(Salle F101)

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  Streeck, Jürgen (University of Texas, Austin)

The gestural structuring of the world at hand

Gesture serves human activities, including conversation, in a number of different capacities that can be conceived as alignment-types : ways of aligning people, gesturing hands, and the situated world within which people interact. Alignment types are disinguishable on the basis of the framework of participant orientation within which gestures are perceived and understood, i.e. in terms of their alignment and coordination with gaze, speech, action, and the setting or landscape within which the interaction takes place. In one of these alignment-types, gestures aid in the structuring and making sense of the world-at-hand. Among the ‘jobs’ that gestures do in the world-at-hand are : to structure the participants’ perception of objects ; to disclose intrinsic, invisible features and affordances of things ; to analyze, abstract, and exhibit action ; and to ‘mark’ up the setting. In this paper I distinguish and describe several gestural practices that serve to make a setting intelligible and highlight its features ; these include tracing : an index fi nger, set of fi ngers, or hand is moved along a surface, thereby drawing a line, but also gathering tactile information ; exploratory procedures : patterned actions by which hands systematically explore and at the same time disclose and broadcast intrinsic object properties and affordances ; and highlighting action and its accessories in which practical actions or their stages are elaborated through formal operation such as exaggeration, repetition, and segmentation, to disclose their logic, components, and characteristics to coparticipants.