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Contrastive negation constructions in Israeli Hebrew: A multimodal approach
Abstract
The volume is of direct interest to scholars, from senior academics to PhD students, interested in linguistically relevant phonetic and gestural information and in the relationship between multimodal communication and grammar. It contains important work in a relatively new, dynamic and exploratory field that is receiving a lot of attention, namely the relation of multimodal communication with grammatical frameworks, notably Construction Grammar. Drawing on case studies in different languages (English, Modern Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Italian), the chapters provide both the necessary theoretical discussion and solid empirical evidence (corpus-based or experimental) for integrating multimodal interactional features with grammatical description and analysis. This timely collection of studies highlights the recent marriage of cognitive/constructional and interactional approaches and addresses head-on questions and challenges like: which multimodal features are systematic and conventional enough to be integrated into grammar and what are appropriate ways of achieving the integration.
East Asian languages and cultures are known to show substantial differences from European ones, including in terms of how negation is expressed. The present study considers how gestures relate to the expression of verbal negation by speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Based on around 400 minutes of Chinese TV programs, we establish some relatively stable gestural form-meaning mappings associated with verbal negation. For instance, holding away gestures tend to express rejection , and wigwagging gestures tend to express denial . Our analyses of these gestural correlations with verbal negation provide insights into the multifunctionality of negative verbal clauses when viewed from a multimodal perspective.
The present study examines the roles that the gesture of the Raised Index Finger (RIF) plays in Hebrew multimodal interaction. The study reveals that the RIF is associated with diverse linguistic phenomena and tends to appear in contexts in which the speaker presents a message or speech act that violates the hearer’s expectations (based on either general knowledge or prior discourse). The study suggests that the RIF serves the function of discourse deixis : Speakers point to their message, creating a referent in the extralinguistic context to which they refer as an object of their stance, evaluating the content of the utterance or speech act as unexpected by the hearer, and displaying epistemic authority. Setting up such a frame by which the information is to be interpreted provides the basis for a swifter update of the common ground in situations of (assumed) differences between the assumptions of the speaker and the hearer.
This study uses Hebrew data to examine the practices accomplished by index-finger pointing toward the addressee, with a focus on interactional purposes beyond merely indexing the reference. The data were taken from the Haifa Multimodal Corpus of Spoken Hebrew, which consists of video recordings of naturally occurring casual conversations collected between 2016 and 2023. By employing the methodologies of interactional linguistics and multimodal conversation analysis, the study elaborates on the social actions that are accomplished via this gesture, showing that pointing at the addressee in Hebrew talk-in-interaction can be explained from different perspectives. The study suggests that non-referential pointing primarily serves as an attention-drawing device. However, similar to other gestural or verbal attention-drawing devices, in some contexts, the gesture can also be considered to be a cue whereby conveying a negative stance or displaying epistemic authority is recognized. Additionally, it can be employed as an abrupt way of interrupting or as an attempt to elicit a response from the addressee.
In the present study, using Hebrew data, we discuss the formation and semiosis of gestures associated with a cognitive domain of negativity, and delve more deeply into analysis of one such gesture: the Brushing Hands gesture. We propose that this manual gestural form originates in a recurrent everyday experience—cleaning one’s hands of food scraps at the end of a meal—and propose that an indication of this particular physical action or experience may develop into an indication of an abstract notion of negativity which can be expanded by the interlocutors in various ways that suit the current context. More generally, we discuss similarities between such gestures and lexical items in various domains, such as metaphoric and metonymic routes and the process of grammaticalization that they may undergo.
