Geste und verstreichende Zeit: Innehalten und Bedeutungswandel der „bietenden Hand“

Publication Server of the Institute for German Language (Institute for German Language) · 2026-05-07

Unter Prozessualität des Gesprächs können wir zunächst ganz einfach die Tatsache verstehen, dass Gespräche, wo und wie auch immer sie stattfinden, Geschehen in der Zeit sind: sie entfalten sich von Augenblick zu Augenblick, und jeder der Bausteine oder Einheiten, aus denen sie sich zusammensetzen, hat selbst Ereignischarakter. Anders ausgedrückt: wie sinnvoll und nützlich es auch von Fall zu Fall sein mag, sich bei der Beschreibung primärer kommunikativer Medien (wie z.B. menschlicher Sprachen) einer Dingsprache zu bedienen - so als seien Wörter kleine Gegenstände -, letzten Endes ist für ihre Materialität kennzeichnend, dass sie manifeste Realität nur während der kurzen Zeit ihrer Produktion besitzen und nur in sekundären Repräsentationen (z.B. Erinnerungen oder Protokollen) überdauern. Selbst wenn Teile des kommunikativen Geschehens dingliche und dauerhafte Form annehmen - wie Wörter in Briefen oder e-mail-messages - so ist die Verständigung doch auch hier ein Geschehen in der Zeit: Wir können in diesem Zusammenhang von der Zeitlichkeit kommunikativer Formen (Einheiten) sprechen.

Language, culture, and gesture

2026-02-11

In everyday interaction, language and gesture are conceived as modalities that form an integrated system, as interwoven components of an utterance’s construction that may be orchestrated in line with each other or complementarily, depending on the corresponding occasion (Kendon 2004; McNeill 1992). The relationship among cognition, language, gesture, context, and interaction has traditionally been examined in a unidirectional manner, predominantly emphasizing the influence of cognition on gesture. Furthermore, the roles of cultural sedimentation and the cultural environment have been approached from various perspectives, yet seldom considered from a metaperspective. This study adopts a praxeological and phenomenological approach, positing that gestures are fundamentally actions that are both cognitive and communicative. They manifest as both ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ phenomena, being observable to others while simultaneously experienced internally. Gestures are adaptive to the environment and, in turn, help to structure it. Made by embodied individuals, gestures reflect their biographical experiences of inhabiting and understanding life-worlds, thereby exerting a reciprocal influence on cognition.

Echo and synchrony

2023-11-17 · 1 citations

We investigate the participation of a ten-year-old congenitally blind girl during a music lesson in a school for the visually impaired. The student exhibits behaviours – often labelled “blindisms” – common among many blind children: she rocks and sometimes jumps up, flailing her arms. This kind of motor-behaviour is also common among autistic children and is known as “stimming”. Why many blind children engage in periodic motor-behaviours is subject to debate. We compare the movement styles of four children and describe the temporal structure of our main subject’s movements. Although at first glance she appears to be ensconced in a cocoon spun by her own movements, her behaviours are responsive to the social environment, and other interactional participants attune their own speech and movements to her rhythm. Rather than focusing on the individual child and assuming that her behaviour is socially disruptive, it is important to investigate how the interacting system accommodates and uses this rhythmic behaviour.

15. Building, dwelling, and interacting: Steps in the evolution of public space from Paleolithic to present

2022-09-05 · 1 citations

The design of contemporary cities has led philosophers and sociologists to put the geometry of built space in opposition to practices of dwelling in them. Where and how did this apparent contradiction begin? In this chapter, we trace select stages of the history of hominin and human encounters and sociality in environments built by them - from the Paleolithic to the first built settlements to public squares in contemporary cities. We show how the question of the relationship between design and everyday use already arose for the biface, a Paleolithic stone tool that first exhibited geometric features. From there, we turn to proto-architectural stone circles and discuss the importance of the material marking of a human domain versus a segregated outdoor space. Does the creation of private homes automatically lead to the creation of a distinct public sphere? We trace how, in the course of urbanization, cities are forming increasingly complex architectural and social distinctions. Initially, a place where people of different classes meet and sometimes fight their battles, the city in the twentieth century becomes a place of unfocused encounters where people leave each other alone. Our empirical studies of encounters in a neighborhood square in a coastal city in Colombia and a marketplace in Zurich nevertheless reveal a wide range of interactive forms through which co-presence continues to be established and maintained in thoroughly manmade public spaces. By examining the cumulative evolution of material structures and their role in organizing human co-presence, the article substantiates the relevance of discussing selected archaeological and paleo-anthropological research for a pragmatically grounded understanding of space. Moreover, it explores possibilities for an interaction-analytic perspective on prehistoric settings and practices to generate new insights into the development of human communication

Cultural concept, movement, and way of life:<i>jeitinho</i>in words and gestures

Intercultural Pragmatics · 2022-08-20 · 5 citations

Abstract Starting from a non-dualistic view on embodiment this paper approaches the relationship between cognition, gesture, language, and cultural practice by analyzing the gestural construction of the cultural concept jeitinho in talk-in-interaction. After introducing our phenomenological view on embodiment and gesture in interaction, we give a short overview of some main studies broaching the issue of cultural matters before presenting the concept jeitinho as delineated in historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches. In the empirical section, we offer a fine-grained analysis of four videosequences taken from a conversation about jeitinho between two Brazilian and two German professors who have lived in Brazil for more than 20 years. We show that the gestural style of both Brazilian professors differs significantly from the gestural engagement of the German professors since they schematically embody a sinuous gesture style and construe the cultural concept jeitinho as a qualium by adopting a character viewpoint while the German participants remain observers regarding their gestural performance.

Gesture research

Handbook of pragmatics online/Handbook of pragmatics · 2022-08-08

Interaktion

Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG eBooks · 2021-01-01 · 2 citations

Indexikalische Ausdrücke und mimetische Kommunikation

transcript Verlag eBooks · 2021-10-01

Ein zentrales Thema in den Studies und anderen frhen Schriften der Ethnomethodologie (Cicourel 1973) sind indexikalische Ausdrcke und ihre programmatische und letztlich erfolglose Ersetzung durch objektive Ausdrcke in den Wissenschaften.In diesem Beitrag argumentiere ich

The emancipation of gestures

Interactional Linguistics · 2021 · 39 citations

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Linguistics

Abstract Interactional linguists are interested in ways in which communicative resources emerge from interactional practice. This paper defines a place for the study of gesture within interactional linguistics, conceived as ‘linguistics of time’ ( Hopper, 2015 ). It shows how hand gestures of a certain kind – conceptual gestures – emerge from ‘hands-on’ instrumental actions, are repeated and habitualized, and are taken to other communicative contexts where they enable displaced reference and conceptual representation of experiences. The data for this study is a video-recording of one work-day of an auto-shop owner ( Streeck, 2017 ). The corpus includes auto-repair sequences in which he spontaneously improvises new gestures in response to situated communication needs, and subsequent narrative sequences during which he re-enacts them as he explains his prior actions. He also makes numerous ‘pre-fabricated’ gestures, gestures that circulate in the society at large and that are acquired by copying other conversationalists. They are ready-made manual concepts. The paper explains the life-cycle of conceptual gestures from spontaneous invention to social sedimentation and thereby sheds light on the ongoing emergence of symbolic forms in corporeal practice and intercorporeal communication.

Gesture, Mimesis, and the Linguistics of Time

Georgetown University Press eBooks · 2021-10-01 · 2 citations