Gesturing for discourse management

Many gestures are used for managing the conversation that the speaker is involved in. As with content gestures, discourse management gestures come in different flavours. There can be gestures which are symbols in discourse management, such as shaking or nodding of the head. Gestures can be es such as eye gaze, pointing, nodding. And they can be o s smiling, frowning or putting on a thinking face. These gestures perform a number of discourse management functions. One analysis distinguishes delivery, citing, seeking and turn-taking Bavelas, 1994.

 A delivery gesture indicates that the subject matter is being communicated to the listener, often by a specific handing-over’ gesture directed towards a particular recipient. Similarly, there are gestures which are associated with a change in topic or which are used when new information is being delivered. These gestures often involve changes in body position or leg position Beattie, 1980.

 Gestures that are used in citing refer back to an earlier contribution to the conversation, e.g. by pointing at an addressee who made the earlier contribution, indicating something like as you said earlier’.

A seeking gesture usually requests a response. That is, the speaker is trying to get a particular response from an addressee; e.g. by looking at the addressee as if to say something like can you give me the word for . . .’?

Turn-taking gestures contribute more obviously to the management of conversation. An example would be a gesture that indicates that another speaker may now have a turn, a ceding the floor’ gesture. For instance, a speaker might hand over’ the floor to the addressee with one of the indica tive gestures discussed earlier under the heading indices’. This can include eye gaze or body orientation. These gestures can either be expressing con tent by referring to the addressee or managing discourse by inviting the addressee to take the floor, or both.

It is not only the speaker who manages conversation – listeners can contribute through their use of what are referred to as collateral gestures, e.g. head-nods as acknowledgment or some kind of mimicry related to the content. This kind of feedback manages conversation in that it confirms for the speaker that their turn is being understood and followed. It may also be used to express sympathy, such as when an observer grimaces when either witnessing or being told about an accident. The grimace does not mean that the listener is in the emotional state expressed by the facial gesture, as shown by experimental observations from a role-play situation. This involved a staged accident where it looks to the observer that an experimenter has dropped some equipment on his finger Bavelas, Black, Lemery & Mullett, 1986. Observers typically and quickly form a grimace. If the experimenter looks up and makes eye-contact, the grimace continues, presumably to display sympathy. If the experimenter remains hunched-up the grimace is dropped.

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مواضيع ذات صلة

Sources of typicality effects

The theory of idealised cognitive models

Problems with prototype theory

The horizontal dimension

The vertical dimension

The categorisation system

Principles of categorization

Prototype theory

The problem of prototypicality

The problem of conceptual fuzziness

The definitional problem

The classical theory