There are many studies on the palm-up open hand (PUOH) as a gesture used when the speaker is presenting a point, but many other gesture forms can also accompany this discursive move. While the forms may appear diverse based on traditional means of gesture analysis, the relations between a number of them can be analyzed in a coherent way using the kinesiological system developed by Boutet (2010; 2018; to appear). This system approaches gestural forms not from external criteria based on the viewer’s perspective (involving hand shapes, locations in gesture space, etc.), but rather from the inside; in the present analysis, the focus is on the directions of movements made at joints in producing them (e.g. whether flexion vs. extension was involved, whether any rotation involved was inward or outward, etc.). Four particular gestures are considered as points along a continuum: from the finger extension, to the forearm and wrist turn-out of the hand, to the supination of the PUOH, to an exaggerated form of the PUOH produced with extension and abduction of the upper arm. A multifunctional model is also proposed to analyze the degree of transparency of the different gestures’ representational, pragmatic, and interactive functions. The functional analysis performed with this model is grounded in form features from a combination of the kinesiological and traditional four-parameter form-based systems. This methodological exploration provides a model which could be applied or adapted for the analysis of other groups of gestures that are related in terms of their physiological means of production.
This paper investigates the body’s role in grammar in argument sequences. Drawing from a database of public disputes on language use, we document the work of the palm-up gesture in action formation. Using conversation analysis and interactional linguistics, we show how this gesture is an interactional resource that indexes a particular epistemic stance—namely to cast the proposition being advanced as obvious. In this report, we focus on instances in which participants reach what we refer to as an ‘impasse’, at which point the palm up gesture becomes a resource for reasserting and pursuing a prior position, now laminated with an embodied claim of ‘obviousness’ that is grounded in the sequentiality of the interaction. As we show, the palm up gesture appears with and in response to a variety of syntactic and grammatical structures, and moreover can also function with no accompanying verbal utterance at all. This empirical observation challenges the assumption that a focus on grammar-in-interaction should begin with, or otherwise be examined in relation to, ‘standard’ verbal-only grammatical categories (e.g., imperative, declarative). We conclude by considering the gestural practice we focus on alongside verbal grammatical resources (specifically, particles) from typologically distinct languages, which we offer as a contribution to ongoing discussions regarding an embodied conceptualization of grammar—in this case, epistemicity.
This is a comparative investigation of contrastive negation in English and Finnish, i. e. combinations of a negated and an affirmed part construed as alternatives to one another. In both languages, there are several constructions that express contrastive negation, but their division of labour remains unclear. The aims of the paper are two-fold: first, to see what constructional strategies are available for contrastive negation in the two languages and, second, to see how the strategies are motivated by its interactional functions. In English, contrastive negation may be expressed by using the adversative conjunction but correctively (e. g. It’s not the bikers but the other vehicle on the road ), whereas standard Finnish has a specialised corrective conjunction vaan alongside the adversative mutta . Moreover, many constructions can express contrastive negation, including ones without a conjunction (e. g. It’s not the bikers, it’s the other vehicle on the road ). An analysis of conversational data shows that English favours constructions without conjunctions, while in Finnish constructions both with and without conjunctions are frequent. The uses of contrastive negation are divided into reactive and non-reactive. The pragmatic functions largely explain the usage patterns, and these in turn can explain the cross-linguistic regularities of corrective conjunctions.
During communication, speakers commonly rotate their forearms so that their palms turn upward. Yet despite more than a century of observations of such palm-up gestures, their meanings and origins have proven difficult to pin down. We distinguish two gestures within the palm-up form family: the palm-up presentational and the palm-up epistemic. The latter is a term we introduce to refer to a variant of the palm-up that prototypically involves lateral separation of the hands. This gesture—our focus—is used in speaking communities around the world to express a recurring set of epistemic meanings, several of which seem quite distinct. More striking, a similar palm-up form is used to express the same set of meanings in many established sign languages and in emerging sign systems. Such observations present a two-part puzzle: the first part is how this set of seemingly distinct meanings for the palm-up epistemic are related, if indeed they are; the second is why the palm-up form is so widely used to express just this set of meanings. We propose a network connecting the different attested meanings of the palm-up epistemic, with a kernel meaning of absence of knowledge, and discuss how this proposal could be evaluated through additional developmental, corpus-based, and experimental research. We then assess two contrasting accounts of the connection between the palm-up form and this proposed meaning network, and consider implications for our understanding of the palm-up form family more generally. By addressing the palm-up puzzle, we aim, not only to illuminate a widespread form found in gesture and sign, but also to provide insights into fundamental questions about visual-bodily communication: where communicative forms come from, how they take on new meanings, and how they become integrated into language in signing communities.
