Gesture in contexts of verbal negation in Chinese
Published online: 6 February 2025
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.22015.wu
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.22015.wu
Abstract
East Asian languages and cultures are known to show substantial differences from European ones, including in terms
of how negation is expressed. The present study considers how gestures relate to the expression of verbal negation by speakers of
Mandarin Chinese. Based on around 400 minutes of Chinese TV programs, we establish some relatively stable gestural form-meaning
mappings associated with verbal negation. For instance, holding away gestures tend to express
rejection, and wigwagging gestures tend to express denial. Our analyses of
these gestural correlations with verbal negation provide insights into the multifunctionality of negative verbal clauses when
viewed from a multimodal perspective.
Keywords: negation, recurrent gestures, embodiment, multimodality, Chinese
Article outline
- Introduction
- Method
- Database
- Speech identification and coding
- Establishing negators
- Identification of clauses with negators or free-standing negators in the database
- Negative function coding
- Gesture identification and coding
- Gesture identification
- Gesture coding
- Coding reliability
- Gesture categories occurring with clauses of negation in Chinese
- Emerging form-function patterns
- Denial and wigwagging gestures
- Rejection and holding away gestures
- Prohibition and palm-down gestures
- Questions and palm-up presentational & palm-up lateral gestures
- Epistemic negation and palm-up lateral gestures
- Indifference and sweeping away gestures
- Incapability and cyclic gestures
- Failure and beat gestures
- Summary and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Note
References
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