The browser you are using is not supported by this website. All versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported, either by us or Microsoft (read more here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support).

Please use a modern browser to fully experience our website, such as the newest versions of Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari etc.

On the lower limit of gesture

På svenska

Author

  • Mats Andrén

Editor

  • Mandana Seyfeddinipur
  • Marianne Gullberg

Summary, in English

Where, if, and how, should researchers draw the limit between gesture proper and semiotically less complex forms of bodily conduct that do not quite qualify as gesture? This is the question of a lower limit of gesture (Andrén 2010). In accord with a comparative semiotic approach (Kendon 2008) I suggest that the question is best understood, not as a binary distinction between gesture and non-gesture, but as a matter of several different semiotic properties that can vary independently of each other. This involves, in particular, different levels of representational complexity and communicative explicitness. These semiotic properties are both conceptually explicated and applied to empirical examples in this paper, eventually leading me to propose a family resemblance conception of gesture.

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Publication/Series

Visible Utterance in Action

Document type

Book chapter

Publisher

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Keywords

  • semiotics
  • language
  • gesture

Status

Inpress

Project

  • Gestures that involve handling of objects
  • Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (RJ)