Gesture and the Poetics of Prose

Pointing Deictic gestures, or points, have the obvious function of indicating objects around the narrator, but they also play a part in narrations where there is nothing objectively present to point at. Although the gesture space may look empty, to the speaker it is filled with discourse entities. Deictic gestures establish in space the participants of a narrative and the participant events. An example of the former is a speaker who said, "the artist and Alice are walking by," pointing first to his right and then straight in front of him, before making an iconic gesture for "walking by." An example of the latter comes from a speaker who asked his interlocutor, "Where did you come from before?" and accompanied that with pointing vaguely to one side (Figure 5). The specific kind of abstract pointing to be discussed below often occurs at the beginning of new narrative episodes and scenes, where it is the dominant gesture. In this context, pointing may mark the establishment of a new focus space (Grosz 1981). In narrations of cartoon stories, about three-quarters of all clauses are accompanied by gestures of one kind or another; of these, about forty percent are iconic, forty percent are beats, and the remaining ten percent are divided between deictic and metaphoric gestures. In narrating films, the proportions of metaphoric and deictic gestures increase at the expense of iconic gestures (statistics from McNeill and Levy 1982; McNeill [forthcoming]). 386 Poetics Today 12:3 Figure 5 . An abstract pointing gesture with "where did you come horn before?" (speaker on the left). Ill. Function of Gestures in Narratology