This paper will offer a conceptualization of the contemporary field of gesture studies (Cienki, 2024; Müller, 2002), evaluating to what extent its different traditions can be considered ‘embodied’ when viewed from enactive and ecological perspectives (Baggs and Chemero, 2021; Di Paolo, Heras-Escribano, Chemero, & McGann, 2020). To do this, I focus on studies of a well-researched gesture associated with spoken language negation (Harrison, 2024), building a micro-corpus from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. I take these perspectives to represent some of the field’s disciplinary influences, and furthermore, view their focus on gesture and speech as a fractal for the authors’ conceptions of bodies and language. This latter move brings gesture studies into the territory of radical embodied cognitive science, where questions of what is meant by ‘the body’ and by ‘language’ are seen as foundational issues (Di Paolo, Cuffari, & De Jaegher, 2018; Gallagher, 2017; Steffensen, Döring, & Cowley, 2024; Thibault, 2021). It is from radical answers to these questions that I distil desiderata for approaches to gesture that aspire to be embodied. Showing how radical notions of bodies and language can work as a guide rail for exploring and evaluating the field of gesture studies, I discover accounts of gestures without bodies in my corpus, which allow me to identify a misconception that equates the material one works with (bodies) with the approach to gesture one takes (which can be ‘disembodied’).

Gesture’s links with negation have historically featured in the work of major scholars and landmark texts, arguably playing a role in the development of contemporary gesture studies. Theoretical and methodological innovations in multimodal language research have given rise to a domain of multimodal negation that attracts attention from spoken and signed language researchers. Shaped by methods of gesture analysis and multimodal research techniques, findings from contemporary studies of negation offer insights on the specifics of multimodal language development, use, and meaning-making, as well as more broadly on the nature of gesture, understanding, and perception. This workshop aims to develop the foundations and dynamics of the research domain, convening scholars of multimodal negation across spoken and signed language fields, and focusing on typological accounts, corpus-based research, and comparative points of view.

Pre-Conference Workshop at the 10th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies

Date & Time: 8 July 2025, 9 - 12.30

Location: Max Planck Institute  for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

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Panel at the 10th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies

Date & Time: 9-11 July 2025

Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

‘Vocal-entangled gestures’ arise from the fleshy biomechanics of bodily coupled systems (Pouw & Fuchs, 2022). Inferring vocal-entangled gestures within utterances characterised by multimodal negation (Harrison, 2024), this study explored the extent to which gesture kinematics are correlated with prosodic prominence at onset consonant of negation particles. Identified in a corpus of media discourse, the initial target data were utterances involving ‘lateral sweep’ (Calbris, 2011) with saliently lengthened onset of negation particle NEVER (average 300 msec; Niebuhr, 2010). ELAN and PRAAT were used to identify and visualise correspondence between kinesic (gesture phase) and acoustic dynamics (duration, pitch, and intensity), then mediapipe output from speaker’s index finger was used to plot the velocity, speed, acceleration, and jerk of gesture (Owoyele et al., 2022). This paper shows the dependence we found between gesture acceleration and prosodic prominence, discussing potential support for the ‘gesture–speech biomechanics thesis’ (Pouw & Fuchs, 2022).

References

Calbris, G. (2011). Elements of meaning in gesture. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Harrison, S. (2024). ‘This you may NNNNNNEVER have heard before’: initial lengthening of accented negative items as vocal-entangled gestures. Language and Cognition, 1–34. doi:10.1017/langcog.2024.26

Niebuhr, O. (2010). On the phonetics of intensifying emphasis in German. Phonetica, 67: 170–198.

Pouw, W., & Fuchs, S. (2022). Origins of vocal-entangled gesture. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 141, 104836

Owoyele, B., Trujillo, J., De Melo, G., Pouw, W. (2022). Masked-Piper: Masking personal identities in visual recordings while preserving multimodal information. SoftwareX. doi: 10.1016/j.softx.2022.101236.