(Salle F08)
Mittelberg, Irene
(Cornell University, Ithaca)
The gesture hold : A look at its forms and pragmatic
functions in teaching contexts
Gestures are a comparatively fl uid medium : They usually vanish as
quickly as they emerge, often melting into one other. In comparison
to such an unmarked fl ow of gestural forms and movements,
the gesture hold can be considered as a marked instance of manual
communication, standing out by taking on a certain stability in time
and space. This phenomenon is particularly interesting in the teaching
context, where, by holding a gesture, the teacher makes the
represented concept interactively available for longer than usual.
Teacher and students can contemplate a gestural form, which may
help them keep their attention on the phenomenon in question and
reason about it.
On the basis of video data collected in linguistics lectures and beginning
language courses, this paper explores how the teachers’ linguistic
explanations and spontaneous co-speech gestures render abstract
concepts and structures, especially those pertaining to grammar,
more graspable. The focus is on the gesture hold and its forms and
pragmatic functions of gesture holds as observed in the data. Combining
cognitive and semiotic approaches to multimodal communication
(Bouvet, Calbris, Cienki, Eco, Jakobson, Johnson, Lakoff, Müller,
Peirce, Sweetser, Taub), I will illustrate several types of semiotic
modes (iconic, indexical, metaphoric, etc.) that may be at work in
such semiotic acts. I will also demonstrate to what degree gesture
holds may be situated in different kinds of interactions : between
gesture hold and concurrent speech information, between gesture,
gaze, and head movements, as well as between teachers and students
(eliciting feedback, guiding attention, etc.).
Gesture holds, seen as a sort of classroom practice, may serve to
compensate for the lack of genuine objects of contemplation and
manipulation in linguistics courses where the subject matter consist
of abstract categories, relations, functions, and structures. Also,
by engaging the body in semiotic activities, language teachers may
transgress the students’ linguistic limitations and appeal to their
conceptual knowledge. The goal is to show that investigations into the logic and use of the gesture hold can foster our understanding
of situated, distributed cognition and the emergence of meaning in
interpretive processes (Goodwin, Streeck, van Lier).
