Functions of three open-palm hand gestures

INTRODUCTION Kendon distinguishes between two different types of gestures: " 'Pragmatic' gestures that indicate type of speech act or aspects of discourse structure and 'substantive' gestures that express utterance content " (1995:247). He further defines 'pragmatic gestures' as playing " modal, performative and parsing functions " as well as " interpersonal functions " (Kendon, 2004:159). A gesture therefore assumes a 'modal function' when it allows the speaker to express a stance (certainty, uncertainty...) on their utterance, a performative function when it indicates " the kind of speech act or interpersonal move the speaker is engaged in " and a parsing function when it shows the different units of a stretch of speech. It plays an 'interpersonal function' when it shows the participant's role claiming in the interaction and the sequences of turns at speech (op. cit). This paper proposes to go a step further into the analysis of some of these pragmatic gestures studying three types of open-palm gestures: beats and two instances of the hand flip, elsewhere called the 'palm-up open-hand' gesture (Müller, 2004; Cienki & Müller, 2008). Drawing upon three different corpora (political speeches made at the European Parliament, a television show in which the role of this parliament is presented and a corpus of conversational speech recorded in a lab), I propose an analysis into prosodic, discursive and modal gestures. The paper – through the discussion of particular examples – will address the issues of the type of prosodic and discourse units which are marked by these gestures. Using the same methodological framework, I will consider what grammatical modality is conveyed by open-palm gestures. In verbal communication, as described by Norris (2004, 2011), linguistic messages acquire meaning in the larger context of interaction. Each interaction is itself included into some higher-level action and so forth. This means that at different points of the interaction, participants may be engaged in various activities pertaining to different modes. None of these modes work independently from the others, although a mode may stand out as more prominent at a particular point in time. Even in speech itself, the vocal or the verbal mode may be more prominent at particular points in time. Therefore, different perspectives should be adopted to analyze speech at these different times which is the approach adopted here. For example, beat gestures were described by McNeill as beating " time along with the rhythm of speech " (2005:40). …