Cover not available

Article published In: Gesture
Vol. 16:2 (2017) ► pp.245–276

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Discourse management gestures

 | University of California at Berkeley
Published online: 12 January 2018
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.16.2.04weh
Abstract
Gestures that are used by interlocutors to manage the gist of their ‘discourse interactions’, namely content exchange and floor taking, can have one of two very different pragmatic functions: to signal inclusion and cooperation in friendly conversation, or to establish control in more argumentative conversation. While inclusive-cooperative gestures have been extensively studied (e.g., Bavelas, Janet B., Nicole Chovil, Douglas Lavrie, & Allan Wade (1992). Interactive gestures. Discourse Processes, 15 (4), 469–489. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Kendon, Adam (1995). Gestures as illocutionary and discourse markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 231, 247–279. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; (2004). The palm-up-open-hand: A case of a gesture family? In Cornelia Müller, Roland Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; (1998). Regular metaphoricity in gesture: Bodily-based models of speech interaction. Actes du 16e Congrès International des Linguistes. CD-ROM: Elsevier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), control gestures received little attention (although see Kendon, Adam (1995). Gestures as illocutionary and discourse markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 231, 247–279. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) until a recent spark of interest in their form and function (e.g., (2011). Elements of meaning in gesture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; (2017). How recurrent gestures mean: Conventionalized contexts-of-use and embodied motivation. Gesture, 16 (2), 277–304 ( this issue ). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Wehling, Elisabeth (2010). Argument is gesture war: Function, form and prosody of discourse structuring gestures in political argument. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, (2012). When interlocutors get pushy: Communicative force in discourse management gestures. Presented at the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver., (2013). Discourse management gestures: Their pragmatic functions, primary metaphors, and force-dynamics. Presented at the Gesture Pragmatics Symposium, University of California, Berkeley.). However, even though research has detailed important aspects of such discourse managing gestures, to date no comprehensive account of their conceptual foundations and pragmatic functions exists. The present paper fills this gap in the literature. Building on prior analyses of control gestures in argumentative discourse (e.g., Wehling, Elisabeth (2010). Argument is gesture war: Function, form and prosody of discourse structuring gestures in political argument. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and inclusive-cooperative gestures in friendly conversation (e.g., Bavelas, Janet B., Nicole Chovil, Douglas Lavrie, & Allan Wade (1992). Interactive gestures. Discourse Processes, 15 (4), 469–489. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; (2004). The palm-up-open-hand: A case of a gesture family? In Cornelia Müller, Roland Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), it details a typology of discourse management gestures that distinguishes inclusive-cooperative and control gestures as separate pragmatic types and accounts for their forms and functions in terms of their conceptual foundations in primary metaphoric, space-motion schematic, and force dynamic reasoning.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Gesture
  • Discourse management gestures: A functional classification
  • The metaphoric foundations of discourse management gestures
  • The force-dynamic foundations of discourse management gestures
  • Exemplifying the force-dynamic categories of gestural discourse management
    • Content agonism
    • Stabbing and referential pointing in gestural agonism
    • Content antagonism
    • Floor agonism
    • Floor antagonism
    • Force conflict resolution
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (56)
References
Barbey, Aron & Phillip Wolff (2006). Causal reasoning from forces. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 24391.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bavelas, Janet B., Nicole Chovil, Douglas Lavrie, & Allan Wade (1992). Interactive gestures. Discourse Processes, 15 (4), 469–489. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bavelas, Janet B., Nicole Chovil, Linda Coates, & Lori Roe (1995). Gestures specialized for dialogue. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 211, 394–405. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bressem, Jana & Cornelia Müller (2014). The family of away gestures: Negation, refusal and negative assessment. In Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva H. Ladewig, David McNeill, Jana Bressem (Eds.), Body – language – communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, Vol. 21 (pp. 1592–1604). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cacioppo, John, Joseph Priester, & Gary Bernston (1993). Rudimentary determination of attitudes: II: Arm flexion and extension have differential effects on attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 651, 5–17. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Calbris, Geneviève (1990). The semiotics of French gesture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2011). Elements of meaning in gesture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Casasanto, Daniel (2008). Similarity and proximity: When does close in space mean close in mind? Memory and Cognition, 36 (6), 1047–1056. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Casasanto, Daniel & Kyle Jasmin (2010). Good and bad in the hands of politicians: Spontaneous gestures during positive and negative speech. PLoS ONE, 5 (7): e11805. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chen, Mark & John Bargh (1999). Consequences of automatic evaluation: Immediate behavior predispositions to approach or avoid the stimulus. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 251, 215–224. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cienki, Alan (1998). Metaphoric gestures and some of their relations to verbal metaphorical expressions. In Jean-Pierre Koenig (Ed.), Discourse and cognition: Bridging the gap (pp. 189–204). Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cienki, Alan, & Cornelia Müller (2008). Metaphor and gesture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cooperrider, Kensy (2011). Reference in action: Links between pointing and language. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Diego.