Culturally Widespread Gestures in Cross-Linguistic Perspective: A Comparative Study of Gestures Associated with Negation in Mandarin Chinese and American English

Description

Of the many stereotypes surrounding gesture and culture, among those often heard is that some cultures gesture more while others gesture less. The impressive gesture vocabulary of Italians may come to mind. Another one revolves around gestures that function one way within one culture but seemingly the opposite in another, such as the head shake for ‘yes’ or ‘no’. With the development of the interdisciplinary field of gesture studies, however, we have come to realise that gesture frequency, form, and function are subject to influence from innumerable variables, rendering general statements about cultural differences in gesturing more problematic than previously thought. Not only are macrosocial factors within cultures such as age, region, and sociocultural group even more nuanced and impactful on gesture than cultural stereotypes suggest, but equally influential are various aspects that the stereotypes completely ignore, including the conceptual and linguistic resources of the language being spoken, the setting for discourse, and the type of gesturing in question. Discovery of these varied influences coupled with methodological developments in gesture studies have paved the way for new lines of empirical and theoretical scholarship addressing the complex relation between language, gesture, and culture. The proposed project is situated within these developments. It involves bringing a culturally-widespread set of gestures into a rigorous cross-linguistic perspective, focused on the case of negation. The PI’s recent review of eighty-four studies of gestures associated with negation from languages around the world established that similar gestures are found among culturally distinct groups, yet they also showed important cross-linguistic variations in several dimensions, including their kinesic forms, linguistic organisation properties, and relations with negative functions in speech. By comparing gestures associated with negation across Mandarin Chinese and American English spoken language corpora within a validated mode of inquiry known as multilevel or multimodal, the proposed project sets out to discover how various typological and cultural differences affect the different dimensions of gesture communication. The findings will bring crucial evidence to bear on the relation between language, gesture, and culture. They will contribute to specific scientific debates in different lines of linguistic, pragmatic, and cognitive research, including the question of cross-cultural gesture frequency. Based on this project, we will also establish an international research network and host major knowledge exchange events, while aiming to change perceptions of the language-gesture- culture link among stakeholders other than specialised academics.