The purpose of this paper is to address some methodological questions arising in the framework of usage-based construction grammar facing the multimodality of language use. These questions will be discussed with respect to different patterns of head nods accompanying different appositional patterns in spoken German.
The meaning-making process in face-to-face interaction relies on the integration of meaningful information being conveyed by speech as well as the tone of voice, facial expressions, hand and head gestures, body postures and movements (
This is – at least at first sight – surprising because the usage-based model of Construction Grammar (C × G) seems particularly well-equipped to unite the natural interest of linguists in the units that define language systems with the multimodality of language use. Constructions are conceptualized as holistic “conventionalized clusters of features (syntactic, prosodic, pragmatic, semantic, textual, etc.) that recur as further indivisible associations between form and meaning” (
This paper presents some of the current issues for a Multimodal Construction Grammar. The aim is to frame the debate and to briefly summarize some of the discussion’s key issues. The individual papers in the special issue elaborate in more detail on particular points of discussion and/or present empirical case studies.
In this article, we examine methods that participants use to resolve troubles in the realization of practical courses of action. The concept of recruitment is developed to encompass the linguistic and embodied ways in which assistance may be sought—requested or solicited—or in which we come to perceive another’s need and offer or volunteer assistance. We argue that these methods are organized as a continuum, from explicit requests, to practices that elicit offers, to anticipations of need. We further identify a class of subsidiary actions that can precede recruitment and that publicly expose troubles and thereby create opportunities for others to assist. Data are in American and British English.
Speakers' dialogical orientation to the particular others they talk to is implemented by practices of recipient-design. One such practice is the use of negation as a means to constrain interpretations of speaker's actions by the partner. The paper situates this use of negation within the larger context of other recipient-designed uses of negation which negate assumptions the speaker makes about what the addressee holds to be true (second-order as sumptions) or what the addressee assumes the speaker holds to be true (third-order assumptions). The focus of the study is on the ways in which speakers use negation to disclaim interpretations of their turns which partners have dis played or may possibly arrive at. Special emphasis is given to the positionally sensitive uses of negation, which may occur before, after or inserted between the nucleus actions whose interpretation is constrained by the negation. Inter actional motivations and rhetorical potentials of the practice are pointed out, partly depending on the position of the negation vis-à-vis the nucleus action. The analysis shows that the concept of 'recipient design' is in need of distinc tions which have not been in focus in prior research.
This volume gives an easily accessible, yet comprehensive, sophisticated, and example-rich introduction to Construction Grammar as it has been developed from the early 1980’s by Charles J. Fillmore and his associates. It also provides a succinct account of the historical and intellectual background of the model and shows how Construction Grammar can easily be applied to typologically very different languages and to a variety of language-specific phenomena. All of the contributors to the volume came out of the Fillmorean school at UC-Berkeley and have worked consistently on applying and further developing the model in various domains of linguistic analysis.
The 'Thumbnail sketch' by Fried & Östman is the only extensive introduction published so far to Fillmorean Construction Grammar.
This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical, attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic, interactional, and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants. Each paper explores one or more of these dimensions of stance from perspectives including interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, language description, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics. Research languages include conversational American English, colloquial Indonesian, and Finnish. The understanding of stance that emerges is heterogeneous and variegated, and always intertwined with the pragmatic and social aspects of human conduct.
