Gestures, at first glance, look like spontaneous movements of hands that help the speaker to produce the utterance. A more detailed analysis shows that these movements are strictly associated with certain concepts, and rather than being random, they are meaningful and systemic. The first part of the paper contains an overview of gestures of negation used by Hausa speakers (both emblems and co-speech gestures). In the second part, four types of co-speech gestures are scrutinised: shaking the index finger sideways, hand scissors, brushing the palms against each other and brushing the back of the hands. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the gestures in question co-occur with the specific markers of negation and emphasize one of the meanings or functions of the negation, such as prohibition, refusal, rejection, denial, nonexistence and totality.
The present study focuses on strategies which speakers employ when gesturing in a shared articulatory space. Using data from English and Czech multimodal corpora of spontaneous business meetings, we conducted a qualitative analysis of gestural patterns based on two strategies: alignment and elaboration of gestures representing abstract/conceptual objects. We show that speakers make use of both strategies in the context of co-operative meaning formation (with various pragmatic functions) and that the notions of alignment and elaboration provide useful analytic and descriptive tools for the study of human interaction from a multimodal perspective.
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