Peirce’s universal categories: On their potential for gesture theory and multimodal analysis

This paper presents an account of how Peirce’s Universal Categories (UCs) of perception and experience may, as heuristic principles, inform gesture theory and multimodal analysis. Peirce’s UCs – Firstness (possibility), Secondness (actuality), and Thirdness (law, habit) – constitute the core of his phenomenology and thus also the foundation of his triadic semiotics. I argue that compared to the basic sign-object relations icon, index, symbol mainly used in previous gesture research, the more fundamental UCs allow one to discern additional facets of how coverbal gestures act as signs. This notably pertains to the phenomenology, multidimensionality, and multifunctionality of gesture. The guiding assumption is that compared to Thirdness-laden linguistic symbols constituting written, spoken or signed discourses, gestures may exhibit the UCs to more strongly varying degrees and in different, modality-specific ways. The multimodal analyses discussed in the paper show how Firstness tends to draw attention to the articulatory qualities of gestural signs, including aesthetic and affective strata, Secondness to their experiential grounding and contextualized meaning, and Thirdness to embodied habits of perceiving, feeling, (inter-)acting, thinking, and communicating with others. I further suggest that particularly through interacting with embodied image schemata and force dynamics, such habits may give rise to flexible regularities and schematicity in gesture.

Comprehension of Metaphors and Idioms

This chapter covers the underlying neurobiology of metaphor and idiom comprehension. The topic has gained interest in many different research fields. For decades, it has been claimed that clinical populations may have a selective deficit in metaphor comprehension, including patients with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain and those with disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The majority of research has been focused on these disorders, but some studies have investigated other conditions, including dementias, William’s syndrome, depression, traumatic brain injury, relational aggression, schizotypal personality traits, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)), and other developmental disorders. Paradigms on metaphor and idiom comprehension are also used as clinical and research tools to investigate embodiment and motor language, social cognition, aphasia, intelligence, and coverbal gestures. It is therefore not surprising that the number of studies on the neural correlates of these forms of communication has consistently increased, especially within the last 10 years. This chapter reviews the functional magnetic resonance imaging studies on metaphor and idioms.