In this article, we investigate the functional itinerary followed by Hebrew be'emet (`really, actually, indeed', lit. `in truth'), through a close exploration of its synchronic uses in the contemporary spoken language. Since this utterance, derived from the noun 'emet (`truth'), is so profoundly tied in with the speaker's beliefs and attitudes towards his or her discourse, we consider issues of metalanguage, modality, evidentiality, and stance. Be'emet is traditionally classified as `adverb', but in our corpus of naturally occurring Hebrew conversation, only 22 percent of all tokens function in this role. Whereas these tokens function referentially, the great majority of tokens (70%) function in the interpersonal realm of discourse, manifesting properties of discourse markers: 44.5 percent of all tokens function as full-fledged discourse markers (both semantically and structurally, Maschler, 1998) serving mirative (DeLancey, 2001), reprimanding, or negating any doubt roles; 22.5 percent function to ratify a previous stance; and three percent function to latch onto a new topic, requesting its elaboration. An intermediate category (8%) is composed of tokens functioning both referentially and interpersonally, mid-way between an adverb and a discourse marker, in a way that is particularly illuminating for understanding the changes undergone by be'emet as a result of its employment in discourse. The study thus lends support to previous studies of subjectification and intersubjectification in the process of grammaticization of discourse markers (Traugott, 2003; Traugott and Dasher, 2002).
The present study examines the roles that the gesture of the Raised Index Finger (RIF) plays in Hebrew multimodal interaction. The study reveals that the RIF is associated with diverse linguistic phenomena and tends to appear in contexts in which the speaker presents a message or speech act that violates the hearer’s expectations (based on either general knowledge or prior discourse). The study suggests that the RIF serves the function of discourse deixis : Speakers point to their message, creating a referent in the extralinguistic context to which they refer as an object of their stance, evaluating the content of the utterance or speech act as unexpected by the hearer, and displaying epistemic authority. Setting up such a frame by which the information is to be interpreted provides the basis for a swifter update of the common ground in situations of (assumed) differences between the assumptions of the speaker and the hearer.
This book is a contribution to the growing field of diachronic construction grammar. Focus is on corpus evidence for the importance of including conventionalized pragmatics within construction grammar and suggestions for how to do so. The empirical domain is the development of Discourse Structuring Markers in English such as after all, also, all the same, by the way, further and moreover (also known as Discourse Markers). The term Discourse Structuring Markers highlights their use not only to connect discourse segments but also to shape discourse coherence and understanding. Monofunctional Discourse Structuring Markers like further, instead, moreover are distinguished from multifunctional ones like after all and by the way. Drawing on usage-based work on constructionalization and constructional changes, the book is in three parts: foundational concepts, case studies, and currently open issues in diachronic construction grammar. These open issues are how to incorporate the concepts subjectification and intersubjectification into a constructional account of change, whether position in a clause is a construction, and the nature of constructional networks and how they change.
This paper argues that argumentative discourse markers pragmaticalize and become 'polysemous' via a single core function. The focus of the paper is on discourse markers of rectification, where an accessible assumption or claim is replaced with another, rectifying claim (in the form of an explanation, clarification, definition, justification etc.). Specifically, I discuss Hebrew be-ʕecem, originally a prepositional phrase meaning ‘in a bone’ and its evolution into a polysemous discourse marker whose meaning is versatile: ‘on second thought'/‘actually’/‘essentially’/‘basically’. I claim that it is its persistent core function of argumentative rectification not only serves as the motivation behind its linguistic evolution, but also serves as the link connecting all of its meanings/uses. Pragmaticalization is therefore given a new light, highlighting the discourse marker's core function which governs the course of its history.
The topic of this chapter is a varied class of phenomena, most of them small if not tiny, some elaborate and large, which occur in all kinds of visible and audible shapes in all kinds of contexts in human talk and interaction. What is common to all of them is that they occur as prefatory components to bigger things to come. Prefaces range from rather minimal units such as uh, well, or micro-moments of silence, to fully developed pre-sequential utterances such as can I ask you a question? (Schegloff 1980). Gestures also are quite often performed in prefatory slots. The role of prefaces – or pre's (as conversation analysts have fondly nicknamed these pet phenomena) – is to ‘foreshadow’ or ‘project’ (Sacks et al. 1974) something that comes after them, to bring it into play and ‘prepare the scene’ (Schegloff, 1984b). They allow other participants a certain premonition as to what this actor might be up to next.
