult speech, to our knowledge, no prior investigation has studied the relationship between information structure (IS) and gesture referentiality in children’s narrative speech from a developmental perspective. A longitudinal database consisting of 332 narratives performed by 83 children at two different time points in development was coded for IS and gesture referentiality (i.e., referential and non-referential gestures). Results revealed that at both time points, both referential and non-referential gestures were produced more with information that moves discourse forward (i.e., focus) and predication (i.e., comment) rather than topical or background information. Further, at 7–9 years of age, children tended to use more non-referential gestures to mark focus and comment constituents than referential gestures. In terms of the marking of the newness of discourse referents, non-referential gestures already seem to play a key role at 5–6 years old, whereas referential gestures did not show any patterns. This relationship was even stronger at 7–9 years old. All in all, our findings offer supporting evidence that in contrast with referential gestures, non-referential gestures have been found to play a key role in marking IS, and that the development of this relationship solidifies at a period in development that coincides with a spurt in non-referential gesture production.


Author(s):  
Dudok Kh.R.

The article analyzes the role of phraseological constituents in the process of replenishment in the mobile communication terminology. It is noted that phraseological units carry much more information than a single word and should be studied and taken into account in various aspects: cognitive, linguistic and cultural, functional, etc. It is argued that cognitive phraseological units as constituents of the language system are used by native speakers to describe semantic processes and states. It is proved that the deep semantic nature of phraseology has been emerged under the influence of socio-domestic, political and other social phenomena. Some constituents in the professional language through time acquire additional, situational meaning, i.e. new semantic content of constant expressions giving it a special text format. It is suggested that the semantic structure of the phraseological component in professional speech is formed by a set of its semantic elements, which are closely correlated with each other. It is stressed that the components of phraseological semantics, in turn, are divided into semantic components, semantic features that act not only as constituents of the main semantic components of phraseology, but also as a close link between them. Thus, such characteristic features of phraseological constituents as internal form, motivation, imagery, idiomaticity and stability, enable the phraseological units to create semantic transformation. It is argued that the professional language of mobile communication is filled with phraseological constituents, in which the value of the whole combination is not accurate, and sometimes not deduced from the sum of its components, or dominates the value of its components. It is concluded that phraseology is one of the inexhaustible sources of richness and expressiveness of speech, which nourishes the professional subtext of mobile communication, gives it an artistic sounding, filled with components of lexical and syntactic sophistication and completeness. We may sum up that the phraseological constituent is a productive semantic and stylistic means, so metaphor and metonymy are used in various spheres of language, the terminology of mobile communication in particular.Key words: phraseological constituents, internal form, meanings, sences, concept, idiomaticity, metaphor, metonymy. У статті проаналізовано роль фразеологічних конституентів у процесі поповнення терміносистеми мобільний зв’язок. Зазначено, що фразеологізми мають набагато більше інформації в порівнянні з окремим словом та їх слід вивчати й враховувати в різних аспектах: когнітивному, лінгвокультурологічному, функціональному тощо. Стверджується, що когнітивно фразеологічні одиниці як конституенти мовної системи використовуються носіями мови для опису смислових процесів і станів. Доведено, що глибинна семантична природа фразеологізмів полягає в тому, що під впливом соціально-побутових, політичних та інших суспільних явищ деякі конституанти у фаховій мові із часом набувають додаткового, ситуативного смислу, тобто нового смислового наповнення сталим висловам надає спеціальний текстовий форматив. Висунуто припущення, що семан-тичну структуру фразеологічного компонента у фаховому мовленні формує сукупність його семантичних елементів, що знаходяться між собою в тісних кореляціях. Розвинуто думку, що складові частини фразеологічної семантики своєю чергою розчленовуються на семантичні компоненти, семантичні ознаки, що виступають не тільки як конституенти основних семантичних складових частин фразеологізму, але і як тісна сполучна ланка між ними. Таким чином, такі характерні риси фразеологічних конституентів, як внутрішня форма, мотивованість, образність, ідіоматичність і стійкість уможливлюють здатність фразеологізмів до семантичної трансформації. Аргументовано, що фахова мова мобільного зв’язку наповнена фразеологічними конституентами, в яких значення цілого сполучення не точне, а іноді й зовсім не виводиться із суми складових компонентів або домінує над значенням складових частин. Зроблено висновок, що фразеологізми є одним із невичерпних джерел багатства й виразності мовлення, які живлять фахову підмову мобільного зв’язку, надають їй художнього зву-чання, наповнюють компонентами лексичної та синтаксичної витонченості й завершеності. Підсумовано, що фразеологічний конституент є продуктивним семантико-стилістичним засобом, так само як і метафора, метонімія, які використовується в різних сферах мови, зокрема терміносистеми мобільного зв’язку.Ключові слова:фразеологічні значення, внутрішня форма, значення, смисли, концепт, ідіоматичність, метафора, метонімія.


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