Functions of three open-palm hand gestures

Gaëlle Ferré (1)

1 LLING - Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes

This study proposes an analysis of some pragmatic gestures with three types of open-palm gestures: beats and two instances of the hand flip, elsewhere called the 'palm-up open-hand' gesture (Müller, 2004; Cienki & Müller, 2008). Drawing upon three different corpora (political speeches made at the European Parliament, a television show in which the role of this parliament is presented and a corpus of conversational speech recorded in a lab), it proposes an analysis into prosodic, discursive and modal gestures. The paper - through the discussion of particular examples - will address the issues of the type of prosodic and discourse units which are marked by these gestures. Using the same methodological framework, the type of grammatical modality conveyed by open-palm gestures will also be considered.

Mots clés: open-palm hand gesture; prosodic emphasis; discourse structure; grammatical modality

Domaines: Linguistique

Gaëlle Ferré. Functions of three open-palm hand gestures. Multimodal Communication, 2011, 1 (1), pp.5-20. ⟨hal-00666025⟩