Vague as it is, this description is not likely to yield a neatly bounded set of phenomena. The collection I describe is eclectic at best. The chapter is loosely organized around a sequence of talk between two nurses from Thailand who discuss weather conditions and proper attire in Germany. This sequence was chosen because it nicely illustrates the theme that runs through all of the examples, namely that interactional units foreshadow one another: moment by moment, the speaker's gestures prefigure the next moment, allowing the participants to negotiate joint courses of action until, finally, a communication problem is solved collaboratively.
This paper identifies hitherto unidentified aspects of the relationship between language and bodily behaviour by examining the production of a recognisable embodied practice in interaction – the ‘Palm Up’ (PU), by which the palms of the hands are turned in parallel to face towards the recipient. Two features turn out to be central to understanding both this practice and, by extension, embodied action in interaction generally. The first is the ‘held’ element, iconically indicating disruption to the progressivity of the interaction. The second is the production of the PU at particular positions in sequences of talk. Using multi-modal Conversation Analysis to examine two contexts in English – pursuits and challenges – reveals that it is analytically insufficient to focus on solely the embodied action and its affiliated utterance without considering its wider sequential context. Rather, any account of embodied action should in the first instance investigate its temporal and sequential production to identify its pragmatic function in interaction.
This study recommends a functional linguistic-based framework to categorize gestures according to their pragmatic functions. Through this study, we propose a revision of the pragmatic functions of gestures to simplify their classification. This framework is based on another introduced by López Serena and Borreguero Zuloaga for discourse markers. Existing categorizations refer to gestures that are referential or pragmatic in function, with an additional category for interactional regulators. We suggest bringing the interactional function under the same umbrella of pragmatic functions. The proposed re-classification of pragmatic functions into interactive, metadiscursive and cognitive is illustrated with different occurrences of the Palm Up Open Hand gesture (PUOH), which has been observed to recur in different speakers and contexts. The examples of PUOH gestures have been taken from speakers of various languages, in different interactive settings. We conclude that PUOH gestures have a primarily pragmatic function, more complex than has been suggested to date but this categorization relies on having access to the speech as well as other body gestures.
The goal of the volume is to shed fresh light on Modern Hebrew from perspectives aimed at readers interested in the domains of general linguistics, typology, and Semitic studies. Starting with chapters that provide background information on the evolution and sociolinguistic setting of the language, the bulk of the book is devoted to usage-based studies of the morphology, lexicon, and syntax of current Hebrew. Based primarily on original analyses of authentic spoken and online materials, these studies reflect varied theoretical frames-of-reference that are largely model-neutral in approach. To this end, the book presents a functionally motivated, dynamic approach to actual usage, rather than providing strictly structuralist or formal characterizations of particular linguistic systems. Such a perspective is particularly important in the case of a language undergoing accelerated processes of change, in which the gap between prescriptive dictates of the Hebrew Language Establishment and the actual usage of educated, literate but non-expert speaker-writers of current Hebrew is constantly on the rise.
The present study examines various uses of the gestures that are usually associated with explicitly expressed negation (overt negation) in spoken Israeli Hebrew. The analysis of such uses uncovers hidden negative structures (covert negation) at different levels, such as lexical, propositional, or discursive. For example, the study reveals that the gestural patterns that are usually coordinated with grammatical markers of negation may co-occur with various lexemes that have a negative component as part of their meaning (such as absence, bad, and the like), or with discourse markers that imply negation or restriction as part of their procedural meaning. The fact that the same gestural patterns are used in all these contexts suggests that the gestures indicate a higher abstract notion — namely, ‘negativity’ — rather than negation. Grammatical negation, therefore, should be considered one of the expressions of negativity. Moreover, the findings contribute to the claim that there is a conceptual affiliation between speech and gesture that goes beyond individual linguistic segments.
