Cover not available

Article published In: Recurrent Gestures
Edited by Simon Harrison, Silva H. Ladewig and Jana Bressem
[Gesture 20:2] 2021
► pp. 180–218

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

French and British children’s shrugs

A cross-linguistic developmental case-study of a recurrent gesture

 | Sorbonne University
 | Sorbonne Nouvelle University
Published online: 30 May 2022
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.19043.bea
Abstract
This paper presents a multimodal and form-based approach to language development grounded in situated practices and focuses on the longitudinal analysis of a composite gesture, the shrug, in two datasets of mother-child interactions in French and British English. The shrug in its full-fledged form can combine a palm-up, lifted shoulders, a head tilt, raised eyebrows and a mouth shrug (. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Streeck, Jürgen. (2009). Gesturecraft: The manu-facturing of meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). All formal components and functions of the two children’s shrugs between the ages of 1 and 4;2 were coded within the multimodal ongoing discourse. Multiple correspondence analyses were combined with detailed qualitative analyses. Despite differences in the two children, interesting similarities in the development were observed over three periods: (1) absence is mainly expressed with palm-ups; (2) both children start using head tilts and shoulder lifts to express epistemicity and interpersonal positioning; (3) head tilts increase, and each body part is more clearly associated with one function.
Article outline
  • 1.State of the art in shrug gesture research
    • 1.1The shrug as a gesture family
    • 1.2The shrug family and form-meaning pairings in adult use
    • 1.3The shrug family and form-meaning pairings in child use
  • 2.Approach, data, and method
    • 2.1Approach
    • 2.2Data
    • 2.3Method
  • 3.Quantitative and qualitative analyses
    • 3.1Ellie’s use of shrugs
    • 3.2Madeleine’s use of shrugs
    • 3.3Comparison between Ellie and Madeleine
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (55)
References
Aronsson, Karin & Morgenstern, Aliyah. (2021). “Bravo!”: Co-constructing praise in French family live. Journal of Pragmatics, 1731, 1–14. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bavelas, Janet B., Chovil, Nicole, Lawrie, Douglas A., & Wade, Allan. (1992). Interactive gestures. Discourse Processes, 15 (4), 469–489. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline. (2015). Multimodal acquisition and expression of negation. Analysis of a videotaped and longitudinal corpus of a French and an English mother-child dyad. Ph.D. Dissertation, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris.
Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline, Morgenstern, Aliyah, & Boutet, Dominique. (2015). A child’s multimodal negations from 1 to 4: The interplay between modalities. In Pierre Larrivée & Chungmin Lee (Eds.), Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives (pp. 95–123). Cham: Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline & Debras Camille. (2017). Developing communicative postures. The emergence of shrugging in child communication. Language, Interaction and Acquisition (LIA), 8 (1), 89–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blondel, Marion, Boutet, Dominique, Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline, & Morgenstern, Aliyah. (2017). La négation chez les enfants signeurs et non signeurs. Language, Interaction and Acquisition (LIA), 8 (1), 141–171. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul, & Weenink, David. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International, 5 (9/10), 341–347.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boutet, Dominique. (2008). Une morphologie de la gestualité: Structuration articulaire. Cahiers de Linguistique Analogique, (5), 81–115.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2010). Structuration physiologique de la gestuelle: Modèle et tests. Lidil. Revue de linguistique et de didactique des langues, (42), 77–96. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2018). Pour une approche kinésiologique de la gestualité. Habilitation à diriger des recherches, Université de Rouen-Normandie. [URL]
Calbris, Geneviève. (1990). The semiotics of French gestures. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chu, Mingyuan, Meyer, Antje, Foulkes, Lucy, & Kita, Sotaro. (2013). Individual differences in frequency and salience of speech-accompanying gestures: the role of cognitive abilities and empathy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1431, 694–709. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cienki, Alan. (2012). Usage events of spoken language and the symbolic units we (may) abstract from them. In Janusz Badio & Krystof Kosecki (Eds.), Cognitive processes in language (pp. 149–158). Bern: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cooperrider, Kensy, Abner, Natasha, & Goldin-Meadow, Susan. (2018). The Palm-Up puzzle: Meanings and origins of a widespread form in gesture and sign. Frontiers in Communication, 31. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
D’Onofrio, Annette, Hilton, Katherine, & Pratt, Teresa. (2013). Creaky voice across discourse contexts: Identifying the locus of style for creak. Presented at the conference New Ways of Analyzing Variation, 42, in Pittsburgh, PA.
Darwin, Charles. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: John Murray. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Da Vinci, Leonardo. (1982). Trattato della pittura, Milan: Savelli.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Debras, Camille. (2013). L’expression multimodale du positionnement interactionnel (multimodal stance-taking): Étude d’un corpus oral vidéo de discussions sur l’environnement en anglais britannique. Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2017). The shrug. Gesture, 16 (1), 1–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
