Gesture
[1] Gestures allow individuals to communicate a variety of feelings and thoughts, from contempt and hostility to approval and affection, often together with body language in addition to words when they speak.
[2] In fact, language is thought by some scholars to have evolved in Homo sapiens from an earlier system consisting of manual gestures.
[6] A study done in 1644, by John Bulwer an English physician and early Baconian natural philosopher wrote five works exploring human communications pertaining to gestures.
[8] In the 19th century, Andrea De Jorio an Italian antiquarian who considered a lot of research about body language published an extensive account of gesture expressions.
[9] Andrew N. Meltzoff an American psychologist internationally renown for infant and child development conducted a study in 1977 on the imitation of facial and manual gestures by newborns.
[10] In 1992, David Mcneill, a professor of linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, wrote a book based on his ten years of research and concluded that "gestures do not simply form a part of what is said, but have an impact on thought itself."
Meltzoff argues that gestures directly transfer thoughts into visible forms, showing that ideas and language cannot always be express.
[17] Juana María Rodríguez borrows ideas of phenomenology and draws on Noland and Muñoz to investigate how gesture functions in queer sexual practices as a way to rewrite gender and negotiate power relations.
Adam Kendon was the first to hypothesize on their purpose when he argued that Lexical gestures do work to amplify or modulate the lexico-semantic content of the verbal speech with which they co-occur.
[1] However, since the late 1990s, most research has revolved around the contrasting hypothesis that Lexical gestures serve a primarily cognitive purpose in aiding the process of speech production.
Some movements are not purely considered gestures, however a person could perform these adapters in such way like scratching, adjusting clothing, and tapping.
[23] Body language is a form of nonverbal communication that allows visual cues that transmit messages without speaking.
Examples of Non-manual gestures may include head nodding and shaking, shoulder shrugging, and facial expression, among others.
Motor or beat gestures usually consist of short, repetitive, rhythmic movements that are closely tied with prosody in verbal speech.
The elaboration of lexical gestures falls on a spectrum of iconic-metaphorical in how closely tied they are to the lexico-semantic content of the verbal speech they coordinate with.
Corballis (2010) asserts that "our hominid ancestors were better pre-adapted to acquire language-like competence using manual gestures than using vocal sounds.
"[34] This leads to a debate about whether humans, too, looked to gestures first as their modality of language in the early existence of the species.
Gestures are a crucial part of everyday conversation such as chatting, describing a route, negotiating prices on a market; they are ubiquitous.
[35] Gestures are learned embodied cultural practices that can function as a way to interpret ethnic, gender, and sexual identity.
For example, Vitarka Vicara, the gesture of discussion and transmission of Buddhist teaching, is done by joining the tips of the thumb and the index together, while keeping the other fingers straight.
Their common neurological basis also supports the idea that symbolic gesture and spoken language are two parts of a single fundamental semiotic system that underlies human discourse.
This phenomenon uncovers a function of gesture that goes beyond portraying communicative content of language and extends David McNeill's view of the gesture-speech system.
Studies have found strong evidence that speech and gesture are innately linked in the brain and work in an efficiently wired and choreographed system.
McNeill's view of this linkage in the brain is just one of three currently up for debate; the others declaring gesture to be a "support system" of spoken language or a physical mechanism for lexical retrieval.
Because gestures aided in understanding the relayed message, there was not as great a need for semantic selection or control that would otherwise be required of the listener through Broca's area.
These two functions work together and gestures help facilitate understanding, but they only "partly drive the neural language system".
Spontaneous gesticulations are not evident without the presence of speech, assisting in the process of vocalization, whereas language-like gestures are "iconic and metaphoric, but lack consistency and are context-dependent".
Following pantomime are emblems, which have specific meanings to denote "feelings, obscenities, and insults" and are not required to be used in conjunction with speech.
[43] Giorgio Agamben, in the book Karman, says gesture is a pure means without purpose, as an intermediate form between the doing of praxis and that of poiesis.
[46] According to this philosophy, gesture is our normal procedure to embody vague ideas in singular actions with a general meaning.