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This article examines a recurrent format that speakers use for defining ordinary expressions or technical terms. Drawing on data from four different languages—Flemish, French, German, and Italian—it focuses on definitions in which a definiendum is first followed by a negative definitional component (‘definiendum is not X’), and then by a positive definitional component (‘definiendum is Y’). The analysis shows that by employing this format, speakers display sensitivity towards a potential meaning of the definiendum that recipients could have taken to be valid. By negating this meaning, speakers discard this possible, yet unintended understanding. The format serves three distinct interactional purposes: (a) it is used for argumentation, e.g. in discussions and political debates, (b) it works as a resource for imparting knowledge, e.g. in expert talk and instructions, and (c) it is employed, in ordinary conversation, for securing the addressee's correct understanding of a possibly problematic expression. The findings contribute to our understanding of how epistemic claims and displays relate to the turn-constructional and sequential organization of talk. They also show that the much quoted ‘problem of meaning’ is, first and foremost, a participant's problem.
This paper discusses constructional variation in the domain of contrastive negation in English, using data from the British National Corpus. Contrastive negation refers to constructs with two parts, one negative and the other affirmative, such that the affirmative offers an alternative to the negative in the frame in question (e.g. shaken, not stirred; not once but twice; I don’t like it – I love it). The paper utilises multiple correspondence analysis to explore the degree of synonymy among the various constructional schemas of contrastive negation, finding that different schemas are associated with different semantic, pragmatic and extralinguistic contexts but also that certain schemas do not differ from each other in a significant way.
In the eighteenth century and before, gesture was considered from the point of view of how it should be used in oratory, as a part of the art of engaging in persuasive discourse. This contrasts with the interest pursued in modern gesture studies where, for the most part, the hand movements that people make when they speak have been studied as representations of the substantive or propositional content of the utterance, seen as providing clues about the mental or cognitive processes governing speaking. Speaking is also a form of social action, however, and gestures play an important role in this. An historical perspective on the study of gesture from a pragmatic point of view is provided, followed by a summary of the main features of the pragmatic functioning of gesture.
This is an open-access publication that can be found here: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/series/volumes/19/silvennoinen/
This paper investigates the register variation of contrastive negation in English, a family of constructions that has so far not been explored in corpus-linguistic studies. Contrastive negation refers to expressions in which one element is negated and another one is presented as its alternative (e.g., not once but twice; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him). The study combines the methods of corpus linguistics and interactional linguistics to investigate expressions that are highly resistant to automatised queries, comparing conversation and newspaper discourse on the one hand (“apples and oranges”), and various sub-registers of newspaper discourse on the other (“apples and apples”). The results show that the expression of contrastive negation is highly differentiated by register: conversation is dominated by asyndetic clause combinations while in writing, various constructions are attested more evenly. Sub-registers of writing also display variation: argumentative texts have a particularly high number of negative-contrastive constructions while in sports reports their prevalence is much lower. The study shows that both apples-and-apples and apples-and-oranges comparisons shed light on construction choice: data needs to be not only big enough but also rich and thick enough for this to be possible in the analysis of highly polysemous items.
If multimodal work in terms of Construction Grammar is still rare nowadays, this is not just because the upsurge of multimodality in linguistics in general is rather recent. Attempts to include non-verbal layers of expression (especially gesture) in Construction Grammar have uncovered a number of theoretical issues that need to be reflected upon before any serious claims on the existence of multimodal constructions can be made. While some scholars take these issues as reasons for leaving the non-verbal outside of the scope of Construction Grammar, this paper shows that several of these issues are not actually related to multimodality, but rather hint at more general theoretical issues in Construction Grammar. Hence, it is argued that these issues should be seen as an incentive for rethinking and refining the notion of ‘construction’, rather than as a reason for leaving multimodality aside.
This article reflects on recent challenges emerging from the study of language and the body in social interaction. There is a general interest in language and the body across disciplines that has invited a reconceptualization of the broader issues relative to action, cognition, culture, knowledge, social relations and identities, spatiality and temporality. The study of social interaction focuses on how multimodal resources – including language and bodily movements – are holistically and situatedly used in building human action. This article discusses some consequences and challenges of putting the body at the center of attention: it repositions language as one among other modalities, and invites us to consider the involvement of entire bodies in social interaction, overcoming a logo-centric vision of communication, as well as a visuo-centric vision of embodiment. These issues are developed through a series of conversation analytic studies, firstly of classic topics in linguistics like deixis, then of more recent topics, such as mobility and sensoriality.