de Jorio, Andrea. (2000 [1832]). La mimica degli antichiInvestigata nel gestire Napoletano. Gesture in Naples and gesture in Classical Antiquity. English translation, notes, and introduction by Adam Kendon. Bloomingdon, IN: Indianana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Desagulier, Guillaume. (2014). Visualizing distances in a set of near-synonyms: Rather, quite, fairly, and pretty. In Dylan Glynn & Justyna A. Robinson (Eds.), Corpus methods for semantics. Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy (pp. 145–178). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2017). Corpus linguistics and statistics with R. Introduction to quantitative methods in linguistics. New York: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ekman, Paul & Friesen, Wallace V. (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica, 1 (1), 49–98. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Filhol, Michael, Hadjadj, Mohamed N., & Choisier, Annick. (2014). Non-manual features: the right to indifference. Language resources and evaluation conference (LREC), Reykjavik, Iceland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Givens, David B. (1977). Shoulder shrugging: A densely communicative expressive behaviour. Semiotica, 19 (1/2), 13–28. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Glynn, Dylan. (2014). Correspondence analysis: Exploring data and identifying patterns. In Dylan Glynn & Justyna Robinson (Eds.), Corpus methods for semantics: Quantitative studies in polysemy and synonymy (pp. 443–485). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles. (2007). Environmentally coupled gestures. In Susan D. Duncan, Justine Cassell, & Elena T. Levy (Eds.), Gesture and the dynamic dimension of language (pp. 195–212). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2017). Co-operative action. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Graziano, Maria. (2014). The development of two pragmatic gestures of the so-called Open Hand Supine family in Italian children. In Mandana Seyfeddinipur & Marianne Gullberg (Eds.), From gesture in conversation to visible action as utterance: Essays in honor of Adam Kendon (pp. 311–330. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harrison, Simon & Larrivée, Pierre. (2016). Morphosyntactic correlates of gestures: A gesture associated with negation in French and its organisation with speech. In Pierre Larrivée & Chungmin Lee (Eds.), Negation and polarity: Experimental perspectives (pp. 75–94). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Isaacson, Walter. (2017). Leonardo da Vinci. New York: Simon & Shuster.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jurafsky, Daniel. (1996). A probabilistic model of lexical and syntactic access and disambiguation. Cognitive Science, 201, 137–194. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kendon, Adam. (1983). The Study of gesture: Some remarks on its history. In John N. Deely & Margot D. Lenhart (Eds.), Semiotics 1981 (pp. 153–164). New York: Plenum Press. [URL].
. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ladewig, Silva H. (2014). Recurrent gestures. 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. 1558–1574). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lê, Sébastien, Josse, Julie, & Husson, François. (2008). FactorMineR: An R package for Multivariate analysis. Journal of Statistical Software, University of California, Los Angeles, 2008, 25 (1), 1–18.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maury-Rouan, Claire. (2011). “Voices” and bodies: Investigating nonverbal parameters of the participation framework. In Gale Stam & Mika Ishino (Eds.), Integrating gestures: The interdisciplinary nature of gesture (pp. 309–320). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. [URL].
McNeill, David. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morgenstern, Aliyah. (2014). Children’s multimodal language development. In Christiane Fäcke (Ed.), Manual of language acquisition (pp. 123–142). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morgenstern, Aliyah, Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline, Blondel, Marion, & Boutet, Dominique. (2016). A multimodal approach to the development of negation in signed and spoken languages: Four case studies. In Lourdes Ortega, Ande E. Tyler, Hae I. Park, & Mariko Uno (Eds.), The usage-based study of language learning and multilingualism (pp. 15–36). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morgenstern, Aliyah & Parisse, Christophe. (2012). The Paris Corpus. Journal of French Language Studies, 22 (1), 7–12. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(Eds.). (2017). Le langage de l’enfant. De l’éclosion à l’explosion. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morris, Desmond. (1994). Bodytalk: A world guide to gestures. London: Cape.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia. (2004). Forms and uses of the Palm Up Open Hand: A case of a gesture family? In Cornelia Müller & Roland Posner (Eds.), The semantics and pragmatics of everyday gestures, Proceedings of the Berlin conference, April 1998 (pp. 233–256). Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Müller, Cornelia, Bressem, Jana, & Ladewig, Silva H. (2013). Towards a grammar of gesture – a form based view. In: Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva H. Ladewig, David McNeill, & Sedinha Teßendorf (Eds.), Body – language – communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction. (Vol. 11, pp. 707–733). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perdoncin, Anton & Mercklé, Pierre. (2014). Représenter graphiquement les résultats d’une analyse factorielle avec R. [URL]
Sacks, Harvey, Schlegloff, Emanuel A., & Jefferson, Gail. (1974). A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taling for conversation. Language, 501, 696–735. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shaw, Emely. (2013). Gesture in multiparty interaction: A study of embodied discourse in spoken English and American Sign Language. Unpublished thesis manuscript, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Sutton-Spence, Rachel & Woll, Bencie. (1999). The linguistics of British Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tennant, Richard & Gluszak Brown, Marianne. (1998). The American Sign Language handshape dictionary. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Valli, Clayton & Lucas, Ceil. (2000). Linguistics of American Sign Language: An introduction (3rd Ed.). Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wittenburg, Peter, Brugman, Hennie, Russel, Albert, Klassmann, Alex, & Sloetjes, Han. (2006). ELAN: a professional framework for multimodality research. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06) (pp. 1556–1559), Genoa, Italy. [URL]
Cited by (11)

