Silva Ladewig

Georg-August-Universität Göttingen | GAUG · Department of German Philology

The book explores the multifaceted nature of media and communication by challenging traditional views that consider media solely as technical infrastructures for transmitting information. Instead, it focuses on mediality as an empirically relevant concept and proposes to understand media as socially constituted semiotic procedures that shape and ar...

Recurrent gestures are stabilized forms that embody a practical knowledge of dealing with different communicative, interactional, cognitive, and affective tasks. They are often derived from practical actions and engage in semantic and pragmatic meaning-making. They occupy a place between spontaneous (singular) gestures and emblems on a continuum of...

This paper introduces a manual movement performed recurrently by German children in the age range of four to six. Based on the movement gestalt and its meaning, we termed it the Slapping movement. All forms identified in the data were performed with a communicative function, yet they showed different degrees of “gesturality.” To be more precise, we...

Der Begriff ‚Parainteraktion‘ rückt ein Phänomen in den Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit, das aus unserem Alltag nicht mehr wegzudenken ist: audiovisuell mediatisierte Interaktion. Die damit verbundene theoretisch wie empirisch interessante Frage nach der Spezifik einer solchen vermittelten Interaktion und ihrer Implikationen für Bedeutungskonstitutionspro...

In gesture studies, the adjective ‘recurrent’ has developed to distinguish a range of semiotic and conceptual phenomena concerning the nature of meaningful bodily movements. This article begins with a brief and recent history of recurrent gesture studies. We raise ongoing debates concerning the position of recurrent gestures on the so-called Kendon...

This paper introduces the Slapping movement as an embodied practice of dislike or meta-commentary recurring in conflictive situations between German children aged four to six ( Hotze, 2019 ). Children move this way primarily in stopping a co-participant’s action and protesting against the action to be stopped. The Slapping movements documented show...

The study presented in this article investigates the temporal unfolding and multimodal orchestration of meaning in a narration. Two aspects are focused on. First, the temporal and multimodal orchestration of conceptual spaces in the entire narrative is described. Five conceptual spaces were identified which were construed by multiple visual-kinesic...

This study examines the ontogenetic development of the recurrent Slapping away gesture which we documented in 10hrs of video data of everyday interactions between 4 to 6 aged children in kindergarten. This gesture is characterized by a movement downwards with the flat hand oriented downwards or away from the speaker’s body. It usually starts at a p...

Based on an analysis accounting for the whole body as a possible articulator in the depiction of actions, this chapter argues for an expansion of the notion of ‘character viewpoint gestures’ to a notion of ‘multimodal action depiction from a character viewpoint’. Our study shows that speakers may deploy only single articulators, providing a semanti...

Recurrent gestures have often been investigated under the label of pragmatic or interactive gestures (Bavelas et al. 1992; Kendon 1995). However, when having a closer look at ges- tures allocated to this group, it turns out that they seem to have been identified on the basis of their conventional character rather than on their pragmatic functions....

Studies on gestures most often focus on multimodal utterances in which gesture and speech are used in temporal overlap. This chapter investigates a different phenomenon, namely gestures that are integrated linearly into a spoken utterance by occupying syntactic gaps. Based on syntactic and semantic analyses of speech and gestures, it will be shown...

Volume II of the handbook offers a unique collection of exemplary case studies. In five chapters and 99 articles it presents the state of the art on how body movements are used for communication around the world. Topics include the functions of body movements, their contexts of occurrence, their forms and meanings, their integration with speech, an...

This paper shows that an analysis of gestures based on the four parameters hand shape, orientation, movement, and position in gesture space, introduced for the notation of sign language (Battison 1974; Stokoe 1960) can uncover recurrent patterns and structures in gestures. By presenting two studies we argue for a discovery procedure that rests upon...

This chapter introduces forms and functions of the cyclic gesture. It focuses on the distribu- tion of this recurrent gesture over different contexts-of-use and shows how the different context variants correlate with variation of form and meaning. Furthermore, the cognitive- semiotic processes driving the use of this recurrent gesture will be eluci...

Departing from Kendon’s (2004) notion of “features of manifest deliberateness” and their particular movement characteristics: “Deliberate expressive movement was found to be movement that had a sharp boundary of onset and offset and that was an excursion, rather than resulting in any sustained change of position” (Kendon 2004: 12), the chapter pres...

This chapter gives a brief overview of gesture research from a linguistic point of view. It begins with a short overview of the history of research on gestures as part of spoken language and an attempt to understand the longstanding lack of linguistic interest in considering gestures a relevant topic – or a relevant feature of language. It then sho...

This chapter outlines an annotation system for gestures grounded in a cognitive linguistic approach to language use and provides guidelines for the annotation of gestures (gesture units and phases, form and motivation of form), the annotation of speech as well as the relation of gestures with speech on a range of levels of linguistic description (p...

This chapter presents a proposal for the description of gesture phases derived from articulatory characteristics observable in their execution. It is grounded in a linguistic approach to gestures which stresses the separation of gestural forms and functions in the analytic process. By presenting a context-independent and a context-sensitive descrip...

Volume I of the handbook presents contemporary, multidisciplinary, historical, theoretical, and methodological aspects of how body movements relate to language. It documents how leading scholars from differenct disciplinary backgrounds conceptualize and analyze this complex relationship. Five chapters and a total of 72 articles, present current and...

In this paper we describe the cognitive model that governs the forms and uses of the cyclic gesture, recurrent in a corpus of spontaneous German conversations. The gesture shows a stable form-meaning relationship: The continuous circular outward movement correlates with the semantic core of cyclic continuity in each context of use. On the basis of...

This paper presents a proposal for the description of gesture phases derived from articulatory characteristics observable in their execution. Based on the results of an explorative study examining the execution of gesture phases of ten German speakers, the paper presents two sets of articulatory features, i.e., distinctive and additional features b...

Ulrike Bohle widmet sich in ihrem Buch "Das Wort ergreifen - das Wort über- nehmen" der Organisation des Sprecherwechsels - einem "zentralen Aspekt der Kommunikation und Interaktion" (S.11). Ziel ist es, durch eine Verbindung der methodischen Ansätze von Konversati- onsanalyse und Gestikforschung, "zu einem umfassenderem Verständnis vom Ge- spräch...

In this talk we will argue that a description of coverbal gestures based on the four parameters "hand shape", "orientation", "movement" and "position in gesture space" first introduced for the notation of Sign Language (Battison 1972; Stokoe 1960, 1972) can be fruitful for characterizing the physical appearance of gestures. Combined with a descript...