Negative structures are a characteristic of all human languages. One such structure is ‘node’ and ‘scope’ of negation. In an utterance, the node is the location of a negative form, and the scope is the stretch of language to which the negation applies. In this paper, I examine a gesture that English speakers perform when they negate and show how speakers organize the different phases of gestural action in relation to the negative structures in speech. In this gesture, speakers first bring one hand across their body (preparation phase). Then, with the palm turned down, they move their hand rapidly along the horizontal axis (stroke phase). Often, they hold their hand in space for a short period after the stroke (post-stroke hold phase), before returning it to rest (recovery phase). In several negative utterances, drawn from a corpus of audiovisual recordings of conversations in everyday settings, speakers prepared this gesture in advance of the node of negation, synchronized the stroke of the gesture with the node, and performed a post-stroke hold throughout the scope. I suggest that the grammatical concepts of node and scope can also account for the way speakers gesture when they negate. This study refines understanding of how gesture phrase structure functions and suggests a multimodal view of grammatical phenomena.
This paper describes the organisation of kinesic ensembles associated with negation in speech through a qualitative study of negative utterances identified in face-to-face conversations between English speakers. All the utterances contain a verbal negative particle (no,not,nothing, etc.) and the kinesic ensembles comprise Open Hand Prone gestures and head shakes, both associated with the expression of negation in previous studies (e.g., Kendon, 2002, 2004; Calbris, 1990, 2011; Harrison, 2009, 2010). To analyse how these elements relate to each other, the utterances were studied in ELAN annotation software with separate analytical tiers for aspects of form in both speech and gestures. The micro-analysis of the temporal and semantic coordination between tiers shows that kinesic ensembles are organized in relation to the node, scope, and focus of negation in speech. Speakers coordinate gesture phrase structures of both head and hand gestures in relation to the grammar of verbal negation, and the gestures they use share a core formational feature that expresses a negative semantic theme in line with the expression of negation in the verbal utterance. The paper demonstrates these connections between grammar and gesture and sheds light on the mechanics of ‘multimodal negation’ at the utterance level.
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