Cited by 11 other publications

Cienki, Alan, Maíra Avelar & Olga Iriskhanova
2025. Action Schemas Can Account for Prototypical and Non-Prototypical Palm-Up Open Hand Gestures. Languages 10:11 ► pp. 282 ff. DOI logo
Morgenstern, Aliyah & Stéphanie Caët
2025. The integration of the visual-gestural modality in research on child language development: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek. First Language 45:6 ► pp. 769 ff. DOI logo
Alvarez, Eric & Aliyah Morgenstern
2024. Third-Generation Heritage Spanish Acquisition and Socialization: Word Learning and Overheard Input in an L.A.-Based Mexican Family. Languages 9:3 ► pp. 108 ff. DOI logo
Harrison, Simon
2024. On Grammar–Gesture Relations: Gestures Associated with Negation. In The Cambridge Handbook of Gesture Studies, ► pp. 446 ff. DOI logo
Harrison, Simon
2024. ‘This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before’: initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures. Language and Cognition 16:4 ► pp. 1778 ff. DOI logo
Morgenstern, Aliyah
2024. The choreography of multimedial procedures and multimodal languaging in French family dinners. In Media as Procedures of Communication [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 348], ► pp. 188 ff. DOI logo
Wu, Suwei, Alan Cienki & Yaoyao Chen
2024. Gesture in contexts of verbal negation in Chinese. Gesture 23:1-2 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Yao, Xiaochao
2024. Research on Multimodal English Teaching Methods and Practices Leading to Intelligent Generation. Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences 9:1 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
Harrison, Simon & Silva H. Ladewig
2021. Recurrent gestures throughout bodies, languages, and cultural practices. Gesture 20:2 ► pp. 153 ff. DOI logo
Harrison, Simon, Silva H. Ladewig & Jana Bressem
2021. The diversity of recurrency. Gesture 20:2 ► pp. 143 ff. 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