LINGUIST List 33.1740
Mon May 16 2022
Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Bressem (2021)
Editor for this issue: Amalia Robinson <amalialinguistlist.org>
Date: 11-Apr-2022
From: Lauren Gawne <l.gawne
latrobe.edu.au>
Subject: Repetitions in Gesture
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AUTHOR: Jana Bressem
TITLE: Repetitions in Gesture
SUBTITLE: A Cognitive-Linguistic and Usage-Based Perspective
SERIES TITLE: Applications of Cognitive Linguistics
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Lauren Gawne, La Trobe University
SUMMARY
Repetition in the performance of communicative gestures has long been observed, but this monograph brings new levels of rigour to the study of how repetitions are used and their role in communication. “Repetitions in Gesture” takes a usage-based approach, drawing on a German language corpus of materials to provide insights into the semantic functions, syntactic integration, and interactional role in signalling attention. This work is grounded in a Cognitive Linguistic approach to multimodal communication. (I reviewed the physical version of this title, which is a hardcover book. It is also available as an electronic book, which I did not have the opportunity to access.)
This book has seven chapters, with a set of appendices that provide more detail on the coding schema used and key examples referred to across chapters.
Chapter One introduces the topic of gestural repetitions, the multimodality of grammar, and the data on which the analysis is based.
Chapter Two provides some background on the importance of iteration across spoken and signed languages as well as gestures, noting modality-specific differences, particularly the prevalence of reduplication as a grammatical feature of signed languages.
Chapter Three provides the key analysis of the corpus, including details of the coding process. This chapter provides the overview that sets up the categorisation of repetitions and is the core contribution of the book to the wider Gesture Studies literature. Across 30 hours of data from a variety of settings, including television interviews and informal conversations and games, Bressem identified 182 gestural repetitions made with the arms and/or head by 40 speakers. From these examples Bressem identifies two main categories of repetition and gives definitions of these that include structural and functional features: iterations and reduplications. Iterations involve repetitions with no change in realisation between strokes that repeat a single gestural meaning, thus reenforcing the utterance, resembling the long-established ‘baton/beat’ gesture category (Efron 1941/1972, Ekman & Johnson 1969, McNeill 1992). Reduplications are repetitions where there is some change in the movement parameters between strokes, thus building up complex meaning alongside spoken content. Two different types of reduplications with different semantic functions are noted by Bressem. The first involves a change in the parameter of direction of movement or position, (“Type A reduplications”), the second involves a change in the parameter of position (“Type B reduplications”). Bressem also notes differences in performance between the two major categories: reduplications are formed from multiple-stroke sequences without preparation between strokes, while iterations can be formed from multiple stroke sequences or preparation-stroke sequences.
Chapter Four examines the relationship between gestural repetitions and semantics. The first half of the chapter explores a cognitive-semantic classification of iterations and reduplications, paying attention to the distribution of these categories in the corpus, and their formal properties. Iterations were far more common and also showed far more flexibility in terms of the number of strokes, with examples sometimes demonstrating a length of nine or more strokes (but iterations and reduplications both tended to have 2-3 strokes overall). The second half of the chapter examines the semantic differences in light of these formal differences. Iterations tend to involve the acting mode, and are used to represent the hands, while reduplications tend to use a representing mode, with the manual gesture used to represent something other than the hand. This opens them up to be used for more abstract meaning making.
Chapter Five examines how repetitions interact with the syntax of co-produced speech. Bressem opens by situating her work within the multimodal grammar tradition, before examining the temporal relationship of the repetitions in the corpus with syntactic elements. Bressem notes that reduplications have a stronger temporal alignment with the relevant lexical affiliate than do iterations, suggesting that different types of repetition have different levels of integration with the co-speech content. In the second half of this chapter Bressem introduces the distinction between multimodal constructions, where the speech is obligatory and the gesture optional, and verbo-kinesic constructions, where the gesture is a required element for the utterance to have meaning.
Chapter Six looks at the role that repetitions have with regard to attention and salience, as grounded in the literature on Cognitive Linguistics. Bressem notes that gesture is generally considered a foregrounding strategy, but discusses the different functions of iterations and reduplications. Iterations, because they do not have semantic complexity, have a particular function in attention focus.
