Negation, reification and manipulation in a cognitive grammar of substance

Lapaire, Jean-Rémi

doi:10.4000/books.pufr.4853

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…9. Our argument for a cross-linguistic distribution of these gestures due to their bodily basis is strengthened by Lapaire's (2006) account of how lexical and grammatical patterns found in negative spoken expressions "are etymologically related to the perceptual-motor system and metonymically profile body-parts, with varying degree of cognitive salience and explicitness". The manual activities of taking, holding, throwing, and giving, for instance, are lexically coded as to object (lit.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Multimodal language use in Savosavo

Bressem

Stein

Wegener

2022

PRAG

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Departing from a short overview on pragmatic gestures specialized for the expression of refusal and negation, the article presents first results of a study on those gestures in Savosavo, a Papuan language spoken in the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific. The paper focuses on two partly conventionalized gestures (sweeping and holding away) and shows that speakers of Savosavo use the gestures in a very similar way as speakers of German, English or French, for example. The article shows how a linguistic and semiotic analysis might serve to uncover proto-morpho-semantic structures in a manual mode of communication and contributes to a better understanding of the conventional nature and cross-linguistic distribution of gestures. Moreover, by examining partly conventionalized gestures in a small, little known and endangered language, it presents a particular approach to the analysis of multimodality in the field of language documentation.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

Multimodal language use in Savosavo

Bressem

Stein

Wegener

2022

PRAG

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“…Examples of gestures that have been associated with spoken language negation include the headshake (with its notorious cultural variations; Harrison, 2014b) and facial expressions like the 'not face' (Benitez-Quiroz et al, 2016). However, various manual gestures striking outwards from the body or raised with open palms towards the addressee have received much more attention and analysis in gesture studies (Boutet et al, 2021;Bressem & Müller, 2014;Calbris, 2005;Harrison, 2018;Kendon, 2004;Lapaire, 2006).…”

Section: Gesture and Negationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Multimodal treatments of these gestures have demonstrated how they interrelate and work together with the linguistics and pragmatics of negation during spoken communication (for overviews, see Prieto & Espinal, 2020). Quite consistently across several languages, gestures have been kinesically related to the dialogic contexts of use in which negation is being expressed (Kendon, 2004) as well as with the conceptual semiotics and cognitive etymology of negation (Calbris, 2011;Lapaire, 2006). Building on these authors and working with a corpus of German speech, Bressem and Müller (2014) identified different patterns of gestures whose forms can be interpreted as cognitively and semiotically motivated by underlying actions that all involve movements away from one's body (sweeping away, holding away, brushing away and throwing away) and showed their association with different negative meanings and functions.…”

Section: Gesture and Negationmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before’: initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures

Harrison

2024

Lang. cogn.

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Movement scientists have proposed to ground the relation between prosody and gesture in ‘vocal-entangled gestures’, defined as biomechanical linkages between upper limb movement and the respiratory–vocal system. Focusing on spoken language negation, this article identifies an acoustic profile with which gesture is plausibly entangled, specifically linking the articulatory behaviour of onset consonant lengthening with forelimb gesture preparation and facial deformation. This phenomenon was discovered in a video corpus of accented negative utterances from English-language televised dialogues. Eight target examples were selected and examined using visualization software to analyse the correspondence of gesture phase structures (preparation, stroke, holds) with the negation word’s acoustic signal (duration, pitch and intensity). The results show that as syllable–onset consonant lengthens (voiced alveolar /n/ = 300 ms on average) with pitch and intensity increasing (e.g. ‘NNNNNNEVER’), the speaker’s humerus is rotating with palm pronating/adducing while his or her face is distorting. Different facial distortions, furthermore, were found to be entangled with different post-onset phonetic profiles (e.g. vowel rounding). These findings illustrate whole-bodily dynamics and multiscalarity as key theoretical proposals within ecological and enactive approaches to language. Bringing multimodal and entangled treatments of utterances into conversation has important implications for gesture studies.

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“…Socio-pragmatic scripts for assertion are about pressing one's ideas, notions or conceptions onto other people, and so have a manual-haptic basis. At a more general level of cognitive organization, manual force is applied to some reified object of belief, so as to fix it firmly into the "ground" of reality" -reality being construed as a blended mentalmaterialregion where real or conceivable things can be placed with lesser or greater confidence (Lapaire 2004c). Thus, "strong epistemic judgments" of the kind exemplified by Palmer -"He must be there."…”

Section: Epistemic Modality Deals With the Reality Or Truth Status Ofmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Propositions are firmly or tentatively "placed" (Latin ponere) before the addressee, while conjectures or "thrown" (Latin jacere) into the realm of possibility. In either case, the object or construct must resist the antagonistic, unsettling, or disintegrating forces of contradiction (Lapaire 2004c). Consistent 23 interpretations must "stand" to reason or "withstand" attack(Latin stare "to stand").…”

Section: Epistemic Meaning Making: the Epistemic Workhop Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%