(cassell_mcneill, 382) Iconic gestures bear a close formal relationship to the semantic content of speech. That is, in their form and manner of execution they exhibit aspects of the action or events described by the accompanying narrative discourse. Iconic gestures can be holistic or analytic.
Je partirai de cette problématique du geste iconique, en prenant mes exemples dans les arts de parole et par exemple l'art du conteur.
cassell_mcneill_gesture_prose.pdf — Justine Cassell and David McNeill, Gesture and the Poetics of Prose, Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 375-404.
1 / Le geste iconique et la parole
One might suppose that the spoken word provides the most accurate and perfect view of the events taking place at the moment of speaking. However, evidence from gestures synchronized with speech reveals that this is not so, that there is something more. Gestures are not merely a translation of speech into a kinesic medium. The two channels differ in fundamental ways. Speech has standards of well-formedness, is linear-segmented and combinatorial, has duality of patterning, has recurrent forms that are stable in different contexts, and is socially ratified. Gestures of the kind we will describe are the opposite on every one of these dimensions. They are not specifically organized into a socialized code. They do not constitute a separate "gesture language." They lack duality of patterning, standards of form, a lexicon, and rules of combination.
parole
normes de la parole bien formée
segmentation linéaire
combinatoire
double articulation
formes récurrentes |
geste iconique
non codifié
ce n'est pas un langage
pas de double articulation
ni dictionnaire
ni règles combinatoires
|
Yet these gestures are symbols produced along with speech and supportive of its meaning and function. Expanding our observational net thus to include speech and synchronized gesture offers us two coordinated but distinct views of the same underlying processes of thinking/speaking/communicating. This is the essential point of our approach. It is not that gestures are uninfluenced by conventions, but that the conventions influencing the kind of gestures we study are the conventions of social life in general, not specific gesture conventions. Thus, we set a conventionalized system of linguistic code elements side-by-side with a gestural perfor- mance that is not specifically conventionalized: this is our justification for seriously studying gesture. If language is a window into the mind, we find that it is not the only one; gesture is a second window or, better, a second eye, and gesture and language together provide something like binocular vision and a new dimension of seeing.
2 / Le Geste iconique, cas particulier du Geste imagé (imagistic gesture)
deRuiter_postcards.pdf — Jan Peter de Ruiter, Postcards from the mind: the relationship between speech, imagistic gesture and thought, Gesture, Volume 7, Number 1, 2007 , pp. 21-38(18) [Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company].
(2) An intriguing class of gestures is what McNeill (1992) calls imagistic gestures. These are special because they are not conventionalized. While other gestures, such as emblems or quotable gestures (Kendon, 1990) and pointing gestures have conventionalized form-meaning mappings shared within a given linguistic community (Kendon, 1988; Kendon & Versante, 2003; Wilkins, 2003), imagistic gestures have a form-meaning relationship that is 'idiosyncratic' (McNeill, 1992). This implies that the meaning of these imagistic gestures can only be inferred from their spatio-temporal characteristics and the information available in the accompanying speech. For the remainder of this paper, I follow the taxonomy by McNeill (1992), and use the word ‘gesture’ to refer to imagistic gestures, including both iconic and metaphoric gestures.
3 / La Voix narrative en relation au geste iconique
(cassell_mcneill, 379) The world of narrative may be conceived of as a set of interlocking participation frameworks, where actors participate in a given act. One participation framework is the telling of a story, and the actors are a narrator and his/her listener. Another framework is the world of the story [la diégèse] in which, for example, a man jealously watches his wife through the slats of window blinds. The units of the participation framework are represented events, each of which is composed of actions realized by (human) agents over a stretch of time and situated in a specific space.
(388) Gestures have their part to play in this enrichment of the narrative line. Iconic gestures are the chief accompaniments of the narrative level, but they change, depending on narrative voice and perspective and the distances implied by the different options within these parameters. In parallel, the grammatical form of speech also changes, and we see in speech itself a further illustration of iconicity since multiple clauses are used to depict narrative distance, as is gesture.
(1) Voice. Voice—who is narrating at the moment—is inferred from the form and space of the iconic gesture. We infer the character as the voice when the depiction is dispersed over the narrator's body in the appropriate way: the narrator's hand plays the part of a character's hand, her body the part of this character's body, etc. The gesture enacts the character, and we infer that this character is the one who is narrating at the moment. Conversely, if the depiction is concentrated in the hand, that is, the character being shown only as a whole in the hand, the voice is that of an observer/narrator. The narrator's body is an onlooker and the voice is this onlooker, possibly the "omniscient observer" of fiction theory (Brooks and Warren 1959) or the narrator herself, replicating her earlier role of onlooker at the video screen. The use of space also differs for these voices, and this provides another clue to differentiating them. With the character voice, the space envelops the narrator—it is a space for the enactment of the character and includes the locus of the speaker at its center. With an observer's voice, by contrast, the narrative space is localized in front of the narrator—as if it were an imaginary stage or screen—and in this space the narrator moves the relatively undifferentiated figures. The following example illustrates both observer and character voices……………………………………