Chapter Seven concludes the book by returning to the possible universality of repetition across linguistic systems, independent of articulatory modality, and the implications of repetition for Cognitive Linguistics and linguistics more broadly.
EVALUATION
Bressem has brought a new level of rigour to the often observed but under-analysed phenomenon of repetition in gesture. By grounding the research in the existing literature from spoken languages and signed languages as well as Gesture Studies, this work provides observable generalisations that should be replicable across languages and corpora. The use of a clearly defined data set and robust quantification of observed repetition phenomena sets a new benchmark for corpora approaches to gesture. This book is reminiscent of Harrison’s (2018) monograph, which focused on the multimodal construction of negation, and its scholarly tradition is very much in the European Cognitive Linguistic approach to Gesture Studies found in the work of Ladewig (2020), Cienki (2017), and Müller (2017), and Cognitive Linguistics more generally, particularly Langacker (2000).
“Repetitions in Gesture” is a dense 200 pages of content. Those pages pack in a lot, including 30 figures, 21 tables, 112 footnotes and over 60 block quotes. The footnotes provide the option for more contextualisation of data and analysis, and there are eight appendices which give more detail on data coding and key examples used in the volume. This allows for the invested reader to build a deeper understanding, but I admit I did not make use of many of them. Example art is presented as refreshingly dynamic pencil line drawings, which are unfortunately pale in the printed volume, and the converse text printing shows through. This is one element where the digital version will likely offer a superior reading experience.
The distinction between iterations and reduplications, which is established in Chapter Three and backed up by semantic, syntactic, and interactional perspectives in subsequent chapters, is a key contribution of this volume. I would have preferred a more semantically transparent labelling of Type A and Type B reduplications, as these are revisted throughout the chapters and I struggled at times to keep them clearly distinguished. While it is clear that Cognitive Linguistics allows Bressem to make keen-eyed observations about the functional and structural relationship between gestural repetitions and co-speech content, occasionally chapters take a deeper turn into Cognitive Linguistic theory, beyond the direct scope of the data being analysed. For example, the final section of Chapter Five discusses multimodal constructions more generally, and, as a reader not versed in Cognitive Linguistic or Construction Grammar theory, I found it hard to follow the thread from the earlier data analysis. Having said that, scholars coming to this book from this theoretical background will find analysis here that grounds gestural repetitions in the larger discussions of the field.
“Repetitions in Gesture” is a robust and rigorous work that sets a new standard for how we talk about a ubiquitous feature of co-speech gesture. Bressem uses a corpus to excellent effect to show the different ways speakers use repetition. In doing so, she answers big questions about the role of gesture in interaction, and shows that gesture can be used to build units of different complexities. This book, and particularly Chapter Three, will be of value to gesture researchers who want to bring rigour to the description of repetition movements in their analyses, as well as Cognitive Linguists who want to ensure that their work is truly grounded in a multimodal approach to language.
REFERENCES
Cienki, Alan. 2017. Utterance Construction Grammar (UCxG) and the variable multimodality of constructions. Linguistics Vanguard 3(s1).
https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0048Efron, David. 1941/1972. Gesture, race and culture; a tentative study of the spatio-temporal and “linguistic” aspects of the gestural behavior of eastern Jews and southern Italians in New York City, living under similar as well as different environmental conditions. Mouton.
Ekman, Paul & Wallace V. Friesen. 1969. The repertiore of nonverbal behaviour: Categories, origins, usage, and coding. Semiotica 1. 49-98.
Harrison, Simon. 2018. The impulse to gesture: Where language, minds, and bodies intersect. Cambridge University Press.
Ladewig, Silva. 2020. Integrating gestures: The dimension of multimodality in cognitive grammar. de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2000. Grammar and conceptualization. de Gruyter.
McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. The University of Chicago Press.
Müller, Cornelia. 2017. How recurrent gestures mean: Conventionalized contexts-of-use and embodied motivation. Gesture 16(2). 277-304.
https://doi.org/10.1075/gest.16.2.05mul ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Lauren Gawne is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at La Trobe University. Lauren’s current research focus is the cross-cultural variation in gesture use. Lauren also works on the grammar of Tibeto-Burman languages, constructed languages, emoji use online and communicating linguistics to a general audience.
Page Updated: 16-May-2022