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2017). Foreground gesture, background gesture. Gesture, 16 (2), 176–202 ( this issue ). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Förster, Jens & Fritz Strack (1997). Motor actions in retrieval of valenced information: A motorcongruence effect. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 851, 1419–1427. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1998). Motor actions in retrieval of valenced information: II: Boundary conditions for motor congruence effects. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 861, 1423–1426. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond (1996). Why many concepts are metaphorical. Cognition, 611, 309–319. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grady, Joseph (1997). Foundations of meaning: Primary metaphors and primary scenes. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haviland, John (2003). How to point in Zinacantán. In Sotaro Kita (Ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet (pp. 139–170). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johnson, Christopher (1999). Metaphor vs. conflation in the acquisition of polysemy: The case of see . In Masako Hiraga, Chris Sinha, Sherman Wilcox (Eds.), Cultural, typological and psychological perspectives in cognitive linguistics (pp.155–170). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kendon, Adam (1995). Gestures as illocutionary and discourse markers in Southern Italian conversation. Journal of Pragmatics, 231, 247–279. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kita, Sotaro (2003). Interplay of gaze, hand, torso orientation, and language in pointing. In Sotaro Kita (Ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet (pp. 307–328). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kwon, Iksoo (2011). Evidentials and epistemic modals in a causal event structure. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Elisabeth Wehling (2008). Auf leisen Sohlen ins Gehirn: Politische Sprache und ihre heimliche Macht. Heidelberg: Carl-Auer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ladewig, Silva (2011). Putting the cyclic gesture on a cognitive basis. CogniTextes, 61: [URL].
McNeill, David (1985). So you think gestures are nonverbal? Psychological Review, 92 (3), 350–371. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mittelberg, Irene (2013). Balancing acts: Image schemas and force dynamics as experiential essence in pictures by Paul Klee and their gestural enactments. In Mike Borkent, Barbara Dancygier, Jennifer Hinnell (Eds.), Language and the creative mind (pp. 325–346). Stanford: CSLI.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mittelberg, Irene & Linda R. Waugh (2009). Metonymy first, metaphor second: A cognitive-semiotic approach to multimodal figures of thought in co-speech gesture. In Charles Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (Eds.), Multimodal metaphor (pp. 329–356). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia (1998). Redebegleitende Gesten. Kulturgeschichte – Theorie – Sprachvergleich. Berlin: Berlin Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2004). The palm-up-open-hand: A case of a gesture family? In Cornelia Müller, Roland Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nuñez, Rafael & Eve Sweetser (2006). With the future behind them: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive Science, 301, 401–450. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reddy, Michael (1979). The conduit metaphor. In Andrew Ortony (Ed.), Metaphor and thought (pp. 284–310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Semino, Elena (2006). A corpus-based study of metaphors for speech activity in British English. In Anatol Stefanowitsch, Stefan Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 36–62). Berlin: de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Streeck, Jürgen (2009). Gesturecraft: The manu-facture of meaning. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve (1987). Metaphorical models of thought and speech: A comparison of historical directions and metaphorical mappings in the two domains. Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1990). From etymology to pragmatics: Metaphorical and cultural aspects of semantic structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1992). English metaphors for language: Motivations, conventions, and creativity. Poetics Today, 13 (4): Aspects of Metaphor and Comprehension, 705–724. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1998). Regular metaphoricity in gesture: Bodily-based models of speech interaction. Actes du 16e Congrès International des Linguistes. CD-ROM: Elsevier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sweetser, Eve & Marisa Sizemore (2008). Personal and interpersonal gesture spaces: Functional contrasts in language and gesture. In Andrea Tyler, Yiyoung Kim, Mari Takada (Eds.), Language in the context of use: Cognitive and discourse approaches to language and language learning (pp. 25–52). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard (1981). Force dynamics. Paper presented at the Conference on Language and Mental Imagery. University of California, Berkeley.
(1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science, 121, 49–100. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2000). Toward a cognitive semantics. Vol. I: Concept structuring systems. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tom, Gail, Paul Pettersen, Teresa Lau, Trevor Burton, & Jim Cook (1991). The role of overt headmovement in the formation of affect. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 121, 281–289. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wehling, Elisabeth (2010). Argument is gesture war: Function, form and prosody of discourse structuring gestures in political argument. Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(2012). When interlocutors get pushy: Communicative force in discourse management gestures. Presented at the 11th Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.
(2013). Discourse management gestures: Their pragmatic functions, primary metaphors, and force-dynamics. Presented at the Gesture Pragmatics Symposium, University of California, Berkeley.
Wells, Gary & Richard Petty (1980). The effects of overt head movements on persuasion: Compatibility and incompatibility of responses. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 11, 219–230. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilkins, David (2003). Why pointing with the index finger is not a universal (in sociocultural and semiotic terms). In Sotaro Kita (Ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet (pp. 171–215). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wolff, Phillip (2003). Models of causation and the semantics of causal verbs. Cognitive Psychology, 47 (3), 276–332. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (26)