The papers in this volume all explore one kind of functional explanation for various aspects of linguistic form – iconicity: linguistic forms are frequently the way they are because they resemble the conceptual structures they are used to convey, or, linguistic structures resemble each other because the different conceptual domains they represent are thought of in the same way. The papers in Part I of this volume deal with aspects of motivation, the ways in which the linguistic form is a diagram of conceptual structure, and homologous with it in interesting ways. Most of the papers in Part II focus on isomorphism, the tendency to associate a single invariant meaning with each single invariant form. The papers in Part III deal with the apparent arbitrariness that arises from competing motivations.
This chapter presents the grammatical construction theory and the familiar dichotomies. Grammatical Construction Theory differs from a number of other frameworks, first in its insistence that syntactic patterns are often tightly associated with interpretation instructions, but secondly, in that it takes as a major part of its assignment the task of accounting for the workings of complex grammatical constructions as well as simple ones. The chapter only focuses on the structures that can be fully understood in terms of their constituent elements, but also in constructions that are complex to begin with. In Grammatical Construction Theory, constructions are taken as structured but not strictly decomposable, that is, they are taken as having properties in the manner of the properties of a gestalt in Gestalt Psychology. The properties of a construction may often be seen as motivated by, but they do not necessarily follow from any facts about their composition.
Departing from an overview of research on gesture families and, in particular, on “gestures of negation” (Kendon 2004), the chapter describes “the family of Away gestures” along with their structural motivations: shared formational features, shared motivations, and shared semantic themes. Building upon Kendon’s analysis of two gesture families, the Open Hand Supine (OHS) family and the Open Hand Prone (OHP) family, we present a sys- tematized reconstruction of a structural island of interrelated gestures: the Away family. The family consists of four recurrent gestures (including Kendon’s Open Hand Prone fam- ily), which share one formational or kinesic feature “a (mostly straight) movement away from the body” and a motivation: The family is semantically based on a similar effect of different kinds of manual actions, which serve to clear the body space from unwanted objects. The chapter presents an account of how an action scheme may selectively be used to motivate gestural meaning. It also shows how such an action scheme may provide a semantic motivation for a structural island within the gestural mode of expression that is visible in both forms and functions of the gestures. In doing so, suggestions for embodied roots of negation, refusal, and negative assessments are made and a further pathway to the study of how gestures may evolve to signs within signed languages is outlined.
This book investigates the nature of generalizations in language, drawing parallels between our linguistic knowledge and more general conceptual knowledge. The book combines theoretical, corpus, and experimental methodology to provide a constructionist account of how linguistic generalizations are learned, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations can be explained. Part I argues that broad generalizations involve the surface forms in language, and that much of our knowledge of language consists of a delicate balance of specific items and generalizations over those items. Part II addresses issues surrounding how and why generalizations are learned and how they are constrained. Part III demonstrates how independently needed pragmatic and cognitive processes can account for language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations, without appeal to stipulations that are specific to language.
When involved in face-to-face conversations, people move their heads in typical ways. The pattern of head gestures and their function in conversation has been studied in various disciplines. Many factors are involved in determining the exact patterns that occur in conversation. These can be explained by considering some of the basic properties of face-to-face interactions. The fact that conversations are a type of joint activity involving social actions together with a few other properties, such as the need for grounding, can explain the variety in functions that are served by the multitude of movements that people display during conversations.
The prototypical pointing gesture is directed outward at concrete objects, people, or locations in the world. But in everyday discourse pointing gestures are also commonly directed inward, toward the body. Body-directed gestures are co-produced with a variety of spoken referents, from personal pronouns (I, we) to experiential concepts (belief, instinct), exhibit wide but motivated variation in handshapes and movement patterns, and involve conceptual processes whose prevalence in co-speech gesture has gone largely unexamined. Based on a corpus of 40 one-on-one interviews from the Tavis Smiley Show, three varieties of body-directed gestures—self-points, body-points, and body-anchors—are introduced and the semiotic and morphological characteristics of each variety are investigated. Body-directed gestures present a variegated subset of pointing gestures more generally, affording a novel vantage on pointing and its relation to speech, conceptual processes in everyday real-time behavior, and the role of the body as a foundational site for anchoring meaning of all kinds.
