Developing communicative postures

Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline; Debras, Camille

doi:10.1075/lia.8.1.05bea

Cited by 15 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Nor do we consider the palm-up, open-hand points sometimes used by speakers when indicating interlocutors or other people (see, e.g., McGowan, 2010 for examples), perhaps for politeness reasons (Calbris, 1990). Finally, we do not discuss the emblematic "all gone" gesture, produced with both palms turned up, which is widely observed in children's gesture and in childdirected gesture (McNeill, 1992;Iverson et al, 2008;Beaupoil-Hourdel and Debras, 2017), but does not appear to be widely used in adult discourse.…”

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confidence: 97%

The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign

2018

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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.

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confidence: 97%

The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign

2018

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“…However, there has been evidence that different forms of shrugs are used to express different types of disengagement (Debras, 2017). For example, palm-revealing gestures have been suggested to be associated with the expression of incapacity and inaction (M€ uller, 2004), facial shrug is used as a disclaimer, and head tilt is associated with the expression of uncertainty (Beaupoil-Hourdel & Debras, 2017). Findings from the current study provide further insights into the compositional view of shrug and the specificity of the meanings of different shrug components.…”

Section: Nonverbal Cues and Indirect Replymentioning

confidence: 99%

Encoding and decoding hidden meanings in face-to-face communication: Understanding the role of verbal and nonverbal behaviors in indirect replies.

Chu¹,

Tobin²,

Ioannidou³

et al. 2023

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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In everyday conversation, we often use indirect replies to save face of our interlocutor (e.g., “Your paper does have room for improvement”). Six experiments were conducted to examine the role of verbal and nonverbal behaviors in the production and comprehension of indirect replies. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants engaged in question-answer exchanges designed to elicit four types of replies (i.e., direct, indirect, lie, and neutral). Results showed that uncertainty terms, discourse markers and head tilt were most uniquely associated with the production of indirect replies. In Experiments 2a, 2b, 3a and 3b, participants categorized the types of replies in video clips of real participants in Experiments 1a and 1b. Results showed that nonverbal behaviors enhanced the performance and boosted the confidence in the identification of indirect replies. Furthermore, uncertainty terms, discourse markers and head tilt were also the most reliable cues for identifying indirect replies. Finally, the extent to which people relied on verbal and nonverbal cues to identify an indirect reply was context dependent. The more informative the verbal/nonverbal information was, the fewer nonverbal/verbal cues that contributed to the identification of indirect replies. Our results demonstrated that people integrate verbal and nonverbal information to enhance their understanding of the intended meaning in indirect replies. Findings from the current research provide an initial step toward developing a comprehensive and unified model of the production and comprehension of indirect replies, which takes both verbal and nonverbal behaviors into account.

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Stability and visibility in embodiment: The ‘Palm Up’ in interaction

Clift

2020

Journal of Pragmatics

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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.

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Developing communicative postures

Cited by 15 publications

References 42 publications

The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign

The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign

Encoding and decoding hidden meanings in face-to-face communication: Understanding the role of verbal and nonverbal behaviors in indirect replies.

Stability and visibility in embodiment: The ‘Palm Up’ in interaction

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