Cited by 26 other publications

Scholman, Merel & Schuyler Laparle
2025. Can gestures speak louder than words? The effect of gestural discourse markers on discourse expectations. Discourse Processes 62:6-7 ► pp. 457 ff. DOI logo
Ladewig, Silva H.
2024. Recurrent Gestures: Cultural, Individual, and Linguistic Dimensions of Meaning-Making. In The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies, ► pp. 32 ff. DOI logo
Laparle, Schuyler, Gaëlle Ferré & Merel C. J. Scholman
2024. More Than One Gesture but Less Than Two? Inter-stroke Dependencies in Form and Meaning. In Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 14711], ► pp. 245 ff. DOI logo
Mittelberg, Irene & Jennifer Hinnell
2024. Iconicity, Schematicity, and Representation in Gesture. In The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies, ► pp. 56 ff. DOI logo
Oakley, Todd, Vera Tobin, Adrian Vietorisz, Noah Slobodin & Katherine Gordon
2024. Shocking projections: The rise of the [x-shock] construction complex in macroeconomics. Lingua 312 ► pp. 103829 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Icy (Yunyi), Tina Izad & Erica A. Cartmill
2024. Embodying Similarity and Difference: The Effect of Listing and Contrasting Gestures During U.S. Political Speech. Cognitive Science 48:3 DOI logo
Corella, Meghan
2023. “Talk to the hand”: handling peer conflict through gestural socialization in an elementary classroom. Frontiers in Communication 8 DOI logo
Dyrmo, Tomasz
2023. Levels of metaphor in gesture. Pragmatics & Cognition 30:2 ► pp. 330 ff. DOI logo
Dyrmo, Tomasz
2025. Secrets in motion. Narrative Inquiry DOI logo
Francis, Naomi, Patrick Georg Grosz & Pritty Patel-Grosz
2023. THROW. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 8:1 DOI logo
Laparle, Schuyler
2023. Gradient at-issueness and semiotic complexity in gesture: a response. Theoretical Linguistics 49:3-4 ► pp. 261 ff. DOI logo
LEHMANN, CLAUDIA
2023. As if that wasn't enough: Englishas ifclauses as multimodal utterance constructions. English Language and Linguistics 27:1 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
Bressem, Jana & Claudia Wegener
2021. Handling talk. Gesture 20:2 ► pp. 219 ff. DOI logo
Nuckolls, Janis B.
2020. “How do you even know what ideophones mean?”. Gesture 19:2-3 ► pp. 161 ff. DOI logo
Wilson, Anna
2020. It’s Time to Do News Again. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 68:4 ► pp. 379 ff. DOI logo
Alviar, Camila, Rick Dale & Alexia Galati
2019. Complex Communication Dynamics: Exploring the Structure of an Academic Talk. Cognitive Science 43:3 DOI logo
Gawne, Lauren, Chelsea Krajcik, Helene N. Andreassen, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker & Barbara F. Kelly
2019. Data transparency and citation in the journal Gesture . Gesture 18:1 ► pp. 83 ff. DOI logo
Streeck, Jürgen
2019. Gesture research. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Streeck, Jürgen
2021. The emancipation of gestures. Interactional Linguistics 1:1 ► pp. 90 ff. DOI logo
Streeck, Jürgen
2022. Gesture research. In Handbook of Pragmatics [Handbook of Pragmatics, ], ► pp. 672 ff. DOI logo
Kamunen, Antti
2018. Open Hand Prone as a resource in multimodal claims to interruption. Gesture 17:2 ► pp. 291 ff. DOI logo
Lopez-Ozieblo, Renia
2018. Can gestures help clarify the meaning of the Spanish marker ‘se’?. Lingua 208 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Lopez-Ozieblo, Renia
2020. Proposing a revised functional classification of pragmatic gestures. Lingua 247 ► pp. 102870 ff. DOI logo
Mittelberg, Irene
2017. Embodied frames and scenes. Gesture 16:2 ► pp. 203 ff. DOI logo
Mittelberg, Irene
2018. Gestures as image schemas and force gestalts: A dynamic systems approach augmented with motion-capture data analyses. Cognitive Semiotics 11:1 DOI logo
Mittelberg, Irene
2019. Visuo-Kinetic Signs Are Inherently Metonymic: How Embodied Metonymy Motivates Forms, Functions, and Schematic Patterns in Gesture. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue