‘Away’ gestures associated with negative expressions in narrative discourse in Syuba (Kagate, Nepal) speakers

Abstract This article examines the formal and functional features of a recurring ‘away’ gesture in Syuba (Tibeto-Burman, Nepal). The properties this include pronation forearms to bring palms downward while fingers spread away, is most often performed with both hands. Functionally, it found utterances that signal negation, particularly absence something. A growing body literature links trajectories or negative evaluation speech content cross-linguistically. temporal alignment between these lexical also shows cross-linguistic differences word order appear affect performance gestures associated negated content.