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

Abstract

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.

Multimodal Language Processing in Human Communication

“…Even the gestures of young children can fulfil speech-act-like functions, such as requesting (reaching, pointing) and offering (holding out hand with object) [68][69][70], with some parallels in the behavior of nonhuman primates [71,72] suggesting that these social actions may be deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. An observation that resonates with this idea is that quite a few of the abovementioned visual form-meaning mappings occur across different cultures [43,47,50,53,64,66], pointing to the possibility of a common biological origin. While more systematic, large-scale, quantitative studies on conversational corpora are needed, there is already some convincing evidence for systematic associations between specific bodily signals (or combinations of several signals) and conversational social actions, representing the basis for efficient gestalt recognition.…”

“…a response [42,[60][61][62][63]. Combined with a lateral movement of the hands away from the speaker's midline, the palm-presenting gesture is often used in contexts that relate to the 'absence of knowledge' [63,64], such as in interrogative contexts when posing proper or rhetorical questions [42,53,60,64]. Another specimen is the 'Away Gesture Family' [65,66] where the hand is moved away from the speaker, to sweep, brush, hold, or throw away an imaginary entity located in frontal gesture space to express ideas of rejection, refusal, negative assessment, or negation.…”

Universals and diversity in gesture: Research past, present, and future

“…But as soon as we move up a notch in abstraction, to more broadly scoped gestures-gesture families, recurrent gestures, and gestural practices-we begin to see striking similarities across cultures. For example, several prominent recurrent gestures recur across groups (e.g., Bressem, Stein, & Wegener, 2017); the palmup epistemic gesture is a broadly shared pairing of form and meaning (Cooperrider, Abner, & Goldin-Meadow, 2018); and many conventional negation gestures are strikingly widespread (see, e.g., Inbar & Shor, 2019;Mesh & Hou, 2019). We might say, borrowing Darwin's words, that these gestures seem too widespread to be thought of as "altogether conventional or artificial" (Darwin, 1872, p. 274).…”

“…In accounts of gestures with several meanings, there is often implicitly assumed to be a core meaning, which gets extended through processes akin to semantic/pragmatic extension in spoken language (e.g., see Jurafsky, 1996;Sweetser, 1990). The result is what has been called a meaning network with a coreand-extension structure (Cooperrider, Abner, & Goldin-Meadow, 2018 Cooperrider & Núñez, 2012).…”

“…My colleagues and I recently surveyed observations about how palm-ups are used around the world, focusing on a variant in which the hands are laterally spread out from the body (Cooperrider, Abner, & Goldin-Meadow, 2018; see also Kendon, 2004). We dubbed this gesture the "palm-up epistemic" because it expresses a cluster of meanings built around a core meaning of "absence of knowledge."…”