Gesture in political oratory and debate is renowned for its nonreferential indexical functions, for the way it purportedly can indicate qualities of speaker and materialize acts of persuasion — functions famously addressed in Quintilian’s classic writings but understudied today. I revisit this problematic through a case study of precision-grip (especially thumb to tip of forefinger) in Barack Obama’s debate performances (2004–2008). Cospeech gesture can index valorized attributes of speaker — not directly but through orders of semiotic motivation. In terms of first-order indexicality, precision-grip highlights discourse in respect of information structure, indicating focus. In debate, precision grip has undergone a degree of conventionalization and has reemerged as a second-order pragmatic resource for performatively “making a ‘sharp’, effective point.” Repetitions and parallelisms of precision grip in debate can, in turn, exhibit speaker-attributes, such as
being
argumentatively ‘sharp’, and from there may even partake in candidate branding.
This paper advocates an approach to CA studies of talk and body movements that focuses on the employment of various resources observable as methods for interaction that are sequentially consequential. It aims to demonstrate such an approach by analysing the combination of talk and the body movement ‘leaning forward’ in specific interactional environments. These environments are characterized by extended repair sequences, i.e. by troubles in understanding an action and by troubles in achieving a common understanding through repair. The paper shows how a combination of talk and the body movement ‘leaning forward’ is used as means to construct a repair in this local context. The components are ordered in specific ways. The use and the ordering of them are sequentially consequential and oriented to by the co-participant, who may construct his subsequent action by employing similar components and ordering them in similar ways. The paper also aims at discussing if and how a CA analysis can ascertain that a speaker is for instance relying upon both body movement and talk in a prior turn and not simply upon the talk in it if he restricts himself to deploying the component talk in the construction of his subsequent turn.
Corrective uses of adversative markers like but, as in John isn’t going to Paris, but to Berlin, have proved rather difficult to capture in a unified theory of adversative markers, whereas corrective uses of additive markers, as in John is going to Berlin, and not to Paris, have been almost entirely ignored in theoretical semantics and pragmatics. These uses are taken under closer consideration in this paper, with special focus on the phenomenon I will refer to as (a)symmetric correction. I propose the following generalisation. Adversative markers are asymmetric in their corrective uses (e.g. the English but). That is, the first conjunct of but must be negated, while the second is positive. If the order of the negative and the positive conjunct is reversed, the corrective reading is not available for but, though it can be recovered if but is replaced by and or left out altogether. In contrast, additive markers are symmetric in this function. If a language standardly employs an additive marker to express correction (e.g. the Russian a), the order of the negative and the positive conjunct does not affect its corrective interpretation. The present paper develops a unified account of the semantics of but which accommodates its corrective uses and explains the above mentioned asymmetry. The proposed solution has non-trivial consequences for a general theory of additivity and adversativity, in particular, for the ongoing debate which function of but is the most basic, ‘denial of expectation’ or ‘formal contrast’.
The parallel-opposition construction has not yet been widely described as an independent construction type. This article reports on its realization in everyday British-English conversation. In particular, it focusses on prosodic projection in the lexically and syntactically unmarked first component of this syntactic pattern, and thus adds to the body of research investigating the organization of turn-taking in the context of bi-clausal constructions with which the first part lacks explicit lexical hints to their continuation. It is shown that the parallel-opposition construction, next to specific semantic–pragmatic, syntactic and lexical features, also exhibits a relatively fixed range of prosodic features in the first conjunct, among these narrow focus, continuing intonation and/or the avoidance of intonation-unit boundary signals. These are used to project continuation of an otherwise complete utterance and, thus, to secure the floor for the expression of contrast. In addition, the detailed analysis of apparently deviant cases, which takes into account the on-line production of syntax, shows that a lack of prosodically projective features in the first component of the parallel-opposition construction can be explained by the strategic, retrospective use of the construction to resolve problems in turn transition.