19-21 July 2012:
Workshop "Alignment in Communication: Towards a New Theory of Communication"
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Workshop "Alignment in Communication: Towards a New Theory of Communication"
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13.04.2012, 10:00–12:00 in Q2-101
Mats Andrén:
Acting socially: Conceptual and empirical aspects of children's gestures
My talk will address various questions related to the overarching question of “what is gesture?”. This will be done both on a general conceptual level and in the specific empirical context of children’s use of gesture between 18 and 30 months (Andrén 2010). The talk will begin with an outline of my general conceptual framework for talking about, and describing, gestural phenomena. This involves not only considerations about the term "gesture" itself, but also other terms such as "communicative", "sign", "conventionality", and more. The point of this discussion is to put such concepts together on an overarching map: starting from the properties of practical action and more "primitive" kinds of communication (e.g. blushing), which lack properties that we require of actions that we perceive as gestures, and then go all the way up to phenomena such as gesture and sign language. This can be seen as an extension and elaboration of what McNeill (1992, 2000, 2005) has called “Kendon’s continuum” (cf. Kendon 1988) that starts out from actions that are “already” gesture.
The conceptual framework will then serve as a backdrop for the rest of the talk, which is a selection of some of the empirical findings from my PhD thesis (ibid.) concerning the use and development of gesture in Swedish children between 18 and 30 months. First, some general developmental trends will be shown, regarding the children’s use of gesture during this period — a period when children go from using mainly one-word utterances to more complex multi-word utterances. Then I will demonstrate some interactionally organized aspects of the children's gestures. Finally, if time permits, I will show an analysis of gestural actions in the borderland between practical action and gesture. These kinds of action has escaped systematic treatment by most child gesture researchers (with notable exceptions like Katharina Rohlfing!), presumably because there is a general tendency to operate on the basis of a binary distinction between gesture and non-gesture, which doesn’t allow for intermediate steps. In contrast, the conceptual framework I offer allows a more fine-grained analysis, which enables us to analyze gesture and gesture-like actions along several continua from practical action to gesture: highlighting both similarities and differences between different forms of action and bodily expression.